LOL! That face would stop the Q Clock once and for all if the anons allowed it!
My friend who tosses things at me over the transom, which is right in in the front entryway to the Qanteen, has been busy and actually chunked four things at me today which I REALLY want to share. Together they make up a bit of a lengthy text, so in a possibly vain attempt to avoid a No_Doll_i Dancing Girl Award, these will be posted separately.
*texokie, who finally made it to the LexiQon office sends these reports with the vow that after this, she will get busy on LexiQon research!*
[Transom Friend says, “BEST PRESIDENT EVER!!! Truly transparent government!”]
President Trump Invites Media To Remain for Another White House Cabinet Meeting…
Posted on August 16, 2018 by sundance
When we elected a successful businessman as President of the United States and leader of the executive branch, we elected a person who fundamentally changed the framework of accountability and transparency in government. President Donald J Trump holds an average of two to three full cabinet meetings each month where the cabinet members give direct updates on execution of policy priorities.
No President in modern history has put that much accountability into the position of each cabinet member. No President has ever coordinated strategic objectives with such a high level of expectation and scrutiny. No President has folded transparency into the cabinet with full media access over White House cabinet meetings. This is a new executive branch standard.
NEC Director Larry Kudlow break-out discussion on the economy at 03:45.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1B5ylX3qBQ
https://theconservativetreehouse.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/cabinet-meeting-august-1.jpg
https://theconservativetreehouse.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/cabinet-meeting-august-2.jpg
https://theconservativetreehouse.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/cabinet-meeting-august-3.jpg
https://theconservativetreehouse.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/cabinet-meeting-august-4.jpg
[I (texokie) watched this meeting live and was amazed at what they covered, and how much transformational stuff is REALLY going on in each area discussed. Entire meeting:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?449893-1/president-trump-holds-cabinet-meeting]
Article Two from Transom Friend:
About the Pennsylvania investigation into Catholic Church
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/catholic-churchs-pennsylvania-grand-jury-report/
The Catholic Church’s Rotherham
By Michael Brendan Dougherty
If the Church cannot govern itself from within, it will be governed from without.
‘We are deeply saddened.” So begin the many perfunctory statements of many Catholic bishops today in response to the Pennsylvania grand-jury report detailing how priests in that state abused children and how bishops shuffled these priests around. What deeply saddens these men? The rape of children, the systematic cover-up, or the little schemes to run out the clock on the statute of limitations? Are they saddened by the people who were so psychologically wounded by their abuse at the hands of priests that they killed themselves? What exactly are they sorry about? Soon the bishops are telling us about a chance for “renewal” after the promised implementation of new policies. They tell us about “overcoming challenges” in the Church. Or they use the phrase “a few bad apples.”
I find it impossible not to notice that these expressions of sorrow never arrive before the courts, the state attorneys general, or the local press arrive on the scene. That fact gives you another idea about what causes the bishops’ sorrow.
Fifteen years ago Frank Keating, the former governor of Oklahoma, resigned from a panel called the National Review Board, set up by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to monitor compliance with the Church’s new anti-abuse politics. He was under intense pressure to resign because he had offended bishops when he said some of them were acting like “La Cosa Nostra,” a reference to the Sicilian Mafia.
Cardinal Roger Mahoney of Los Angeles and other prelates made a great show of detesting Keating’s remarks. Keating refused to apologize. “My remarks, which some bishops found offensive, were deadly accurate. I make no apology,” he said. “To resist grand-jury subpoenas, to suppress the names of offending clerics, to deny, to obfuscate, to explain away; that is the model of a criminal organization, not my church,” Keating said in his resignation statement.
Keating was dismissed as a crank. Hadn’t every consultant and auditor given the the Church’s anti-abuse policies hearty endorsements? Wasn’t it routinely described as a model of safety?
Of course, Keating was right. Mahoney was later exposed as having engaged in an energetic attempt to cover up the truth about his own diocese. He shielded predators from law enforcement and even argued that the personnel files of the archdiocese were protected by the seal of the confessional.
[RELATED: ‘Grand Jury: 300 “Predator Priests” Have Been Credibly Accused.’ Link to this article is at the above link for this story.]
This season is a new round of exposure for Catholic bishops, particularly those who have sold themselves as part of the solution to the Church’s abuse crisis. Cardinal Seán O’Malley, who is supposed to have cleaned up in Boston and heads the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, is now trying to explain how it was that he fobbed off a credible report substantiating the well-known reputation of D.C. cardinal Theodore McCarrick. Cardinal Donald Wuerl, McCarrick’s successor and a former bishop of Pittsburgh, has always bragged about his record of being a no-nonsense administrator, someone who even fought with the Vatican to have abusive priests removed from ministry. The latest news paints a slightly different picture.
The Pennsylvania grand-jury report names hundreds of predator priests across seven decades of life in six Catholic diocese in the state. Some of the details in the report are so vile and lurid they would have been rejected from the writer’s room of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. They include priests “marking” their preferred boy-victims with special crosses, priests trading and compiling their own homemade child pornography. At one point in the report, a large redaction is made over what appears to be, in context, a ritualized and satanic gang-rape of a young boy by four priests.
The report implicates bishops of every persuasion. A fastidious conservative such as Bishop James Timlin of Scranton would not allow himself to be seated near the pro-choice Catholic MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews at a commencement ceremony, but in this report he is found writing a consoling letter to one of his priests, a priest who had just raped an underaged girl and arranged for the abortion of his own child. The tone of the letter would be no different if he were writing a priest grieving a deceased grandparent. There there, son, I know it hurts.
We don’t need your sadness, we don’t need new policies. We need better men.
The liberal bishop Donald Wuerl, then of Pittsburgh, does seem to take a hard line in some cases of clerical abuse. But in ones that preceded him, he takes a different approach. When an abusive priest who had been shuffled out of his diocese reports back to Wuerl’s office that he has information on other abusive priests operating in the Pittsburgh diocese and will inform on them if his stipend is increased, Wuerl advises the priest to write a letter in which he disavows any knowledge of the aforementioned illegal sexual activity. In exchange his stipend is increased. Wuerl did not implement a zero-tolerance policy against clerical sexual misbehavior; what he instituted was a zero-liability policy for the diocese and a zero-responsibility policy for himself. Wuerl outlined exactly what he did not want to know, and rewarded the man who kept him in ignorance. Wuerl, who in a recent interview suggested that there was no real crisis in the Church, greeted the release of the grand-jury report with the launch of a website designed by a crisis-public-relations firm, touting his good reputation.
If the events outlined in the Pennsylvania grand-jury report had happened among Pakistani immigrants, rather than the Catholic clergy, the perpetrators would called a grooming gang. If we treated the Catholic Church the same way as the British public treated the grooming gangs of Rotherham in South Yorkshire, we would be asking tough questions about the culture that produces abuse on this scale. We would ask questions about what twisted form of political correctness dissuaded law enforcement from identifying and confronting the criminal network until now. We might be debating our immigration policy, and possibly shutting down our embassies in the countries from which this gang receives support and reinforcements.
In fact, much of that would be the correct response. The Vatican has previously tried investigating and reporting on America’s Catholic seminaries, offering recommendations on how to fix them. The recommendations were not only weak, but mostly ignored. Not a single American bishop has emerged from reviewing the records in his chancery offices and apologized before the cops, the courts, and the news media arrived to ask about the revelations. Not a single bishop has publicly demanded that one of his brother bishops resign after being exposed for playing games with the statute of limitations. They knew about the powerful cardinal who preyed upon seminarians, they know about the decadent culture of the seminaries where priests are trained. And they tell themselves there is nothing they could really have done about it.
The problem of sexual abuse and blackmail in the Church isn’t reducible to “policy,” and the promises made by bishops to make policy changes should be greeted with extreme cynicism. The problem is personnel. For a number of reasons, the Catholic priesthood has selected for sexual deviancy. Bishops have been selected for their ability to manage legal and social risk, rather than their ability to govern and lead a religious organization. As one smart canon lawyer put it, men don’t rise through the ranks of the Catholic Church, they are pulled upward by those above them. High-ranking churchmen select for men who make peace with this sexualized culture in the priesthood. They prize collegiality rather than exacting holiness, or even competence. Cardinal Wuerl was selected by the pope to sit on the powerful Congregation of Bishops, which helps recommend to the pope new candidates for the office of bishop. It’s time we ask why he was deemed suitable for this task.
[Comments from Transom Friend:
Other state attorneys general should do investigations like Pennsylvania’s. As a Catholic, I’m tired of waiting for the next red slipper to drop. If the Church cannot govern itself from within, then it will be governed from without. That’s not a policy, but the iron law of history.]
Transom Friend’s Article 3:
William Kristol’s ties to Fusion GPS - just when you think he couldn’t go lower
[Caps are from texokie for emphasis]
https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/15/the-weekly-standards-ties-to-fusion-gps/
The Weekly Standard’s Ties to Fusion GPS
By Julie Kelly
In his online appeal for money after being fired this week, disgraced former FBI agent Peter Strzok credited an unlikely source to vouch for his victim status: The Weekly Standard.
At one time a leading conservative magazine, the Standard declared last month that Strzok’s plight was merely an “overwrought tale of bias” and the case against him is “just sound and fury.” The article brushed off Strzok’s actions as “several bad judgment calls” and blasted Congressional Republicans for continuing a criminal investigation into the now-unemployed G-man.
Strzok is following only 32 people on his newly-verified Twitter account. Bill Kristol, the editor-at-large of the Standard, is one of them.
So, what’s with the fanboying between the Standard—an allegedly serious publication dedicated to advancing conservative principles—and a corrupt government bureaucrat who embodies everything the conservative movement fought against for decades?
I FOUND AN ARTICLE IN THE STANDARD ARCHIVES THIS WEEK THAT MIGHT EXPLAIN WHY. ON JULY 24, 2016, JUST DAYS BEFORE STRZOK HELPED LAUNCH A COUNTERINTELLIGENCE PROBE INTO THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN, KRISTOL GAVE STRZOK AND THE OBAMA JUSTICE DEPARTMENT A BIG ASSIST FROM THE ANTI-TRUMP RIGHT BY POSTING A FLAWED AND QUESTIONABLY-SOURCED ARTICLE. “PUTIN’S PARTY” IS COMPELLING EVIDENCE THAT KRISTOL AND THE STANDARD WERE FAR FROM MERE SIDELINE OBSERVERS AS THE TRUMP-RUSSIA COLLUSION SCAM TOOK SHAPE IN THE SUMMER OF 2016.
AT THE VERY LEAST, THE TIMING OF THE ARTICLE SUGGESTS THERE WAS CAREFUL COORDINATION BETWEEN THE CENTRAL PLAYERS—INCLUDING THE HILLARY CLINTON CAMPAIGN—AND BILL KRISTOL TO DERAIL TRUMP’S CANDIDACY JUST WEEKS BEFORE THE ELECTION. BUT THE ARTICLE’S CONTENT ALSO SERVES TO RAISE ALARMING QUESTIONS ABOUT THE CLAIMS BY MANY REPUBLICANS THAT “CONSERVATIVES” HAD NO KNOWLEDGE OF OR INVOLVEMENT WITH THE CHRISTOPHER STEELE DOSSIER.
Let’s back up a bit. On the morning that Kristol’s piece posted, the Trump-Russian election collusion story was in its embryonic stage—nearly all American voters that summer remained blissfully unaware of the details in this preposterous story—but secretly it was being peddled to the media by Fusion GPS, a political opposition research firm hired by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to dig up Russian-related dirt on Donald Trump. Talking points produced by Glenn Simpson, the head of Fusion, and contained in the Steele dossier, were making the rounds in the D.C.-NYC media claque during July 2016. (At the same time, Steele was working with the FBI and alerting the agency to his dubious findings about the Trump campaign.)
KRISTOL’S ARTICLE HITS ON EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THE SIMPSON-STEELE TALKING POINTS: TRUMP forced the GOP to water-down language on the Ukraine in the party’s platform (it didn’t happen); the Russians were behind Wikileaks’ release of the DNC’s hacked emails (unproven); Trump encouraged foreign powers to interfere in the election (he didn’t); and Trump would not honor U.S. commitments to NATO (an overblown assessment of Trump’s NATO criticism nearly all the Republican candidates made). He listed a handful of unknown Trump campaign associates who would soon become household names, including campaign manager Paul Manafort; national security advisor, Lt. General Michael Flynn; and foreign policy aide Carter Page. (Strzok and the FBI formally opened their investigation into the three men—and campaign aide George Papadopoulos—on July 31, 2016.)
THE CONTENT OF KRISTOL’S PIECE CLOSELY MIRRORED REPORTING BY OTHER NEWS OUTLETS AT THE SAME TIME. (Lee Smith wrote about how the Fusion-planted media echo chamber evolved before the election.) But despite the flimsiness of the accusations, Kristol took his advocacy a step further.
These indications provide sufficient grounds for Trump’s links to Putin to be further investigated. Politicians who are currently supporting Trump should withdraw their unconditional support. We don’t know how direct and close a financial relationship Trump and Manafort have with the Putin regime. If Trump and Manafort don’t act to allay these concerns by releasing their tax returns (or in other ways), wouldn’t it be advisable for a Republican member of Congress to lead an urgent investigation into whether Putin is interfering in the current American election? Trump and Manafort may be Putin’s chumps. Will other Republicans sit by as the whole Republican party becomes Putin’s party?
A FEW HOURS AFTER THE STANDARD PIECE WENT ONLINE, CLINTON CAMPAIGN MANAGER ROBBY MOOK REINFORCED KRISTOL’S MESSAGE IN AN INTERVIEW ON CNN. Desperate to change the subject from DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s pending resignation, Mook also claimed the Russians were behind the DNC’s computer hack because Putin wanted Trump to win. There were other similarities to Kristol’s article. “Trump and his allies made changes to the Republican platform to make it more pro-Russian,” Mook told Jake Tapper. “And we saw him talking about how NATO shouldn’t intervene to defend our Eastern European allies if they are attacked by Russia. So, I think, when you put all this together, it’s a disturbing picture.”
THE NEXT DAY, CARTER PAGE RECEIVED HIS FIRST TEXT FROM A REPORTER AND FORMER WALL STREET JOURNAL COLLEAGUE OF SIMPSON’S, asking him about his ties to Russia and mentioning dossier-sourced specifics. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest fielded his first (planted) question during the daily press briefing by an AP reporter, who oddly asked whether the DNC hack was an attempt to influence the election in favor of Donald Trump.
Coincidence? Not a chance.
Kristol would take to Twitter dozens of times before the election to promote the Trump-Russia collusion fantasy, even referring to the GOP as “the Putin Party.” Kristol’s handpicked candidate to challenge Trump, Evan McMullin, also pushed the Trump-Russia narrative. (On the other hand, despite Fusion and Glenn Simpson being covered in the conservative media for more than a year, Kristol has zero tweets about the firm.)
It might be easy to dismiss all of this as mere happenstance, the rantings of a fierce Trump foe determined to do whatever he could to stop Trump from winning. But there is an important sidebar to consider: THE WASHINGTON FREE BEACON ADMITTED LAST YEAR THAT THEY RETAINED FUSION FROM LATE 2015 UNTIL APRIL 2016 TO GATHER OPPOSITION RESEARCH ON REPUBLICAN PRIMARY CANDIDATES. THE WEBSITE IS RUN BY KRISTOL’S SON-IN-LAW, MATTHEW CONTINETTI. The Beacon posted numerous negative stories about the Trump campaign in 2016, including hit pieces on Carter Page in March and July.
THE BEACON’S STORY KEEPS CHANGING, however. At first, Continetti admitted that the Beacon “retained Fusion GPS to provide research on multiple candidates in the Republican presidential primary.” Days later, Continetti explained why his website failed to mention its relationship with Fusion in several related articles prior to October 2017. After some blather about aggregated articles, Continetti vowed that future articles “will mention its history” with Fusion.
And they did. A few days after that, the Beacon posted an article with this disclaimer: “THE WASHINGTON FREE BEACON WAS ONCE A CLIENT OF FUSION GPS. THAT RELATIONSHIP ENDED IN JANUARY 2017.”
Say what? Something is not adding up here; in fact, it stinks.
We are expected to believe that Bill Kristol’s son-in-law paid Fusion throughout the 2016 presidential campaign cycle but Simpson doesn’t pitch one dossier-related story to either one? Kristol just comes up with the very same flimsy talking points that Simpson and Steele are peddling—at the exact same time—and it’s pure coincidence? Kristol just happens to call for an investigation one week before the FBI takes the outrageous and unprecedented step of probing private citizens working on an opposing presidential campaign? Kristol and Robby Mook just strangely regurgitate the identical Trump-Russia plotline—on the same morning?
SINCE THE ELECTION, KRISTOL AND THE STANDARD HAVE IGNORED MAJOR DEVELOPMENTS IN SPYGATE WHILE SHAMEFULLY WORKING WITH DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES TO SMEAR LAWMAKERS SUCH AS REP. DEVIN NUNES (R-CALIF), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who are trying to get to the bottom of the scandal. Kristol has been in the forefront of keeping Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation working in perpetuity.
And the Standard has yet to report on Strzok getting fired. (Nor has Kristol tweeted about Strzok.)
Unfortunately, there are still some conservatives who trust Kristol and the Standard fairly to report on the Trump presidency and Republican Congress. IT’S IMPORTANT THAT THE PUBLIC FULLY UNDERSTANDS WHAT ROLE KRISTOL AND HIS PUBLICATION PLAYED—AND CONTINUE TO PLAY—IN FUELING THE BIGGEST POLITICAL CORRUPTION SCANDAL IN AMERICAN HISTORY.
KRISTOL ASKS A LOT OF QUESTIONS ON TWITTER. IT’S TIME FOR HIM TO ANSWER SOME NOW.
Transom Friend’s 4th Article
CHINA and TRADE - from someone who describes a Chinese perspective
Transom Friend says about this:
“I like Don Surber and he reads South China News. Thinks China/US export war about to resolve.”
https://donsurber.blogspot.com/2018/08/trump-has-red-china-reeling.html
Trump has Red China reeling
Don Surber
Omarosa. The show trial for Paul Manafort. These are the things CNN chipmunks chattered about endlessly the last few days. But CNN has no news judgment because it is run by a moron with a Harvard degree and a Napoleon Complex.
To find the news, I read the South China Morning Post, which is worried spitless that the Red Chinese economy will tank like its stock market has.
(Its stocks overall have declined in value by 40% in the last three years. Our stocks are up 33% since we elected Trump. In the eight years from Obama’s election to Trump’s, the Dow rose by 33%.)
The newspaper is running a series of columns by panicked investors and experts.
Aidan Yao is senior emerging Asia economist at AXA Investment Managers.
Yao wrote, “China needs to put its house in order as the trade war goes from bad to worse.”
He pointed out, “In contrast with the progress seen in United States-European Union negotiations, there are no signs of trade talks resuming between the US and China since the breakdown of negotiations in June.”
There are 375 billion reasons this is bad for Red China. That is the number of dollars its profit was from exports to the United States last year.
Xu Yimiao is an independent China-based researcher.
Xu wrote, “China should cut its losses in the trade war by conceding defeat to Donald Trump.”
He spared not Chairman Xi’s regime.
“Beijing’s strategy of a tit-for-tat retaliation over tariffs has clearly failed. In fact, this strategy escalated the conflict. The direct retaliation after the US announced the first batch of 25 per cent tariffs on US$50 billion in Chinese goods (with the increase from US$34 billion just finalised and coming into effect on August 23) brought few benefits for China. If anything, it gave the US an excuse to plan for a new batch of tariffs covering US$200 billion in Chinese goods. To be fair, it is possible that the US would have escalated the conflict even if China had not retaliated, but whatever the case may be, China’s strategy did not work,” Xu wrote.
Here’s the problem, we buy roughly $500 billion of their stuff. They buy only $125 billion or so of our stuff. We have four times as much to tariff as they do.
Xu ended his piece, “To get out of this predicament, Beijing probably needs to deal with Trump directly, figure out what he needs to declare a win and create conditions for that. Of course, allowing Trump to declare victory might be tough and even embarrassing for Beijing, but sometimes it is the best choice to stop losses in one trade and hope to profit at another time.”
Reporters Wendy Wu and Kristin Huang wrote, “Did China think Donald Trump was bluffing on trade? How Beijing got it wrong.”
This happens when your intelligence consists of spying on Dianne Feinstein and watching CNN.
Fraser Howie is co-author of “Red Capitalism, The Fragile Financial Foundations of China’s Extraordinary Rise.”
Howie wrote, “China has no idea how to play Trump, and it is doing what it always does when it smells trouble.”
Thanks, Red China.
Predictability plays right into President Trump’s hands.
“Beijing may be shocked by how things have played out for the moment, but they haven’t lost control of levers of power in the economy, nor are they going to stand by as pressure mounts. A coordinated monetary and fiscal policy can indeed avert short-term impacts, but China hasn’t even cleaned up the post-financial crisis stimulus and is now embarking on another as the outlook becomes ever more complicated,” Howie wrote.
“Yet again, China is facing a very delicate balancing act. In November, America will see midterm elections which could change the dynamic again, but the possibility of a second term for Trump should not be discounted. China will continue to be in Trump’s crosshairs. Pumping more money into an already bloated economy may have worked in the past, but the Chinese may find out that indeed this time really is different.”
It is brutal. The money men are not pleased with Chairman Xi. That may explain, in part, this last story from Bloomberg News.
“Asian stocks pared losses and Treasury yields ticked higher after China said its vice commerce minister will visit the U.S. for trade talks in late August. The dollar slipped along with the yen,” Bloomberg reported.
He will bring the white flag. How do you say “no mas” in Mandarin?
Oh, the press will play this as a big win for Red China. When was the last time the press got President Trump right?