Ratcheting up war with Venezuela

Congress isn't going to do a damned thing.

Trump is still mad that his first term attempt to depose Maduro was a failure.  And as a two-fer, Venezuela has lots of oil.

Scream all you want.  Nobody's listening.

 

The non-SOTU

President Donald Trump will address a joint session of Congress Tuesday (6pm Pacific) in a speech that will not technically be a State of the Union address.

It comes amid a flurry of actions implemented by the Trump administration targeting immigrants without legal status in the United States, diversity, equity and inclusion policies, federal layoffs, tariffs, and more.

Tuesday’s speech is not an official State of the Union address because Trump was sworn into office less than two months ago.

  USA Today

 So...there won't be a televised Democrat's response.  See how that works?

Like it would matter if there was...

JFC!  I'm with Mehdi.

He's yours, Virginia.  

And, another thing...

Speaking of regulating banks...

Eight years before the second-largest bank failure in American history occurred this week, the bank’s president personally pressed Congress to reduce scrutiny of his financial institution, citing the “low risk profile of our activities and business model”, according to federal records reviewed by the Lever.

Three years later – after the bank spent more than half a million dollars on federal lobbying – lawmakers obliged.

  Guardian

Jesus, these fuckers. 2008 wasn't enough.  This is exactly what people were warning about back then when banksters got bailed out instead of serving prison time they deserved.

[Failed Silicon Valley Bank] reportedly did not have a chief risk officer in the months leading up to the collapse, while more than 90% of its deposits were not insured.

In 2015, SVB’s president, Greg Becker, appeared before a Senate panel to push legislators to exempt more banks – including his own – from new regulations passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

[...]

Touting “SVB’s deep understanding of the markets it serves, our strong risk management practices”, Becker argued that his bank would soon reach $50bn in assets, which under the law would trigger “enhanced prudential standards”, including more stringent regulations, stress tests and capital requirements for his and other similarly sized banks.

In his testimony, Becker insisted that $250bn was a more appropriate threshold.

[...]

Becker, who reportedly sold $3.6m of his own stock two weeks ago, in the lead-up to the bank’s collapse...

Of course he did. And will he go to jail?

Two months later, SVB added the former Obama treasury department official Mary Miller to its board, noting she had previously helped oversee “financial regulatory reforms”.

And what's her cut?

[T]he Systemic Risk Designation Improvement Act of 2015 [...] was the precursor to legislation ultimately signed by President Donald Trump that increased the regulatory threshold for stronger stress tests to $250bn.

Trump signed the bill despite a report from Democrats on Congress’s joint economic committee warning that under the new law, SVB and other banks of its size “would no longer be subject to nearly any enhanced regulations”.

That was the fucking point.

The bill was supported in the Senate by 50 Republicans and 17 Democrats, including the Democratic Virginia Senator Mark Warner, for whom Becker held a fundraiser at his Menlo Park, California, home in 2016. [...] The bank’s political action committee also donated a total of $10,000 to Warner’s campaigns in the 2016 and 2018 election cycles.

In 2019, when the Federal Reserve proposed regulations implementing the deregulatory law, financial watchdogs warned that its regulations on Category IV institutions – as SVB was later classified due to its size and other risk factors – were far too weak.

“The proposal to significantly weaken enhanced prudential standards for Category IV firms could be disastrous,” Better Markets, a non-profit advocating for stricter financial regulations, wrote in a comment on the Federal Reserve’s proposal. “Moreover, these are not small or insignificant firms. Recall that the smallest among this class of banks is over twice the size of the $50bn banks that automatically required enhanced prudential regulation under the Dodd-Frank Act as originally enacted.”

[...]

In 2021, SVB passed the threshold of $100bn under management, triggering some additional scrutiny as a Category IV bank but remaining exempt from the more frequent and detailed analyses that regulators perform to determine whether banks above $250bn of assets have sufficient capital to withstand a crisis.

[...]

SVB is the biggest bank to collapse since Washington Mutual failed in 2008 during the financial crisis, and the second-biggest bank failure in US history.

[...]

In 2019, Becker was elected to serve on the board of directors at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Becker left the board on Friday.

No need to go to a country without an extradition treaty. Nothing will happen to him here.

Jesus Tapdancing Christ.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 03/12/2023:

And, yes, the deregulation was signed into law by Trump.

Just like the railroad regulations were rolled  back by Trump.  But the fallout on both happened in the Biden administration, so that's who will take the blame.

UPDATE 03/13/2023:

And she's right.

UPDATE 03/14/2023:

There goes another one.  Signature Bank in New York has folded.

Is the GOP Un-American?

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the bill's sponsor, announced earlier Tuesday that [Maine Republican Senator Susan] Collins had signed onto the bill, saying that Congress needed "to make it clear for presidential campaigns going forward: if a foreign power contacts you attempting to interfere in our elections, you call the FBI."

But her support comes as election security legislation has emerged as an increasingly partisan fight in the Senate. Republicans have blocked attempts by Democrats to pass House bills, arguing that they are meant to politically benefit Democrats.

  The Hill

So what they're saying is they can't win without foreign assistance. That's a sad admission.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) blasted his critics on Tuesday accusing them of “lying” and “modern-day McCarthyism.” Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) fired back that the GOP leader should bring a bill up for a vote if he didn’t like the criticism.

Mitch McConnell’s foot-stomping screed on the Senate floor over the nickname “Moscow Mitch” caused the tag to trend Tuesday on Twitter.

The Senate Majority Leader slammed attacks against him as “modern-day McCarthyism” after MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, gave McConnell the pet name for blocking two election security measures late last week.

[...]

“I was called unpatriotic, un-American and essentially treasonous by a couple of left-wing pundits on the basis of bold-faced lies," he said in the Senate floor. "I was accused of aiding and abetting the very man I’ve singled out as an adversary and opposed for nearly 20 years, Vladimir Putin.

[...]

His denunciation of the moniker only re-fueled the online fire and set #MoscowMitch trending once again on Tuesday.

A pair of similar hashtags, #MoscowMitchMcTreason and #MoscowMitchUnAmericanTraitor, also shot to the top of the trending chart on Twitter along with memes and pictures of McConnell dressed as a Russian soldier.

[...]

The majority leader reacted quite differently the last time he was bestowed with a not-so-endearing nickname.

Don Blankenship, a failed Senate candidate from West Virginia, released a campaign advertisement last year labeling McConnell “Cocaine Mitch” insinuating that a shipping company owned by relatives of his wife, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, was involved in shady business.

McConnell’s campaign embraced the label, selling bright red T-shirts featuring a faceless figure over the name “MITCH” with a sprinkling of cocaine blowing around for $35-a-pop.

  NY Daily News

Jesus.




So ignorant he has no idea that sounds like an admission of ignorance.

Why does he always give these mini press conferences under the screaming of a helicopter engine so that everybody - including him - has to shout to be heard?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Interesting note:  Rule of Law is a Republican organization.

Because they can't win if they don't cheat.

About the Senate Intel Committee investigation

Though [Republican Chairman Richard] Burr and Mark Warner, the committee’s Democratic vice-chairman, have largely agreed on the parameters of the investigation, they have recently begun to disagree more publicly on what the facts they’ve collected add up to: Conspiracy? A series of coincidences and bad decisions? Or something in between?

The new Democratic chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, does not believe those questions can be answered without a thorough examination of Trump’s financial history and his potential entanglements with Russian money launderers, especially given new revelations about Trump’s efforts to pursue a multimillion-dollar real-estate deal in Moscow in 2016. So he has revived the panel’s floundering Russia probe by hiring upwards of a dozen dedicated staffers with expertise in corruption or illicit finance, or prosecutorial experience. That brings the total number of investigators, which could increase, to 24 on the House panel alone. Many are bringing specific skills to the committee that the nine staffers working on the Senate’s Russia probe—despite their extensive intelligence-community experience—do not have.

[...]

A particular emphasis will also be placed on Deutsche Bank—the Trump family’s bank of choice for decades, which was fined in 2017 over a $10 billion Russian money-laundering scheme involving its Moscow, New York, and London branches. “The concern about Deutsche Bank is that they have a history of laundering Russian money,” Schiff told NBC in December. [...] Deutsche Bank representatives said last month that the bank was working with the House Intelligence and Financial Services Committees to “determine the best and most appropriate way of assisting them in their official oversight functions.”

[...]

It is undeniable that the Senate Intelligence Committee has traditionally been far more unified than its House counterpart, mostly by virtue of longer term limits and different rules.

[...]

Nevertheless, the bipartisan ground on which the Senate purported to have built its inquiry may be cracking. On Tuesday, Warner said he disagreed with Burr’s claim that the probe had found no “direct evidence” of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

  The Atlantic

But what wasn't widely noted in reports of Burr's claim there's no direct evidence is this fact: legally, in a court of law, circumstantial evidence is given the same weight as direct evidence.

Some Democratic aides were also confused by Burr’s recent claim that a key witness in the probe, the former British spy Christopher Steele, had not responded to the committee’s attempts to engage with him. In fact, Steele submitted written answers to the panel last August, two people familiar with the matter who requested anonymity to discuss the investigation told me.

The Senate’s subpoena for his testimony was dropped shortly thereafter—indicating that the senators were satisfied enough with his responses that they weren’t planning to compel further testimony.

[...]

Investigators who have traveled to London since then have not approached Steele for an interview, according to Steele’s lawyer, who declined to be identified due to sensitivities surrounding the probe. Burr suggested in an interview with CBS last week that Steele remained out of reach. “We’ve made multiple attempts,” to elicit a response, Burr said.

Steele’s lawyer said that was “flatly not true,” and that the committee had actually agreed in writing not to seek further information from Steele after he submitted his written testimony.

Richard Burr's word simply cannot be trusted.

Burr recently defended the decision not to hire outside investigators, telling CBS that they “would’ve never had access to some of the documents that we were able to access from the intelligence community.”

[...]

Ryan Goodman, an expert in national-security law, told me he saw “red flags” in the way the investigation was being carried out, including the chairman’s “failure to hire outside staff with professional expertise and experience in complex investigations, and the failure to use the subpoena power to easily obtain financial records from entities like Deutsche Bank.”

[...]

A spokesperson for Warner declined to comment on whether the senator agreed with that assessment.

We'll guess.

And if anything happens to Maxine Waters

That is incitement to "his people".

Maxine Waters did no such thing.  This is what she said:

“If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere,” the congresswoman said.

  HuffPo

That's not "supporters" - that's administration officials.

I'd like to see an actual IQ test on Trump.

He's going after people right and left this evening.  Well, left and left.

What's illegal - let alone "highly" illegal about him making such a claim? The only thing that's approaching illegal that I can see is Trump slandering someone on Twitter.

And if we're being transparent with hearings, let's see a video of Don Jr's testimony, and make sure the cameras are rolling when Trump gives his Stormy Daniels deposition.

The Memo

Looks like two can play that game.

[Sen. Mark] Warner, the top Democrat on the committee, told Politico that Congress late last year got "extraordinarily important new documents" regarding its Russia probe.

He said the "end-of-the-year document dumps" showed "very significant" revelations.

He added that they "opened a lot of new questions" regarding the Senate panel's investigation.

[...]

Warner also said during the interview that special counsel Robert Mueller is "getting closer and closer to the truth."

“Closer and closer to the truth is getting closer and closer to the president," he said.

  The Hill

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Maybe they want to be Republicans

Dem Co-chair of Senate Intel Investigation Is Convinced

Whatever lie they think will buy them some time, I have no doubt.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

You Need a Scorecard

With new reports of a memo written by former FBI Director James Comey detailing a request from President Trump to back off the bureau’s Russia investigation, two additional congressional committees have amped up their efforts, joining the super secretive House and Senate intelligence committees, which have already been on the case for several months.

Both the House Oversight Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee have demanded to see the Comey memo, if it exists, and other documents related to the ousted FBI director’s interactions with the President. Members of both committees say that they’re actively seeking a public hearing with Comey.

[...]

Here’s your guide to the four congressional committees now investigating matters related to Trump, Comey and Russia’s influence in the 2016 election:

  TPM

Continue reading.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.