Tag: George W. Bush

Unwilling to leave political arguments for after Thanksgiving, Donald Trump returned to the offensive against judges and judgements he does not like, blaming both for “bedlam, chaos, injury and death”. “Whatever the scope of the president’s authority,” Jon Tigar wrote, “he may not rewrite the immigration laws to impose a condition that Congress has expressly forbidden.” Tigar, who was appointed by Barack Obama in 2012, is in fact a district judge based in San Francisco, under the jurisdiction of the ninth circuit but not a member of its appeals court. On Wednesday, in response to the president’s invective on the matter, Roberts issued a statement denying that judges’ opinions were shaped by the president who appointed them. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.” Trump tweeted then: “Sorry Chief Justice John Roberts, but you do indeed have ‘Obama judges’, and they have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country. It would be great if the ninth circuit was indeed an ‘independent judiciary’, but if it is why are so many opposing view (on border and safety) cases filed there, and why are a vast number of those cases overturned. We need protection and security – these rulings are making our country unsafe! The Washington Post reported that though ninth circuit rulings are often overturned by the supreme court, “studies show that over the past five years, three other [circuit courts] have a higher percentage of decisions overturned”. After vaunting his record on border security, the president called the ninth circuit “a big thorn in our side” and “a disgrace”. In 2017, he attacked the legitimacy of a Washington-state judge who ruled against his first travel ban against people from certain Muslim-majority countries.

CNN anchor Poppy Harlow told viewers on Tuesday that the network’s decision to sue the Trump administration over its revocation of White House correspondent Jim Acosta’s press credentials is "not about politics" but instead "about constitutional rights.” In the lawsuit filed Tuesday morning, CNN accuses President Trump and other White House officials of violating Acosta’s First and Fifth Amendment rights, the latest escalation of an ongoing feud between Trump and CNN. “I think, Ted, we should remind our viewers this is not about politics," Harlow said during an interview with Ted Boutrous, who is representing CNN in the suit. And Ted Olson and I, we come from different political viewpoints, actually, even though we have been partners for 30 years," replied Boutrous. "That’s the whole point." So this ruling will protect everyone in the press and every citizen, no matter what their political affiliation, so they get as much information as they can get so they can govern themselves," he continued. It is a First Amendment issue that is really important to our society.” Boutrous's argument on CNN echoes that of the language in the lawsuit, which says the White House decision to revoke Acosta's pass has a "dangerous chilling effect for any journalist." "If left unchallenged, the actions of the White House would create a dangerous chilling effect for any journalist who covers our elected officials." The legal action comes six days after a combative exchange between Acosta and Trump in the White House East Room that dominated headlines for days. The exchange came to a head Acosta fired off a series of questions while openly debating the president of his portrayal of a migrant caravan as an “invasion.” When Trump tried to move on to another reporter after Acosta attempted to ask a fourth question, Acosta initially refused to surrender the microphone to a White House intern. The following day, Sanders announced that Acosta's "hard pass" was being revoked as a result.

Alex Trebek says the answer to what’s missing from politics in the Trump era is humor. “That’s one of the things, unfortunately, that we lack in politics today. There isn’t enough humor,” the longtime “Jeopardy!” host tells Vulture in an interview published Monday. Previous commanders in chief had a knack for injecting a dose of comedic relief into the political climate, according to the game show host. But President Trump doesn’t make jokes, Trebek insists, and instead “picks on people.” “I think back to George W. Bush, who had a good sense of self-deprecating humor. Now, some would say, ‘He should have been self-deprecating because he was worthy of self-deprecation.’ But I wouldn’t agree with that necessarily,” Trebek, 78, said. “[Former President Barack] Obama also had a good sense of humor, with a pretty sharp edge. [Former President Ronald] Reagan had a good sense of humor, and not a mean-spirited one.” “But pity the fool who comes up with a funny line now,” Trebek, who was born in Canada, laments. “We are so polarized that he or she is only going to be savaged for it.” Trebek, who describes himself as an independent, says he’s never met Trump. In a 2016 chat with ITK, the game show guru predicted that then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton would win the White House, saying that Trump seemed "bent on shooting himself in the foot every time he takes a step forward, and that’s unfortunate for him.” Asked by Vulture how the president would do in a game of “Jeopardy!,” Trebek quipped that Trump “might not agree that any of the correct responses are correct.”

Philadelphia (CNN)Former Vice President Joe Biden lamented the "demeaning" nature of today's politics while presenting an award to President George W. Bush and former first lady Laura Bush in Philadelphia on Sunday. "As President Bush was my opposition as the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, he was never my enemy," Biden said. There's the opposition, not the enemies." The event at the National Constitution Center marked Biden's first public appearance since the midterm elections. "In a week following another contentious political season, the presentation of the Liberty Medal is a critical reminder that neither Republicans nor Democrats hold a monopoly on the values and the ideals that define us as a nation," Biden said. "It's no secret President Bush and I occasionally had our political disagreements," Biden said Sunday. "I always respected the President. That's the way the system is supposed to work -- voices raised in a contest of ideas to determine the direction we take as a nation." The Bushes have spearheaded several initiatives to help veterans, their families and caregivers, including Warrior Wellness Alliance, which aims to improve veterans' health care; VET Roadmap, which seeks to help veterans find employment, and the Warrior 100K, an annual mountain bike ride for veterans. "For my part, to return the salute of such people was the highest of all the privileges that came with the office of President, and because the Liberty Medal is presented to Laura and me on Veterans Day, we will cherish it all the more," Bush added.

The Story: On Friday, November 2, Steve Bannon debated David Frum about populism and conservatism, and about the volatile combination of the two known in...

Welcome to On Politics, your guide to the day in national politics. Some of President Trump’s biggest financial backers live here. In the final days, much of the midterm election seems to have clarified around a central question: What is American identity? But discomfort with the president’s rhetoric among college-educated white voters, particularly women, is also part of the reason that Democrats have a shot of winning long-held Republican House seats in suburbs like Highland Park, which has been represented by the Republican Pete Sessions since 2002. ____________________ Lots of people are voting early With less than a week until Election Day, 28 million ballots have been cast through early and absentee voting. That’s a lot: Four years ago, 27 million people voted early. (Both of those states have high-profile Senate races.) • Even a few states without major competitive races, like Maryland and Louisiana, have surpassed their early voting numbers from the last midterms. ____________________ Today in live polls: Georgia, and the big picture Image As the election nears, The Times’s live polling project is talking to voters in some of the closest races. Today, Nate Cohn and the Upshot team highlighted a few polls happening right now: If We Had More Time: We’ve run out of time to add new House polls.

The “October surprise,” that peculiarly American tradition of a last-minute revelation intended to alter the course of a political campaign, has typically hinged on an act of unsavory behavior. Trump won, anyway. Similarly, in early November of 2000, news broke of George W. Bush’s decades-old D.U.I. On Monday, photographs surfaced showing Stacey Abrams, the Democratic nominee, participating in the burning of a Georgia state flag, in 1992, when she was a sophomore at Spelman College, in Atlanta. An attempt to change the flag nearly derailed Governor Zell Miller’s political career, in 1994, and, eight years later, Governor Roy Barnes lost his bid for reëlection partly as a result of his having successfully removed the Confederate elements from the flag. Elements of the Confederate flag had been incorporated into the Georgia flag in 1956, as part of that state’s massive resistance against the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Fifty-three years ago, Lester Maddox, an entrepreneur who had failed in two previous attempts to be elected to public office, launched a quixotic campaign for governor of Georgia. Maddox won his first political campaign, and was sworn in as governor. The playbook of racist populism that was so key to the victory of Donald Trump in 2016 was perfected in the South—Trump, in effect, treated the entire country as if it were the South in 1966—and the governor’s race is another testament to its durability. It is likely that a part of the state’s population will consider the burning of a Confederate-tinged flag twenty-five years ago to be an act of outrage that is disqualifying for the governorship.

Learn the answer to that, and you'll nearly always know whether someone's voting Republican or Democrat in midterm elections. We traveled here to central Florida to watch those dynamics in actions at The Villages, a retirement community about an hour northwest of Orlando. With more than 120,000 residents, it's massive enough to be its own census-designated place. Residents move around these sunny streets in golf-carts. They play plenty of golf. Across the state, there are enough senior citizens to tip all the crucial contests Florida faces this year. Floridians 65 and over cast one in four votes in the midterm elections in 2014 – above the national average. Their choices include eight battleground races for the House. For the U.S. Senate, longtime Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson battles for re-election against current GOP Gov. Trump supporters gave virtually no ground, hailing him as the greatest president of their lifetimes despite his many scandals and provocations.

Susan Collins, the moderate US senator from Maine whose vote to put Brett Kavanaugh on the supreme court was decisive, despite sexual assault allegations, defended herself on Sunday against charges of betraying women and the #MeToo movement – as the Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, boasted that the bitter fight on Capitol Hill has given his party a late advantage in the forthcoming midterm elections. With the dust barely settling after a process that was meant to uphold the sanctity and august bearing of the supreme court but ended up being one of the most partisan, and narrowly won, confirmation proceedings in history, brickbats continued to fly over the weekend. He told CBS that the fight put up by Democrats against the judge had simply energized Republican voters for the November midterm elections who had previously been less motivated then Democrats. “So I want to thank the other side,” he said. He’d said after the confirmation vote on Saturday afternoonthat: “These things always blow over.” But bitter divisions in Congress and the country are almost certain to continue. The political wing of the women’s health organization Planned Parenthood, which has been a firm ally of Collins in the past and even presented her with an award, put out a devastating statement in which it said: “Senator Collins has made it clear that she can no longer call herself a women’s rights champion. Play Video 3:24 A crowd-sourced fund set up this weekend to try and unseat Collins when she comes up for re-election in 2020 has already attracted more than $2m. Collins hit back at Rice on Sunday with a snarky remark about her potential rivals’ connections to Maine. Hirono, however, concluded with: “I want to ask Susan Collins, if you were interviewing someone for a lifetime position to some company would you hire somebody with this kind of cloud over their heads?” Meanwhile Heidi Heitkamp, a Democratic senator who voted against Kavanaugh despite representing the deeply conservative state of North Dakota, where her seat is now in serious jeopardy, put out a new TV ad in which she states: “I don’t think he told the truth” and in any case he was “too biased to be impartial”. “Everybody knows how energized the Democrat side is, and so our energy and enthusiasm was lagging behind theirs until this.

Suddenly, it was clear that the United States was under attack. A country whose continental states had not seen a major attack in nearly 200 years was stunned to find that its financial and military centres had been hit by a small terrorist group based thousands of miles away. Its most lasting and consequential effects are interlinked: a massively expensive and unending “war on terror”, heightened suspicion of government and the media in many democratic countries, a sharp uptick in Western antagonism toward Muslims, and the decline of US power alongside rising international disorder – developments that aided the rise of Donald Trump and leaders like him. Just weeks after 9/11, the administration of US President George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan with the aim of destroying al Qaeda, which had been granted safe haven by the extremist Taliban regime. It is now the longest war the United States has fought. In many parts of the world, the war fuelled anti-Americanism; in Europe, public opinion about the war set in motion a widening estrangement between the United States and its key European allies. Monetary and social costs Today, the United States spends US$32 million every hour on the wars fought since 9/11. In the United States and in other countries, citizens are increasingly suspicious of government sources and the media — at times even questioning whether truth is knowable. The consequences for democracy are dire. Instead, it is countries with large Muslim populations that have seen a rise in terrorist attacks.