monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Energy Secretary Rick Perry raised eyebrows Monday after a clip of an interview he gave on Fox News went viral. The evangelical Christian praised President Trump as “God’s chosen one” — an idea that is not unpopular among the president’s conservative Christian supporters. But the declaration has attracted quite a bit of pushback from Christians and others alike.

Perry shared his conviction with Fox News’s Ed Henry that Trump and his authority come from God.
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The statements raised eyebrows among some who are skeptical that Trump was chosen by God to lead the country.
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But Perry’s take on Trump and God is not uncommon among the white conservative evangelicals who approve of the president’s job performance at rates higher than most other groups. Other religious leaders have said similar things. According to Henry, Perry also believes that Trump’s predecessor was chosen by God to lead.

But the support for Trump’s presidency among conservative evangelicals appears to be at levels that even they have never seen.

“I think evangelicals have found their dream president,” Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University, told The Washington Post’s Sarah Pulliam Bailey months after Trump’s inauguration. “I’ve never seen a White House have such a close relationship with faith leaders than this one.”

And the idea that Trump was heaven-sent has come with harsh criticism of those who do not support his leadership. In a conversation Thursday in which evangelist Franklin Graham suggested that criticism of Trump was coming from “a demonic power,” author Eric Metaxas lamented those who question the idea that Trump was ordained for the presidency by God.

“They go on to cite how he’s the least Christian, and they go on and on and on," he said. "And I think these people don’t even have a biblical view when it comes to that. If somebody doesn’t hold to our theology, that doesn’t mean they can’t be a great pilot, or a great doctor, or a dentist.”

And it appears that Trump has embraced the belief himself, tweeting quotes from conservatives comparing him to the “second coming of God” and even proclaiming “I am the chosen one” and looking toward the heavens while defending his administration’s trade war with China.

The idea is rooted in several narratives (including those that Perry mentioned) and verses from the Bible that teach that leaders are in place because God has allowed them to be.

But one verse that often resurfaces in this discussion is a passage from Romans where the apostle Paul instructs early Christians on how to view government leaders. The King James version of the first verse of the 13th chapter of Romans says: “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.”

The English Standard version says: “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.”
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And there is also a belief among some that Trump is similar to biblical personalities that God used to save nations heading in a calamitous direction — something some believe was the case for the United States under the Obama administration.

This worldview has real implications for how adherents view Trump and America — particularly when it comes to policy. For some of them, Trump is a leader who will bring America closer to what they believe this country was always meant to be: a Christian nation.
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While not all of those who believe that Trump was chosen by God are adherents of Christian nationalism, believing that God chose Trump may explain why many white evangelicals ignore some of the actions of the president that some critics consider ungodly. However, Christianity is bigger than white evangelicalism. While Trump’s support remains high among that group, the president’s political future could still be in jeopardy given the number of people who disapprove of his leadership — including many Christians.

The worst commander in chief ever

For aiding Trump’s abuse of power, the GOP should be voted out of existence

The truth unquestionably is, that the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion. Tired at length of anarchy, or want of government, they may take shelter in the arms of monarchy for repose and security.

Those then, who resist a confirmation of public order, are the true Artificers of monarchy—not that this is the intention of the generality of them. Yet it would not be difficult to lay the finger upon some of their party who may justly be suspected. When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits—despotic in his ordinary demeanour—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may “ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.”

In March of 1974, as a young state attorney general, I reluctantly called for President Richard Nixon’s resignation amid revelations of abuses of power related to Watergate. It wasn’t an easy thing to do. As a Republican, I didn’t enjoy breaking with my party or my president. As an elected official and practical politician, I didn’t particularly enjoy the implications of turning against someone who had comfortably carried Washington State just two years earlier. None of it was pleasant, but I believed it was the right thing to do on the facts and on the merits.

John Adams said, “Facts are stubborn things.” Forty-five years after Mr. Nixon resigned before he could be impeached by the House, the facts should be the focus of every elected official, Republican or Democrat, as they decide what to do about another president facing impeachment and a possible Senate trial.

To my fellow Republicans, I give this grave and genuine warning: It’s not enough merely to dismiss the Ukraine investigation as a partisan witch hunt or to hide behind attacks against the “deep state,” or to try to find some reason to denounce every witness who steps forward, from decorated veterans to Trump megadonors.

History demands that we all wrestle with the facts at hand. They are unavoidable. Fifty years from now, history will not accept the position that impeachment was a referendum on the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi. It must be a verdict reached on the facts.

My judgment so far as an objective observer is that there are multiple actions on this president’s part that warrant a vote of impeachment in the House, based on corroborated testimony that Mr. Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, pressured leaders of Ukraine to investigate the Democratic presidential candidate Joseph Biden and his family.

From what I have read, it seems clear that President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine was subjected to a shakedown — pressured to become a foreign participant in President Trump’s re-election campaign, a violation of the law.

Several credible witnesses have testified to the existence of a quid pro quo, including William B. Taylor Jr., the acting ambassador to Ukraine; Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the White House’s top Ukraine expert; and Gordon Sondland, Mr. Trump’s ambassador to the European Union. They and others have testified that there was a push for politically motivated investigations, and three of them were so alarmed that they attempted to report their concerns up the chain of command at the National Security Council.

Are they to be believed? Here’s my bottom line: That’s what an impeachment inquiry and a Senate trial are designed to find out. That’s why there’s a process under the Constitution.

But make no mistake: This is precisely the kind of crisis Alexander Hamilton feared. In Federalist No. 75, he warned that a president might be tempted to betray the interests of the country for his own benefit, “to sacrifice his duty to his interest, which it would require superlative virtue to withstand”; that “an avaricious man might be tempted to betray the interests of the state to the acquisition of wealth”; that a president might “make his own aggrandizement, by the aid of a foreign power, the price of his treachery to his constituents.”

Given the temptations a president might have in dealing with foreign powers, Hamilton’s solution was equally clear: Congress should be involved. “The participation of the whole or a portion of the legislative body in the office of making them,” he wrote of treaties. And in the same vein, the founders gave Congress the power to check a president accused of abusing the power of his office. They expected Congress to render its judgment on the facts.

So, to my fellow Republicans who have been willing only to attack the process, I say: engage in the process. If the president is innocent, use the process to surface those exculpatory facts so that Congress and the country can agree whether or not Mr. Trump should be removed from office. The facts — not rhetoric — should answer this question: Is there an offense serious enough to undo the results of the 2016 election?

A heavy burden to meet, but not an impossible one.

Here’s what I know: Neither the country nor the Constitution is served by a partisan shouting match divorced from the facts, a process boycotted by one side refusing to engage on the merits. John Adams is still right 250 years later: Facts are stubborn things. Facts are what should determine whether a stubborn president stays in office. Republicans, don’t fight the process, follow the facts wherever they lead, and put country above party.
Slade Gorton was a Republican senator from Washington from 1981 to 1987, and again from 1989 to 2001

Law & Crime
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Subpoenas Related to Giuliani’s Business and Associates Suggest Probe of ‘Very Long List of Serious Crimes’ http://bit.ly/2KUmIIb

Republicans, don’t fight the process, follow the facts wherever they lead, and put country above party.

Washington (CNN)A federal judge decided Monday that President Donald Trump's former White House counsel Don McGahn must testify to the House of Representatives in its impeachment probe.

"However busy or essential a presidential aide might be, and whatever their proximity to sensitive domestic and national-security projects, the President does not have the power to excuse him or her from taking an action that the law requires," Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote.

The ruling is a blow to Trump and White House efforts to block parts of the impeachment inquiry. It could encourage resistant witnesses from the administration to testify and could bolster any case House Democrats make to impeach the President for obstructing its proceedings or obstructing justice.

Don't count on the Supreme Court to act sanely here.

Don't count on the Supreme Court to act sanely here.

Google has fired four employees in what activists within the company describe as an attempt to "crush" workers' attempts to organise.

The people, who have been dubbed the "Thanksgiving Four", had their contracts terminated on Monday.

Staff were told via an internal memo that the firings were related to data security and employee safety.

But those who lost their jobs have said they were being punished for "speaking out".

The sackings followed a demonstration at Google's San Francisco office on Friday, attended by more than 200 Google employees. Two of the four fired employees, Rebecca Rivers and Laurence Berland, spoke at the protest.

The Silicon Valley giant has confirmed the authenticity of the memo, first published by Bloomberg, but would not comment further.