Focused Agenda Block
~ Personal 📎Note:
Both the Focused Read and the Focused Point of Interest are long today but I hope you find the time to read them. Both Jane Mayer and Joan Walsh have done extraordinary work in writing a news piece and an opinion piece, respectively. Their work will help all of us to be informed consumers of the upcoming impeachment inquiry witnesses who will be coming before Congress this week.
Focused Read, excerpts in 5-6 minutes
"The Invention of the Conspiracy Theory on Biden and Ukraine
How a conservative dark-money group that targeted Hillary Clinton in 2016 spread the discredited story that may lead to Donald Trump’s impeachment.
For nearly two years, conservative operatives have been trying to weaponize the Ukraine-based story that has led Trump to the brink of impeachment.
A look back over the coverage of the story—a repeatedly discredited conspiracy theory involving Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s work in Ukraine—suggests that America’s news organizations continue to be just as susceptible to manipulation by political partisans pushing complicated and hard-to-check foreign narratives as they were in 2016.
In fact, several of the same players are involved.
“There’s no effective mechanism in this country for weeding disinformation out,” Paul Barrett, the deputy director of N.Y.U.’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, and the author of the recent study “Disinformation and the 2020 Election,” said. “We’re not doing anything about it at all.”
Anyone trying to track the Ukrainian conspiracy stories that were eventually embraced by President Trump is likely to get mired in the same echo chamber of right-wing news purveyors that misinformed voters in 2016.
A pivotal source of the allegations against the Bidens, for instance, is the Government Accountability Institute, a Florida-based opposition-research operation that was founded by the former Trump political adviser Stephen Bannon—the same conservative nonprofit that ginned up questionable stories about the Clintons during the last Presidential campaign.
In both instances, much of the coverage of the scandal was kicked off by Peter Schweizer, a longtime conservative political writer who is an editor-at-large at Breitbart News and the president of the Government Accountability Institute.
Since its founding, in 2012, the group has largely been funded with millions of dollars in tax-exempt donations from the family foundation of the New York hedge-fund magnate Robert Mercer, who was a major donor to Trump’s 2016 campaign.
In the organization’s most recently available I.R.S. tax filings, for 2017, Mercer’s daughter Rebekah is listed as the board chairman.
Asked about the Government Accountability Institute’s role in this year’s Biden scandal coverage, Bannon e-mailed to say, “It’s key. It was the predicate,” as it had been for much of the previous Clinton scandal coverage.
As Joshua Green describes in “Devil’s Bargain,” his book, from 2017, about Bannon’s role in the Trump campaign, Bannon designed the organization as a means of transmitting partisan dirt-digging to the mainstream media.
He realized that, though mainstream reporters were suspicious of partisan opinion, they were open to damning facts about public figures, regardless of the sourcing. He set out, with Schweizer, to produce material that would generate mainstream coverage, and right-wing outrage.
Thus, during the last Presidential campaign, under the auspices of the Government Accountability Institute, Schweizer published the best-selling book “Clinton Cash.”
But when it ran a front-page story derived from the book on April 24, 2015, the Times stirred controversy and criticism, including from its own public editor.
(Emphasis is mine.)
The story insinuated that, as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton had risked national security by facilitating the sale of American uranium mines to Russia in exchange for more than two million dollars in contributions to the Clinton Foundation from the businessmen behind the deal, who worked for a company called Uranium One.
The story enabled Clinton’s opponents to frame her as greedy and corrupt. Even a year after she had lost the race, the Fox News host Sean Hannity was still invoking it on air, calling it “the biggest scandal ever involving Russia.”
Yet later reporting poked holes in the story’s insinuation of corruption, revealing that multiple government agencies—not just Clinton’s State Department—had approved the deal, and that the amount of uranium involved was negligible. (Schweizer didn’t respond to phone calls from The New Yorker.)
On Thursday, the Daily Beast identified what it said were over a dozen passages in his book, “Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends,” that were lifted from other sources, such as Wikipedia—a charge that his publisher, HarperCollins, denied amounted to a violation of fair use.
For those who recall the “Clinton Cash” controversy, the baseless tales claiming that Biden corruptly intervened on behalf of his son’s Ukrainian business interests feel a lot like the movie “Groundhog Day.”
In March of 2018, Schweizer and the Government Accountability Institute once again produced a book that was perfectly timed for the Presidential campaign.
“Secret Empires” devoted a chapter to the subject of “Bidens in Ukraine,” which laid out the conflicts of interest posed by the wheeling and dealing of Biden’s son Hunter. (An additional chapter laid out Hunter Biden’s business deals in China.)
As the book recounted, in 2014, Hunter Biden, a Washington lobbyist, took a profitable post on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company run by a shady oligarch, while his father, who was then the Vice-President, handled a drive to rid Ukraine of corruption.
Other news organizations, including the Times and the Wall Street Journal, had already run stories on the same unethical-seeming morass.
(In July, The New Yorker published a piece about the relationship between Joe and Hunter Biden that dismissed allegations of any illegality in the Ukraine matter but included some concerns from Obama Administration officials that Hunter could potentially undermine his father’s work.)
(Emphasis is mine.)
In March of 2018, Schweizer and the Government Accountability Institute once again produced a book that was perfectly timed for the Presidential campaign.
“Secret Empires” devoted a chapter to the subject of “Bidens in Ukraine,” which laid out the conflicts of interest posed by the wheeling and dealing of Biden’s son Hunter. (An additional chapter laid out Hunter Biden’s business deals in China.)
As the book recounted, in 2014, Hunter Biden, a Washington lobbyist, took a profitable post on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company run by a shady oligarch, while his father, who was then the Vice-President, handled a drive to rid Ukraine of corruption.
Other news organizations, including the Times and the Wall Street Journal, had already run stories on the same unethical-seeming morass.
(In July, The New Yorker published a piece about the relationship between Joe and Hunter Biden that dismissed allegations of any illegality in the Ukraine matter but included some concerns from Obama Administration officials that Hunter could potentially undermine his father’s work.)
(Emphasis is mine.)
But Schweizer went a step further. His chapter implied not just that Burisma was a crooked company but that the end of a Ukrainian criminal investigation into it on January 12, 2017, was in some unstated way connected to Joe Biden’s visit to the country four days later.
In this way, Schweizer floated the possibility that, as Vice-President, Biden had abused his power to protect the company or his son from prosecution.
Yet Schweizer provided no proof of causation nor evidence of illegality.
Yet Schweizer provided no proof of causation nor evidence of illegality.
(Emphasis is mine.)
As he rolled out his new book, Schweizer promoted it in all the usual conservative news outlets...But the turning point in the Biden coverage, it appears, was in late 2018, when Trump’s private lawyer and political advocate, the former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, got involved.
That winter, Giuliani began speaking to current and former Ukrainian officials about the Biden conspiracy theory, and meeting with them repeatedly in New York and Europe.
Among those officials was Viktor Shokin, a former top Ukrainian prosecutor who was sacked in March, 2016, after European and U.S. officials, including Joe Biden, complained that he was lax in curbing corruption.
Shokin claimed that he had lost his powerful post not because of his poor performance but rather because Biden wanted to stop his investigation of Burisma, in order to protect his son.
The facts didn’t back this up.
(Emphasis is mine.)
The Burisma investigation had been dormant under Shokin.
But in March, according to NBC News, Giuliani gave the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, a packet of Trump Hotel folders containing the purported evidence against Biden,
including Giuliani’s interview with Shokin and his strategy to spread the Biden story, “including segments being placed on Fox News.”
Before long, this explosive, politically useful legend took on a life of its own in America’s conservative media.
(Emphasis is mine.)
Among those officials was Viktor Shokin, a former top Ukrainian prosecutor who was sacked in March, 2016, after European and U.S. officials, including Joe Biden, complained that he was lax in curbing corruption.
Shokin claimed that he had lost his powerful post not because of his poor performance but rather because Biden wanted to stop his investigation of Burisma, in order to protect his son.
The facts didn’t back this up.
(Emphasis is mine.)
including Giuliani’s interview with Shokin and his strategy to spread the Biden story, “including segments being placed on Fox News.”
(Emphasis is mine.)
(Emphasis is mine.)
As an anonymous whistle-blower’s complaint to Congress revealed, and as the Washington Post has reported, no journalist played a bigger part in fuelling the Biden corruption narrative than John Solomon, who until last week was an opinion columnist and executive vice-president of The Hill, in Washington.
(Emphasis is mine.)
As Giuliani conspired this past spring with questionable Ukrainian sources, Solomon pumped out a string of eye-catching stories echoing those sources’ claims about the Bidens.
This appears to have been no coincidence.
According to NBC, the Giuliani documents show that Solomon’s columns were part of the Trump team’s strategy. (The New Yorker was unable to reach John Solomon, and a question e-mailed to the editor of The Hill, about whether the publication stood by Solomon’s stories, went unanswered.)
(Emphasis is mine.)
Solomon had been a respected investigative reporter for the Washington Post, but in recent years he worked for overtly conservative outlets, including a stint as the editor of the Washington Times.
This appears to have been no coincidence.
According to NBC, the Giuliani documents show that Solomon’s columns were part of the Trump team’s strategy. (The New Yorker was unable to reach John Solomon, and a question e-mailed to the editor of The Hill, about whether the publication stood by Solomon’s stories, went unanswered.)
(Emphasis is mine.)
This spring, Solomon wrote a series of columns, based on an interview with Ukraine’s top prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko.
On March 26th, Solomon wrote a column about Lutsenko’s claim that the then U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, an Obama holdover named Marie Yovanovitch, had given him a list of politically protected figures that he was forbidden from prosecuting—
a charge the State Department dismissed as “an outright fabrication.”
That same day, Solomon wrote another column suggesting a new investigation into Clinton, which he shared in a tweet, writing, “Did Ukraine try to secretly help Hillary Clinton win the 2016 election? Chief prosecutor says there’s enough evidence to start investigating.”
On March 26th, Solomon wrote a column about Lutsenko’s claim that the then U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, an Obama holdover named Marie Yovanovitch, had given him a list of politically protected figures that he was forbidden from prosecuting—
(Emphasis is mine.)
On April 1st, Solomon turned his focus to Biden, writing a column for The Hill called “Joe Biden’s 2020 Ukrainian Nightmare,” which claimed that Ukraine was reopening its criminal probe into Burisma. It also repeated the unsubstantiated claim that Shokin’s investigation into the company had been cut short at the behest of Biden.
In Solomon’s April 1st column, he cited Schweizer’s book.
Two days later, Schweizer sent “kudos” to Solomon during an interview on Breitbart News, and added, “We’re talking about potentially legal jeopardy involving the Vice-President’s family.” Schweizer opined that it was “all the sort of thing that needs to be investigated and looked into by a grand jury,” and added, “it’s pretty clear that you have a pattern that the for-sale sign was open with the Biden family . . . and that in itself demands investigation in the United States.”
(Emphasis is mine.)
(Emphasis is mine.)
Soon, both Schweizer and Solomon were appearing repeatedly on Fox News, spreading the anti-Biden narrative further.
According to the liberal watchdog group Media Matters, during the month of April, Fox ran at least twelve segments about Solomon’s reporting on Biden.
After one of seven episodes in which Sean Hannity discussed it on his show, President Trump tweeted a reference to Solomon’s reporting.
His son Donald Trump, Jr., took up the narrative, too, and tweeted a link to a story in the Daily Wire, a conservative outlet, which echoed Solomon’s claims.
(Emphasis is mine.)
After one of seven episodes in which Sean Hannity discussed it on his show, President Trump tweeted a reference to Solomon’s reporting.
His son Donald Trump, Jr., took up the narrative, too, and tweeted a link to a story in the Daily Wire, a conservative outlet, which echoed Solomon’s claims.
On April 7th, Giuliani appeared on Fox and demanded that the Justice Department investigate the Democrats’ Ukraine dealings.
On April 25th, the same day that Joe Biden officially declared that he was running for President, Trump himself called in to Hannity’s show on Fox, saying that he wanted the Attorney General, Bill Barr, to be involved.
By raising the spectre of a criminal investigation, Trump, a President dogged by allegations of corruption had, with the help of the conservative echo chamber, managed to cast his chief political rival in a parallel story, leaving the public in a fog of suspicion and confusion.
As Barrett, of N.Y.U., explained it, “The consequence is that we begin to inch our way towards the mire that Russians are in where ordinary people lose their ability to tell truth from untruth, and even cease caring about it.”
By raising the spectre of a criminal investigation, Trump, a President dogged by allegations of corruption had, with the help of the conservative echo chamber, managed to cast his chief political rival in a parallel story, leaving the public in a fog of suspicion and confusion.
By May, the mainstream media, including the Times, had picked up on the story about Biden and Ukraine.
Although the Times’ piece ran under a headline pointing out that that the scandal was being “promoted by Trump and Allies,” and, midway, noted that there was no evidence of criminality, critics attacked the paper for reprising the Uranium One playbook.
“It’s precisely what we saw in the last election,” Yochai Benkler, a professor at Harvard Law School and the co-author of the recent book “Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics,” told me.
Benkler argues that when a publication with the Times’ credibility pays any attention to a fringe conspiracy theory, it “provides enormous validation” just by covering the story.
“I don’t fault the Times for doing a story,” he said. “But it’s not like the nineteen-sixties anymore, when there were just three TV networks.
You live in a country where a large part of the population is susceptible to propaganda.
There’s a new editorial responsibility to be much more careful and not bury the denial.”
Although the Times’ piece ran under a headline pointing out that that the scandal was being “promoted by Trump and Allies,” and, midway, noted that there was no evidence of criminality, critics attacked the paper for reprising the Uranium One playbook.
“It’s precisely what we saw in the last election,” Yochai Benkler, a professor at Harvard Law School and the co-author of the recent book “Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics,” told me.
Benkler argues that when a publication with the Times’ credibility pays any attention to a fringe conspiracy theory, it “provides enormous validation” just by covering the story.
“I don’t fault the Times for doing a story,” he said. “But it’s not like the nineteen-sixties anymore, when there were just three TV networks.
You live in a country where a large part of the population is susceptible to propaganda.
There’s a new editorial responsibility to be much more careful and not bury the denial.”
By mid-summer, the Times and other mainstream outlets, most notably Bloomberg News, had more or less knocked down the conspiracy theories.
(Emphasis is mine.)
By then, Trump was so invested in the counterfactual narrative that he was demanding that Ukraine’s new President provide confirmation of it, as the whistle-blower’s complaint relates.
Or, as documents released by Congress earlier this week revealing discussions between his emissaries to Ukraine put it, “Potus really wants the deliverable.” ..."
(Emphasis is mine.)
(Emphasis is mine.)
You can read Jane Mayer’s original story with relevant links here
Focused Thought in 30 seconds
Focused Action in 30 seconds
You can retweet my Tweet, addressed to Trump, here
Focused Point of Interest, excerpts in 3 minutes
"In the Ukraine Scandal, Trump Won’t Be Taking the Fall Alone
Administration stalwarts Mike Pence, Mick Mulvaney, William Barr, and Mike Pompeo are all implicated, too.
After weeks of ever-worsening news about how Donald Trump, according to multiple accounts, held up military aid to Ukraine until the country promised to investigate Joe Biden’s (fabricated) corruption and Trump’s nutty conspiracy theories about the origins of the Russia probe, it remains remarkable how this godless New York grifter so thoroughly took over a political party that pretended to be about sober conservatism, Christian piety, and balanced budgets.
Let’s look at four administration stalwarts up to their necks in this mess: Vice President Mike Pence, Attorney General William Barr, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney.
Together they represent the four tent poles of the modern GOP circus: the extreme Christian right, the stolid GOP establishment, the corporate Koch brothers wing, and the allegedly anti-deficit, actually white nationalist Tea Party. When those tent poles go down, they could bring the whole sad party with them.
Barr is starting to make career racist Jeff Sessions look like Eric Holder.
Even Trump critics in the legal community hoped Barr would cure what ailed the Justice Department after Sessions’s impaired successor—remember Matt Whitaker?—had to leave the stage. Instead Barr has turned out to be just what Trump asked for: his Roy Cohn.
Over the past month we’ve learned that Barr traveled to foreign capitals, at least once circumventing local US diplomatic staff, to “investigate” the debunked notion that some of America’s top allies helped gin up the Russia probe to discredit Trump’s presidency.
Equally disturbing, Barr ignored the recommendation of the CIA’s general counsel to criminally investigate Trump’s heavy-handed “requests” of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—
even though Trump mentioned Barr on the call, which many believe means the attorney general should have recused himself. (Who knew Sessions had more professional integrity?)
But Barr’s perfidy shouldn’t surprise us.
Instead, it should remind us that the Ukraine scandal is less like Watergate—
which, bad as it was, involved only domestic politics—
and more like the Reagan-Bush Iran-contra scandal and its aftermath,
in which Barr was also implicated as George H.W. Bush’s attorney general.
While arms for hostages might sound marginally more honorable than arms for political dirt, the attempted trades are comparable:
two efforts backed by a GOP White House to subvert the bipartisan foreign policy appropriations of Congress and advance Republican interests.
(In case you missed the connection, Trump gave Reagan’s attorney general Ed Meese the Presidential Medal of Freedom on October 8.)
Barr, who advised Bush to pardon the indicted conspirators of Iran-contra, is up to his neck in both betrayals of his country.
He helps prove that even the pre-Trump Republican Party was more interested in power than rectitude.
If Congress is not too busy, Barr should be impeached.
As should Pompeo.
(Emphasis is mine.)
In 2016, as a Kansas congressman supported by Charles and David Koch...Pompeo warned that Trump would be “an authoritarian president who ignored our Constitution.”
Now he’s helping Trump do just that.
After ducking questions about it, Pompeo had to admit he was on the July 25 call in which Trump pressured Zelensky to investigate Biden in exchange for military aid that Congress had already approved.
That was bad enough. Then Pompeo attempted to defy Democratic subpoenas ...
Unfortunately for him, some of those officials have agreed to testify before Congress, and House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff suggested that his committee could include Pompeo’s defiance in articles of impeachment involving the administration’s habitual obstruction of justice.
Shortly thereafter, former Ukraine envoy Kurt Volker shared a raft of once-encrypted texts that demonstrate the arms-for-political-dirt quid pro quo that Pompeo and other Trump defenders deny existed. Others who were subpoenaed also indicated their willingness to testify. Pompeo should also be impeached.
(But Barr comes first.)
Then there’s Mulvaney.
The South Carolina Tea Party Republican was a founding member of the wing nut Freedom Caucus and purported to be a mortal foe of deficit spending—at least by a black president, as it turns out.
Like Pompeo, Mulvaney opposed Trump in 2016, calling him a “terrible human being,” but then took multiple jobs in his administration; he’s still Office of Management and Budget head as well as acting White House chief of staff.
First he peddled the budget-busting Trump tax cuts.
Now he’s the guy who gave the order to halt congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine, as Trump directed.
He has also been subpoenaed to provide a libraryful of administration documents to the committees investigating impeachment.
I don’t think you can impeach a White House chief of staff, but Mulvaney will go down in history as a corrupt hypocrite who helped prove that the Tea Party movement was about big racism, not small government.
Which brings us to Pence.
Mother save us.
... to be fair, we have no evidence of Pence’s personal corruption, which is what brought down Nixon’s first VP. But Pence has let himself get so close to Trump that he gives the president impeachment insurance.
After news of the Zelensky call broke, Trump first told reporters, “I think you should ask for VP Pence’s conversation, because he had a couple of conversations also.”
Then White House officials leaked that Pence’s top national security adviser was on the Zelensky call as well, that the vice president had likely received detailed notes on it, and that he’d been sent by Trump to emphasize the administration’s concern about corruption when Pence met Zelensky during his trip to Poland in August.
Uncharacteristically, Team Pence pushed back on those claims, but it’s probably too late.
Trump has set him up so that if congressional Republicans ever begin to walk on two feet again, they will know that impeaching Trump could put in the White House the person behind Pence in the line of succession:
Can you say “President Nancy Pelosi”? ... "
Focused Monthly Inspiration
( #itsNovember2020Now )
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THE next Democratic Party 2020 Presidential Nomination Debate will be held Tuesday, October 15 (and 16 if a second night is required). You can find more information here
And the best candidate for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination is Kamala Harris, IMO...
* @Kamala is the only candidate for the Democratic Party Presidential 2020 Nomination who grasps that 100's of 1000' of the American People are drowning and they need economic relief -- NOW. That is what her 3 A.M. Agenda addresses, an urgent response to People in distress.
You can read that Agenda here
* @Kamala is the only candidate for the Democratic Party Presidential 2020 Nomination who grasps that 100's of 1000' of the American People are drowning and they need economic relief -- NOW. That is what her 3 A.M. Agenda addresses, an urgent response to People in distress.
You can read that Agenda here
And you can find more information on her website here
You can follow her on facebook here
You can follow her on Twitter here
You can follow her on Instagram here
→ Some of my favorite Direct sources & resources for Democrats:
* ( My personal favored and most informative follows are also shared here, below, with the understanding that readers will always apply their own critical thinking to any information provided anywhere by anyone. #StrongerTogether does not share sources of information lightly but -- no one is perfect! -- so always #DistrustAndVerify -- even if it's me. I am using a "star" rating that is strictly based on my situational experience with the work of the media personality specifically in relation to issues of interest to me. )
Democratic Party Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, representative of The People at home & abroad while the President of the United States is MIA...
There is no better way to get your information than to #Go2TheSource
You can find the Speaker's website here
You can find the Speaker's Twitter feed here
You can find the Speaker's Facebook Page here
The Democratic Party Website
Also, NOT exactly a Democratic Party specific source under a GOP majority but a good place to hear and to watch speeches & hearings directly, i.e. #Go2TheSource C-SPAN
+
→ Some of my favorite, most active organizations:
(Full disclosure, I am a member!)
"Women are already the majority. Now Let's build a Supermajority.
Women are on the cusp of becoming the most powerful force in America. But to fundamentally transform this country, we need to work together. That’s where Supermajority comes in.
LET’S GET ORGANIZED
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You can email your two Senators and your Representative in Congress in one email here
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What started on March 11, 2017 with sharing 5 addresses apiece to 5 volunteers on Facebook...
Now, we consist of over 20,000+ volunteers in every state (including Alaska and Hawaii) who have written close to 3 million postcards to voters in over 100+ key, close elections."
You can find Postcards to Voters here
Town Hall Project empowers constituents across the country to have face-to-face conversations with their elected representatives. We are campaign veterans and first time volunteers. We come from a diversity of backgrounds and live across the country. We share progressive values and believe strongly in civic engagement. We research every district and state for public events with members of Congress. Then we share our findings to promote participation in the democratic process.
This movement is diverse, open source, and powered by citizens. We are proud to be a part of it.
" Born from conversations between Governor Howard Dean and Secretary Hillary Clinton in the aftermath of the 2016 election, Onward Together was established to lend support to leaders — particularly young leaders — kicking off projects and founding new organizations to fight for our shared progressive values." here
Organizing for America and the Democratic National Redistricting Committee have merged in "All On The Line":
"Barack Obama Throws All His Weight Behind ‘Issue Of Singular Importance’
" Since #StandOnEveryCorner has grown, it’s become a stand by all of us to protect our democracy from corruption and treason...A stand not at your State Capitol, but in your own backyard. Not once every few months, but as often as you can here "
→ Fact checking organizations courtesy of the Society of Professional Journalists
in alphabetical order...
→ Some of my favorite, most informative
follows on Twitter include:
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ US Intelligence | Author | Navy Senior Chief | NBC/MSNBC
⭐⭐⭐ Federal Government Operations | Vanity Fair | Newsweek | MSNBC Contributor | Author
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Voting Rights/Voter Suppression | Author | Mother Jones
→ Some of my favorite, highly credible media -- at the moment:
→ Some of my favorite Talking Heads -- at the moment -- and their Twitter handles:
→ Some of my favorite media/panelists -- at the moment -- and their Twitter handles:
✅✅✅ Jonathan Lemire White House reporter for AP; Political analyst for MSNBC & @NBCNews
✅✅✅✅ Joan Walsh national affairs correspondent for The Nation; CNN political contributor
✅✅✅ Heidi Przybyla USA TODAY Senior Political Reporter
✅✅✅✅ Jennifer Rubin Conservative blogger at @ WashingtonPost's Right Turn,MSNBC contributor
Intel community. @ NBCNews/@ MSNBC contributor
✅✅✅✅ Betsy Woodruff Daily Beast reporter, federal law enforcement.
→ Some of my favorite legal analysts in the context of Putin attacked America to install Trump investigations, primarily seen on MSNBC:
→ Some of my favorite Democrat Party Leaders to follow on Twitter, not in elected office but proving knowledge & experience are positives & not negatives are:
Former First Lady Michelle Obama
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
Former Labor Secretary/Today's DNC Chair Tom Perez
Note: I rarely get involved in primary races -- outside of those in my own area and unless there is a glaring reason that can not be ignored, I support Democratic Party nominees in general elections. I don't support bashing Democrats.
→ PARTY Informational
(Full disclosure, I am a life-long, registered Democrat!)
"To Whom It May Concern: By authority of the Democratic National Committee, the National Convention of the Democratic Party is hereby scheduled to convene on July 13-16, 2020 in TBD at an hour to be announced, to select nominees for the offices of President and Vice President of the United States of America, to adopt and promulgate a platform and to take such other actions with respect to such other matters as the Convention may deem advisable. ... "
"PREAMBLE We, the Democrats of the United States of America, united in common purpose, hereby rededicate ourselves to the principles which have historically sustained our Party. Recognizing that the vitality of the Nation's political institutions has been the foundation of its enduring strength, we acknowledge that a political party which wishes to lead must listen to those it would lead, a party which asks for the people's trust must prove that it trusts the people and a party which hopes to call forth the best the Nation can achieve must embody the best of the Nation's heritage and traditions. What we seek for our Nation, we hope for all people: individual freedom in the framework of a just society, political freedom in the framework of meaningful participation by all citizens. Bound by the United States Constitution, aware that a party must be responsive to be worthy of responsibility, we pledge ourselves to open, honest endeavor and to the conduct of public affairs in a manner worthy of a society of free people. Under God, and for these ends and upon these principles, we do establish and adopt this Charter of the Democratic Party of the United States of America."
What is the CPD? The Commission on Presidential Debates (the “CPD”) is a private, nonpartisan 501(c)(3) organization. As a 501(c)(3) organization, it is eligible under federal law so serve as a debate sponsor. The CPD's primary mission is to ensure, for the benefit of the American electorate, that general election debates are held every four years between and among the leading candidates for the offices of President and Vice President of the United State. The CPD is an independent organization. It is not controlled by any political party or outside organization and it does not endorse, support, or oppose political candidates for parties. It receives no funding from the government or any political party, political actions committee or candidate. The CPD has sponsored general election presidential debates in every election since 1988. Although its plans for 2020 are in the developmental stage, it looks forward to bringing high quality, educational debates to the electorate in 2020 ...
You can read more here
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(Linked) "...is our 2016 platform...a declaration of how we plan to move America forward. Democrats believe that cooperation is better than conflict, unity is better than division, empowerment is better than resentment, and bridges are better than walls.
It’s a simple but powerful idea: We are stronger together."
Owned, Created and Curated by Gail Mountain, this blog is often gently edited and/or excerpted for quick reading, with occasional personal commentary in the form of the written word and/or in the form of emphasis noted. Network For #StrongerTogether ! is not affiliated with The Democratic Party in any capacity. This is an independent blog and the hope is you will, at a glance, learn more about the Party and you will, with a click or two, also take action on its behalf as it is provided!
( * As a privately owned blog, I reserve the right to edit or remove inappropriate comments such as hate, vulgarity, threats of violence, racism, anti-Semitism, spam, advertising or personal/abusive attacks on other users.)
A long time Democratic Party activist, Gail Mountain is a former community organizer, journalist & personal planning coach with a focus on single moms working toward careers able to support them & their families, while working toward changing the systems that once served them through leadership training. She is a former Affordable Health Care for America Act advocate (2009!); a Hillary supporter who volunteered as a Grassroots Tweeter for Hillary, a Women's Outreach for Hillary member; an OFA Truth Team member; & a DNC Factivist member...currently a media influencer, digital activist/strategist, blogger and head of curation, editor and co-Founder of The People for Kamala Harris; an editor for Progress for Democrats on Facebook; a member of a closed group supporting Speaker Pelosi & her agenda, a member of Supermajority and a volunteer for Kamala Harris for the 2020 Democratic Party Nomination for President of the United States.
You can follow her Blog
at https://networkstrongertogether.blogspot.com & you can follow her on Twitter at GKMTNtwits
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*** Sometimes life gets in the way, and it has for me right now, delaying the release of my updated ebook but "How to Influence Media in Real Time!"is coming soon and in time to begin your conversation with media as we head into primary season.
What's in the book?:
( My updated ebook, "How to Influence Media in Real Time," will be ready soon. It will include updated examples of the conversations I have with some of my “media friends” and some updated indications that media can hear us! If you have left a donation toward my effort to help Democrats win in 2020, I will send you an updated copy as soon as it is ready. New donors who leaves a name and an email on my GoFundMe Page will get one as soon as it is ready to go! Thanking you in advance for your interest. I hope you will join me in helping media be the best they can be -- by being a media influencer, too, in your own way and at your own pace. )
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See the League of Women Voters website:
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...for Networking for Democrats today!
g. (Unapologetic Democrat)
✊ Resisting "Fake News"
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