About time to start investigating Pence

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skmo
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Re: About time to start investigating Pence

Post by skmo »

freedomforall wrote: June 30th, 2017, 3:14 pm So, why are the children of Boomers and their kids going a different way?what has happened as to why America is in so much turmoil and chaos? Who is to blame for such a massive decline? What is right and what is wrong?
I don't have an answer, but I certainly notice a VAST difference. We're no longer even the same country.

I started High School in the 70's. Guys drove pickups to school with gun racks in the back windows, and it wasn't uncommon for there to be a .22 lever or pump and maybe a break open 12 gauge in the rack. Not in all of them, not all the time, but they were there occasionally. The only time I was suspended was in 8th grade when I had a Ruger Single Six in my locker. My buddy and I were going shooting after school and I didn't want to have to go back home. I was suspended for a day. No FBI, no news media, not even local cops.

We didn't shoot each other. It was never thought of. We got into fights, one won, one lost. We didn't need counselling over it, no one was really hurt and we learned and grew up. One nice thing about getting old, I don't have all that much longer I have to watch the country fall apart for all that much longer.

(Just watch - God will have me live to 120 years old now.)

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skmo
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Re: About time to start investigating Pence

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freedomforall wrote: June 18th, 2017, 10:18 pm Meanwhile, Muslims are next door attempting to enforce Sharia Law. #-o #-o #-o
Are you saying mean things about those nice brown people again? Why do you hate brown so much? Did a UPS truck run over your dolly?

OH - WAIT - Maybe it's not all brown people you are worrying about, just the ones who are raping Swedish and Norwegian and German women weekly, throwing homosexuals and people who quit Islam off of very high buildings, and sexually mutilating little girls so they can be properly groomed for marriage at the age of 12.

freedomforall
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Re: About time to start investigating Pence

Post by freedomforall »

skmo wrote: August 15th, 2017, 5:31 pm
freedomforall wrote: June 18th, 2017, 10:18 pm Meanwhile, Muslims are next door attempting to enforce Sharia Law. #-o #-o #-o
Are you saying mean things about those nice brown people again? Why do you hate brown so much? Did a UPS truck run over your dolly?

OH - WAIT - Maybe it's not all brown people you are worrying about, just the ones who are raping Swedish and Norwegian and German women weekly, throwing homosexuals and people who quit Islam off of very high buildings, and sexually mutilating little girls so they can be properly groomed for marriage at the age of 12.
And I conclude that since the country has slid so far down the proverbial slope, that a return to the top is impossible due to too many apathetic, care less attitude, ain't my problem paradigms, that there aren't enough people for liberty and freedom that it would be fruitless to try and rally the type of force needed to straighten things out.

I remember those days of seeing rifles in trucks. I remember being able to, as a kid, take my BB rifle and go shooting just about anywhere throughout my neighborhood and nobody complained. No cops harassing, no one running scared and calling 911, which didn't exist before 1968, and very, very few people coming out and scolding for accidentally hitting the side of their house or pelting a window.
Now it is illegal to discharge a BB pistol in my own back yard and using hay bails to catch the BB. And if you want to shoot a handgun, you either have to join a gun club or drive miles and miles and HOPEFULLY find a safe place to shoot. Very rare. And they do not build homes having a full basement around here, if you catch my drift.

freedomforall
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Re: About time to start investigating Pence

Post by freedomforall »

skmo wrote: August 15th, 2017, 5:30 pm
freedomforall wrote: June 30th, 2017, 3:14 pm So, why are the children of Boomers and their kids going a different way?what has happened as to why America is in so much turmoil and chaos? Who is to blame for such a massive decline? What is right and what is wrong?
I don't have an answer, but I certainly notice a VAST difference. We're no longer even the same country.

I started High School in the 70's. Guys drove pickups to school with gun racks in the back windows, and it wasn't uncommon for there to be a .22 lever or pump and maybe a break open 12 gauge in the rack. Not in all of them, not all the time, but they were there occasionally. The only time I was suspended was in 8th grade when I had a Ruger Single Six in my locker. My buddy and I were going shooting after school and I didn't want to have to go back home. I was suspended for a day. No FBI, no news media, not even local cops.

We didn't shoot each other. It was never thought of. We got into fights, one won, one lost. We didn't need counselling over it, no one was really hurt and we learned and grew up. One nice thing about getting old, I don't have all that much longer I have to watch the country fall apart for all that much longer.

(Just watch - God will have me live to 120 years old now.)
I blame the baby-boomers for not maintaining freedom and liberty and teaching their kids to do the same. Too many hippies and campus protesters protesting events and having wild parties...all the while, freedoms and liberty were being chipped away little by little...and these folks were to selfish to even look up and see the giant, humongous spider overhead ready to pounce and wrap everyone up in a cocoon.

"You Americans are so gullible. No, you won’t accept communism outright, but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you’ll finally wake up and find you already have communism. We won’t have to fight you. We’ll so weaken your economy until you’ll fall like overripe fruit into our hands." -- Nikita Khrushchev

Address given on Oct 25, 1966 by Ezra Taft Benson at Brigham Young University.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Stand Up For Freedom - Ezra Taft Benson


See marks 19:30 (discussing Constituion), 33:40 (what liberals are doing)


Silver
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Posts: 5247

Re: About time to start investigating Pence

Post by Silver »

Narcissists quit when the going gets tough. So what do you really know about Pence?

http://www.newsmax.com/Politics/art-of- ... id/808135/

'Art of the Deal' Co-Author: 'Trump Is Going to Resign'
Art of the Quit.jpg
Art of the Quit.jpg (52.33 KiB) Viewed 596 times
Image: 'Art of the Deal' Co-Author: 'Trump Is Going to Resign'
(ABC News)
By Jeffrey Rodack | Thursday, 17 Aug 2017 08:03 AM

Tony Schwartz, the co-author of Donald Trump's book, "Art of the Deal" is predicting the president will soon resign.

Schwartz said he believes an investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller is closing in on Trump. His comments came in a series of Twitter postings.

Follow
Tony Schwartz ✔ @tonyschwartz
The circle is closing at blinding speed. Trump is going to resign and declare victory before Mueller and congress leave him no choice.
12:34 PM - Aug 16, 2017


Tony Schwartz ✔ @tonyschwartz
Trump's presidency is effectively over. Would be amazed if he survives till end of the year. More likely resigns by fall, if not sooner.
2:20 PM - Aug 16, 2017


Tony Schwartz ✔ @tonyschwartz
Trump must be isolated. Resistance every day. The end is near but must keep pressure high.
5:58 PM - Aug 16, 2017

Replying to another Twitter user, Schwartz said he believes Trump will step down in order to avoid a jail term.

Schwartz made similar predictions about Trump before, The HuffPost reported. It also noted Schwartz advised Hillary Clinton's campaign in 2016 for free.

"He's going to have to figure out a way to resign," he had told CNN's Anderson Cooper in May.

Last month, Schwartz told the New Yorker Magazine, "I feel deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is."

Schwartz added, if he could do things over again, he would write a "very different book" titled "The Sociopath."

freedomforall
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Posts: 16479
Location: WEST OF THE NEW JERUSALEM

Re: About time to start investigating Pence

Post by freedomforall »

Silver wrote: August 17th, 2017, 9:49 pm Narcissists quit when the going gets tough. So what do you really know about Pence?

http://www.newsmax.com/Politics/art-of- ... id/808135/

Image: 'Art of the Deal' Co-Author: 'Trump Is Going to Resign'
(ABC News)
By Jeffrey Rodack | Thursday, 17 Aug 2017 08:03 AM

Tony Schwartz, the co-author of Donald Trump's book, "Art of the Deal" is predicting the president will soon resign.

Schwartz said he believes an investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller is closing in on Trump. His comments came in a series of Twitter postings.

Follow
Tony Schwartz ✔ @tonyschwartz
The circle is closing at blinding speed. Trump is going to resign and declare victory before Mueller and congress leave him no choice.
12:34 PM - Aug 16, 2017


Tony Schwartz ✔ @tonyschwartz
Trump's presidency is effectively over. Would be amazed if he survives till end of the year. More likely resigns by fall, if not sooner.
2:20 PM - Aug 16, 2017


Tony Schwartz ✔ @tonyschwartz
Trump must be isolated. Resistance every day. The end is near but must keep pressure high.
5:58 PM - Aug 16, 2017

Replying to another Twitter user, Schwartz said he believes Trump will step down in order to avoid a jail term.

Schwartz made similar predictions about Trump before, The HuffPost reported. It also noted Schwartz advised Hillary Clinton's campaign in 2016 for free.

"He's going to have to figure out a way to resign," he had told CNN's Anderson Cooper in May.

Last month, Schwartz told the New Yorker Magazine, "I feel deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is."

Schwartz added, if he could do things over again, he would write a "very different book" titled "The Sociopath."
So you take messages from the left and spread them around so you can gloat and pat yourself on the back? What did you say about narcissism?

Silver
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Posts: 5247

Re: About time to start investigating Pence

Post by Silver »

Pence will be the guy in charge. Do you know that he's another warmonger?

http://news.antiwar.com/2017/08/19/trum ... ions-made/

Trump: Afghan War Decisions Made
Press Secretary: Announcement Will Be Made at an Appropriate Time
Jason Ditz Posted on August 19, 2017

Taking to Twitter on Saturday, President Trump declared that a decision has been made on the Afghanistan War following yesterday’s Camp David meeting. This was a single sentence, and not followed by further details.

Speculation on the war has circled for months. Trump had initially delegated the decision to Defense Secretary James Mattis, but Mattis found a cap limiting his maximum deployment too restrictive. Now, Vice President Pence and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster are also taking up the cause of large-scale escalation, pushing Trump to accept the recommendations of the commanders.

Pence and McMaster were at the Camp David meeting, but Blackwater founder Erik Prince, who has been pushing a “privatize the war” initiative, was blocked, apparently at the behest of McMaster. Trump aide Steve Bannon, another skeptic of military escalation, was sacked outright.

Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee-Sanders gave no hints on what had been decided either, though she did say that a formal announcement will be made “at the appropriate time.” Before the Tweet, reports out of Washington suggested nothing had been decided at all during the meeting.

With the Camp David meeting stacked with hawks, it’s unclear if President Trump’s reticence about signing off on a large scale escalation of the losing war is still intact. He’s clearly under both mounting pressure to make a decision, and pressure from Republican hawks to make it a decision to double down on the war, however, so if he didn’t sign off on that, the people briefing him during the Camp David meeting would’ve likely discouraged him making an announcement on a “decision” to try to keep whittling down his resistance.

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skmo
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Re: About time to start investigating Pence

Post by skmo »

Silver wrote: August 20th, 2017, 12:50 am Pence will be the guy in charge. Do you know that he's another warmonger?
Maybe we could put Rosie O'Donnell in the WH. The only war she'd want to start would be to destroy diet soft drinks and whole grain bakeries.

Silver
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Posts: 5247

Re: About time to start investigating Pence

Post by Silver »

http://theantimedia.org/president-pence/

Trump’s Terrifying, but Do You Really Want President Pence?
August 23, 2017 at 2:53 pm
Written by Darius Shahtahmasebi


(ANTIMEDIA Op-ed) — Many people believe Donald J. Trump is one of the vilest human beings the world has known. Think back to 2013 when satirical outlet the Onion wrote a piece entitled: “When You’re Feeling Low, Just Remember I’ll Be Dead In About 15 or 20 Years,” a comical op-ed portrayed as being written by Trump himself.

We knew what he was like even back then, and yet at the beginning of this year, he seized the most powerful throne in the world and has made headline news ever since, wreaking havoc across the globe.

Make no mistake: Trump should not be president of the United States. This week, Twitter erupted into a storm with the ever-trending hashtag #TrumpResign – an eventuality most sane people would actively welcome.

But what kind of world thinks the problems of today can be solved by Trump’s resignation and Trump’s resignation alone? A world that is naïve at best, simply put. Has the United States forgotten who Donald Trump’s right-hand man is, poised to take the lead should Trump ever be ousted?

As explained by award-winning journalist Jeremy Scahill, Vice President Mike Pence (a) wants to criminalize abortion and previously signed a law that required fetal tissue from abortions to be buried or cremated; (b) hates gays and the rest of the LGBT community (unless they undergo conversion therapy); (c) wants to make the Patriot Act permanent; (d) would openly support Israel in a war against Iran; (e) wants to “fill up” Guantanamo Bay; (f) would deny refugees their rights under international law; (g) believes global warming is a myth; and (h) has a curious financial relationship with the founder of the mercenary company Blackwater – just to name a few.

Is this the president you want to take up the reins of the American empire?

In plain terms, the United States of America and the rest of the world are suffering a major delusion if they believe our problems will disappear as a result of Trump’s inevitable demise. In reality, Mike Pence is a Deep State insurance policy to guarantee the American empire can continue as it always has — just as it did under Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in its anti-Eastern global push to dominate the financial order of the world.

And what is the democratic value of forcibly ousting Trump from office? As explained by Glenn Greenwald:

“What they’re doing instead is trying to take maybe the only faction worse than Donald Trump, which is the deep state, the CIA, with its histories of atrocities, and say they ought to almost engage in like a soft coup, where they take the elected president and prevent him from enacting his policies. And I think it is extremely dangerous to do that. Even if you’re somebody who believes that both the CIA and the deep state, on the one hand, and the Trump presidency, on the other, are extremely dangerous, as I do, there’s a huge difference between the two, which is that Trump was democratically elected and is subject to democratic controls, as these courts just demonstrated and as the media is showing, as citizens are proving. But on the other hand, the CIA was elected by nobody. They’re barely subject to democratic controls at all. And so, to urge that the CIA and the intelligence community empower itself to undermine the elected branches of government is insanity. That is a prescription for destroying democracy overnight in the name of saving it. And yet that’s what so many, not just neocons, but the neocons’ allies in the Democratic Party, are now urging and cheering. And it’s incredibly warped and dangerous to watch them do that.” [emphasis added]

It has also become very clear that people oppose Trump for completely different reasons than the humanitarian ones some of us oppose him for. Trump is continuing the murderous policies of the Bush and Obama years, burying civilians by the thousands in places such as Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and Somalia, to name a few. He is also attempting to single-handedly take on Iran, North Korea and Latin America, countries where the CIA has long interfered, anyway.

The mass media, social media, and the intelligence community are completely silent on these topics. So what is the actual basis of their opposition to Trump? As sad as it is, most of the opposition to Trump seems to be rooted in the disgraceful comments he makes, not in the actual criminal actions his administration is regularly engaged in, just like Obama, Bush, and Clinton before him.

To the rest of us, it really just appears that Trump is continuing and exacerbating the worst policies of the previous administrations, all the while tweeting like a buffoon and making racist statements as he does so.

Trump was never the problem. He was a cancerous symptom of the problem, able to emerge like a zombie from the woods of the neoliberal Obama years.

No matter who is in office, the U.S. will maintain the highest incarceration rate in the world, will continue bombing civilians relentlessly in foreign countries, will continue turning a blind eye as its allies commit notorious human rights abuses, and will also turn a blind eye as its own police force becomes an execution force targeting unarmed members of the public.

Ultimately, the problem is that the U.S. has decided democracy is best implemented by requiring over 300 million people to identify with one man (or woman) as opposed to a more realistic inclusive and representative system that wouldn’t disenfranchise the populace.

The only decent element of Trump’s election campaign was that he vowed to draw down the wars overseas and work on pursuing détente with Russia, which whether we like to admit it or not, is in the interests of the global community. Since taking office, this has been completely undone, possibly in an attempt to appease his critics. Despite this, he is still on the verge of a collapsing presidency.

If the U.S. truly believes their problems will be solved by Trump’s ouster, followed by a presidency led by Mike Pence — or any of the other Deep State’s candidates — then perhaps we all deserve what’s coming to us.

Silver
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Posts: 5247

Re: About time to start investigating Pence

Post by Silver »

https://theintercept.com/2017/08/21/tru ... plex-will/

TRUMP MAY NOT FINISH HIS TERM BUT THE ASSASSINATION COMPLEX WILL LIVE ON
Jeremy Scahill
August 21 2017, 1:09 p.m.
DONALD TRUMP’S SPEECH on Afghanistan will briefly turn the media spotlight onto America’s longest war. Much of the media analysis will undoubtedly be about how the speech impacts Trump politically. Given the events of the past week, it seems unlikely that Democratic pundits will repeat their inane praise of the State of the Union address, in which Trump apparently became presidential for the first time. But this speech should serve as a moment to seriously examine the trajectory of the U.S. war machine from 9/11 to the present.

Amid the deluge of scandal, incompetence, and bigotry emanating from the Trump White House, the relative calm of the Obama era seems like a far-off galaxy. The reality that Trump may not even finish a full term as president, either due to removal or resignation, means that the palace intrigue must be reported on thoroughly by the press. But a dangerous consequence of the overwhelming, obsessive focus on the daily Trump affairs is a virtual dearth of coverage on the permanent, unelected institutions of U.S. power, namely the military and the CIA.

Spend just a moment studying moves of the Pentagon and Langley during the Trump era, and you will find that very little has changed in their post-9/11 course. Covert operations continue unabated throughout the Arab world and, increasingly, in Somalia. The U.S. remains in Iraq and Afghanistan and is becoming entrenched more deeply in Syria. If anything, the military and CIA are less restrained and are in greater control of decisions — that arguably create policy rather than implement it — than they were under Obama. And civilians are being killed at a greater rate under Trump, particularly in Iraq and Syria. There are reports that Trump has delegated more unilateral authority to the commanders than his predecessor and has relaxed rules ostensibly put in place to minimize civilian deaths. He has surrounded himself with generals who have spent their lives studying and preparing for war and know how to marshal the resources needed for overt and covert campaigns. This — combined with Trump’s questionable sanity, his pathological addiction to television and Twitter, and his compulsive need to respond to random pundits and congressmen at all hours — removes a crucial component of civilian oversight of the world’s most lethal force.

Years from now, when honest historians and scholars examine the Trump moment, it is certain that among the greatest beneficiaries of his presidency will be the military and CIA. But it would be a mistake to attribute this exclusively to Trump. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump, Hillary Clinton — and yes, even Bernie Sanders — all made clear that they supported and would continue the “targeted killing” program.

George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney used 9/11 to take the leash off the most unsavory forces in the military and CIA. They empowered the elite Joint Special Operations Command to wage a global, covert war replete with operations kept secret even from U.S. ambassadors and the State Department. The CIA set up black sites and conducted heinous acts of torture with the White House’s blessing.

While Barack Obama did roll back some of the most blatant activities enthusiastically endorsed by Bush and Cheney, he was also a careful manager of empire and in key ways, served as a launderer for operations of some of the most aggressive forces in the U.S. arsenal. He used his credibility among liberals — and the derision hurled at him by conservatives who characterized him as an Islamic-radical-friendly socialist — to legitimize assassination and covert offensive military actions as lawful, moral, and necessary. The patently false allegations from the right that Obama was somehow a dove only served to undermine the severity of military and paramilitary actions he authorized and expanded. In reality, Obama teed up the special operations forces and spooks for Trump to (inadvertently) guide to a new golden age.

Although much attention has been paid to the technology of remote killing, the focus on drones has been in many ways a distraction, a surrogate for what should be a broad examination of the state’s power over life and death. Whether extrajudicial killings are carried out by drones or manned aircraft or special forces operators on the ground, the result is the same. Drones are a tool, not a policy. The policy is assassination.

In the waning months of the Obama presidency, the administration slowly and inadequately revealed some details on the secret drone-based U.S. assassination program. It asserted that a small number of civilians had been killed, and that drone strikes were lawful and generally accurate. Yet by the time Trump took the oath as the 45th American president, the public still remained largely in the dark about the secret process used to decide whose name gets placed on the kill list and the standards used to determine if those people will receive the death penalty without even the pretense of a trial. There was no public accounting by the Obama administration for the countless special operations ground raids conducted across the globe. Those raids and the drone strikes continue, but Trump and his advisers have only been asked about it when U.S. personnel are killed.

The Obama administration boasted its efforts to create a “durable legal and policy framework to guide our counterterrorism actions,” yet it shrouded that framework in secrecy, precluding a full democratic debate over the government’s policy of remotely killing unarmed and unknown people. There is zero chance any such debate will happen under Trump, so the best information available to the public on how the assassination program functions is from the end of Obama’s time in office.

When Obama publicly stated that a small number of civilians had been killed in drone strikes, he said he felt “profound regret,” specifically about Western hostages accidentally killed in a strike on Al Qaeda. In the end, Obama told the public as many as 116 civilians may have been killed in drone strikes conducted during his time in office. But his statistics were highly misleading. As secret U.S. military documents obtained by The Intercept confirmed, the Obama administration as a matter of policy classified unknown persons killed in airstrikes as “enemies killed in action,” even if they were not the intended targets. During a five-month period in Afghanistan, for example, nearly 90 percent of those killed in one high-value campaign were not intended targets. Between January 2012 and February 2013, U.S. special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people, only 35 of whom were intended targets. All were labeled EKIA, enemies killed in action.

An injured Afghan youth receives treatment at a hospital following a suspected US drone airstrike in the Achin district of Nangarhar province on September 28,2016.</p><br /><br /><br /><br /> <p>A suspected US drone strike has killed 18 people in the restive eastern province of Nangarhar, with some Afghan sources claiming some of the fatalities were Afghan civilians. / AFP / NOORULLAH SHIRZADA (Photo credit should read NOORULLAH SHIRZADA/AFP/Getty Images)
An injured Afghan youth receives treatment at a hospital following a suspected U.S. drone strike that reportedly killed 18 people, including civilians, in the Achin district of Nangarhar province on Sept. 28, 2016. Photo: Noorullah Shirzada/AFP/Getty Images
After many years of warfare, the U.S. military has developed extensive intelligence networks on the ground in Afghanistan. Outside of declared war zones, in Yemen and Somalia, the Executive’s killing program relies on far weaker intelligence sources, especially signals intelligence, which the military’s own documents acknowledged is inferior and unreliable. As a result, the accuracy of its targeting judgments in those regions is likely to be even worse. According to one classified slide, as of June 2012, Obama had authorized the assassination of 16 individuals in Yemen. Yet that year, U.S. strikes killed more than 200 people in that country. The White House has never explained who the overwhelming majority of the dead were and why they were killed.

In 1976, following Church Committee recommendations regarding allegations of assassination plots carried out by U.S. intelligence agencies, President Gerald Ford signed an executive order banning “political assassination.” Jimmy Carter subsequently issued a new order strengthening the prohibition by dropping the word “political” and extending it to include persons “employed by or acting on behalf of the United States.” In 1981, Ronald Reagan signed Executive Order 12333, which remains in effect today. The language seems clear enough: “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.”

Congress, despite commissioning a report on the subject from the Congressional Research Service, has avoided legislating the issue or even defining the word “assassination.” Whether one calls the murder a targeted killing or a signature strike, an extrajudicial killing carried out by agents of the U.S. government of a person who poses no imminent and immediate threat to citizens of the United States, in a country with which the United States is not at war, is an assassination.

The Obama administration, by institutionalizing a policy of drone-based killings of individuals judged to pose a threat to national security — without indictment or trial, through secret processes — bequeathed to our political culture, and thus to Donald Trump, a policy of assassination, in direct violation of Executive Order 12333 and, moreover, the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. To date, at least seven U.S. citizens are known to have been killed under this policy, including a 16-year-old boy. Only one American, the radical preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, was said to have been the “intended target” of a strike.

Trump may not finish his term as president, but the CIA and the Pentagon will. The unprecedented powers these forces have attained through Democratic and Republican administrations, and continue to accumulate under Trump, should be a permanent focus of media coverage, no matter what horrid bigotry Trump tweets or idiotic quip he makes. History has shown that the unelected national security apparatus does not give back its powers easily.

Many liberals ignored these issues during the Obama presidency, and now they are consumed with the Trump disaster’s 24-hour spectacle of bread and circuses. By all means, let’s have aggressive reporting on the Trump administration, but not at the total expense of monitoring the growing authority of the United States’s most lethal forces.

Silver
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 5247

Re: About time to start investigating Pence

Post by Silver »

Y'all getting ready for Trump, the narcissist, to resign..."for the good of the country which I love bigly?"

President Pence...I wonder if President Pence will keep President Jared Kushner around.

Are the Trumpsters tired of winning yet?

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-09-1 ... -impeached

Right "Explodes In Anger" Over Trump's New Immigration Push

Tyler Durden's picture
by Tyler Durden
Sep 14, 2017 12:42 PM

Trump's base woke up to a fairly surprising flip-flop this morning from the White House on DACA and the infamous, beautiful border wall which was discussed repeatedly on the campaign trail throughout 2016. It all started when Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi released the following statement after their White House dinner with the President last night:

"We had a very productive meeting at the White House with the President. The discussion focused on DACA. We agreed to enshrine the protections of DACA into law quickly, and to work out a package of border security, excluding the wall, that's acceptable to both sides."
That statement was followed up by a tweet storm (we covered it here) from the President this morning which seemingly revealed his complete support for DACA and referred to 'The Wall' as a "renovation of old and existing fences and walls" rather than the "physically imposing" yet "aesthetically pleasing" structure that he repeatedly promised his supporters.

The apparent flip flop by the President resulted in an immediate backlash from some of his most vocal supporters with Ann Coulter wondering aloud over twitter, "at this point, who DOESN'T want Trump impeached?"

Ann Coulter ✔ @AnnCoulter
"Put a fork in Trump, he's dead." https://twitter.com/costareports/status ... 4340901888
5:40 AM - Sep 14, 2017

Ann Coulter ✔ @AnnCoulter
At this point, who DOESN'T want Trump impeached? https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/sta ... 0611779585
6:05 AM - Sep 14, 2017

Meanwhile, former Congressman and nationally syndicated radio host Joe Walsh blasted Trump for getting "screwed by Chuck and Nancy."

Follow
Joe Walsh ✔ @WalshFreedom
No wall.
DACA enshrined.

Trump didn't make a deal w Chuck and Nancy. Trump got screwed by Chuck and Nancy.

Trump just screwed his base.
9:23 PM - Sep 13, 2017

Joe Walsh ✔ @WalshFreedom
NONE of this is a surprise. I voted 4 Trump knowing he wasn't a Conservative & knowing he had no core.

I voted 4 the wall & against amnesty
7:12 AM - Sep 14, 2017


And, not surprisingly, Trump's former Chief Strategist Steve Bannon took direct aim at the White House with a series of negative headlines.

Breitbart
2017.09.14 - Breitbart_0.JPG
2017.09.14 - Breitbart_0.JPG (19.99 KiB) Viewed 411 times
So what say you? Clever, "4-D" calculated move by a President just looking for small policy achievements or did Trump just destroy his base and cement his fate as a one-term President?

Silver
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 5247

Re: About time to start investigating Pence

Post by Silver »

Serious consideration for President Pence is in the works. See the article at the link. It is much longer than the portion pasted below.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017 ... dent-pence

October 23, 2017 Issue
The Danger of President Pence
Trump’s critics yearn for his exit. But Mike Pence, the corporate right’s inside man, poses his own risks.

By Jane Mayer

Stephen Bannon, the former White House strategist, worries that Pence would “be a President that the Kochs would own.”Illustration by Todd St. John

On September 14th, the right-wing pundit Ann Coulter, who last year published a book titled “In Trump We Trust,” expressed what a growing number of Americans, including conservatives, have been feeling since the 2016 election. The previous day, President Trump had dined with Democratic leaders at the White House, and had impetuously agreed to a major policy reversal, granting provisional residency to undocumented immigrants who came to America as children. Republican legislators were blindsided. Within hours, Trump disavowed the deal, then reaffirmed it. Coulter tweeted, “At this point, who doesn’t want Trump impeached?” She soon added, “If we’re not getting a wall, I’d prefer President Pence.”
Trump’s swerve did the unthinkable—uniting Coulter and liberal commentators. After Trump threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea, Gail Collins, the Times columnist, praised Vice-President Mike Pence as someone who at least “seems less likely to get the planet blown up.” This summer, an opinion column by Dana Milbank, of the Washington Post, appeared under the headline “ ‘president pence’ is sounding better and better.”

Pence, who has dutifully stood by the President, mustering a devotional gaze rarely seen since the days of Nancy Reagan, serves as a daily reminder that the Constitution offers an alternative to Trump. The worse the President looks, the more desirable his understudy seems. The more Trump is mired in scandal, the more likely Pence’s elevation to the Oval Office becomes, unless he ends up legally entangled as well.

Pence’s odds of becoming President are long but not prohibitive. Of his forty-seven predecessors, nine eventually assumed the Presidency, because of a death or a resignation. After Lyndon Johnson decided to join the ticket with John F. Kennedy, he calculated his odds of ascension to be approximately one in four, and is said to have told Clare Boothe Luce, “I’m a gambling man, darling, and this is the only chance I’ve got.”
If the job is a gamble for Pence, he himself is something of a gamble for the country. During the tumultuous 2016 Presidential campaign, relatively little attention was paid to how Pence was chosen, or to his political record. And, with all the infighting in the new Administration, few have focussed on Pence’s power within the White House. Newt Gingrich told me recently that the three people with the most policy influence in the Administration are Trump, Chief of Staff John Kelly, and Pence. Gingrich went on, “Others have some influence, such as Jared Kushner and Gary Cohn. But look at the schedule. Pence has lunches with the President. He’s in the national-security briefings.” Moreover, and crucially, Pence is the only official in the White House who can’t be fired.

Pence, who declined requests for an interview, is also one of the few with whom Trump hasn’t overtly feuded. “The President considers him one of his best decisions,” Tony Fabrizio, a pollster for Trump, told me. Even so, they are almost comically mismatched. “You end up with an odd pair of throwbacks from fifties casting,” the former White House strategist Stephen Bannon joked, comparing them to Dean Martin, the bad boy of the Rat Pack, and “the dad on ‘Leave It to Beaver.’ ”

Trump and Pence are misaligned politically, too. Trump campaigned as an unorthodox outsider, but Pence is a doctrinaire ideologue. Kellyanne Conway, the White House counsellor, who became a pollster for Pence in 2009, describes him as “a full-spectrum conservative” on social, moral, economic, and defense issues. Pence leans so far to the right that he has occasionally echoed A.C.L.U. arguments against government overreach; he has, for instance, supported a federal shield law that would protect journalists from having to identify whistle-blowers. According to Bannon, Pence is “the outreach guy, the connective tissue” between the Trump Administration and the most conservative wing of the Republican establishment. “Trump’s got the populist nationalists,” Bannon said. “But Pence is the base. Without Pence, you don’t win.”

Pence has taken care to appear extraordinarily loyal to Trump, so much so that Joel K. Goldstein, a historian and an expert on Vice-Presidents who teaches law at St. Louis University, refers to him as the “Sycophant-in-Chief.” But Pence has the political experience, the connections, the discipline, and the ideological mooring that Trump lacks. He also has a close relationship with the conservative billionaire donors who have captured the Republican Party’s agenda in recent years.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump characterized the Republican Party’s big spenders as “highly sophisticated killers” whose donations allowed them to control politicians. When he declared his candidacy, he claimed that, because of his real-estate fortune, he did not need support from “rich donors,” and he denounced super pacs, their depositories of unlimited campaign contributions, as “corrupt.” Pence’s political career, though, has been sponsored at almost every turn by the donors whom Trump has assailed. Pence is the inside man of the conservative money machine.
On Election Night, the dissonance between Trump’s populist supporters and Pence’s billionaire sponsors was quietly evident. When Trump gave his acceptance speech, in the ballroom of the Hilton Hotel in midtown Manhattan, he vowed to serve “the forgotten men and women of our country,” and promised to “rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, and hospitals.” Upstairs, in a room reserved for Party élites, several of the richest and most conservative donors, all of whom support drastic reductions in government spending, were celebrating. Doug Deason, a Texas businessman and a political donor, recalled to me, “It was amazing. In the V.I.P. reception area, there was an even more V.I.P. room, and I counted at least eight or nine billionaires.”

Deason’s father, Darwin, founded a data-processing company, Affiliated Computer Services, and in 2010 he sold it to Xerox for $6.4 billion. A.C.S. was notorious for outsourcing U.S. office work to cheaper foreign-labor markets. Trump campaigned against outsourcing, but the Deasons became Trump backers nonetheless, donating a million dollars to his campaign. Doug Deason was enlisted, in part, by Pence, whom he had known and supported for years. “Mike and I are pretty good friends,” Deason said, adding, “He’s really the contact to the big donors.” Since the election, Deason has attended two dinners for wealthy backers at the Vice-Presidential residence.

“Well, there’s never going to be a perfect time to start a family.”
Among the billionaires who gathered in the room at the Hilton, Deason recalled, were the financier Wilbur Ross, whom Trump later appointed his Secretary of Commerce; the corporate investor Carl Icahn, who became a top adviser to Trump but resigned eight months later, when allegations of financial impropriety were published by The New Yorker; Harold Hamm, the founder and chairman of Continental Resources, an Oklahoma-based oil-and-gas company that has made billions of dollars through fracking; and David Koch, the richest resident of New York City.

Koch’s presence was especially unexpected. He and his brother Charles are libertarians who object to most government spending, including investments in infrastructure. They co-own virtually all of Koch Industries, the second-largest private company in the United States, and have long tapped their combined fortune—currently ninety billion dollars—to finance candidates, think tanks, pressure groups, and political operatives who support an anti-tax and anti-regulatory agenda, which dovetails with their financial interests.

During the campaign, Trump said that Republican rivals who attended secretive donor summits sponsored by the Kochs were “puppets.” The Kochs, along with several hundred allied donors, had amassed nearly nine hundred million dollars to spend on the Presidential election, but declined to support Trump’s candidacy. At one point, Charles Koch described the choice between Trump and Hillary Clinton as one between “cancer or heart attack.”

Marc Short, the head of legislative affairs in the Trump White House, credits Pence for the Kochs’ rapprochement with Trump. “The Kochs were very excited about the Vice-Presidential pick,” Short told me. “There are areas where they differ from the Administration, but now there are many areas they’re partnering with us on.” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, who has accused the Kochs of buying undue influence, particularly on environmental policy—Koch Industries has a long history of pollution—is less enthusiastic about their alliance with Pence. “If Pence were to become President for any reason, the government would be run by the Koch brothers—period. He’s been their tool for years,” he said. Bannon is equally alarmed at the prospect of a Pence Presidency. He told me, “I’m concerned he’d be a President that the Kochs would own.”
This summer, I visited Pence’s home town of Columbus, Indiana. Harry McCawley, a retired editor at the Republic, the local newspaper, told me, “Mike Pence wanted to be President practically since he popped out of the womb.” Pence exudes a low-key humility, but, McCawley told me, “he’s very ambitious, even calculating, about the steps he’ll take toward that goal.”

McCawley, who died, of cancer, in September, knew the Pence family well, in part because the Vice-President’s mother, Nancy Pence Fritsch, wrote a chatty column for the newspaper for several years (“memories blossom with arrival of spring”). Eighty-four and energetic, Fritsch met me for coffee this summer, along with her eldest son, Gregory, who is in the antiques business in the Columbus area. Like the Vice-President, they are good-looking, with chiselled features, and have an unpretentious, amiable manner. They ribbed each other as they reminisced about the years when the Pences’ six children lived with their parents in a series of modest houses. There was so little to do in the way of entertainment, Gregory Pence recalled, that “we sometimes got in the car with our parents on Friday nights and followed after the fire truck.” All the boys had nicknames. “My name was General Harassment,” Gregory said. “Michael’s was Bubbles, because he was chubby and funny.”

“Michael’s hilarious,” his mother agreed. “I attribute it to the Irish. We’re faith-filled, and have a good sense of humor.” The family identifies as Catholic, and Mike was an altar boy. “Religion is the most important thing in our lives,” she said. “But we don’t take it seriously. I don’t proselytize.”
Pence’s maternal grandfather was from Ireland, but his paternal grandfather, Edward Joseph Pence, Sr., came from a German family. Brief mentions of Edward in the press have described him as having worked in the Chicago stockyards, leaving the impression that he was poor. But Gregory told me that Edward was well off, with a seat on the Chicago Stock Exchange. “Grandfather Pence was a very hard man,” Gregory said. Edward refused to provide financial support when Gregory and Mike’s father, Edward, Jr., went to college; an aunt loaned him the tuition, but he had to leave law school when he ran out of money. “Grampa Pence was a gambler!” Fritsch chimed in. “He played cards and went to Las Vegas.”

Fritsch went to secretarial school. With a laugh, she recalled that she met her first husband “in a club—in other words, a tavern.” A Korean War veteran, Edward Pence, Jr., was in uniform that night. (He had won a Bronze Star, which the Vice-President keeps in his office.) In 1959, after leaving law school, he moved with Fritsch from Chicago to Columbus, where he sold fuel to gas stations, farms, and convenience stores. Shortly after their arrival, Michael Pence, the couple’s third child, was born.

Fritsch said of life in Indiana, “I hated it. I always looked forward to going back to Chicago.” But the family stayed, gradually moving into the upper middle class—Edward became part owner of an oil distributorship—and switching from the Democratic to the Republican Party. Fritsch had worshipped the Kennedys, but, she said, “I guess I became a Republican because my husband was one. I was a Stepford wife.”
“She was like the Scarecrow in ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ ” Gregory said at one point.
“You see what I have to put up with?” she shot back. Growing more serious, she explained that, until she went back to school, at sixty-five, to get a college degree in psychology, she “didn’t have much self-esteem.”
“That’s when she got her brain,” Gregory said.
Edward, Jr., like his father, was a tough disciplinarian. Gregory recalled, “If you lied to him, you’d be taken upstairs, have a conversation, and then he’d whack you with a belt.” He expected his children to stand up whenever an adult entered the room. “He’d grab you if you didn’t,” Gregory said. At dinner, the kids were forbidden to speak.

While Gregory was in college, he was sleeping late on a visit home when his father pulled the covers off him and told him to get up for church. “I said he couldn’t tell me what to do anymore, because he was only paying half my college tuition,” Gregory said. His father stopped paying his tuition altogether. “He was black and white,” Gregory said. “You were never confused where you stood. My brother’s a lot like him.”

Columbus, which has a population of forty-five thousand, was dominated by a major engine manufacturer, Cummins, and escaped the economic woes that afflicted many other parts of the region. But McCawley, the newspaper editor, told me that, while Pence was growing up, Columbus, “like many Indiana communities, still had vestiges of the Ku Klux Klan.” The group had ruled the state’s government in the twenties, and then gone underground. In Columbus, landlords refused to rent or sell homes to African-Americans until Cummins’s owners demanded that they do so. Gregory Pence insisted that the town “was not racist,” but contended that there had been anti-Catholic prejudice. Protestant kids had thrown stones at him, he recalled. “We were discriminated against,” Pence’s mother added.

The Pence children attended St. Columba Catholic School through eighth grade. Mike discovered a talent for public speaking that made him a favorite with the nuns. In fifth grade, he won a local oratory contest, defeating kids several years older. “When it came his turn, his voice just boomed out over the audience,” his mother told the newspaper. “He just blew everybody away.” In high school, Pence won third place in a national contest. When his mother recalled Mike as “a good student,” Gregory said, “Not a fabulous one. I don’t think he stood out. He was class president, but that wasn’t cool.” Nonetheless, by senior year, Mike was talking to classmates about becoming President of the United States.

Mike Pence attended Hanover College, a liberal-arts school in southeast Indiana. On a visit home, he told his father that he was thinking of either joining the priesthood or attending law school. His father suggested he start with law; he could always join the priesthood later. Shortly thereafter, to his family’s surprise, Pence became an evangelical Christian. His mother said that “college gave him a different viewpoint.” The story Pence tells is that he was in a fraternity, and when he admired another member’s gold cross he was told, “You have to wear it in your heart before you wear it around your neck.” Soon afterward, Pence has said, he attended a Christian music festival in Kentucky and “gave my life to Jesus.”

His conversion was part of a larger movement. In 1979, during Pence’s junior year in college, Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority, to mobilize Christian voters as a political force. Pence voted for Jimmy Carter in 1980, but he soon joined the march of many Christians toward the Republican Party. The Moral Majority’s co-founder, Paul Weyrich, a Midwestern Catholic, established numerous institutions of the conservative movement, including the Heritage Foundation and the Republican Study Committee, a caucus of far-right congressional members, which Pence eventually led. Weyrich condemned homosexuality, feminism, abortion, and government-imposed racial integration, and he partnered with some controversial figures, including Laszlo Pasztor, a former member of a pro-Nazi party in Hungary. When Weyrich died, in 2008, Pence praised him as a “friend and mentor” and a “founding father of the modern conservative movement,” from whom he had “benefitted immeasurably.”

While in law school, at Indiana University, Pence met and married Karen Batten, a schoolteacher whom he had noticed playing guitar in a church service. A friend at the time, Dan LeClerc, told me, “He was head over heels.” Pence took her ice-skating; she made him taco salad for dinner. Soon, anticipating a proposal, she began carrying in her purse a gold cross with the inscription “Yes.” Eight months after they began dating, he asked her to marry him, having buried a ring box in a loaf of bread that he’d brought on a walk, ostensibly to feed ducks. They shellacked the loaf. Pence’s friends have called Karen his “prayer warrior.”

The couple became almost inseparable. One Christmas, she gave him an antique red phone, connected to a “hotline” whose number only she knew. As the Washington Post reported, he kept it on his office desk long after the advent of cell phones. At home, they worked out on twin treadmills. And, as Rolling Stone reported in January, he referred to her in front of guests as “Mother.” Pence’s office has disputed the account, but a former Indiana Democratic Party official told me, “I’ve heard him call her Mother myself.” Pence also began observing what’s known as the Billy Graham rule, meaning that he never dined alone with another woman, or attended an event in mixed company where alcohol was served unless his wife was present. Critics have argued that this approach reduces women to sexual temptresses and precludes men from working with women on an equal basis. A Trump campaign official said that he found the Pences’ dynamic “a little creepy.” But Kellyanne Conway defended him vigorously, telling me, “I’ve been a female top adviser of his for years, and never felt excluded or dismissed.” She went on, “Most wives would appreciate a loyal husband who puts them first. People are trying to bloody and muddy him, but talk about narrow-minded—to judge his marriage!”

In 1987, a year after Pence graduated from law school, LeClerc, his old friend, was asked by a mutual acquaintance, “Guess who’s running for Congress?” He drew a blank. Pence’s decision, at the age of twenty-nine, to challenge a popular incumbent Democratic congressman surprised many people, including his father, Edward, who thought that it was silly, given that Mike was a young newlywed with no steady job. But after Mike entered the race Edward became his biggest booster, helping him raise money and put up lawn signs. Then, just a few weeks before the Republican primary, Edward, who was fifty-eight, had a heart attack and died. Mike won the primary, but the Democratic incumbent, Phil Sharp, was reëlected.
In 1990, Pence tried and failed again to unseat Sharp, waging a campaign that is remembered as especially nasty. One ad featured an actor dressed in Middle Eastern garb and sunglasses, who accused Sharp, falsely, of being a tool of Arab oil interests. But Pence’s campaign foundered after the press revealed that he had used donations toward personal expenses, such as his mortgage and groceries. It wasn’t technically illegal, but it violated the trust of his supporters and sullied his pious image. “Mike burned a lot of bridges,” Gregory recalled. “He upset a lot of his backers. It was partly because of immaturity, but he really was kind of full of $#!%.”

The following year, Mike Pence wrote an essay, carried by local newspapers, titled “Confessions of a Negative Campaigner,” in which he said, “A campaign ought to demonstrate the basic human decency of the candidate.” He admitted to reporters that he had violated this standard, and said that he had no “interest in running for elected office in the foreseeable future,” but added that if he ever did he would not wage a negative campaign. “I think he realized he’d besmirched himself,” Sharp told me. “He comes across as Midwestern nice, but it was mean and shallow.” Sharp, who after two more terms joined the faculty at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and is now semi-retired, remains unimpressed by Pence. “This is not a person, in my limited exposure, about whom I’d ever say, ‘Wow, he should be President!’ ”

Pence took a job at a law firm in Indianapolis, where he handled mainly small-claims and family cases, and started each day by praying with colleagues. An Indiana attorney recalled, “He was a big, jocular, friendly guy who would put his arm around you at the local pub. He probably weighed a hundred pounds more than today.” There was a clear hierarchy in the Indianapolis legal world, and Pence was far from its top rungs, relying on referrals for work. “There were dozens of guys like that,” the lawyer said. “But the great American story is that a guy like Mike Pence is now Vice-President.”

Gregory said of his brother, “Law wasn’t really his thing,” adding, “He’s completely unmotivated by money. I don’t think he would think for one second about it, if it weren’t for Karen.”
“Service is his motivation,” Pence’s mother said.
“And, of course, popularity,” his brother added. “He had ambitions.”

Pence was thrown a lifeline in 1991, when he was offered a job as president of the Indiana Policy Review Foundation, a tiny new think tank that promoted free-market policies. Pence joked that some people called the foundation “an old-folks home for unsuccessful candidates,” but it gave him a steady paycheck and valuable exposure to the burgeoning universe of business-funded conservative nonprofit groups. The foundation was part of the State Policy Network, a national web of organizations that had been launched at Ronald Reagan’s suggestion. It was designed to replicate at a more local level the Heritage Foundation’s successful promotion of conservative policies. One of the State Policy Network’s founders, Thomas Roe, a construction magnate with strong anti-union views, was said to have told a Heritage board member, “You capture the Soviet Union—I’m going to capture the states.”

In a 2008 speech, Pence described himself as “part of what we called the seed corn Heritage Foundation was spreading around the country in the state think-tank movement.” It isn’t fully clear whose money was behind the Indiana Policy Review Foundation, because think tanks, as nonprofits, don’t have to disclose their donors. But the early funders of the Heritage Foundation included some Fortune 500 companies, in fields such as oil, chemicals, and tobacco, that opposed health, safety, and environmental regulations.

Cecil Bohanon, one of two adjunct scholars at Pence’s think tank, had a history of financial ties to tobacco-company front groups, and in 2000 Pence echoed industry talking points in an essay that argued, “Smoking doesn’t kill. In fact, two out of every three smokers doesn’t die from a smoking-related illness.” A greater “scourge” than cigarettes, he argued, was “big government disguised as do-gooder, healthcare rhetoric.” Bohanon, who still writes for the think tank’s publication, also has ties to the Kochs. Last year, John Hardin, the head of university relations for the Charles Koch Foundation, told an Indiana newspaper that the Kochs had been funding Bohanon’s work as a professor of free-market economics at Ball State University “for years.”

Even as Pence argued for less government interference in business, he pushed for policies that intruded on people’s private lives. In the early nineties, he joined the board of the Indiana Family Institute, a far-right group that supported the criminalization of abortion and campaigned against equal rights for homosexuals. And, while Pence ran the Indiana Policy Review Foundation, it published an essay arguing that unmarried women should be denied access to birth control. “What these people are really after is contraceptives,” Vi Simpson, the former Democratic minority leader of the Indiana State Senate, told me. In 2012, after serving twenty-eight years in the legislature, she ran for lieutenant governor on a ticket with the gubernatorial candidate John R. Gregg, who lost the election to Pence. Simpson believes that Pence wants to reverse women’s economic and political advances. “He’s on a mission,” she said.
Pence’s true gift was not as a thinker but as a talker. In 1992, he became a host on conservative talk radio, which had been booming since the F.C.C., in 1987, repealed the Fairness Doctrine and stopped requiring broadcasters to provide all sides of controversial issues. At a time when bombastic, angry voices proliferated, Pence was different. Like Reagan, who had become his political hero, he could present even extreme positions in genial, nonthreatening terms. “I’m a conservative, but I’m not mad about it,” he liked to say. He welcomed guests of all political stripes, and called himself “Rush Limbaugh on decaf.”
“His radio career gave him great statewide name recognition,” Jeff Smulyan, the C.E.O. of Emmis Communications, on whose radio stations Pence’s program aired, said. “He’s likable, and a great self-promoter.” Smulyan, a Democrat, added, “I’m not sure how he’d fare in a detailed policy debate, but Mike knows what Mike believes.” In 1994, Pence was on eighteen Emmis stations, five days a week. By then, he’d lost weight and had three children; he’d also amassed a Rolodex full of conservative connections and established a national network of wealthy funders. In 2000, when a Republican congressman in northern Indiana vacated his seat, Pence ran as the Party favorite, on a platform that included a promise to oppose “any effort to recognize homosexuals as a discrete and insular minority entitled to the protection of anti-discrimination laws.” He won, by a twelve-point margin.
Once Pence got to Washington, Conway said, his background “in the think-tank-slash-media axis really equipped him to defend and explain an argument in a full-throated way.” Pence was in demand on the conservative speaking circuit, and frequently appeared on Sunday talk shows. “He was invited to Heritage, gun owners’ groups, property-rights groups, pro-life groups, and pro-Israel groups,” Conway recalled. “People started to see an authentic, affable conservative who was not in a bad mood about it.” Michael Leppert, a Democratic lobbyist in Indiana, saw Pence differently. “His politics were always way outside the mainstream,” Leppert said. “He just does it with a smile on his face instead of a snarl.”
Pence served twelve years in Congress, but never authored a single successful bill. His sights, according to Leppert, were always “on the national ticket.” He gained attention by challenging his own party’s leaders, both in Congress and in the George W. Bush Administration, from the right. He broke with the vast majority of his Republican peers by opposing Bush’s expansion of Medicaid coverage for prescription drugs, along with the No Child Left Behind initiative and the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the government’s emergency bailout of banks. Conway calls him “a rebel with a cause.” In 2004, the House’s most conservative members elected him to head their caucus, the Republican Study Committee. Pence joked that the group was so alien to the Party’s mainstream that running it was like leading a “Star Trek” convention. “He was as far right as you could go without falling off the earth,” Mike Lofgren, a former Republican congressional staff member, who has become a Trump critic, told me. “But he never really put a foot wrong politically. Beneath the Bible-thumping earnestness was a calculating and ambitious pol.”
In 2006, Pence boldly challenged the House Minority Leader at the time, John Boehner, a more centrist Republican from Ohio, for his post. Pence got wiped out, but in 2008 Boehner—perhaps trying to contain Pence’s ambition—asked him to serve as the Republican Conference chair, the Party’s third-highest-ranking post in the House. The chair presides over weekly meetings in which Republican House members discuss policy and legislative goals. Pence used the platform to set the Party’s message on a rightward course, raise money, and raise his profile.
After Barack Obama was elected President, Pence became an early voice of the Tea Party movement, which opposed taxes and government spending with an angry edge. Pence’s tone grew more militant, too. In 2011, he made the evening news by threatening to shut down the federal government unless it defunded Planned Parenthood. Some Hoosiers were unnerved to see footage of Pence standing amid rowdy protesters at a Tea Party rally and yelling, “Shut it down!” His radicalism, however, only boosted his national profile. Pence became best known for fiercely opposing abortion. He backed “personhood” legislation that would ban it under all circumstances, including rape and incest, unless a woman’s life was at stake. He sponsored an unsuccessful amendment to the Affordable Care Act that would have made it legal for government-funded hospitals to turn away a dying woman who needed an abortion. (Later, as governor of Indiana, he signed a bill barring women from aborting a physically abnormal fetus; the bill also required fetal burial or cremation, including after a miscarriage. A federal judge recently found the law unconstitutional.)
Pence’s close relationship with dozens of conservative groups, including Americans for Prosperity, the Kochs’ top political organization, was crucial to his rise. A key link to these groups was provided by Marc Short, the current White House official, who in 2008 became Pence’s chief of staff at the Republican Conference. Short had grown up in moneyed conservative circles in Virginia, where his father had helped finance the growth of the Republican Party, and he had run a group for conservative students, Young America’s Foundation, and spent several years as a Republican Senate aide before joining Pence’s staff. His wife, as it happened, worked for the Charles Koch Foundation, and he admired the brothers’ anti-government ideology. A former White House colleague described Short to me as “a pod person” who “really delivered Pence to the Kochs.”
In June, 2009, Short brokered Pence’s first invitation to address a Koch “seminar,” as the brothers call their secretive semi-annual fund-raising sessions for top conservative donors. The theme of the gathering, in Aspen, Colorado, was “Understanding and Addressing Threats to American Free Enterprise and Prosperity.” Pence’s speech was a hit. Short told me, “I’ve never seen someone who can take a complex subject and distill it in a heartbeat like he can.” He’d also never seen “anyone who is as dedicated a public servant, and lives their faith as Mike does.” Short, who is a devout Christian, said, “People often profess faith that’s not lived out, but with him it’s lived out each and every day. It guides him. It’s his core.”

“No, Barry, I want you to want to help bury the evidence.”
The Kochs, who are not religious, may have been focussed more on pocketbook issues than on Pence’s faith. According to Scott Peterson, the executive director of the Checks & Balances Project, a watchdog group that monitors attempts to influence environmental policy, Pence was invited to the Koch seminar only after he did the brothers a major political favor. By the spring of 2009, Koch Industries, like other fossil-fuel companies, felt threatened by growing support in Congress for curbing carbon emissions, the primary cause of climate change. Americans for Prosperity devised a “No Climate Tax” pledge for candidates to sign, promising not to spend any government funds on limiting carbon pollution. At first, the campaign languished, attracting only fourteen signatures. The House, meanwhile, was moving toward passage of a “cap and trade” bill, which would charge companies for carbon pollution. If the bill were enacted, the costs could be catastrophic to Koch Industries, which releases some twenty-four million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere a year, and owns millions of acres of untapped oil reserves in Canada, plus coal-fired power plants and oil refineries.
Pence, who had called global warming “a myth” created by environmentalists in their “latest Chicken Little attempt to raise taxes,” took up the Kochs’ cause. He not only signed their pledge but urged others to do so as well. He gave speeches denouncing the cap-and-trade bill—which passed the House but got held up in the Senate—as a “declaration of war on the Midwest.” His language echoed that of the Koch groups. Americans for Prosperity called the bill “the largest excise tax in history,” and Pence called it “the largest tax increase in American history.” (Neither statement was true.) He used a map created by the Heritage Foundation, which the Kochs supported, to make his case, and he urged House Republicans to hold “energy summits” opposing the legislation in their districts, sending them home over the summer recess with kits to bolster their presentations.
According to the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, after Pence began promoting the Kochs’ pledge the number of signatories in the House soared, reaching a hundred and fifty-six. James Valvo, the policy director for Americans for Prosperity, who spearheaded the pledge, told the Reporting Workshop that support from Pence and other Republicans helped “a scrappy outlier” become “the established position.” The cap-and-trade bill died in the Senate.
Short said that he “didn’t recall the Kochs ever asking for help on the issue,” adding, “The Republican Conference believed it was a winning issue because of the impact that the bill would have had on jobs.” In any event, the pledge marked a pivotal turn in the climate-change debate, cementing Republican opposition to addressing the environmental crisis.
Peterson said that the Checks & Balances Project hadn’t detected “much money going from the Kochs to Pence before he promoted the ‘No Climate Tax’ pledge.” Afterward, “he was the Kochs’ guy, and they’ve been showering him with money ever since.” Peterson went on, “He could see a pathway to the Presidency with them behind him.”
Indeed, by 2011 Pence had reportedly become Charles Koch’s favorite potential candidate for President in 2012. Andrew Downs, a political scientist who directs the nonpartisan Mike Downs Center for Indiana Politics, in Fort Wayne, said, “People thought Pence was gearing up for a Presidential run.” Downs pointed out that when Pence was in Congress “he probably had a shot at becoming Speaker of the House.” Downs continued, “Instead, he spoke at a lot of engagements with a national focus, and visited places like Iowa and New Hampshire. Running for President isn’t an idea that just occurred to Mike Pence when he joined the ticket in 2016. It goes back a long way.”
But the House of Representatives is a tough platform from which to get elected President. And so, in 2012, after mulling over his national prospects, Pence ran instead for governor of Indiana. “The conventional wisdom is that he ran for governor so he could check that box, get some executive experience, and then run for President,” Downs said. Pence won the governor’s race, but with only forty-nine per cent of the vote. “He was scary to the center,” Bill Oesterle, a co-founder of Angie’s List, an Indiana company that collates user reviews of local contractors, said. Oesterle, a Republican, contributed a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to Pence’s campaign. David Koch contributed two hundred thousand dollars.
Pence’s commitment to the Kochs was now ironclad. Short, his former chief of staff, had become a top operative for the Kochs, earning upward of a million dollars a year as president of the Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, the brothers’ Virginia-based membership group for big conservative donors. It served as a dark-money bank, enabling donors to stay anonymous while distributing funds to favored campaigns and political organizations. (During the past decade, the group has pooled an estimated billion and a half dollars in contributions.) The Kochs’ national political network, which had offices in nearly every state, became the most powerful and best-financed private political machine in the country. At least four other former Pence staffers followed Short’s lead and joined the Koch network, including Emily Seidel, who joined Freedom Partners, and Matt Lloyd, who became a Koch Industries spokesman. In 2014, a Republican strategist told Politico that “the whole Koch operation” had become “the shadow headquarters of Pence for President.”
Pence’s tenure as governor nearly destroyed his political career. He had promised Oesterle and other members of the state’s Republican business establishment that he would continue in the path of his predecessor, Mitch Daniels, a well-liked fiscal conservative who had called for a “truce” on divisive social issues. “Pence was very accommodating,” Oesterle said. But after he was elected he began taking controversial far-right stands that, critics believed, were geared more toward building his national profile than toward serving Indiana voters.
At first, Pence highlighted fiscal conservatism. In 2013, he proposed cutting the state income tax. An internal report by Americans for Prosperity described the proposal as an example of the Kochs’ “model states” program “in action.” Indiana Republicans, who had majorities in both legislative chambers, initially balked at the tax cut, deeming it irresponsible. But Americans for Prosperity acted as a force multiplier for Pence, much as it is now promising to do for Trump’s proposed federal tax cuts. The group mounted an expensive campaign that included fifty rallies, two six-figure television-ad blitzes, and phone-bank calls and door-to-door advocacy in fifty-three of Indiana’s ninety-two counties. Eventually, the legislature went along with what Pence often describes as “the largest income-tax cut in the state’s history,” even though Indiana already had one of the lowest income taxes in the country, and had cut it only once before. Trump has recently described Pence’s record as a template for the White House’s tax plan, saying, “Indiana is a tremendous example of the prosperity that is unleashed when we cut taxes.” But, in the view of Andrew Downs, the Indiana political scientist, “the tax cuts were fairly meaningless.” Residents earning fifty thousand dollars a year received a tax cut of about $3.50 per month. Pence claimed that the cut stimulated the economy, but John Zody, the chairman of the state’s Democratic Party, told me, “Our per-capita income is thirty-eighth in the nation, and not climbing.” The state recently had to increase its gas tax by ten cents per gallon, to repair its crumbling infrastructure.
In a few surprising instances, Pence veered from conservative orthodoxy. In 2014, he broke with many other Republican governors and agreed to expand Medicaid in Indiana. He declared that his proposal was “the kind of health-care reform that puts working Hoosiers in the driver’s seat.” He was no fan of Obamacare: when it passed, he likened the blow to 9/11. Nevertheless, Pence negotiated with the Obama Administration and established waivers that made the expansion acceptable to him. Among other things, all Indiana residents were required to demonstrate “personal responsibility” by paying something toward the cost of their medical services. Critics argued that such measures were needlessly punitive toward poor residents. Americans for Prosperity, which objects to any form of government health care, gently reproached Pence for “meeting Washington’s demands.” But the Medicaid-expansion plan was, and remains, popular in the state.
After this apostasy, Pence tilted back toward the right. At the last minute, he killed an application for an eighty-million-dollar federal grant to start a statewide preschool program. Education officials in Pence’s own administration favored the grant, but conservative opponents of secular public education had complained. When reporters asked Pence about his decision, he said only that the federal government had attached “too many strings.” But, as Matthew Tully, a columnist at the Indianapolis Star, wrote, “he could not name one.” Eventually, after widespread criticism, Pence reapplied for the grant. Tully concluded that Pence had a “fatal flaw”—he was “too political and ideological” to be a good governor. “His focus was on the next step up, not the job at hand,” Tully wrote.
Political handicappers noticed that Pence was spending a lot of time taking trips to states with important Presidential primaries and mingling with big out-of-state donors. In the summer of 2014, Pence spoke at an Americans for Prosperity summit in Dallas. At the event, he stood by Short’s side and declared himself “grateful to have enjoyed” David Koch’s support. That fall, Pence reached out to Nick Ayers, a young, sharp-elbowed political consultant, to see if he would help him in a 2016 Presidential run. Nothing came of it, but Pence clearly had White House ambitions.
In the spring of 2015, Pence signed a bill called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which he presented as innocuous. “He said it protected religious freedom, and who’s against that?” Oesterle recalled. But then a photograph of the closed signing session surfaced. It showed Pence surrounded by monks and nuns, along with three of the most virulently anti-gay activists in the state. The image went viral. Indiana residents began examining the law more closely, and discovered that it essentially legalized discrimination against homosexuals by businesses in the state.
“The No. 1 challenge we face in Indiana is the ability to attract and retain talented people,” Oesterle said. “If the state is seen as bigoted to certain members of the community, it makes the job monumentally harder.” The Religious Freedom Restoration Act, Oesterle said, “was not an issue of Pence’s creation”—it had “gurgled out” of the far-right fringe of the Indiana legislature. But, he added, “there was a lack of leadership.” In his view, Pence should have prevented it and other extreme bills from moving forward. “You can see it happening in Washington now,” Oesterle said. “He’s not that effective a leader, or administrator. Extremists grabbed the initiative.”
The outcry over the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was enormous. Gay-rights groups condemned the bill and urged boycotts of the state. Pete Buttigieg, the young gay mayor of South Bend, who is a rising figure in the Democratic Party, told me that he tried to talk to Pence about the legislation, which he felt would cause major economic damage to Indiana. “But he got this look in his eye,” Buttigieg recalled. “He just inhabits a different reality. It’s very difficult for him to lay aside the social agenda. He’s a zealot.”
In an effort to quell criticism, Pence consented, against the advice of his staff, to be interviewed by George Stephanopoulos on his Sunday-morning show on ABC. Stephanopoulos asked him five times if it was now legal in Indiana for businesses to discriminate against homosexuals, and each time Pence was evasive. Pence also sidestepped when Stephanopoulos asked him if he personally supported discrimination against gays. “What killed him was his unwillingness to take a clear position,” Oesterle said. “You saw the conflict between his ideology and his ambition. If he’d just said, ‘Look, I think people should have the right to fire gay people,’ he would have been labelled a rigid ideologue, but he wouldn’t have been mocked.”
Smulyan, the broadcasting executive, began getting calls from acquaintances all over the country, asking what was wrong with Indiana. The hashtag #BoycottIndiana appeared on Twitter’s list of trending topics, and remained there for days. Alarmed business executives from many of the state’s most prominent companies, including Cummins, Eli Lilly, Salesforce, and Anthem, joined civic leaders in expressing disapproval. Companies began cancelling conventions, and threatening to reverse plans to expand in the state. The Indiana business community foresaw millions of dollars in losses. When the N.C.A.A., which is based in Indianapolis, declared its opposition to the legislation, the pressure became intolerable. Even the Republican establishment turned on Pence. A headline in the Star, published the Tuesday after the Stephanopoulos interview, demanded, “fix this now.”
Within days, the legislature had pushed through a less discriminatory version of the bill, and Pence signed it, before hastily leaving town for the weekend. But he clearly had not anticipated the outrage he’d triggered, and then he had tried to save his career at the expense of his professed principles. Steve Deace, an influential conservative radio host, told me that Pence’s reversal was “almost the worst conservative betrayal I’ve witnessed in my career.” He added, “He had no chance at national office after that, other than getting on the Trump ticket.” Similarly, Michael Maurer, the owner of the Indianapolis Business Journal, who is a Republican but not a hard-line social conservative, said, “It just exploded in his face. His polls were terrible. I bet he’d never get elected again in Indiana. But he went from being a likely loser as an incumbent governor to Vice-President of the United States. We’re still reeling!”
Pence loyalists rushed in to help. Matt Lloyd, Pence’s former congressional staffer, left his communications job with Koch Industries to work with him in Indiana. Ayers, the political operative whom Pence had consulted in 2011 about a Presidential run, became an outside adviser. The state also signed a seven-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar contract with a public-relations firm, Porter Novelli, which proposed running ads featuring gay and lesbian couples posing in front of Indiana landmarks. But Pence’s mistake could not be airbrushed away. Lawn signs saying “Fire Pence!” began appearing across the state.

“You were overheard saying you’d kill for a good tomato.”
“His tenure in Indiana was characterized by a lot of missteps,” Buttigieg said. “He was always decent to me, but over all there was a sense that every few months something got bungled. He’s definitely not the mastermind behind the curtain that some people suspect.”
In 2015, Ed Clere, a Republican state legislator who chaired the House Committee on Public Health, became aware of a spike in the number of H.I.V. cases in southern Indiana. The problem appeared to be caused by the sharing of needles among opioid abusers in Scott County, which sits across the Ohio River from Louisville, Kentucky. In a place like Scott County, Clere said, “typically you’d have no cases, or maybe one a year.” Now they were getting up to twenty a week. The area was poor, and woefully unprepared for a health crisis. (Pence’s campaign against Planned Parenthood had contributed to the closure of five clinics in the region; none had performed abortions, but all had offered H.I.V. testing.) That same year, the state health commissioner called Indiana’s H.I.V. outbreak a public-health emergency.
Clere came of age during the aids crisis, and had read Randy Shilts’s best-selling account, “And the Band Played On.” He tried to get the legislature to study the possibility of legalizing a syringe exchange, which he felt “was a matter of life and death,” and could “save lives quickly and inexpensively.”
But conservatives blocked the idea, and Pence threatened to veto any such legislation. “With Pence, you need to look at the framework, which is abstinence,” Clere said. “It’s the same as with giving teen-agers condoms. Conservatives think it promotes the behavior, even though it’s a scientifically proven harm-reduction strategy.” In March, 2015, Clere staged a huge public hearing, in which dozens of experts and sufferers testified about the crisis. Caught flat-footed, Pence scheduled his own event, where he announced that he would pray about the syringe-exchange issue. The next day, he said that he supported allowing an exchange program as an emergency measure, but only on a temporary basis and only in Scott County, with no state funding. Clere told me that he spent “every last dime of my political capital” to get the bill through. After Scott County implemented the syringe exchange, the number of new H.I.V. cases fell. But Republican leaders later stripped Clere of his committee chairmanship, a highly unusual event. “I commend Representative Clere for the efforts to help the state deal with this,” Kevin Burke, the health officer in neighboring Clark County, told me. “But he paid a price for it.”
Clere remains bitter about Pence. “It was all part of his pattern of political expediency,” he said. “He was stridently against it until it became politically expedient to support it.” Clere, a Christian who opposes abortion, told me that he now finds Pence’s piety hypocritical. “He says he’s ‘pro-life,’ ” Clere said. “But people were dying.” When Clere was asked whom he would rather have as President—Trump or Pence—he replied, “I’d take Trump every day of the week, and twice on Sunday.”
Pence likes to say of himself, “I am a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order.” But Clere is not alone in questioning Pence’s political purity. After the November, 2015, terrorist attacks in Paris, Pence, like several other U.S. governors, issued a controversial executive order barring the resettlement of Syrian refugees in the state. The Archdiocese of Indiana had long been deeply involved in resettling refugees, including Syrians, and was about to welcome a new Syrian family. In the hope of reversing Pence’s ban, Joseph Tobin, the bishop of Indianapolis, requested a meeting.
Tobin, who has since been elevated to cardinal and become the archbishop of Newark, New Jersey, told me that he emphasized to Pence that the Syrian family was fleeing violence and terror, and had been vetted for nearly two years while living in a Jordanian refugee camp. He also explained that the family had relatives in the area. Tobin brought along a former refugee who now had a good job at an Indiana hotel, as an example of how successful the resettlement process was. Tobin is revered in the Catholic community of Indiana in which Pence grew up. “I really think he thought it over,” Tobin said. “There was some anguish.” But in the end Pence told him, “I need to protect the people of the state.”
“I respect that,” Tobin replied. “But this isn’t a threat.” Pence didn’t change his mind. Later that week, the Syrian family was sent to Connecticut. Eventually, federal courts struck down Pence’s executive order as discriminatory. I asked Cardinal Tobin if there was a Christian argument in support of turning the refugees away. After a pause, he quietly said, “No.”
Pence has also been criticized for his treatment of Keith Cooper, a former resident of Elkhart, Indiana, who spent nine years in prison for an armed robbery that he didn’t commit. He was released in 2006, but on the condition that he admit guilt, which made it impossible for him to get a decent job. The prosecutor and the Indiana Parole Board, citing DNA evidence and victim recantations, urged Governor Pence to pardon him immediately. But Pence dragged out the process for years. “He didn’t do a thing to help me,” Cooper told me. Pence finally left the decision to his successor, Governor Eric Holcomb, who is also a Republican. Holcomb granted Cooper a pardon within weeks of taking office. It was the first time in Indiana that a pardon was granted on the basis of innocence, rather than clemency.
“It was all about Pence’s political career,” Cooper said. “As a Christian, he’s a hypocrite. He wouldn’t see me or speak with me. God doesn’t turn his back on the truth, but Pence just walked away from the truth. I couldn’t move forward in life. I was stuck in a dead-end job.” Cooper, who was operating a forklift at the time, now cares for his grandchildren. He has become friendly with the robbery victims who mistakenly identified him in a police lineup; they supported his bid for a pardon. “I forgive them,” he said. “They stood up for me.” He went on, “I forgive the prosecutor. He wrote a letter. And the parole board? They saw that justice happened. But I don’t forgive Mike Pence, and never will. He talks all this God stuff, but he’s biased. He hates Muslims, he hates gay people, and he hates minorities. He didn’t want to be the first white man in Indiana to pardon an innocent black man.”
A spokesman for Pence, who declined to be quoted, said Pence believed that Cooper needed to go back to court and face a retrial, instead of seeking a pardon.
Pence, seeing his poll numbers plummet, gave up on running for President, and decided to seek a second term as governor. Victory was far from assured. Once again, he faced John Gregg, a folksy Democratic lawyer. In the spring of 2016, polls showed the two in a dead heat.
The national election, meanwhile, was confounding expectations. As Trump picked up momentum in the Republican primaries, the Koch network became unexpectedly paralyzed. Marc Short pressed the brothers to dedicate their resources to stopping Trump and promoting his rivals. But executives at Koch Industries considered the strategy risky, and the brothers stayed out of the Presidential race. Frustrated, Short quit his job at Freedom Partners and signed on to Marco Rubio’s campaign.

Fiannan
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Re: About time to start investigating Pence

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Silver, there is your problem; you want people to read "The New Yorker?"

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