Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is set to host her first campaign fundraiser in the Los Angeles area Saturday. And while Warren won't be there -- she'll be stumping in New Hampshire -- the event is shaping up to have as many stars as a Hollywood movie premiere.

The gathering promises to be replete with celebrity faces -- and a life-size cardboard cutout of Warren.

Read more:

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/elizabeth-warren-campaign-hold-star-stud...

Christianity Today—which relies on the name of its founder Billy Graham but increasingly not his wisdom or character—has called for the removal of President Donald Trump because of his “immoral behavior.” The Editor in Chief, Mark Galli, was not ambiguous in this proclamation: “Trump Should Be Removed From Office.” Well, we don’t remove Presidents for mere immoral behavior. That would’ve required the removal of all of them. There’s a reason why the Constitution is the Law of the Land and not our subjective and misapplied understanding of Scripture. 

Franklin Graham called out the magazine on social media saying, in part: “Yes, @BillyGraham founded Christianity Today; but no, he would not agree w/ their piece. He’d be disappointed.” He later tweeted this revealing fact about his father: “I hadn’t shared who my father @BillyGraham voted for in 2016, but because of @CTMagazine’s article, I felt it necessary to share now. My father knew @realDonaldTrump, believed in him & voted for him. He believed Donald J. Trump was the man for this hour in history for our nation.”

Uhhh, mic drop.

Christianity Today didn’t call for the removal of a Presidential Predator—Bill Clinton. In their 1998 article entitled “The Prodigal Who Didn’t Come Home”, they lamented his inadequate “apology.” According to CT, Clinton merely “missed a truly historic moment” with what could’ve been a “straightforward admission.” But the conclusion of the article really showed the “progressive” magazine’s hopes for the impeached President: “At this writing, we expect Clinton to hang tough, to remain the comeback kid he is known to be.” 

That was gracious. 

Then there was the 1974 CT editorial that asked the question “Should Nixon Resign?” In it, there is never a call for removal. “The transcripts show him to be a person who has failed gravely to live up to the moral demands of our Judeo-Christian heritage. We do not expect perfection, but we rightly expect our leaders, and especially our President, to practice a higher level of morality than the tapes reveal,” writes CT. I agree with those sentiments exactly. We should expect so much more from our elected leaders. It is tragic how Christians, too often, repeatedly justify political corruption over personal character all in the name of Party allegiance. The following two sentences show CT’s blatant contradiction, though: “Yet the Constitution does not provide for the removal of a President because of moral flaws. To resign would be to leave the presidency for other than a constitutional offense.”

Christianity Today, and many other liberal evangelical outlets, rightfully point out the moral failings in (select) elected leaders. Yet they often fail to apply the same standards to those on the Left, especially when those politicians are advocating issues that CT champions. But where was the call for removal of President Barack Obama? For the first time in history, an American President keynoted a fundraising gala for the leading killer of those made in God’s image—Planned Parenthood. Though Obama campaigned on “middle ground” rhetoric regarding abortion, he never sought it as President. In fact, he was the most radically pro-abortion President in history. Eerily echoing Democrat Governor George Wallace’s famous segregation declaration, Obama proclaimed at the gala: “Planned Parenthood is not going anywhere. It’s not going anywhere today. It’s not going anywhere tomorrow.” The response from the crowd was thunderous applause. He ended the speech to the organization that kills over 330,000 of the most marginalized and most victimized in our society: “God Bless Planned Parenthood!”

But enabling and supporting the shedding of innocent blood apparently isn’t enough for Christianity Today to have called for the ousting of President Barack Obama. That behavior wasn’t immoral enough for his removal. 

I wish the evangelical Left were just as concerned about Christians’ support of the immoral behavior of movie and music celebrities, whose lifestyles are tragically heavily funded by those who should value “loyalty to the Creator of the Ten Commandments.” Why is this outrage relegated only to political leaders?

This is the same publication, by the way, that wanted the American public to “Reconsider Margaret Sanger”, presenting an outrageous defense of the nation’s leading eugenicist and founder of Planned Parenthood. Never mind the the same vile pseudoscience that birthed the holocaust also birthed the nation’s largest abortion chain. But, of course, Christianity Today considered it “moral” to praise a racist and elitist historical figure who defined birth control as a means of “preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives.”

CT does the same thing as mainstream media. They promote a simplistic narrative in order to demonize an entire demographic. In this instance, they claim that evangelicals who support Trump “brush off Mr. Trump’s immoral words and behaviors in the cause of political expediency.” I never have. I find his past and even some current behavior reprehensible—whether it’s marital infidelity, unpresidential rally remarks or demeaning tweets. I find the Left’s obsession with demonizing and distorting his every action and word equally as immoral. Slander is a sin, too, people. I’ll never be invited, like many of my colleagues, to the Trump White House. I’ve never been a Trump apologist, but I will defend the rule of law. I know the alternative to a Trump presidency would’ve been a Hillary Clinton presidency. I didn’t choose the lesser of two evils. I chose to vote my conscience with a Party platform that aligns with my faith and common sense. 

I’ll keep praying for Trump…and every other morally flawed politician who doesn’t have the privilege of daily denouncements. 

As a Christian who happens to be an evangelical, I’m not worried about what CT laments as the consequence of not removing Trump from office: “It will crash down on the reputation of the evangelical religion.” I don’t live for an “evangelical religion.” I live for Christ. If Trump, or any other President, were actually found guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, I would fully advocate his or her Constitutional removal. This sham impeachment process is not it. 

Until then, I consider this partisan feigned outrage more of the predictable noise from the Left that we’ll continue to hear through the 2020 elections and beyond...

Read more:

https://www.christianpost.com/voice/christianity-today-and-the-evangelic...

Read from top. Gus is a rabid atheist...

From Jessa Crispin

...

The goal is to put the offense on a higher level than one of just lying. That way, if the Sanders campaign decides to point to all of the lies Warren has told throughout her career – that her father was a janitor, that she is Native American – her lies won’t matter as much because she’s just electioneering while his lies are rooted in misogyny. It’s a trick that still works for Hillary Clinton, who has repeatedly complained about the lack of support Sanders gave to her campaign, despite all of the evidence to the contrary. (Clinton, after losing the primary to Obama in 2008, appeared at two rallies with Obama and did 10 solo campaign appearances to help him get elected. Sanders, after losing the primary to Clinton in 2016, did three events with Clinton and 37 solo events.) Many of her supporters still claim this supposed lack of support is proof of Sanders’ “problem with women”.

This kind of dirty politics can be effective, but the real losers here are the women for whom “believe women” still means something. 

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/17/believe-women-eliz...

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From Barbara Boland

The media cannot forgive Bernie Sanders for refusing to “bend the knee” to Elizabeth Warren regarding her recounting of a now infamous December 2018 meeting between the two, in which the Vermont senator allegedly said a woman could not be elected president.

Furthermore, if you don’t agree with Sen. Warren’s version of events, or if you mention her history of “embellishing,” you are a sexist and a misogynist just like Sanders. So fall in line with the establishment narrative, quick.

That is the clear takeaway after the media took off its fig leaf of journalistic impartiality at the seventh Democrat presidential debate in Iowa Tuesday.

Never mind that women make up about  70 percent of Sanders’ campaign leadership team, or that  young women actually make up a bigger share of Sanders’s base than young men do.

 During the debate, CNN moderator Abby Phillips had this exchange:

Phillips: You’re saying that you never told Senator Warren that a woman couldn’t win the election?

Bernie: Correct.

Phillips: Senator Warren, what did you think when Sanders said a woman couldn’t win the election?

Warren: I disagreed. Bernie is my friend, and I am not here to try to fight with Bernie.

This is “when did you stop beating your wife” level debate questioning from CNN. The question is premised around  an anonymously-sourced story CNN reported Monday describing a meeting between Sanders and Warren in December 2018, where the two agreed to a non-aggression pact of sorts. For the sake of the progressive movement, they reportedly agreed they would not attack each other during the campaign...

...

If CNN were impartial, they would have mentioned the sourcing and timing of the story, and Warren’s fraught history with the truth. Warren has shown she is willing to tell lies in order to get a job she wants, like when she claimed to have Native American blood. She has also claimed she got fired from her teaching job for being pregnant, even when records contradict that. She’s said her children went to public schools, not private ones, even though that’s not true either.

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/media-skewers-sexist-sa...

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By Daniel Larison

The New York Times published a weird double endorsement of Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar last night. Neither candidate benefits much from a half-hearted half-endorsement, and it is in keeping with the confusion of the Times‘ editorial board that after all of the build-up to making “the choice” they ended up refusing to make one. One thing that struck me about the endorsement is how it engaged in irresponsible threat inflation at the same time that it barely paid any attention to the foreign policy views of any of the candidates. For instance, this line stood out as a ridiculous bit of fear-mongering:

The Middle East is more unstable at this moment than at any other time in the past decade, with a nuclear arms race looking more when than if. 

Have their editors been asleep for the last decade? This is a sweeping and inaccurate statement that requires us to forget the peak of the war in Syria, ISIS’ control over a swathe of Iraq and Syria, the first several years of the war on Yemen, and the upheavals of the protests at the beginning of the decade. Some parts of the region are more unstable than they were at the start of the decade, and others are arguably more stable than they were just a few years ago. The assumption that a “nuclear arms race” is just a matter of time has nothing to support it. We have heard again and again about a nuclear arms race in the region, but almost no one acknowledges that there has been a nuclear weapons state in the region for half a century without setting off such a race. Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons for decades, and there has not been an arms race yet. Proliferation of nuclear weapons in the region is not inevitable, and it makes no sense to talk about it as if it were.

Since the endorsement brings up a potential “nuclear arms race,” you would think that it would have something to say about their preferred candidates’ views on nonproliferation and arms control, right? Well, you’d be wrong about that. The endorsement makes a passing reference to Warren’s competency on foreign policy issues, but it has virtually nothing to say about the positions she has taken. This is quite the oversight in an endorsement that purports to explain why they think that she would be a good presidential nominee. Foreign policy is where the president has the greatest leeway and can potentially do the most harm. The endorsement doesn’t even mention Warren’s serious proposal for reforming and rebuilding the State Department.

Sen. Klobuchar has made a point to talk about the importance of extending New START (a treaty that she voted to ratify), and like the other candidates she has endorsed rejoining the JCPOA, but that never comes up in their description of her views. She has gone out of her way to talk about the importance of arms control, but you would never know that from the write-up that the editorial board gives her. Their account of Klobuchar’s foreign policy record is very limited, and it includes some odd details that don’t make any sense. For example, they claim that Klobuchar cast votes on military action in Libya and Syria:

In 13 years as a senator, she has sponsored and voted on dozens of national defense measures, including military action in Libya and Syria.

It’s not clear how she could have voted on military action in Libya and Syria since the Senate famously never voted on either one of these. The Senate resolution to authorize the ongoing military intervention in Libya never went anywhere, and its House version was voted down by a wide margin. Klobuchar never cast a vote on that because there was never an opportunity for her to vote on it either way, and she was not one of the resolution’s co-sponsors. There might have been an opportunity to vote on military action in Syria in 2013, but the president called off the strike before Congress could vote because there was so much popular opposition to the proposed attack. There was a Syria authorization resolution introduced in early September 2013, but then it was forgotten because it was no longer needed. It is strange that the editorial board felt that they needed to embellish Klobuchar’s Senate record by claiming votes for her that she could not have cast. They ignore real parts of her record and then make up others, and in the end they tell their audience as little as possible about what she would do as president. 

Perhaps the weirdest part of the weird endorsement is that the editorial board doesn’t seem to be very familiar with the foreign policy views of the two senators that they have endorsed.

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/a-very-weird-endorsement/

Read from top. Fortunately, the "deep state" will twist the arms of whomever gets the gig to go and plunder faraway lands under the pretence of "democracy"...

“Being highly-critical of Russia is good politics in the United States,” Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies at New York University and Princeton University, told the Grayzone's Aaron Mate in an interview, uploaded online on Monday.

Nobody ever gets any points for saying anything good about Russia – and only rarely for advocating any kind of partnership with Russia.

Cohen said that “politically it's advantageous to a lot of people to bash Russia,” and even some of the “progressive”Democratic Party candidates in the 2020 presidential race employ rhetoric, which is hostile toward Moscow.

It has become an American way of life to blame Russia when things go wrong. Of course, sometimes Russia is to blame, but not all the time. And yet that's become part of our discourse.

The US Democratic Party's lead impeachment manager, Representative Adam Schiff, has invoked Russia a lot during the trial in the Senate. Democrats want to oust President Donald Trump because they believe he briefly suspended military aid to Ukraine while trying to pressure Kiev into investigating the dealings of his chief 2020 rival, former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Sending weapons to Ukraine serves America's “abiding interest in stemming Russian expansionism,” Schiff argued.

Cohen, however, said that shipping weapons to Kiev would effectively amount to the US turning its back on Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky's efforts to resolve the conflict with Russia through peaceful means. Instead, he thinks Washington should focus on encouraging the neighbors to negotiate.

“If Zelensky had full American backing for his peace talks with Putin – that would help him a lot.”

Speaking on the Senate floor, Schiff accused Moscow of trying to undermine the faith in democracy and government institutions around the globe.

Cohen argued that the congressman misunderstands what Russian President Vladimir Putin actually “sees as his own historical mission,” and it is almost the opposite of what Schiff attributes to him.

According to the researcher, Putin's chief ambition is “to rebuild Russia from the disaster into which it fell in the 1990s”after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The last thing Putin wants is instability. He's trying to build economy at home and economic relations with countries abroad because he sees that as a way to modernize Russia.

The Russia researcher said that Moscow is currently focused on ties with China, but Putin would like to have good trade relations with Europe and the US as well.

“The notion that he wants to foster discord in the very countries, with which he wants what he calls ‘modernizing trade relations’ is just ignorance on the part of Adam Schiff. Because Schiff runs his mouth a lot about Russia, we get to hear the kind of ignorance… that dominates a large segment of policy-makers in Washington.”

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/479380-stephen-cohen-schiff-putin/

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from Arwa Mahdawi ...

Ah, how times have changed. Just a few weeks after tweeting she “won’t take a dime of Pac money”, Warren now has what appears to be the biggest Super Pac advertising presence in crucial Super Tuesday states. Persist Pac, which was formed by female Warren supporters ahead of the Nevada caucuses, announced on Thursday night that it is investing $9m in adverts across California, Texas and Massachusetts. This follows a separate $3m ad buy across 13 Super Tuesday states and a $2m buy in Nevada and South Carolina. Which means Persist Pac has now spent $14m on ads for Warren; money she seems very happy cozying up to.

So what caused this flip-flop? Feminism, apparently. Speaking the Thursday before last, Warren complained that “all of the men who were still in this race and on the debate stage … had either Super Pacs, or they were multibillionaires … And the only people who didn’t have them were the two women. And at that point, there were some women around the country who said, ‘You know, that’s just not right.’” The gender Pac gap swiftly closed; now Amy Klobuchar and Warren both have Super Pac support. Girl power at its finest!

I don’t completely begrudge Warren taking Super Pac money. Her campaign has been flagging; flooding Super Tuesday markets with expensive ad buys is probably her best chance at changing that. However, I do begrudge the highly disingenuous way she framed her Super Pac backtrack as some sort of feminist position. There is nothing remotely feminist about using gender as an excuse to abandon your principles and embrace big money. Feminism is supposed to be about dismantling oppressive systems, not aligning yourself with them.

Let’s remind ourselves exactly what Super Pacs are, shall we? Spawned by the supreme court’s 2010 Citizens United v Federal Election Commission ruling, they are “political action committees”, which are allowed to accept unlimited political donations from individuals and corporations. They are supposed to be independent and can’t contribute directly to a campaign or coordinate with candidates; however, Super Pacs frequently circumvent these rules. In short, they allow the extremely wealthy to avoid the caps on individual contributions; they give a small group of people an outsized impact on elections. They are disastrous for democracy.

Is Warren’s claim that “all” the non-billionaires running, including Bernie Sanders, have Super Pac support correct? Sort of. It is true that a coalition called People Power for Bernie includes a Super Pac affiliated with the national nurses union, and a non-profit Sanders founded called Our Revolution, which functions in a similar way to a Super Pac. However, in response to a recent Intercept inquiry, Our Revolution said it only received a total of six donations over $5,000 in 2019 and its biggest contribution was around $25,000. It hasn’t taken money from any billionaires. It is fair to accuse Sanders of a degree of hypocrisy around Super Pacs, but it is hugely disingenuous to claim that the support he gets from nurses and contributors to Our Revolution is equivalent to the other candidates’ Super Pacs. Sanders is very much running a grassroots campaign.

Who are the donors behind the $14m of pro-Warren Super Pac spending? Nobody really knows. Because the Persist Pac was formed so late it is legally able to keep its donors secret until 20 March, by which time a majority of delegates will be allocated. Warren’s campaign hasn’t responded to requests for comment about whether the Super Pac should make its donors known earlier. Once again, I can understand why she would feel forced to accept Super Pac support. However, it is beyond the pale that she won’t disavow a group that refuses to disclose its donors until after much of the primary voting has already taken place. The fact that the “men” running may embrace big money and eschew transparency is no excuse. Warren has asked other candidates to put their money where their mouth is. Being a woman doesn’t exempt her from doing the same.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/29/elizabeth-warren-s...

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Elizabeth Warren has dropped out of the US Democratic presidential race, according to a person familiar with her plans.

The exit came days after the onetime front-runner couldn’t win a single Super Tuesday state, not even her own.

The Massachusetts senator has spoken with Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, the leading candidates in the race, according to their campaigns.

She is assessing who would best uphold her agenda, according to another person who requested anonymity to discuss private conversations.

Ms Warren’s exit extinguished hopes that Democrats would get another try at putting a woman up against President Donald Trump.

For much of the past year, her campaign had all the markers of success – robust poll numbers, impressive fundraising and a sprawling political infrastructure that featured staffers on the ground across the country.

She was squeezed out, though, by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who had an immovable base of voters she needed to advance.

Read more:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/world/2020/03/06/elizabeth-warren-drops-...

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If Warren is true to her beliefs, she has to support Bernie... but...

Newest 2020 dropout Elizabeth Warren alleges “some really ugly stuff” went on at the hands of Bernie Sanders’ supporters.

Speaking to Rachel Maddow Thursday, Sen. Warren (D-Mass.), who earlier in the day dropped out of the race, claimed that so-called Bernie Bros, as Sanders’ staunchest supporters have come to be known, posted the home addresses and phone numbers of numerous women of color who worked for or ran groups that had either endorsed her or not endorsed Sanders.

The move, she said, led to an “onslaught of online threats.”

“Working Families Party, two women there, women of color … were attacked right after they endorsed me,” the Massachusetts progressive said.

Warren told the MSNBC host that the Bernie Bros made women who did not align with their campaign feel unsafe online.

“[Bernie supporters] actually published the phone numbers and home addresses of the two women, the executive director and the communications director [of the UNITE HERE labor union in Nevada]…and really put them in fear for their families,” she said.

Warren described the victims as “tough women, tough women who’ve run labor organizing campaigns, and really earned their jobs and their union I mean the hard way, and yet, said for the first time because of this onslaught of online threats, that they felt really under attack.”

Warren’s comments marked the first time she had spoken out so aggressively about Sanders and his supporters since bowing out of the race on Thursday.

Read more:

https://nypost.com/2020/03/06/elizabeth-warren-blasts-bernie-bros-for-do...

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If Warren is true to her beliefs, she has to support Bernie... but...