I just watched Mr. Potato head ( tom cotton ) spout a lot of gibberish, ostensibly as an attempt to justify America's belligerent stance toward Iran. Here's the argument; the senate armed forces committee has received reports of Iranian terrorism escalation and advised the administration to take steps. Did they receive these reports from our Intelligence services? Nope, they got them from the State Department. Did the State department get IT'S intelligence from our intelligence services? Nope, they got it from the White House, specifically from the National Security council lead by, yep, you guessed it............Bolton.

So, the senate believes that Iran is at the brink of war, because the Pompeo says they are, who got his intel from Bolton..........................who just made s**t up..........................and advised Trump to do something. It's no secret that Mr. Potato Head has had a hardon for Iran since before he got to the Senate, and has been merciless in his condemnation of the JCPOA and was instrumental in getting Trump to abandon the deal..............well, along with Netanyahu of course.

We know from the Iraq debacle, that whenever an administration wants a war, they direct their own Intelligence sources to provide the justification for it......................and get it. We also know that, eventually, the t***h comes out and America regrets getting duped again by their own leaders. How many young service members will need to die this time, how many bodies permanently damaged, to satisfy some political or personal agenda?

If nothing else, Americans should DEMAND that we end one of our current wars, before starting another one. The Armed Forces are NOT the enforcers for politicians and their agendas, yet time and again, that's exactly what they are used for. Military intervention should be the LAST resort, yet we've become comfortable making it the FIRST tool out of the box. Every time we open that toolbox, someone's sons and daughters, someone's Mother or Father - dies.

So let me ask you Trump h**ers this question...If K**lery would of won Presidency,do you think any of you "heroes" would of even care about Russian interference into our e******ns???

OK, democrats.

We'll scrap the e*******l college in exchange for allowing a sitting president to be exempt from term limits as long as he maintains the popular v**e.

The popular v**e is what you want, right ?

I find that to be rather peculiar when you consider that you democrat folks just ain't very popular right now.

I've asked several of you here on OPP just exactly who you support in 2020.

So far, none of you have stepped up and proclaimed your champion.

So if you think you're gonna retake the Whitehouse with the popular v**e, just exactly who in the heck do you have that's more 'popular' than Trump ?

History is a good indicator of what to expect out of Barr. He has a past of writing his own versions of legal documents that have little to no resemblance to the document he is representing.

This color coded moron crap is going to be designed to hide the most damaging information in a color section that is not related to the reason it would actually need to be redacted. Barr knows that some of the reasons for redaction are going to be easily overturned and congress or the public will be seeing them sooner than other reasons that might hold up longer. Meanwhile the most damaging things will be mislabeled in the wrong sections.

As far as dems leaking classified documents? Republicans are in the middle of trying to selectively release hearings done under classified conditions that pertain to FBI investigations into Russian interference and why they were initiated. They are being selective because much of it consistently makes the point that their reasons were valid to open on espionage grounds.

To hell with Barr's color coded BS, release the whole things. Mueller will be able to easily go through and set Barr straight on how information is classified.

New Compromise deal is a joke....No DEAL!!!
Sici & Co. I’m afraid I Agree With Your
Assessment. Personally, I Wanted President
Trump To Order A National Emergency, Followed By MARTIAL LAW, Mining Our Side Of
The BORDER, Arresting ALL ILLEGAL INVADER’S, That have Sneaked, into America,
Illegally, & Deporting ALL OF THESE UNDOCUMENTED DEMORATIC V**ER’S & EITHER TOSSING THEM BACK, OVER THE BORDER, Or Dropping Them, INTO THE SOUTH PACIFIC OCEAN. At This Time, In AMERICAN HISTORY, I Don’t Give A SH*T!!
The SHARK’S, also need Their EMPATHETIC,
FEEDING, & CARE!!! F**K THE C*******T &
“SISSIFIED” RINO’S, & THROW THEM,INTO
“DAVY JONES” LOCKER!!! I Have Had IT WITH
HESITATION, & APPEASEMENT & PLAIN OUT. COWARDICE, IN THE FACE OF AN INVASION!?
Payback’s Humble, OPINION.

Continued from Part 2, How to restore separation of powers

But the separation of the national government’s powers across different branches does not mean isolating those branches. For instance, Congress can check the president’s executive power by refusing to fund it, or in the foreign-affairs realm, by refusing to ratify treaties. Or the Senate can check the president’s power to staff the executive branch by refusing to give its consent to officers who need Senate consent. The president can check Congress’s exercise of legislative power by vetoing any legislation, which requires a two-thirds congressional majority to override. And the judiciary can check the other branches by declaring their actions in violation of the law, with the other branches able to check the judiciary by legislatively overriding judicial decisions or through gradually changing the composition of the courts via appointments.

There are reasons we have wandered from the protective barrier of the separation of powers. The Supreme Court’s unwillingness to challenge the president and Congress’s collusion in creating the administrative state, for example. Another is that the branches have given up many of their constitutional prerogatives to check each other. Congress refuses to use its power of the purse, or passes legislation without even attempting to debate and determine whether it is constitutional, instead leaving it up to the courts to figure that out — a far cry from the practice of the first Congresses. Similarly, the president signs bills that he doubts are constitutional, content instead to outsource his constitutional judgment to the judiciary. And the judiciary will sometimes (though not often) bend over backwards to defer to the other branches. This is a clear departure from the Constitution’s original design in which, as Madison observed in The Federalist No. 51, “ambition [was] made to counteract ambition.”

Relatedly, the branches, most often Congress, are content to let others do their work. Most laws enacted these days are not statutes, but regulations promulgated by the untold number of executive agencies that oversee and direct nearly every facet of American life. Political scientists posit that the main goal for members of Congress is to win re-e******n. Legislators do not increase their odds in the next e*******l cycle if they v**e on controversial issues that enflame 40 percent of the e*****rate no matter what they do, or if they choose difficult, scientific, technical, or economic policies that might prove mistaken. They are better off delegating those choices to the agencies or the courts, concentrating instead on bringing federal dollars back to the home district, and blaming the president when things go wrong. A Supreme Court that affords agencies greater deference and more freedoms will only exacerbate the failure of the Constitution’s original self-checking mechanisms. In sum, every branch seems to flee from President Harry Truman’s famous aphorism “The buck stops here.” And this results in the republic slouching toward the very thing the Founding generation feared: an “accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective,” which “may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

Restoring the separation of powers, in the law as well as in the minds of the government and of the people, would avoid the need for some of the most controversial cases that have come before the Supreme Court in recent years. Take religious-liberty cases such as Hobby Lobby and Little Sisters of the Poor — both were challenges to the regulations passed by agencies, not laws passed by Congress. Or this term’s Gundy v. United States, in which Congress had delegated to the attorney general the question of whether the law required certain sex offenders to register with the government. Imagine — the branch of government authorized to enforce the law is the same branch permitted to determine the content of the law. As Montesquieu long ago warned, “When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty.”

In short, the separation of powers is not just about the separation of powers. It’s also about religious liberty, free speech, due process, and every other liberty the Constitution protects and all those not enumerated within its text. We have a Bill of Rights Day. But to really celebrate the liberty the Constitution provides, maybe we should have a Separation of Powers Day. And the Court, which has done much of the damage to the separation of powers over the years, can begin restoring that most fundamental part of the Constitution.

President Trump’s vigorous attacks on Mueller’s investigation, including threatening to fire the special counsel, may harm his own political self-interest. But in flexing his executive muscle, the president is defending the Constitution’s original meaning and its liberty-protecting separation of powers. And that’s something, wh**ever their politics, all Americans should welcome.

— John Yoo is the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. James C. Phillips is an attorney in private practice and a non-resident fellow at Stanford Law School’s Constitutional Law Center.
More from National Review

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Restoring the Indispensable Protection for Liberty
The Coming SCOTUS Battle Is a Chance to Curb Judicial Supremacy

When you say that we have the House and the Senate, i tell you NO!!!..We DO have the House, but we DONT have the Senate!!!..Why??...Here where the lesson comes in...The Senate needs 60 v**es,we only have 51!!!!...You do the math!!!....The lesson is over you can go back to being dimwits again!!!!

Autopsy on this boy showed that he died from........Flu!!! He was not being poisoned by Border Patrol Officers..He was not being abused by Border Patrol officers!!!..He died from ordinary flu!!!!....Flu takes millions of lives of American citizens every year..Mostly very old or very young or with c*********d immunity...So Rats,im sorry you cant blame this one on Border Patrol Officers...He could of died at any time no matter where he was...And some POS Rats want Secretary Nielsen to resign!!!...For what???....While Bullosi is resting and celebrating in Hawaii.Nielsen is working hard to secure and prevent illegal scumbags from k*****g American citizens!!!...You people make me fricking sick!!!!!!!1

https://www.politicususa.com/2018/12/23/obamas-stock-market-performance-is-now-crushing-trumps.html


As the stock market continues its Trump slide toward the worst performance since the Great Recession, Obama’s stock market performance is now twice as good as Trump‘s.
The Washington Post reported a statistic that has Trump scared:

Before the market downturn, Trump would take prepared remarks and add comments about the economy, officials say. But lately, he has tweeted less about the economy.

The Dow’s performance since Trump took office is now significantly less than what was achieved at the same point in Barack Obama’s presidency. The Dow is up 18 percent under Trump, compared with 45 percent at this point under Obama, according to Bespoke Investments.
Trump has repeatedly faulted the Federal Reserve for the market slide. But on Wall Street, many say Trump’s recent actions are also to blame.

Except for complaining about the Fed, Trump has largely gone silent on the economy. His days of bragging about and taking credit for the stock market are long gone. It now seems like everytime Trump opens his mouth, he says something else that causes the market to tumble. Trump started a trade war then oversold his trade war truce with China. Trump bragged that he would be proud to shut down the government, and then he did shut down the government. All of these events were Trump created, and they sent markets plunging.
Trump is just above the historical average for presidents at this point in their terms of 15.5%, and he is plunging fast toward the Republican p**********l average of 11%.

Wall Street has lost confidence in Trump and each more erratic move that Trump makes only worsens the crisis. A recession is looming, and no one has confidence that Trump will be able to deal with it.
Wall Street has finally caught up with the rest of the country in that they miss the steady, competent, and intelligent leadership of Barack Obama.
For more discussion about this story join our Rachel Maddow and MSNBC group.

Trump is desperately trying to keep his promise to build a border wall and................hold on.............ok, I read it again and this statement isn't true. Trump promised that MEXICO would pay for the wall AND - that his superior building sk**ls would see Mexico billed for only 10 billion. Taxpayers have already spent 6 billion on the wall and Trumps lackey's in the Senate want to give him another 25 billion. 31 billion dollars ( so far ) instead of 10 billion..................and Mexico hasn't reimbursed a dime. That's two failures over Trump's #1 promise.

Obamacare has been repealed and replaced with something far superior......................opps, that hasn't happened. Healthcare costs AND insurance premiums will increase another 20% in 2019, making the total increase 42% under Trump. That's #2 on Trumps promise list a big fat failure.

It turns out that the only "promises" kept by Trump...........................only positively affect his own businesses and those of his cronies. How long will it take for folks to figure out that they've been hoodwinked?