Posted on 08/19/2018 6:26:38 PM PDT by Libloather
Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., joked about how somebody saving a drowning President Trump would be a "catastrophe" at the start of an event in Sunshine, Fla., on Sunday.
In a video reported by the Daily Caller, Hastings said he first learned of the joke from Ari Silver, whose father is former Florida state legislator and rabbi Barry Silver.
“Do you know the difference between a crisis and a catastrophe?” Hastings said, retelling the joke.
"A crisis is if Donald Trump falls into the Potomac River and can’t swim,” Hastings said. A "catastrophe," he added, "is anybody saves his ass.'”
Cheers and laughter ensued in the audience.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonexaminer.com ...
We lost Henny Youngman, Don Rickles and many others but now for humor we have……...Alcee Hastings?
I think we got cheated.
When does the funny part of her “humor” start? Maybe she can get the Secret Service agents to laugh it up. Maybe not.
Before you take this seriously and tell me it wasn’t a credible specific threat, I’ll agree but tell you that it *was* a direct threat to our human decency and dignity as Americans to have her laughing at our expense. So there.
Sick Joke, not even funny. You can do better than that Democrats!
I didn’t know nasty brown fudge stains on underwear could actually talk...wow.
I wonder how funny the leftists would find it if I were to change around that kind of language to apply to their hero. Let’s see now:
“A crisis is if Hillary Rodham Clinton falls into a dog pit full of pit bulls and can’t climb out. A catastrophe is if no one splashes a bucket of BBQ sauce on her.”
“A crisis is if Barack Hussein Obama falls into a half-filled pool and can’t climb out. A catastrophe is if no one dumps hundreds of piranhas into the pool.”
Two can play that game.
What do you call a bus load of leftist politicians on the bottom of the ocean?
A start.
Does Alcee Hastings know how to swim?
October 20, 1989 Senate voted on 11 articles of impeachment, convicting Hastings on 8 articles, with 2 articles falling short of the necessary two-thirds majority for conviction, and a third article receiving a 95 to 0 vote for not guilty. The president pro tempore of the Senate ordered Hastings removed from office.
https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/briefing/Impeachment_Hastings.htm
Corrupt douchbag.
He reflects the lunatics who vote for him. Pinhead defectives all.
That corrupt sheriff sure gets around, doesn’t he? He hangs out with all the deep state types.
Alcee is a jiveass....I’ll never forget the recordings of his phone conversations that exposed his corruption....talking like a street corner punk to a black guy, but when he’s in front of a serious audience (i.e. not his constituents) he speaks like a fake Oxford don.
ALCEE HASTINGS ASKED A STAFFER WHAT KIND OF PANTIES SHE WAS WEARING
Hastings Record sexual harassment settlement exposes byzantine congressional process / by LEIGH ANN CALDWELL / NBC NEWS
WASHINGTON — With new harassment accusations being revealed on a nearly daily basis in Congress, documents obtained by NBC News from the Hastings case shed light on how taxpayer money ends up being used to essentially sweep such incidents under a bureaucratic rug with little accountability.
On Capitol Hill, a sexual harassment complaint is a long process. The documents include drafts of a letter approving the settlement and a confidentiality agreement as well as an internal “lessons learned” memo written by a House employment lawyer. And while many of the accusations and details of the case remain in dispute, the eventual settlement is a case study of a process shrouded in secrecy despite being funded by taxpayers.
In 2011, Winsome Packer, a congressional staffer who worked for the United States Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (known as the Helsinki Commission) filed a complaint against the commission, alleging that its chairman at the time, Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., made unwanted sexual advances toward her and that she was threatened with retaliation.
The details of Packer’s specific allegations are recorded in the complaint she also brought in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Publicly filed court documents in that lawsuit show that Packer alleged that she “was forced to endure” repeated “unwelcome sexual advances, crude sexual comments and unwelcome touching” by Hastings. In describing the incidents, Packer alleged that Hastings had hugged her multiple times, sometimes in front of witnesses at public events, pressing his whole body against her, and his face to her face. Packer also claimed that after she complained to the commission’s staff director, she was subject to threats of retaliation by both the director and Hastings himself, including “threats of termination.”
Hastings, who has been in Congress since 1993, has denied Packer’s allegations. He called them “malicious” and “absolutely false” in a letter obtained by NBC News.
The Office of Congressional Ethics referred the matter to the House Ethics Committee in 2010. After reviewing more than one thousand pages of documents and interviewing eight witnesses, the committee closed the case after finding that while the congressman admitted to having made some unprofessional comments, it had found “no additional evidence supporting [Packer’s ] allegations.”
The federal court also dismissed the case, with prejudice, in June 2014. Both sides maintain they were wronged. But this case, which took four years to settle, shows the system is so flawed that even Hastings’ House-provided attorney issued a retrospective critical of the process. In an internal congressional document obtained by NBC News this week, Gloria Lett, an attorney for the Office of House Employment Counsel, offered some “lessons learned” from Packer’s case that recommended the adoption of new policies to handle such claims.
The Settlement So how did Winsome Packer end up getting a $220,000 taxpayer-funded settlement in May 2014? And why was that payment, settling sexual harassment claims against a member of the House of Representatives, not included in a disclosure to the House Administration Committee of all such settlement payments in the last five years, provided by Congress’ Office of Compliance, the congressional office that approved the payment?
The puzzle of a byzantine process starts with what Packer says happened when she first made the complaint. Packer claims that from the outset she faced a system that was onerous and intimidating. In an interview, she told NBC News that the process “is designed to totally demolish you and convince you to drop it.” At the beginning, like any accuser who files a complaint with the Office of Compliance (OOC), Packer paid for her own legal representation while it’s the taxpayers who provide free legal counsel for the member of Congress or the office involved in the complaint.
Packer completed an initial requirement of a 30-days-or-less, mandatory counseling period for accusers, and then proceeded to a second requirement of a 30-day mediation period. She called that process “worse than the harassment.” She and one of her lawyers describe an attempt to undermine her credibility and intimidate her. George Chuzi, who represented Packer in her first meeting regarding the complaint, said the House lawyers were “unbelievably aggressive.”
Two government-paid lawyers representing Hastings sat across the table, as did her immediate supervisor. According to Packer and Chuzi, among the first things the House counsel said is that Packer is a “liar and an extortionist.” Packer added that the House attorneys also made an initial demand: Packer had to quit. Chuzi said he was “in shock” about the treatment of the accuser. Packer continued to press her case in federal court for three years.
How Congress is trying to expose sexual harassment payouts Packer eventually received a settlement payment of $220,000, an amount confirmed by documents reviewed by NBC News and the largest known about since the Congressional Accountability Act was passed in 1995. One document obtained by NBC News details early draft terms of Packer’s settlement, and it is one of few such documents that have become public.
The others have not been released because confidentiality requirements, established by Congress and signed into federal law as the Congressional Accountability Act, bind accuser, accused and other legal entities from disclosing any terms or details.
Despite these confidentiality requirements, Packer said she had decided to speak out because the environment has changed for accusers and she has little to lose. Packer, 60, who worked for the commission from 2007 until 2014, said she has not worked since the settlement was reached nearly four years ago, and is now living with her sister in Florida.
Prior to her work as a policy adviser to the Helsinki Commission, Packer worked as a GOP staff member on the House Homeland Security Committee from 2003 through 2006.
But when NBC News directed questions about the settlement and the payment to the two congressional entities the documents showed were involved in establishing and approving them — the Office of Compliance and the Senate Office of the Chief Counsel for Employment — neither provided answers.
In an email, the Office of Compliance’s media representative wrote that “the Congressional Accountability Act requires that the OOC maintain the confidentially of contacts made with the office. The OOC cannot comment on whether matters have or have not been filed with the office.”
The Senate legal office did not respond to questions — including why it reached a settlement in this case even though Hastings is a member of the House.
In the “lessons” memo written by Lett, the counsel representing Hastings’ side, she argued that “the manner in which the case was resolved was not ideal, and, going forward, we strongly recommend that the commission consider adopting regulations or policies to avoid this type of situation.” According to Lett’s memo, Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., who succeeded Hastings as chairman of the Helsinki Commission in 2011, did not favor moving forward with the settlement. Hastings sent letters to Smith and Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., who was the ranking member of the commission at the time, in 2012, saying, “I strongly oppose any settlement with Ms. Packer that would involve her receiving any money or things of value,” calling her allegations “absolutely false.”
According to the “lessons” memo, Packer contacted the Senate Chief Counsel for Employment’s office and “indicated her interest in settling the case.” A draft confidentiality agreement between Packer and the commission, obtained by NBC News, forced Packer to resign in order to accept the settlement. She also had to agree to never seek employment with the commission again.
The agreement was also made with the commission, not Hastings, and required commission employees to attend a sexual harassment training session. Hastings was not required to attend. According to the settlement, the commission’s harassment politics also had to be redrafted and distributed them at the seminar.
The Senate office didn’t communicate with the House office that first opened the case on the terms and details of the settlement, according to Lett’s “lessons” memo. Other than a conversation between Hastings and Cardin in 2014 that a settlement had been reached, Hastings was never provided any details of the settlement until it was reported in the press last week. “Until (last Friday) evening, I had not seen the settlement agreement between the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) and Ms. Packer,” Hastings said. “At no time was I consulted, nor did I know until after the fact that such a settlement was made.”
Alcee Hastings: another negative IQ Democrat...
Harry Truman said it best. “The son-of-a-bitch is no good.”
The Senate Waited Until Christmas To Reveal How Many Harassment Settlements Were Paid Out
Daily Caller | 12/25/2017 | Kevin Daley
FR Posted on 12/25/2017 by ding_dong_daddy_from_dumas
GOP Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, who chairs the Rules Committee, said further particulars cannot be made public, in order to respect the confidentiality afforded to victims.“While the Rules Committee has been eager to provide this information in a transparent manner, it has been our priority to protect the victims involved in these settlements from further harm,” the senator said in a statement attending the report. (Excerpt) Read more at dailycaller.com ...
In a grandiose show of his “impending knighthood,” Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Alabama), Rules Committee chair, graciously said that “further particulars cannot be made public, in order to respect the confidentiality afforded to victims of sex harassment by members.”
MEMO TO SHELBY: you, sir, know dam well. Americans do not want the names of the victims.
Americans DEMAND to know the names of the elected sex harrassers and tax dollars they extorted to silence their victims.
AMERICANS DEMAND TO KNOW THE SCOPE AND DIMENSION OF TAX DOLLARS EXTORTED FOR THESE ITEMS:
<><> tax-paid hush money disguised as bonuses
<><> tax-paid severances
<><> no-show jobs to silence victims
<><> tax-paid legal assistance
<><> payouts from the Office of Compliance
<><> payouts from tax-paid office budgets
<><> all other forms of tax-paid bribery
<><> all other forms of tax-paid hush money.
CONTACT CONGRESS: Capitol Switchboard 1-866-220-0044
U.S. Department of Justice
Comment Line: 202-353-1555
Switchboard: 202-514-2000
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