Lurker > Antifar

Trump on that 5D chess. They wouldn't let him withdraw our troops so he killed Salmi knowing Iraq would kick us out.

One more campaign promise kept. Bring our boys home on that Trump Train!

GO TRUMP!!

is that fair

Didn't a bunch of Maryland Democrats endorse his re-election campaign back in 2018? Maybe they got some kick-backs, but most likely they just like having a Republican governor to excuse them from having to do anything they don't actually want to.

Trump needs a war to stay popular

the timing of this is disgusting yet predictable

Lol not even he wants to endorse Sleepy Joe.

what if you didn't have a smart phone? wtf...so you MUST have a smart phone to work there?

Because they don't want us there and the reason we allegedly died for it was to install Democracy.

It's kind of like if a hero from a video game saved a princess from a dungeon in a castle and then threatened that if she didn't fuck him he'd lock her up in a dungeon in a castle.

For years, Never Trump Republicans have courted Larry Hogan to run for president. Its easy to see why. Hes won two gubernatorial elections in Maryland, where Democrats outnumber Republicans two to one; hes currently one of the most popular governors in America; and hes widely viewed as a moderate whos willing to reach across the aisle. The late-night talk-show host Seth Meyers recently described him as a Republican who believes in climate change. In June, hes publishing a memoira move that suggests hes laying the groundwork for a 2024 presidential bid. Last spring, he launched a national advocacy group, An America United, designed to break partisan gridlock and bring people together to advance bold, common-sense solutions for all Americans. Simply put, everything about Larry Hogans public image would lead you to believe hes the opposite of Donald Trump.

But Hogan, it turns out, has more in common with Trump than his reputation suggests.

Both are real-estate executives who have refused to relinquish their private businesses while in office. Just as Trump maintained his ownership of the Trump Organization when he became president, Hogan maintained ownership of HOGAN, a multipurpose real-estate brokerage firm, when he became governor. Both have left close family members in charge of their businessesTrump with his children; Hogan with his brother, Timothyand created arrangements that allow them to be apprised of the companys dealings. In other words, they have set up situations in which they can use their powerful government positions to increase their private profits.

As governor, one of Hogans signature policies has been to expand state spending on roads, highways, and bridges at the expense of mass transit. His most controversial policy to date was to cancel the Red Linea planned $2.9 billion metro rail line through Baltimore, for which the state had already acquired land. In the process, Hogan gave up $900 million in federal aid from the Obama administration. As The Baltimore Sun put it, Hogan freed up hundred [sic] of millions of dollars he plans to use to undertake a significant shift in the states transportation priorities from public transit to road projects.

Hogan has advanced a number of major state transportation projects that are near properties his company owns, a development that can boost the value of those properties. Before canceling the Red Line, he approved construction of an interchange down the road from a parcel of land his company controlled. Later, he approved millions of dollars in road and sidewalk improvements near property he had bought approximately two years earlier and was turning into a housing development.

Maryland law says that an official may not partake in a decision if the official or a qualifying relativedefined as a parent, spouse, child, or siblinghas an economic interest in the matter and the official or employee knows of the interest. These decisions certainly seem to implicate the statute, said Virginia Canter, the chief ethics counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and a former ethics adviser for the International Monetary Fund. It looks like theres credible evidence of a violation.

Hogans real-estate business has only grown while he has been in office. In 2014, the year before he became governor, his company had ownership in 30 real-estate limited-liability companies, or LLCs, according to his financial-disclosure forms. Now, he has 43. HOGAN is currently selling or leasing more than 20 properties throughout the state, according to its website, and has completed other real-estate deals over the past five years.

But Hogan has not revealed payments he has received from specific real-estate transactions while in office. Hes getting paid by developers all across the statewho hes in charge of regulating in one way or anotherand the public has no idea who they are, said Democrat John Willis, a former Maryland secretary of state and now a University of Baltimore politics professor and a historian of Maryland politics and government.

Hogans income has far exceeded his official yearly government salary of roughly $180,000. From 2015 to 2018, his first three years as governor, he made a total of roughly $2.4 million, according to his tax returns for those years, which he released during his 2018 reelection campaign. But he has refused to release his returns for the years before he became governor, much like Donald Trump, giving the public no way to compare his earnings before and after he ascended to Annapolis. In addition, the tax returns Hogan has released do not include attached statements detailing the sources of his private income, effectively hiding what entities were paying him.

The amount hes made while in office is unprecedented. According to Willis, Hogan has made more money as governor than any other governor in the history of the state and is the only one to have made millions of dollars while in office.

They already have massive sanctions and we used robots firing rockets to kill one of their biggest leaders. How do further sanctions serve as a deterrent. Trump is such a fucking joke.

also i just googled champagne socialist and apparently it's a UK specific term. i thought it was used everywhere

what do americans say?

Does this even matter with the supreme court decision from last june?

As a gesture of good will they can have the australian pm as well

More than a year after his death, a cache of computer files saved on the hard drives of Thomas Hofeller, a prominent Republican redistricting strategist, is becoming public.

Republican state lawmakers in North Carolina fought in court to keep copies of these maps, spreadsheets and other documents from entering the public record. But some files have already come to light in recent months through court filings and news reports.

They have been cited as evidence of gerrymandering that got political maps thrown out in North Carolina, and they have raised questions about Hofeller's role in the Trump administration's failed push for a census citizenship question.

Now more of the files are available online through a website called The Hofeller Files, where Hofeller's daughter, Stephanie Hofeller, published a link to her copy of the files on Sunday after first announcing her plans in a tweet last month.

"These are matters that concern the people and their franchise and their access to resources. This is, therefore, the property of the people," Hofeller told NPR. "I won't be satisfied that we the people have found everything until we the people have had a look at it in its entirety."
...
Stephanie then reconnected with her mother, Kathleen, and visited her parents' apartment in North Carolina, where she found four external hard drives and a clear plastic bag containing 18 USB thumb drives in her father's room. Stephanie says her mother encouraged her to take the devices.

It turned out they were filled with photos of Stephanie with her children and other personal items as well as files from her father's work as a redistricting consultant for Republicans.

While looking for an attorney to represent her mother in 2018, Stephanie says she connected with the North Carolina chapter of Common Cause, an advocacy group that had brought a lawsuit against Republican state officials to overturn political maps Thomas Hofeller helped draw. After mentioning the hard drives to Common Cause, Stephanie received a court order to turn them over as potential evidence for the lawsuit. She did so in March after making a copy of some of the files for herself.

Since then, the Hofeller files have led to bombshell developments in two major legal battles in the political world.

In September, Common Cause won its legal challenge to political maps in North Carolina, where a state court cited some of the files as evidence of gerrymandering designed to unfairly give Republicans an advantage in winning elections and maintaining control of the state legislature.

"The Court finds that in many election environments, it is the carefully crafted maps, and not the will of the voters, that dictate the election outcomes in a significant number of legislative districts and, ultimately, the majority control of the General Assembly," a three-judge panel of the Wake County Superior Court wrote in their ruling.

Other files have become intertwined in the federal lawsuits over the Trump administration's push to add the now-blocked citizenship question to the 2020 census, raising questions about Thomas Hofeller's role and the administration's true motives.

Lawyers with the law firm Arnold & Porter which represented both Common Cause and some of the citizenship question's challengers uncovered an unpublished study in which Thomas Hofeller concluded using responses from such a question would be "advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites" when voting districts are redrawn. The revelation came weeks before the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling in June, affirming a lower court's decision against the question, which has been permanently blocked from forms for the upcoming national head count.

Stephanie says she decided to turn the hard drives over for the North Carolina lawsuit in March and to upload her copy of the files online this week in part to preserve a historical record about her father.

"His work is really having a profound effect and has had long before anybody really noticed on a broader level," Stephanie says. "I think from the historical standpoint, this slice of life, this little snapshot is going to prove very valuable."

Attorneys for Thomas Hofeller's former company, Geographic Strategies, have been trying to keep sealed copies of certain files that were turned over for the North Carolina case, citing them as "trade secrets," and other proprietary information about the company's work. While that dispute has played out in a state court in recent months, news organizations including The New Yorker, The New York Times and The Intercept have published reports based on copies they obtained of Hofeller's files.

"I originally started sharing them with journalists as a direct response to the assertion by the legislative defendants through counsel that they should be destroyed," Stephanie tells NPR, which previously received a copy of the files from her.

The files document the wide reach of Thomas Hofeller's work on political maps across the country including in Arizona, Florida, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Tennessee and Virginia, as well as New York's Nassau County and Texas' Galveston and Nueces counties.

In a Microsoft Word document last saved in 2015, Thomas Hofeller warned against changing the Census Bureau's policy of including prisoners in the population counts of the areas where they're incarcerated, expressing concern that "the actual effect on reapportionment and redistricting is not clearly known for individual states."

As a longtime strategist for the Republican National Committee, Thomas Hofeller was known for his warnings to keep redistricting work under wraps.

"Treat every statement and document as if it was going to appear on the FRONT PAGE of your local newspaper," one of his slides for a 2011 training session for redistricting officials says. "Emails are the tool of the devil."

Stephanie says the irony that some of his work files are now out in public is not lost on her.

"I don't think he cared all that much to protect these people after he was gone," she adds.
...
Stephanie says her father's stated goal was to use gerrymandering to "create a system wherein the Republican nominee would win."

"State legislature, it doesn't matter who votes for what. Congress, it doesn't matter who votes for what. And president, it do

Is this true? Some random twitter account isn't a very trustworthy source.

Irans government said it was ending all its commitments under the 2015 nuclear deal and that it would no longer limit its enrichment of uranium.

The announcement came after Irans National Security Council held an emergency meeting on Sunday to discuss the countrys nuclear policy in the aftermath of Maj. Gen. Qassim Soleimanis assassination.

The statement said: The Islamic Republic of Iran will end its final limitations in the nuclear deal, meaning the limitation in the number of centrifuges. Therefore Irans nuclear program will have no limitations in production including enrichment capacity and percentage and number of enriched uranium and research and expansion.

But the government said Iran would continue its cooperation with International Atomic Agency and return to the nuclear deal if the sanctions against it were removed and Irans interests were guaranteed, the government said.

The announcement followed several steps by Iran to move away from the terms of the agreement, nearly two years after President Trump withdrew the United States from the deal. Since that renunciation, the Trump administration has imposed severe sanctions aimed at crippling Irans economy.

The nuclear agreement had ended many economic sanctions on Iran in return for its verifiable pledge to use nuclear power peacefully. The European parties to the deal, including Britain, France and Germany, had struggled to preserve the agreement amid rising tensions between Washington and Tehran.

If they release Pikmin 4, they don't need to release ANYTHING else AT ALL. I'll just buy third party games.