Just news

[trump2020]

China’s GTV is releasing, as we speak, Hunter Biden sex tapes with him smoking crack. Apparently, they have TONS of footage and releasing it slowly. I am not watching it, because A) I don’t want to, and B) there is talks of potentially underage girl videos, possibly family members. Definitely not something I want anything to do with! I have seen images though just from Twitter of what they’ve currently released, and it is 100% without a doubt Hunter. ITS ALSO STUFF THAT WAS TALKED ABOUT WITH REGARDS TO THE LAPTOP. God knows what else they have, i sure as hell wouldn’t trust Joe Biden with China when they have all this shit on his son. This is definitely evidence that the emails are real as its obviously his laptop.

Are we still going to live in denial that its his? Please stop with the Russia crap, absolute nonsense. What you read is garbage, you just aren’t aware of it. It took my parents forever, now they are able to see through even the local news when what they are reporting isn’t right.  They all have agendas, sooner you realize that the better off you’ll be. Wake up. Stop being spoon fed what these rags tell you and accepting it as fact

[trump2020]

Oct 24, 2020 20:05:32 GMT Not Trump 2020 said:

Pretty obvious how this will all end.

I'm talking in the context of biden winning, which I think is likely but, personally, still wouldn't be surprised if trump does. I'd put it at around 70-30 favouring biden.

Anyway, it will end with the republicans saying covid was forced on them by "Dems" and that's why both the handling of that and the economy was a disaster.

(Never mind that trump inherited a healthy economy and, arguably, did nothing to improve it, or even did some very short-term boosts that were already back on a downward trend by 2019...)

As always, a huge amount of Americans, especially republicans, are very insular and lacking in analytical ability, and won't see how covid has been handled elsewhere. (You know, consistently, clear messaging, with citizens who actually listen to sense and care about other people.)

America will be more divided than ever following this election. Possibly even with further violence. Snowflake far right goons will feel they have more right than black people to complain and protest about stuff. (When they obviously don't.)

The narratives of both sides have been set. If Biden wins, Republicans will say its due to be voter fraud. If Trump wins, Democrats will say it’s due to voter suppression/intimidation somehow. While I personally believe only the former is even plausible, I think that’s where we are at.

I think Trump is going to win, but like I said I also wouldn’t be shocked if he gets smashed. I have no idea. On one hand, the enthusiasm Trump has is so much greater than what is for Biden...we see it with the Trump rallies and Biden speaking to what looks like 20 people at the most sometimes. However, I do also think Biden voters are voting AGAINST Trump and not FOR Biden, so Biden voters wouldn’t go to Biden rallies anyway. They literally don’t care about him, it’s just no more Trump. Tough to call. I also don’t buy polls cause I do think many Trump voters keep it to themselves due to the narrative the Dems/media have created that anyone who votes for Trump is racist. Most polls are usually slanted anyway aside from that. So many factors going on.

Also, you mentioned “far right goons” protesting Trump losing and further violence (which implies they have been violent already). Would you care to expand? I get the impression you are sheep for what I already pointed out as false information. Is it the white supremacist Proud boys with the half black/half Cuban chairman? Is it the guys who wanted to kidnap Whitmer, who also hate Trump? Is it Kyle Rittenhouse who is a clear case of self defense?  I want to hear more about these goons and what they’ve done, please. Honest question...as the goons im seeing are either anarchists who support nobody, or from the left.

[Not Trump 2020]

The more you write, the more you give people like this stuff to go on their wild rants about.

America has the largest % of people who believe in conspiracy theories of any "developed" country.

There is no voter fraud, there IS voter suppression.

BLM was a valid cause, Charlottesville was not a valid cause.

Russian meddling was real, China meddling with biden is a yet to happen conspiracy theory.

I don't care to make a passionate defence of biden, I don't particularly like the guy. Trump is a proven compulsive liar, the biggest snowflake of the lot, is the worst president in the history of America, has divided that country in two for probably some considerable time. There is no comparison to be made.

I'm not interested in a back and forth where people try to "prove" things. Our resident trump fan is defending the indefensible.

Other people have managed good responses where they just address the style of debate instead of the (silly and reductive) "points" being made. I'll let them carry on doing that, and I'll carry on just making my own points.

It's because I'm "scared" to debate the trump fan. Hahahahahahaha!

[Dump Trump 2020]

Joe Biden’s hopes of reaching the White House could rest on two crucial demographic groups that appear to be deserting Donald Trump: elderly people and suburban women.

They would join a broad coalition that includes strong support among African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, the LGBTQ community and young people. With the gender gap potentially bigger than ever, the president appears more reliant than ever on white men.

Little more than a week before election day, Biden enjoys a double-digit lead in almost every national poll and is ahead in the crucial battleground states. More than 52 million people have already voted, according to the US Elections Project.

In the past four presidential elections, Republicans have led among the elderly by around 10 points. But about four in five Americans killed by the coronavirus were older than 65 and a majority of Americans say Trump has mishandled the pandemic.

The president trails among elderly voters by more than 20 points, according to recent CNN and Wall Street Journal/NBC News polls. This swing could prove critical in states such as Arizona and Florida, which have a high number of retirees.

“In terms of voting blocs, there are two that are absolutely dooming Donald Trump,” said Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota.

“He won the senior vote by seven points in 2016; that was very important in Florida and a few other states. He’s now losing that bloc and the polls differ about how much, but the fact that he no longer has an advantage among seniors is really crippling for him.

“And then he has so alienated suburban women that it’s put a whole number of states in play, including states you wouldn’t expect, like Georgia. This kind of macho presidency has gotten the ringing rejection by women, particularly educated women who are so tired of the 1950s.”

The suburban revolt against Trump’s bigotry, hardline agenda and chaotic leadership was manifest in the 2018 midterm elections when Democrats gained 41 seats in the House of Representatives, the biggest such shift since the post-Watergate 1974 elections, and won the popular vote by 8.6%.

Trump’s campaign to win back this constituency, variously known as “soccer moms”, “security moms” and “hockey moms”, has been anything but subtle. He has tried to tap racist fears of suburbs overrun by crime, violence and low-income housing. In one tweet, he promised to protect “the Suburban Housewives of America”. At a recent rally in Pennsylvania, he pleaded: “Suburban women, will you please like me? Remember? Hey, please, I saved your damn neighborhood, OK?”

Polls suggest the plea is falling on deaf ears. Biden leads by 23 points among suburban women in swing states, according to the New York Times and Siena College, and by 19 points among suburban women overall, according to Pew Research. Pew also found that Hispanic women prefer Biden by 44 points and Black women go for the Democrat by a staggering 85 points.

Andrea Moore, 45, a stay-at-home mom in suburban Wayne county, Michigan, voted for Trump in 2016 because she was tired of career politicians.

“He was an unknown quantity, but now we know,” she told the Associated Press, explaining that she will not vote for the president again because of “a million little things” including his divisiveness, fearmongering and failed Covid-19 response.

The trends were underlined this week by a national survey of 2,538 Americans by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) that showed Trump haemorrhaging support among the elderly and suburban women as well as another, less expected group: white Catholics.

Only 38% of people aged 65 or older approve of Trump’s handling of the pandemic while 61% say they disapprove, the PRRI found. Among white college-educated women, seven in 10 disapprove of Trump’s handling of the pandemic, seven in 10 disapprove of his response to racial justice protests and a similar share believe he has encouraged white supremacists.

There are also signs of erosion among religious conservatives, a bulwark of Trump’s base. PRRI found that while three in four (76%) white evangelical Protestants still approve of the job Trump is doing, only 52% of white mainline Protestants and 49% of white Catholics agree. Biden would be only the second Catholic president.

Robert P Jones, chief executive and founder of PRRI, said: “White Catholics are a group that particularly in those swing rust belt states – Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio – are really on the president’s must-win list. They’re also important in a place like Arizona. They are as big or bigger than white evangelicals in those states, so in terms of religious groups they are quite an important constituency.

“White Catholics in 2016 were basically evenly divided between Trump and Hillary Clinton at this stage in the race. We have them at 54% Biden, 41% Trump, so that’s a sea change. This group is going to play an outsized role in Trump’s path to the electoral college and he’s not doing well with them at all.”

Clinton was beaten in the electoral college after suffering heavy losses among non-college-educated white voters – a majority of the population in battleground states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – and failing to turn out African Americans at levels Barack Obama achieved. Current polling suggests Biden will do better on both accounts.

Whereas Clinton lost whites without a college degree by more than 20 points, Biden is trailing by just 12 in UCLA Nationscape’s polling, according to an analysis by the FiveThirtyEight website. This appears to vindicate strategists’ view that Biden, a 77-year-old white male from humble origins in Scranton, Pennsylvania, would resonate more with this demographic than the New York-based wife of a former president.

But, FiveThirtyEight added, Trump is performing slightly better than four years ago among college-educated white voters, and has made modest gains among voters of colour. The president’s support among Black voters aged 18 to 44 rose from around 10% in 2016 to 21% in UCLA Nationscape polling. He is also at 35% among Hispanic voters under age 45, up from the 22% in 2016 – and potentially significant in Florida.

Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, told reporters on Friday: “We’re very proud of the president’s efforts to turn out Latino voters … There’s a lot of enthusiasm for the president, not just for everything that he’s done so far but also because people are really scared about Joe Biden’s appeasing the regimes from Cuba and Venezuela.”

Older voters of colour remain overwhelmingly Democratic, however. Biden is also dominant among all people under 35 even in Republican strongholds, with leads in Texas (59% to 40%), Georgia (60% to 39%) and South Carolina (56% to 43%), according to Axios and SurveyMonkey.

[cliffs]

LOL the laptop from hell that Bannon gave to the shop owner and the shop owner gave Giuliani's lawyers a copy of the hard drive, why would a shop owner make a copy of anybody's laptop. That is invasion of privacy and against the law but you don't give a crap about law do you?.....FOR WHAT REASON DID HE GO TO THE GHOUL INSTEAD OF STRAIGHT TO THE POLICE? Oh yeah, a blind man who could not identify Bannon when he dropped off the laptop.

I also can see this BLIND man's business going belly up if he is peddling customers hard drives.

See how I made your conspiracy theory more realistic. Now prove that I am wrong little trumpette.


And for crying out loud, JOE is running for president not Hunter...think of all the women who have accused your precious of sexual wrong doings and the fact there are prosecutors just waiting for mid January to get here.

[Proud Boy snowflakes 2020]

It is cute and amusing that these trump fans expect (demand!) their arguments to be taken seriously and treated as if they are "equal" opinions.

Out of this humongous shit storm, that part is at least quite fun.

[cliffs]

President Donald Trump called Sacha Baron Cohen "a creep" after previously unseen footage from the new "Borat" movie was shared to Twitter on Friday by Borat's official account.

While speaking to reporters on Air Force One on Friday, Trump was asked whether he was worried about security breaches after footage showed an actress from the movie apparently getting into the White House. He told reporters that he doesn't "know what happened" and followed his answer up with commentary on Baron Cohen.

“Years ago, you know, he tried to scam me," Trump said, noting Baron Cohen had disguised himself as a BBC anchor, according to a copy of the pool report obtained by USA TODAY. "That’s a phony guy. And I don’t find him funny."

The "scam" happened 15 years ago, the president added, but he didn't elaborate. "To me he was a creep," Trump said.

Baron Cohen responded to Trump's comments on Twitter: "Donald — I appreciate the free publicity for Borat!" he wrote. "I admit, I don’t find you funny either. But yet the whole world laughs at you. I’m always looking for people to play racist buffoons, and you’ll need a job after Jan. 20. Let’s talk!"

[Tiny Hands 2020]

Oh, trump didn't like Borat? Well, that's a surprise.

I enjoyed Borat, the female sidekick was great!

Never forgot Penn jillette's comments about how trump doesn't like or listen to ANY music, or have a sense of humour. Says it all, to me:

Jillette described his time with Trump as, “Really weird stuff that you’ve never seen before. You have never seen someone who’s never laughed sincerely, and never made a joke. He will laugh in a bully way—‘Haha! You look kind of fat, Joe!’ He’ll do that. But never even a joke.”

The performer also noted a troubling aspect of Trump’s personality that is rarely touched on by the usual pundits: “I also never saw him show any enjoyment or understanding of music.”

The Celebrity Apprentice boardroom meetings were particularly grueling, Jillette said, as contestants were not allowed to put their hands on the table for fear of leaving smudges, or to turn their bodies in case they’d ruin the shots of Trump taken from cameras mounted on their shoulders. And then Trump would speak.

“So you’ve got about two hours where you sit up straight and you can’t move side to side, and you listen to someone speak for two hours that they’re going to try to edit out to get three minutes where he sounds OK.”

“What does he have to say for two hours?” Rogan asked.

“He would talk about, ‘I was reading this blog on the internet that said I didn’t sell my property for enough. And I bought it for $3 million and I sold it for $4 million. Isn’t that a profit? Isn’t that a profit? What do you think? Isn’t that a profit?’ It’s somebody on the internet! So he’d be arguing in front of us with perhaps an 18-year-old guy on the internet who thought Donald Trump should have made more from a real estate deal.”

Still, Jillette said he appreciates some aspects of Trump’s personality.

“I thought he was wonderful at his job. If you had anybody who was actually a business person on that show, it would be the worst show in the world, because Bill Gates would make proper decisions and there’d be no surprises. You want someone capricious and crazy with no filter. And that’s what we got. So he makes arbitrary decisions and the human brain tries desperately to make those make sense, and that ends up being some kind of entertainment.”

[End Spray On Tan 2020]

The Republican party has become dramatically more illiberal in the past two decades and now more closely resembles ruling parties in autocratic societies than its former centre-right equivalents in Europe, according to a new international study.

In a significant shift since 2000, the GOP has taken to demonising and encouraging violence against its opponents, adopting attitudes and tactics comparable to ruling nationalist parties in Hungary, India, Poland and Turkey.

The shift has both led to and been driven by the rise of Donald Trump.

By contrast the Democratic party has changed little in its attachment to democratic norms, and in that regard has remained similar to centre-right and centre-left parties in western Europe. Their principal difference is the approach to the economy.

The new study, the largest ever of its kind, was carried out by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, using newly developed methods to measure and quantify the health of the world’s democracies at a time when authoritarianism is on the rise.

Anna Lührmann, V-Dem’s deputy director, said the Republican transformation had been “certainly the most dramatic shift in an established democracy”.

V-Dem’s “illiberalism index” gauges the extent of commitment to democratic norms a party exhibits before an election. The institute calls it “the first comparative measure of the ‘litmus test’ for the loyalty to democracy”.

The study, published on Monday, shows the party has followed a similar trajectory to Fidesz, which under Viktor Orbán has evolved from a liberal youth movement into an authoritarian party that has made Hungary the first non-democracy in the European Union.

India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been transformed in similar ways under Narendra Modi, as has the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the Law and Justice party in Poland. Trump and his administration have sought to cultivate close ties to the leadership of those countries.

The Republican party has remained relatively committed to pluralism, but it has gone a long way towards abandoning other democratic norms, becoming much more prone to disrespecting opponents and encouraging violence.

“We’ve seen similar shifts in parties in other countries where the quality of democracy has declined in recent years, where democracy has been eroding,” Lührmann said. “It fits very well into the pattern of parties that erode democracy once they’re in power.”

“The demonisation of opponents – that’s clearly a factor that has shifted a lot when it comes to the Republican party, as well as the encouragement of political violence,” she said, adding that the change has been driven in large part from the top.

“We have several quotes from Trump, that show how he has encouraged supporters to use violence against either journalists or political opponents.”

In western Europe, centre-right parties like Germany’s Christian Democratic Union and Spain’s People’s Party have stuck to their commitment to democratic norms. By the same measure, Britain’s Conservative party has moved some way along the liberal-illiberal spectrum but not to the Republicans’ extremes.

“The data shows that the Republican party in 2018 was far more illiberal than almost all other governing parties in democracies,” the V-Dem study found. “Only very few governing parties in democracies in this millennium (15%) were considered more illiberal than the Republican party in the US.”

The institute has found the decline in democratic traits has accelerated around the world and that for the first time this century, autocracies are in the majority – holding power in 92 countries, home to 54% of the global population.

According to V-Dem’s benchmark, almost 35% of the world’s population, 2.6 billion people, live in nations that are becoming more autocratic.

[boffo]

If there's one thing that Trump has done well during his 5 years as a politician it's manipulating the media to his benefit.  He's done it since day 1 and has continued to do it every day since.

During the primaries he was nothing but a joke candidate in a massive field of people far more qualified then him.  He acted like a joke candidate the whole time and never gave any indication he'd have any potential to be a decent president.  If the media would have treated him as such and ignored him, he'd probably have gone away with a whimper and it'd be nearly forgotten by now that he even ran.  Instead they just couldn't help themselves and had to focus on the craziness.  Trump found the things that drew their attention the most and doubled down on those and eventually he had the vast majority of the media coverage despite the fact he warranted none of it.  The media was at this point doing more for his campaign then Trump could ever do on his own and actually legitimized him as a candidate.  The Republican party still viewed him as a joke candidate and didn't like him but that clearly didn't matter anymore and eventually had to come on board if they wanted to or not.  The media still viewed him as a joke but he clearly brought in viewership so they didn't care because even if he won the primaries it's not like he could beat someone like Hillary Clinton to actually become President.

Problem was that Hillary Clinton was quickly becoming the wrong kind of candidate for the time.  With all the coverage of Trump people were either being lured full force into the cult of Trump or for those Republicans who weren't they were at least seeing him as someone much different from the status quo and he threw them enough bones to make them figure he was worth a shot.  Hillary was the career politician who was very much the status quo and you knew exactly what you'd be getting from her.  She also had enough skeletons in her closet that were easy enough to find and she never seemed overly likeable, even to Democrat supporters.  At this point it was easy enough for Trump to just bombard the media with all of this and it just became headline after headline about how awful Hillary was, despite the fact that she was far and away the candidate most likely to be the better President.  Now you had enough Republicans and Independents thinking she was evil and corrupt and enough Democrats who would rather stay home than vote for her that it opened the door for Trump to win.

Now as President Trump had to change the way he did things.  He'd been setting the table with constant cries of fake news and now he had to push that narrative so you no longer knew what was truth and what was fiction.  Any article written citing anonymous sources from within the Whitehouse telling of turmoil or Trump stupidity I usually ignore.  I don't doubt for a second that Trump makes sure these stories get out that make him look bad but he can easily prove as being not true.  Now if this story was proven fake how can we trust the next one isn't fake?  If the next one actually is true and is bad for Trump there's enough people out there questioning it's legitimacy that the media usually moves on to the next big thing that is typically a day or two away.  If one of these legit stories manages to gain traction Trump knows he can just throw up a wall of stupid tweets which once again usually steers the media attention away from the actually serious news they should be following.  In the few cases where a story continues to stick beyond that then he can shift to evil Democrat conspiracy theories to rile his base up and bore everyone else or just do something slightly worse or more controversial to force the media to move on and start the whole cycle over again.

Now we're up to the re-election phase and he's running into some issues finally.  His attempts to claim the election are rigged against him are going according to plan.  He's kept pushing it and pushing it and the media has kept covering it to the point it has managed to legitimize something that there is 0 proof of as being true in enough peoples minds that it has become a serious issue for election day.  Had the media ignored it as the stupid, baseless claim it really is there'd be no problem right now.

Coronavirus has been a massive problem for the Trump plan because no matter how hard he tries he can't manipulate the media attention away from it.  There's finally a news story that's bigger than him which wouldn't be such a problem if he was doing a competent job in dealing with the virus.  This could have been a slam dunk re-election if he had just shown some empathy, compassion, and leadership to get everyone through this as painlessly as possible.  Instead he's done nothing but argue and fight and blame others while the US is suffering through it worse than any other country has had.  Now the media has no choice but to continue covering the virus and that just keeps exposing what a horrible job Trump has and continues to do in dealing with it.  No amounts of distraction or lies are going to work when there are simple graphs and charts easily available to everyone that show how bad a job he has done.

Joe Biden also goes against the Trump gameplan because he's not Hillary Clinton.  He's a career politician like she is and a lot of Democrats may not be big supporters of his policies, but he's a really hard person to dislike.  He just comes across as genuine, relatable and down-to-earth and has a tragic enough backstory to draw sympathy.  After 4 years of Trump who is basically the exact opposite of that it manages to make a fairly boring candidate like Biden seem refreshing.  Trump has spent most of the year trying to get some negative story about Biden to stick with the media but nothing seemed to be catching on.  Perhaps the media has learned their lesson, perhaps the general public has learned theirs, or perhaps nothing has been bad enough for anyone to overlook Biden's likeability.  Now suddenly with just a few weeks until the election a mysterious laptop supposedly belonging to Hunter Biden has somehow turned up in the hands of Rudy Guiliani with information proving Joe Biden is a criminal that Rudy is going to release piece-by-piece to select media sources only?  If anyone who derides mainstream media, except Fox as fake news is buying into this story as legit that's just showing their bias and how full of it they are.  As experts on fake news every single part of that story should be raising red flags with them.  Conveniently close to the election?  Basically a reprise of the "but her emails" from 4 years ago?  Rudy Giuliani?  Slow release of contents to pro-Trump media sources only instead of releasing the full contents to everyone and letting them choose to either ignore it or search for all the blockbuster bombshells that the media would normally drool over being the ones to uncover?  All of that just makes it seem weird and suspicious.  Even if it turns out to be true it brings the question of so what?  If Hunter Biden did the things Trump keeps accusing him of and the laptop proves as true Hunter isn't running for President.  If Hunter used his dad's position to get some token job where his influence could be used to funnel money to Joe this is the exact same thing Trump and his kids have been doing with the Presidency for the last 4 years, so why is it fine for one of them to do it but not the other?  At this point this whole story screams of Trump trying to pull another rabbit out of his hat at the last minute, but so far it doesn't seem to be working.  If he wins again then obviously it did work, but it certainly feels like he's losing his control over the media throughout this year and without that inadvertent help it's going to be really tough for him.

If anything good will come out of the Trump presidency it will hopefully be the viewing public holding all forms of media more accountable for the content they provide.  I doubt it's a coincidence that we've seen the gap between liberal and conservative ideals grow as we've seen the rise of 24/7 cable news networks.  There's only so much news to fill that many hours of programming so you've got to fill the rest with analysis which in most cases are nothing but opinions.  As long as those opinions mainly lean one way or the other that'll allow people the choice to see the news from just the side they want to which doesn't help an already divided country.  Don't believe something just because it fits your desired narrative.  If something raises questions about its' truth investigate further on your own instead of believing what some "expert" says on TV.  Read more than just the headline.  We have access to all the information we could ever ask for at our fingertips so why don't we use it for ourselves instead of boxing in our thinking?  Trump has certainly shown us how easily the media can be manipulated and the biases that everyone has so now is the time to learn we have the power to make sure that it doesn't continue to happen.

[cliffs]

Donald Trump is complaining on Twitter about “COVID, COVID, COVID” coverage in the media as he heads into the final week of campaigning, even suggesting reporting on a pandemic amounts to “election law violation” after the country recorded its highest number of new coronavirus infections so far over the weekend, reporting more than 84,000 cases on Friday and 79,000 on Saturday.


And this:



On the campaign trail on Sunday, the president also provoked confusion when he claimed falsely to have won two Nobel Peace Prizes during a rally speech in Londonderry, New Hampshire.

[cliffs]

Donald Trump ran for president as an outsider decrying the mounting national debt, which had surged under Barack Obama as he guided the nation out of a deep recession and implemented his health care programs.
"We can't send another politician to the White House," Trump tweeted on July 24, 2015, a few weeks after he announced his candidacy for the presidency.

Several months before the 2016 election, Trump pledged he would be able to eliminate the national debt – then around $19 trillion – “over a period of eight years.”
During a debate with Democrat Hillary Clinton two weeks before the election, Trump dismissed projections from economists that his proposals would actually expand the nation's debt by saying the economic growth they would create would enable a reduction of the debt.

On Trump's first day in office (Jan. 20, 2017), the total U.S. debt stood at $19.95 trillion, up from the 11.9 trillion when Barack Obama was sworn in eight years earlier. As of Oct. 14, the debt under Trump had mushroomed to $27.1 trillion.

[cliffs]

WASHINGTON — A federal judge in New York ruled Tuesday that the Justice Department cannot step in to shield President Donald Trump from a libel lawsuit filed by a woman who claims he raped her in a New York City department store more than 20 years ago.

The Justice Department had sought to block the lawsuit, filed by former gossip columnist E. Jean Carroll, by arguing that the president was acting in his official capacity when he told White House reporters that she made up the rape story.

Carroll sued, claiming that his statements branding her a liar damaged her reputation. Because federal law does not permit suing public officials for libel, the government said, the lawsuit should be dismissed.

But U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan said in his ruling Tuesday that the government was wrong on two counts. First, he said, the law applies only to federal employees, defined as officers of federal agencies — a description that does not include the president, who is in a different legal status.

Second, the judge said, the president's statements about something that happened more than two decades before are not within the scope of his official conduct.

"President Trump's views on the plaintiff's sexual assault allegation may be interesting to some, but they reveal nothing about the operation of government," Kaplan wrote.

[cliffs]

Too funny...even FOX news can read the writing on the wall:


Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has been using his airtime on Fox News to appeal for more money from viewers. But it seems the right-wing network may have had enough.

Graham, who is locked in a tight race against Democratic challenger Jaime Harrison, begged for cash twice during Laura Ingraham’s show on Tuesday. The second time, the network cut him off mid-plea:

[cliffs]

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany appears to have taken on a new gig. In addition to her role as a government employee, she’s now serving as a senior aide on her boss’s reelection campaign.

In an appearance on Fox News on Tuesday morning, McEnany was introduced as “Trump 2020 senior adviser and White House press secretary.” A few hours later, Fox Business Network host Stuart Varney introduced McEnany by saying she is “serving now as adviser for the Trump campaign."

McEnany’s dual roles for the White House and the Trump reelection campaign immediately set off alarm bells among good-government advocates, who said they represent yet another instance of the often blurry lines between the Trump administration and the president’s political operation.

“This looks like the latest example of Trump administration officials bending and breaking ethics laws and norms,” said Paul Seamus Ryan, the vice president of litigation for the group Common Cause. “This is unfortunately par for the course for this administration.”