Thursday News: “Search Your Souls (What’s Left of Them), Republicans”; One Juror Stopped Unanimous Manafort Verdict on All Counts; Sen. Mark Warner Says “The Real Facts Are Closing In”

by Lowell

Here are a few national and Virginia news headlines, political and otherwise, for Thursday, August 23.

• U.S.-China trade war escalates as new tariffs kick in (So stupid.)
• Democrats demand delay in Kavanaugh confirmation, GOP downplays Trumpworld criminal woes (“Several GOP senators noted that crimes committed by two of Trump’s former top associates were not related to allegations of Russian collusion.” Pathetic cowards.)
• Trump ‘calm’ for now, as White House allies brace for potential meltdown
• The Note: Words matter, even in the age of Trump
• White House: Trump never lied about hush payments, it’s a ‘ridiculous accusation’ to say he ever did (“Ha. Ha.”)
• Search Your Souls (What’s Left of Them), Republicans
• Congress, Do Your Job (“After President Trump’s Terrible Tuesday, Republican lawmakers need to stop pretending that there are any red lines that he won’t cross.”)
• Every Single House Republican Is Actively Covering Up Trump’s Guilt (Vote every single Republican OUT OF OFFICE on November 6!)
• Trump Tries to Deny His Crime With Cohen, Confesses by Mistake (“Trump’s own defense, offered on Fox & Friends, is even more confused. Trump insisted he is in the clear because the payments ‘weren’t taken out of campaign finance … They didn’t come out of the campaign, they came from me.’ That is not a defense. That is why it’s a crime. If the money came from the campaign, it would have been legal.”
• Manafort Juror: One ‘Holdout’ Kept Him From Being Convicted on All Counts (This is really a problem with our jury system…one idiot/obstinate/whatever juror can screw up an entire trial.)
• Trump Praises Manafort, Saying ‘Unlike Michael Cohen’ He ‘Refused to Break’ (Very mafia-like.)
• Anatomy of a Crime: Sex, Hush Money and a Trump Fixer’s Guilty Plea
• Powerful Hurricane Lane Lumbers Toward Hawaii As Residents Prepare (This is exactly the type of thing, by the way, that you’d expect in a global warming world on fire.)
• FACT CHECK: Trump’s Misguided Defense Of Cohen Payments
• Elizabeth Warren Just Laid Out an Indictment of Our Political System in All Its Corruption and Sleaze (“While the feds came for Trumpworld, the Massachusetts senator went about her work.”)
• Trump’s latest bad-faith legal defense comes straight from his media sycophants
• Why Trump Supporters Believe He Is Not Corrupt (“When Trump instructed Cohen to pay off women with whom he’d had affairs, he may have been violating the law. But he was upholding traditional gender and class hierarchies. Since time immemorial, powerful men have been cheating on their wives and using their power to evade the consequences…Once you grasp that for Trump and many of his supporters, corruption means less the violation of law than the violation of established hierarchies, their behavior makes more sense. Since 2014, Trump has employed the phrase rule of law nine times in tweets. Seven of them refer to illegal immigration.”)
• Why Michael Cohen Agreed to Plead Guilty—And Implicate the President (“Prosecutors had reams of evidence and a long list of counts, which also could have included the lawyer’s wife”)
• ‘How Did We End Up Here?’ Trump Wonders as the White House Soldiers On
• Duncan Hunter Is an Emblem of Our Entirely Corrupt Campaign Finance System (“The California congressman is of a piece with Michael Cohen and all the rest.”)
• You Don’t Have to Use a Young Woman’s Death to Flog Your Agenda. You Can Be Decent. (Or…you can be Corey Stewart.)
• Mollie Tibbetts’s tragic death shouldn’t confuse the truth about immigrant crime (“Fox News is trying to make this into an immigration story. But immigrants are less likely to commit crimes in the US…As the Pew chart shows, first-generation immigrants are considerably less likely to commit crime. To the extent that second-generation immigrants commit crime at closer rates to that of native-born Americans, that’s actually them ditching the approach of their better-behaved parents and moving closer to the American norm of more criminal activity.” )
• NFL and ESPN attempts to appease Trump on player protests are a lose-lose-lose situation
• Poll: Mueller approval rating jumps 11 points (“The poll revealed that 59 percent of registered voters approve of Mueller’s investigation, marking an 11-point jump from respondents who said the same in a July Fox News poll. Thirty-seven percent of respondents said they disapprove of Mueller’s probe.” Those 37% are the Trumpian hard core/dead-ender contingent of our country.)
• Impeachment debate moves to center of midterm fight
• ‘A new cherry put on top’: Trump scandal fallout hangs over midterms (“‘Payoffs and porn stars and affairs and indictments and all this stuff doesn’t Make America Great Again in the suburbs,’ said one Republican consultant.” Nor do tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, trashing our environment, screwing up our foreign policy, etc, etc.)
• ‘It is what it is’: Republicans shrug off Trump’s legal meltdown (Pathetic. Vote them all out. Also, can you even IMAGINE Republicans saying “it is what it is” if this were happening to President Hillary Clinton or President Barack Obama??? They’d be in all-out impeachment mode right now!)
• Not just misleading. Not merely false. A lie. (“One of the distinguishing characteristics of Donald Trump’s presidency has been his loose relationship with facts.”)
• Trump-friendly think tank struggles to weed out racism from its ranks (“The Claremont Institute shuttered an email list after an exchange over white nationalism blew up.” Least shocking news ever?)
• Duncan Hunter indictment scrambles California election plans (“Rep. Duncan Hunter’s (R) indictment has put his traditionally red seat in Southern California in play this fall, further scrambling the GOP’s effort to hang on to its majority.”)
• House Democrats just previewed how they’d investigate Cohen’s allegations if they win (“House Republicans have been reluctant to investigate Trump. Democrats have no such qualms.”)or
• Defiant Donald Trump accuses Michael Cohen of making up hush money stories (Trump and Don Jr. need to be in prison for a looong time, probably along with other members of his corrupt family.)
• MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reveals Trump’s three eldest children are at serious risk of criminal charges (“His eldest three children — Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump, and Donald Trump Jr. — are all at risk in the ongoing examination of the legally dubious Trump Foundation. (Meanwhile, son-in-law Jared Kushner faces potential exposure in the Russia investigation.)”)
• Manafort, Cohen, Omarosa: This Is How It Always Ends for Trump’s Scuzzy Friends (“Far from taking a bullet, Cohen shot a proverbial one at the Con Man in Chief, and Manafort may end up doing the same. The train wreck of Trump’s life is finally being exposed.”)
• We Already Know Trump Is Betraying His Country (“Investigation or no, the evidence has always been right in front of us. Here it is.”)
• The Kavanaugh Rule (“The GOP has only one principle: Judges must be seated, quickly and permanently, but only by Republicans.” Gorsuch is totally illegitimate – stolen Supreme Court seat – as will be Kavanaugh if he’s confirmed.)
• Jason Kander Says Only One Party “Wants to Let Black People Vote” (Correct, and it is NOT the Republican Party!)
• Rep. Dave Brat (R-VA) touted white nationalist website VDare’s praise of his anti-immigrant amendment (“Republicans have a history with the toxic anti-immigrant website”)
• Shaun Brown’s description of Virginia’s Democratic Party as absurd as it gets (She is absolutely appalling.)
• Chris Wiegard: Set a price on carbon emissions
• LGBTQ advocate Judy Shepard to join Jennifer Lewis at a fundraising reception
• Corey Stewart campaigns alone in Virginia as other Republicans keep their distance (They might be keeping their distance from toxic Corey, but how many of them – if any – have denounced him and the vitriol he’s espousing? None?)
• Kaine Opponent Stewart Calls for ICE Raids in Virginia After Tibbetts Death (Again, very important to emphasize that the VAST majority – 99.9% or whatever – of immigrants in this country are NOT violent, NOT criminals, etc. Corey Stewart is an irresponsible demagogue, among his many other lovely qualities. By the way, I love how Corey cut his unhinged video screed last night, which starts out with him saying “here in Virginia,” while standing in the airport in Minneapolis! Here’s the flight he was on.)
• 5 Virginia Officials Involved in Regulating Dominion Energy Are Invested in the Company (Yep, the corrupt “Virginia Way” strikes again.)
• Thompson: Virginia has opportunity to redesign its tax code (All you really need to know about this screed is that the author is “President of the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy.” According to SourceWatch, this group is Koch-funded and part of the “State Policy Network,”a web of right-wing “think tanks” and tax-exempt organizations in 49 states, Puerto Rico, Washington, D.C., Canada, and the United Kingdom. As of July 2017, SPN’s membership totals 153. Today’s SPN is the tip of the spear of far-right, nationally funded policy agenda in the states that undergirds extremists in the Republican Party.” Of course, the Roanoke Times doesn’t include any of that information, so readers have to just know what the “Thomas Jefferson Institute” is, I guess? This is a HUGE failing of the corporate media, one which I see all the time.)
• Virginia GOP to continue gerrymandering lawsuit despite special session
• Virginia Gov. Sides With Homeowners Affected by I-66 Expansion (But not with homeowners impacted by pipeline construction. Gotcha.)
• Pittsylvania supervisors deny rezoning request by Virginia Uranium president
• Fixes promised for families losing homes to I-66 toll lanes
• Governor marks official start of I–95 Rappahannock River crossing project
• Confederate monument in Richmond vandalized with what appears to be red paint
• Like UNC, VCU has its own Confederate memorial dedicated with explicitly white supremacist speech
• Virginia family hospitalized after eating wild mushrooms found at apartment complex
• A $2,000 glass of whiskey, a state law banning bars and a years-long fight lawmakers can’t seem to untangle
• Fewer Virginia students passed statewide tests last year
• SOL pass rates for students fall throughout Hampton Roads
• Arlington National Cemetery reopens after bomb threat, evacuation
• Virginia elections official says state will ‘use all legal remedies’ to ensure fair ballot in Hopewell (Yeah, you can NOT put one candidate’s name in ALL CAPS, that is utterly ridiculous.)
• Ryan Zimmerman lifts Nationals to walk-off win over Phillies (“Two-run homer caps wild 8-7 victory, but Stephen Strasburg struggles in first start in more than a month.”)
• Beautiful sunshine and low humidity through Friday