during obama's speech when he said Yes She Can and they started chanting that....somewhere Hillary was saying..
Hollywood Hogan... Want Me To Drop The Leg On Kamala
Update: Vice President Kamala Harris is now the Democratic presidential nominee
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Hollywood Hogan... Want Me To Drop The Leg On Kamala
The GOP and Reagan did the same thing during the iranian hostage crisis...
The 1980 October Surprise theory refers to an allegation that representatives of Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign made a secret deal with Iranian leaders to delay the release of American hostages until after the election between Reagan and President Jimmy Carter, the incumbent.
It’s All but Settled: The Reagan Campaign Delayed the Release of the Iranian Hostages
Suspicions have long swirled around unscrupulous campaign manager William Casey. We believe the evidence is now overwhelming.
Forty-three years after the climactic events of 1980, the four of us—all steeped in the history of the Carter administration—believe that it’s time to move past conspiracy theories to hard historical conclusions about the so-called October Surprise. We think there’s now enough evidence to say definitively that Ronald Reagan’s campaign manager, the late William Casey, ran a multipronged covert operation to manipulate the 1980 presidential election—and that these acts of betrayal might have affected the outcome.
In April, the four of us interviewed Stuart Spencer, who was a chief strategist and architect of Reagan’s 1980 general election campaign. He said that he believed then—and now—that Carter might have won if the American hostages seized at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 had been released before the 1980 election.
But Bill Casey was determined not to let that happen. In March, The New York Times confirmed a long-ignored story that in the summer of 1980, Casey persuaded former Texas Governor John Connally to embark on a secret mission to the Middle East, where Connally and his associate, Ben Barnes, asked various Arab leaders to urge the Iranians not to release the 52 hostages. This firsthand account was only the latest evidence that Casey, at a minimum, attempted to prolong their captivity in order to help his candidate win.
Casey, an OSS spymaster for the Allies during World War II, would later become Reagan’s CIA director. In the summer of 1980, he established a secret network of more than 100 current and former diplomats, military officers, and CIA assets to monitor diplomatic channels and military bases, ostensibly to give the Reagan campaign time to spin the news of what Casey dubbed Carter’s potential “October Surprise”—securing the release of the hostages before the election. The initial aim was to get out ahead of the story and plant the suspicion that the president was playing politics with the crisis.
But there’s evidence that this network did more than that. Casey coordinated with Project Alpha, sometimes called Project Eagle, a David Rockefeller–backed operation dedicated at first to giving the exiled Shah of Iran sanctuary in the United States. Project Alpha was run by Joseph Verner Reed, a seemingly upright Chase banker and future ambassador under Reagan, who was shockingly proud of his role in making the hostages suffer months longer, confined and often mistreated in dank basements.
As detailed in 2019 by the Times, Reed wrote his family after the election that “I had given my all” to thwarting Carter’s efforts “to pull off the long-suspected ‘October Surprise,’” an apparent reference to Reed’s efforts to move beyond monitoring the situation to actively discouraging the Iranians from turning over the hostages.
Republicans who knew Casey have long suspected that he might have masterminded this plot. Spencer told us that during that period he spoke on the phone with Casey at least once a day. While Spencer said that Casey never discussed meeting personally with Iranians or dispatching Connally to the Mideast, “the guy was obsessed by this whole thing. He wasn’t rational about it.” The stakes were high. Both Casey and Spencer thought “that if Carter solved the problem, he would probably win the election.” We asked Spencer if disclosures about Casey trying to delay the release of the hostages surprised him. “Nope,” Spencer said. “He was a real spook. That was his style.”
Did Reagan know? Spencer pointed out that Reagan was always a detached manager and that neither he nor the candidate knew what Casey was up to. “Casey was a pain in the ass,” Spencer remembered. “I dubbed him ‘Mumbles’ because the guy was inarticulate. Reagan couldn’t understand him.” Spencer felt that Casey was “entirely capable” of going rogue.
This view of Casey was common. The late Richard Helms, a former ambassador to Iran and CIA director, described Casey as a “conniver.” Clair George, a legendary clandestine officer in the CIA, said, “I liked Casey. He was nuts.” Stuart Eizenstat asked former Secretary of State James Baker in 2019 about the central allegation—that Casey met with a representative of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Madrid. Baker, who served as Reagan’s first White House chief of staff, replied, “Would I be surprised if Casey did it? There is nothing about Casey that would surprise me. He is a piece of work.”
Casey had no scruples in politics. In the run-up to the 1980 Carter-Reagan debate (there was only one that year), Casey paid $1,500 to an anti-Carter operative named Paul Corbin to obtain a stolen copy of Carter’s closely held debate briefing book. Baker later told Eizenstat that Casey walked into his office, put the stolen briefing book on his desk, and told him he might find it interesting.
The stolen binders contained attack lines for Carter to use against Reagan’s controversial positions on issues like Social Security and Medicare. This helped Reagan anticipate Carter’s lines of attack, and he easily won the debate, just eight days before the election. In the aftermath, Carter cut short a campaign trip to return to Washington and make one last attempt to obtain the release of the hostages. Amid all the publicity about that failure and the first anniversary of the embassy takeover (complete with replayed images of blindfolded hostages), the election went from a dead heat in most polls to a Reagan landslide.
It’s important to understand the context of the fall campaign. Carter’s diplomatic efforts were nearly successful in September and October 1980, in part because Iran needed the assets that had been frozen by the U.S. at the outset of the hostage crisis to defend itself against an invasion by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. By then, the broad outlines of a deal to release the hostages were in sight. But the Iranians inexplicably dragged their feet over the financial terms. We can now conclude that they did so at least in part in response to the private urging of Casey, with the help of conciliatory public comments by Reagan on the campaign trail.
Based on our reporting in four books and on investigative reports in the early 1990s by ABC News’s Nightline, PBS’s Frontline, and other news outlets, here is what likely happened:
In late July 1980, Casey attended a World War II conference in London. For years, this was viewed by his defenders as an airtight alibi. But according to historian Robert Dallek, who was present at the conference, Casey was not there until the day after the alleged Madrid meeting took place. We now believe that Casey quietly flew to Madrid, where he met with Ayatollah Mehdi Karrubi, a high-ranking representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Multiple sources interviewed in the 1990s say that Casey told Karrubi that the Iranians would get a better deal from Reagan. Hotel records show that Robert K. Gray, who ran the early warning intelligence network with Casey, was also in Madrid at the time.
In 1991, a bipartisan special House task force, chaired by Democratic Representative Lee Hamilton with strong support from the vice chair, Republican Representative Henry Hyde, began probing the October Surprise. At the same time, skeptics attempted to debunk the story by focusing on the lack of proof that Casey was in Madrid. Because Hamilton’s committee could not establish that Casey was in Madrid, its report contained a lot of suspicious smoke but no smoking gun.
This and the publication of several bogus conspiracy theories knocked the wind out of the October Surprise story until 2011, when the late Robert Parry, an investigative reporter, found an old memo buried in President George H.W. Bush’s presidential library. The 1991 memo was from Bush’s deputy White House counsel, Paul Beach, in response to a subpoena from Hamilton’s committee for all documents related to the October Surprise. In the memo, Beach noted that he had just met with his counterpart at the State Department, Ed Williamson: “In this regard,” Beach noted, “Ed mentioned only a cable from the Madrid embassy indicating that Bill Casey was in town, for purposes unknown.”
Clearly some kind of cover-up had taken place. The Madrid embassy cable should have been turned over to Hamilton’s committee. Instead, the cable disappeared, along with Casey’s passport and Madrid travel and hotel records. And Casey’s calendar date books, on file at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, show that the entries for July 26–27, 1980, have been ripped out.
In 2020, a federal judge ordered the State Department to make a thorough search for the Madrid embassy cable—but it has never been found. When now-retired Representative Hamilton was shown a copy of the Beach memo in 2020, he expressed shock: “If the [George H.W. Bush] White House knew that Casey was there, they certainly should have shared it with us” (Bush was president during the 1991 probe).
During the 1980 campaign, Casey worked on several tracks at once to delay the release of the hostages. Beyond meeting personally with Iranians and dispatching Connally to the Middle East, he also sent a campaign aide, Jack Shaw, to have lunch with a Lebanese businessman, Mustafa Zein, known to be close to PLO chief Yasir Arafat. Shaw informed Zein that Casey wanted Arafat to pass a message to Ayatollah Khomeini. Zein promptly flew to Beirut and told Arafat about Casey’s overture. At the time, Arafat was on good terms with Iran’s revolutionary regime, and he may well have passed on the message. In 1996, however, he told President Carter during a visit to Gaza, “You should know that in 1980 the Republicans approached me with an arms deal if I could arrange to keep the hostages in Iran until after the election. I want you to know that I turned them down.” (Historian Douglas Brinkley was a witness to this exchange.)
The PLO chief received a similar message from another of his Palestinian advisers, Bassam Abu Sharif, who reported that an unnamed Reagan friend “said he wanted the PLO to use its influence to delay the release of the American hostages.” The Israelis were hardly in the dark, either. When former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was asked by reporters in 1993 if he thought delaying the release of the hostages was part of a deal with Iran, he answered: “Of course it was.”
Given all of this, Casey’s unpatriotic conduct should now be viewed by historians as an established fact. And there is strong circumstantial evidence—though no documentary proof—that an actual deal was struck. But even if there was no consummated deal, the signals Casey sent to the Iranians through multiple channels that they would get a better shake if Reagan was elected almost certainly delayed the release of the hostages.
In the end, it was Carter, not Reagan, who secured their freedom. Early on the morning of January 20, 1981, just hours before he left office, Carter completed the final, complex negotiations, with Algeria as the intermediary. He considered it one of the greatest achievements of his life that the hostages all came home safely, though the flight carrying them from Tehran didn’t clear Iranian air space until minutes after Reagan was sworn in.
Within a week of the inauguration, Reagan’s new secretary of state, Alexander Haig, signed off on secret arms sales to a country that had just held Americans hostage for 444 days. We believe the burden of historical evidence now supports viewing this as a quid pro quo, even if one accounts for the Israelis wanting to help Iran resist Iraq’s invasion. In 1982, the delivery route shifted to Sweden, with covert operations that used some of the same shady airlines and even the same planes that were employed by the Reagan administration four years later to send arms to Iran in the Iran-Contra affair of 1985–86, which in retrospect looks like an outgrowth of these earlier arms deals. (Casey was deeply implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal but died suddenly in 1987, just as he was scheduled to testify before Congress.)
Four decades on, the October Surprise story should be remembered as a tale of betrayal, not only of American democracy but of the people held in captivity. After last month’s Times article on the Connally trip, Barry Rosen, 79, one of the surviving hostages, said of the efforts to delay his release: “It’s the definition of treason.” Whatever the legal standard, we believe the larger historical verdict is in: Bill Casey and his knowing associates sold out their country—and have now consigned themselves to the annals of infamy.
It’s All but Settled: The Reagan Campaign Delayed the Release of the Iranian Hostages
Suspicions have long swirled around unscrupulous campaign manager William Casey. We believe the evidence is now overwhelming.
newrepublic.com
Just imagine a debate between Barack Obama and Trump...McCain and Romney couldn't....He would have mopped the floor with Trump...would have been a fun thing to see.
What the fuck....????
Trump refused to debate- his attitude ..indeed most of the GOP attitude is that their ideas dont have to be debated or discussed - its geton board or get treated like a pariah....
there is certainly a lot of this kind of behavior to go around ...but the dynamic i describe above has been de-rigeur for the GOP for decades
Imagine if Beyonce were to show up on the final night of the DNC..with Taylor Swift doing the same the night before
shots fired, motherfucker, deal with it...
Yes, she has the transcript. Melania won't be able to capture the irony, but there mere fact that she doesn't get it makes it even better.
This shit was like a funeral, DNC looks like a week longer party. You know Diaper Donnie is shitting in his diaper throwing Ketchup at the walk and will be renting all week long
'Let's Go!' Top Economist Applauds as Harris Signals Support for Billionaires Tax
Gabriel Zucman, a leading authority on tax evasion by the rich, welcomed news that Kamala Harris' presidential campaign is embracing proposals to tax the ultra-wealthy and large corporations.
An economist at the forefront of the growing global push for a billionaire wealth tax is welcoming news that U.S. Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris is embracing calls for a minimum levy on the United States' richest individuals.
"Let's go!" Gabriel Zucman, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote Tuesday in response to Semaforreporting on the Harris team's endorsement of taxes on ultra-wealthy individuals and large corporations proposed in President Joe Biden's budget for Fiscal Year 2025.
Semafor highlighted a "little-noticed portion" of an analysis released late last week by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which wrote that Harris' campaign "specifically told us that they support all of the tax increases on the high earners and corporations that are in the Biden budget."
That budget blueprint includes a 25% minimum tax on billionaire wealth, much of which is unrealized capital gains that are not currently subject to taxation. A recent analysis by Americans for Tax Fairness estimated that U.S. billionaires and centi-millionaires collectively held at least $8.5 trillion in unrealized capital gains in 2022—a massive untapped source of federal revenue.
U.S. billionaires have seen their collective fortunes grow by more than $2 trillion since former President Donald Trump—the GOP's 2024 nominee—signed into law massive tax breaks for the rich and big corporations. Trump has campaigned on extending the deeply regressive and unpopular tax cuts and slashing rates for large companies even further.
Surging billionaire wealth at a time when roughly two-thirds of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck has amplified calls for a minimum tax on the richest Americans. Zucman noted in a May New York Times piece that in 2018, U.S. billionaires paid a lower effective tax rate than working-class Americans for the first time in the nation's history.
"The idea that billionaires should pay a minimum amount of income tax is not a radical idea," Zucman wrote in May. "What is radical is continuing to allow the wealthiest people in the world to pay a smaller percentage in income tax than nearly everybody else."
Polling has shown that a 25% tax on billionaire wealth is extremely popular with U.S. voters across the political spectrum. A survey in March of last year by Data for Progress found that 87% of Democrats, 68% of Independents and third-party voters, and 51% of Republicans back the idea.
A spokesperson for the Harris campaign confirmed to NBC News on Monday that in addition to backing the push for a minimum tax on billionaires, the vice president supports raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28% as a way to help finance parts of her broader economic agenda, which includes an expanded child tax credit and substantial assistance for first-time homebuyers.
The campaign spokesperson called the move—which would still leave the corporate tax rate lower than it was when Trump first took office in 2017—a "fiscally responsible way to put money back in the pockets of working people and ensure billionaires and big corporations pay their fair share."
He's right, but not in the way that he thinks he is.
Carson imagines Trump is the first guy, but Trump is actually the other guy.
So you fuckwits did it again and ran up the rumor mill.
Harris did not endorse an “unrealized gain” tax.
-Harris’ campaign endorsed the *increases* in tax rate on corporate tax and personal tax rate over $400k in this plan.
-They did not comment on introducing new taxes like the unrealized gains tax. (Which would be dumb)
-Even under Biden’s plan, that unrealized gain only kicked in if you had in excess of $100M in gains that year.
Her plan was already outlined including:
-$6k tax credit for families
-$25k tax credit for first time homebuyers
-Not taxing tips for service industry workers
-Increase corporate tax to 28%
-Increase corporate alternative minimum tax to 21%
-Increase stock buyback tax to 4%
-Set GILTI tax to 21%
-Expand NIIT to include non-passive business income over $400k
-Increase top bracket income rate to 39.6%
So no, she did not endorse an “unrealized gain tax” and even if she did, you don’t earn enough for it to impact you.
You should stop getting your news from WatcherGuru and other shitty “News” accounts that rewrite headlines.
*deadduring obama's speech when he said Yes She Can and they started chanting that....somewhere Hillary was saying..
You know she's mad as hell right now.
The Washington Post and (sometimes) the NYT have taken to fact checking Chump in everything they write..
WAPO 8/21/2024
Trump falsely labels Harris swap as ‘violent’ as he defends Jan. 6 rioters
HOWELL, Mich. — Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Tuesday falsely depicted Vice President Kamala Harris’s path to the Democratic nomination as violent and distorted her record on crime, even as he defended his supporters who attacked police at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Trump, whose lies about theft of the 2020 election inspired his supporters to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, falsely accused Harris of orchestrating a “vicious, violent overthrow” by replacing President Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket. Biden withdrew last month and endorsed Harris. While the process was unusual, it was legal and did not involve violence.
He went on to defend the Jan. 6 rioters by falsely claiming “nobody was killed,” as he compared that day to the protests that erupted after the police killing of George Floyd. Four people died in the mob on Jan. 6, three from medical problems and one shot by a police officer. One officer who fought the mob died of a stroke the next day, and four more officers died by suicide in the days and months that followed.
Trump spoke at the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office surrounded by deputies for an address focused on crime. Democrats criticized the event in advance because of Trump’s own 34 felony convictions and because of a recent neo-Nazi demonstration here. One demonstrator was recorded shouting, “We love Hitler, we love Trump.”
“One of the conclusions you could draw is that he went to Howell specifically because he thinks those people are his biggest supporters and champions,” Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel (D) told reporters on Tuesday. “I find it to be the greatest of ironies that, Trump is in town to talk about crime and public safety when the thing that we know most about Donald Trump is he himself is a one-man crime wave.”
Asked about the Democrats’ criticism over Howell’s historic association with the Ku Klux Klan, Trump responded that Biden had visited here in 2021. His campaign has said the location was chosen for being in the Detroit media market. Both campaigns consider Michigan one of the seven states likely to decide the electoral college.
In response to the appearance, the Harris-Walz campaign condemned Trump for not disavowing the white supremacists and pointed to his 2020 budget proposal to cut federal funding for local community policing programs.
Tuesday’s comments marked another attempt by Trump to undermine confidence in the election and raise questions about the legitimacy of Harris’s candidacy. He has repeatedly referred to Harris’s ascent as a “coup,” a tactic he reprised at the law enforcement event.
In Tuesday’s speech, Trump also joked about his criminal record, comparing it to early 20th century gangster Al Capone, drawing chuckles from the audience of sheriff’s office employees, friends and family.
Do your fucking job Merrick Garland!!!
You could've booked a loss with the other guy. Everything is trending in the right direction with Kamala. Keep campaigning, keep applying pressure, crush the debate and stay in the swing states.
Republicans plan is not to certify the election. And send it to the Supreme court.
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I said this before as well. Trump will create policies for her and they're not going to be good.