monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

There is possibly no other issue that demonstrates with such clarity that the modern GOP's politics are built on - and depend upon - dishonesty.

When it comes to double standards I find it interesting that Republicans are quick to attack the credibility of a woman who accuses one their own of sexual improprieties but in this case the accusations against a Democrat are taken at face value.

The 2016 nominating conventions had recently concluded and the presidential race was hitting a new level of intensity when Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s campaign chairman, ducked into an unusual dinner meeting at a private cigar room a few blocks away from the campaign’s Trump Tower headquarters in Manhattan.

Court records show that Manafort was joined at some point by his campaign deputy, Rick Gates, at the session at the Grand Havana Room, a mahogany-paneled space with floor-to-ceiling windows offering panoramic views of the city.

The two Americans met with an overseas guest, a longtime employee of their international consulting business who had flown to the United States for the gathering: a Russian political operative named Konstantin Kilimnik.
The Aug. 2, 2016, encounter between the senior Trump campaign officials and Kilimnik, who prosecutors allege has ties to Russian intelligence, has emerged in recent days as a potential fulcrum in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation.

It was at that meeting that prosecutors believe Manafort and Kilimnik may have exchanged key information relevant to Russia and Trump’s presidential bid. The encounter goes “very much to the heart of what the special counsel’s office is investigating,” prosecutor Andrew Weissmann told a federal judge in a sealed hearing last week.

One subject the men discussed was a proposed resolution to the conflict over Ukraine, an issue of great interest to the Russian government, according to a partially redacted transcript of the Feb. 4 hearing

During the hearing, the judge also appeared to allude to another possible interaction at the Havana Room gathering: a handoff by Manafort of internal polling data from Trump’s presidential campaign to his Russian associate.

The new details provide a rare hint at what Mueller is examining in the final stretch of his nearly 21-month-old investigation — and underscore his deep interest in the Grand Havana Room gathering, which ended with the three men leaving through separate doors, as Judge Amy Berman Jackson noted.

Weissmann said in the hearing that one of the special counsel’s main tasks is to examine contacts between Americans and Russia during the 2016 race and determine whether Trump associates conspired with the Russian-backed interference campaign.

“That meeting — and what happened at that meeting — is of significance to the special counsel,” he said pointedly.

The hearing was held in a closed courtroom, and only a partial transcript was released because the special counsel has argued that public disclosure of the issues discussed could harm “ongoing law enforcement investigations.”
A spokesman for Mueller declined to comment.

That is another clear example. The question that arises immediately for me and many others when we observe this phenomenon is, "How the **** do these people sleep at night". But that's a moral response and doesn't go very far in figuring why. For me, this is probably the most interesting and fruitful line of investigation.

But that's a moral response

How Manafort’s 2016 meeting with a Russian employee at New York cigar club goes to ‘the heart’ of Mueller’s probe (WP)

Angry Americans Demand DNC Pay Back Money Spent On Russia Collusion Investigation

I can certainly appreciate that Americans are angry that their money was spent on this political fiasco, but good luck in getting that money unless you're going to push for impeaching Democrats that were behind pushing the witch hunt. Still, in less than 48 hours, nearly 100,000 people have signed a White House petition demanding the Democratic National Committee pay the $25 million it cost for criminal Robert Mueller to conduct a more than two-year investigation into Russian collusion that was premised on a phony, bought-and-paid-for Hillary Clinton dossier.

According to the petition:

The Democratic party has wasted time and the money of the American tax payer to conduct a witch hunt based on a phony dossier bought and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign. As of December 2018 the cost was 25 million dollars. The Democratic party is complicit in this attack on the tax payer. Hillary Clinton should be indicted and if convicted all assets should be seized. All remaining cost for the Russia investigation, all money used to investigate, charge, and imprison Clinton and all of her co-conspirators should be paid by the Democratic National Convention.

I wonder how long it has been that cigars have been a signifier of elevated social status?

Mueller's gotten results — guilty pleas and convictions.

The Left’s Been Lying: Study Shows Voter ID Doesn’t Suppress Voting

U.S. states increasingly require identification to vote – an ostensive attempt to deter fraud that prompts complaints of selective disenfranchisement. Using a difference-in-differences design on a 1.3-billion-observations panel, we find the laws have no negative effect on registration or turnout, overall or for any group defined by race, gender, age, or party affiliation. These results hold through a large number of specifications and cannot be attributed to mobilization against the laws, measured by campaign contributions and self-reported political engagement. ID requirements have no effect on fraud either – actual or perceived. Overall, our results suggest that efforts to reform voter ID laws may not have much impact on elections.

FEC Still Refuses To Investigate Alleged $84 Million Clinton Campaign Money Laundering
‘It’s outrageous that the FEC has sat around and done nothing—especially with such a detailed, comprehensive paper trail handed to them,’ lawyer Dan Backer told The Federalist.

Now for more than a year the FEC has ignored its statutory duty to address the CDP’s administrative complaint that laid out solid evidence that during the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton, the DNC, and the state Democratic parties illegally laundered nearly $84 million in campaign contributions. “But they also don’t want anyone doing the job they refuse to do,” Backer said in reference to the FEC’s motion to dismiss the CPF’s lawsuit.

Further, the FEC’s inaction holds significance far beyond the old news of Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential run: “The 2020 cycle has already started, and top-tier national Democratic contenders are already lining up,” Backer notes, adding that “Mark Elias of Perkins Coie, who represented both Clinton and the DNC during the 2016 campaign, is signed up with Kamala Harris.”

“If the FEC doesn’t get off its backside and act, or let others do it as the statute envisions, I have no doubt we’ll see multiple candidates repeating this scheme,” Backer warns.

“The Negro Project” Lives On Through Planned Parenthood

What is The Negro Project? It was a project created by Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger in the 1940s. She wanted to build birth control clinics in black neighborhoods. Abortion was still considered the horror that it is. It wasn’t considered then. Her goal was to control the “breeding” of blacks.

Margaret Sanger’s periodical, Birth Control Review, in 1932:

“The mass of ignorant Negroes still breed carelessly and disastrously, so that the increase among Negroes, even more than the increase among whites, is from that part of the population least intelligent and fit, and least able to rear their children properly.”

...Cigars have traditionally been viewed as expensive, imported, hand-crafted items that corporate and political leaders consume. Whilst they may have been around for hundreds of years, cigars became a symbol of wealth, privilege and success during the late 19th and 20th centuries. Smoking rooms at the turn of the century became places for English aristocrats to retire to after dinner. Men and their (male) guests retreated to the confines of these rooms to discuss the business of the day and any political concerns they might have. Expensive cigars were accompanied by an equally expensive glass of whisky or cognac. From this time forward, power and success became inextricably linked with smoking well-blended imported cigars...

Did Margaret Sanger believe African-Americans "should be eliminated"?

By Clay Wirestone on Monday, October 5th, 2015 at 5:32 p.m.

Despite being dead for 49 years, Margaret Sanger, founder of the organization that became Planned Parenthood, has a way of turning up in the news. Her latest appearance came during remarks by Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson at a retirement center in Exeter, N.H.

Answering a question at RiverWoods Retirement Community, Carson said that "Planned Parenthood, as you know, was founded by Margaret Sanger. . . . Margaret Sanger was a eugenicist. She believed that people like me should be eliminated, or kept under control."

At a press conference later, he specified what he meant by "people like me." He said he was "talking about the black race."

Claims like this have been examined by PolitiFact before. Back in March, New Hampshire Rep. William O’Brien claimed Sanger was an "an active participant in the Ku Klux Klan." That claim was rated false.

And in 2011, businessman and GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain said Planned Parenthood’s early mission was to "help kill black babies before they came into the world." That statement was rated Pants on Fire.

Carson’s statement pulls on the same threads.

Sanger was indeed a believer in eugenics, but the basic concept that humanity could be improved by selective breeding was an article of faith for many in the years before World War II. Winston Churchill, Herbert Hoover, Theodore Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells all supported the movement. African-American leader W. E. B. Du Bois backed many of its principles as well.

Although the eugenics movement included some who had racist ideas, wanting to create some sort of master race, "only a minority of eugenicists" ever believed this, according to Ruth Engs, professor emerita at the Indiana University School of Public Health and an expert in the movement.

At the time that Sanger was active, Engs wrote, "the purpose of eugenics was to improve the human race by having people be more healthy through exercise, recreation in parks, marriage to someone free from sexually transmitted diseases, well-baby clinics, immunizations, clean food and water, proper nutrition, non-smoking and drinking."

It’s a far cry to equate eugenics with advocating the elimination of black people.

For Sanger, her ideas were a matter a public health. As late as 1957, she put her views this way in an interview with Mike Wallace: "I think the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world -- that have disease from their parents, that have no chance in the world to be a human being practically. Delinquents, prisoners, all sorts of things just marked when they're born. That to me is the greatest sin -- that people can -- can commit."

Sanger was indeed a birth control activist, which means that she wanted women to be able to avoid unwanted pregnancies. She worked for women of all classes and races to have that choice, which she believed to be a right.

Quoted in an article about the false accusation that Sanger supported the Ku Klux Klan (she merely addressed a women’s auxiliary and later compared them to children because of their mental simplicity), Jean H. Baker, author of Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion, said Sanger actually opposed prejudice.

Sanger "was far ahead of her times in terms of opposing racial segregation," wrote Baker, a history professor at Goucher College, in an email. She worked closely with black leaders to open birth control clinics in Harlem and elsewhere."

Even authors who treat Sanger critically don’t believe she held negative views about African-Americans. Edwin Black wrote a comprehensive history of the eugenics movement, War Against the Weak, and is no fan of the activist’s beliefs. Ultimately, though, he writes, "Sanger was no racist. Nor was she anti-Semitic."

It’s also worth noting that Sanger died in 1966, six years before the Supreme Court established a nationwide right to abortion services in Roe v. Wade.

Those who point a finger at Sanger as a racist often cite a particular statement in claiming she harbored ill will toward black people. In a Dec. 10, 1939, letter, she wrote that "We don’t want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs."

But PolitFact Georgia debunked those who would read the statement as something sinister.

"Sanger’s correspondence shows this sentence advocates for black doctors and ministers to play leadership roles in the Negro Project to avoid misunderstandings. Lynchings and Jim Crow laws gave blacks good reason to be wary of attempts to limit the number of children they bore. In Harlem, she hired a black doctor and social worker to quell those fears," the article says.

She attracted an impressive roster of supporters, including DuBois; Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of National Council of Negro Women; and the pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church. Eleanor Roosevelt also backed the effort.

"For Sanger to launch a genocidal plot behind their backs and leave no true evidence in her numerous writings would require powers just shy of witchcraft," the PolitiFact piece notes.

Finally, in 1966 Planned Parenthood gave its Margaret Sanger award to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The civil rights leader accepted, and sent his wife, Coretta, to accept. The speech he wrote for the occasion stated that ""There is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger's early efforts."

Sanger was still alive at that point, and her history and statements were well known (she had published an autobiography in 1938 and was never shy about sharing her opinions). If she had, in fact, been a supporter of eliminating black people, it’s doubtful King would have accepted that award.

Our ruling

Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson said that birth control activist Margaret Sanger "believed that people like me should be eliminated." He later clarified that he meant African-Americans. While Sanger indeed supported the eugenics movement, substantial evidence shows that she was not racist and in fact worked closely with black leaders and health care professionals.

Why do you keep harping on this?

While Sanger indeed supported the eugenics movement, substantial evidence shows that she was not racist and in fact worked closely with black leaders and health care professionals.

Margaret Sanger speaks at Ku Klux Klan meeting