Making Memories On The Oregon Coast

Making Memories On The Oregon Coast

D. S. Mitchell

The Pacific coast of the United States is magical. Massive  rock formations,  dramatic vistas, magnificent bridges, miles of expansive beaches are the hallmarks of Oregon’s coastal beauty.  I was born in this “Pacific Wonderland” and every once in a while I like to tell my friends around the world about this amazing place I call home.

A recent article on my beloved coast in Oregon’s largest newspaper, the Portland Oregonian reminded me that I haven’t talked about Oregon’s iconic  landmarks for a while, and never on the Calamity Politics blog.  If you have ever been fortunate enough to explore the Pacific coast of the United States I’m sure that particular spots stand out for you.  The list below highlights several of my special stops on the road.

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80 Reasons To Smile

80 Reasons To Smile

D. S. Mitchell

The last two days have been full of drama and emotion. Jared Kushner is on Capitol Hill and talking to members and staffers from the Senate and House Intelligence Committees, behind closed doors. @POTUS spent 35 minutes last night giving a rambling disgusting speech to 40,000 boy scouts at their annual Jamboree. New Tweets from the president attacking Sessions hit the internet today, which brought significant push back from the conservative branch of the Republican party, including Rush Limbaugh and Breitbart News. The Senate is voting to bring TrumpCare out of committee today and I worry for the possible 30 million people that will lose health care.

I am jumping up and down and I am about to self-combust. But, I know that will not help. I know I need to keep up my efforts to derail TrumpCare. I have made twelve calls to Senators this morning asking a certain few Republican Senators to resist the White House and do what is best for the American people.

Calamity Politics is a political blog with a progressive leaning agenda. Calamity Politics intends to present relevant and engaging political conversation on a daily basis. Usually once a week I try to find something to smile about and share those thoughts with my readers.
As agitated as I am, I thought the best thing for my attitude and my blood pressure was to think of a substantially large number of reasons to smile. So, here are 80 Reasons to Smile, even on a day as disturbing day as today.

1.) Being part of a team 2.) Sunrises 3.) Sunsets 4.) Watching the turntable as an old vinyl plays 5.) Dimples 6.) Warm Apple Fritters 7.) Night games 8.) A checklist 9.) Arched doorways 10.) Search lights 11.) A day at the museum 12.) Finding a 4 leaf clover 13.) A loft for the little ones 14.) Antique claw foot tubs 15.) Sprinklers 16.) Popping bubble wrap 17.) Seeing a dream come true 18.) Baked potato “loaded” 19.) A “free month” of anything 20.) The sweetness of fresh corn on the cob 21.) Flipping pancakes 22.) Paper Airplanes 23.) Tic Tac Toe games 24.) Nervous energy 25.) Homemade onion rings the size of bracelets 26.) Cutting my own bangs 27.) Old perfume bottles 28.) Last nights spaghetti reheated 29.) Shari Lewis’ Lambchop 30.) Old things re-used and re-purposed 31.) Mozart 32.) Holding hands 33.) Salt water aquariums 34.) The caverns and mesas of Arizona, Utah and New Mexico 35.) A reading corner 36.) A secret admirer 37.) A talking parakeet 38.) Lingering over coffee with the Crossword Puzzle 39.) Persistence 40.) Celery filled with crunchy peanut butter 41.) Knowing you are appreciated 42.) Yes or No answers 43.) Floor to ceiling views 44.) Marinas and harbors 45.) Beachcombing 46.) Honeysuckle 47.) Ancient ruins 48.) History 49.) Jazz 50.) A window box garden 51.) Barge homes 52.) Potluck with family and friends 53.) A winning basket scored at the buzzer 54.) A weekly play break 55.) Sunday afternoon poker 56.) A lake cabin 57.) Black licorice 58.) Cobbled streets and tiled roofs 59.) Cast iron skillets 60.) Six layer cakes 61.) Magnolia trees 62.) The buddy system 63.) Old dolls and Teddies 64.) Caramel apples 65.) The Fusion of Tex-Mex 66.)Bead board ceilings 67.) Watching my grand daughter play hop scotch 68.) Loving what you do 69.) Koala bears 70.) Corner cabinets 71.) Elvis music 72.) The ability to change 73.) Tongue twisters 74.) Garden benches 75.) Losing weight 76.) Molasses cookies 77.) Nasturtiums 78.) Afternoon Croquet at the beach house 79.) Clean countertops 80.) Essential oils

Well by the time I got to the number eighty John McCain strode in to the Senate chamber, and cast a deciding vote to bring the Repeal the ACA bill out of committee. Some Republican Senator that I didn’t recognize came on Hardball and said he thought Kushner had been “open and straight forward and appeared to answer all questions thoroughly and honestly.”

I’m not in the mood to add a couple more reasons to smile, cuz I’m really angry and I think I need to take the dog for a walk.

Join the Resistance

Darlene

Natalia and Associates

Calamity Politics is a progressive political blog. Our intention at CP.com is to present relevant, thought provoking articles about serious political issues that are confronting our country.

More Trump Russian scandal news keeps leaking out. It appears that the GOP candidate and his inner circle are intricately enmeshed with various Russian oligarchs and the Russian government. One of the major characters in this building drama is former Senator Jeff Sessions, Trump campaign surrogate and Trump appointee to the position of the highest law official in the United States, the Attorney General.

Mr. Sessions appeared at his confirmation to have developed a sudden onset of amnesia, totally forgetting 2 separate visits he had with then Russian Ambassador, Kisylak. When those meetings were disclosed by the press, Sessions went back and changed his statements, protecting himself from possible perjury charges.

In May of 2017 the U.S. Department of Justice quietly and abruptly settled a case against Prevezon Holdings. Prevezon is a Russian firm accused of laundering an estimated $230,000,000 dollars through Manhattan real estate purchases and sales. The case was about to go to trial when DOJ made Prevezon an offer they couldn’t refuse. DOJ headed by Attorney General Jefferson Sessions felt a fine of 6,000,000 was appropriate. The six million is far less than the case was expected to settle for. Furthermore, the Russian firm was not required to make any admissions of guilt.

Way back in May, the lawyer representing the family of Pyotr Katsyv, the former Vice Governor of the Moscow region, whose son Denis owns Prevezon was an unknown Russian lady lawyer named Natalia Veselnitskaya.

In a statement at the time of the settlement announcement, Veselnitskaya said the offer by Trump’s lying Attorney General was almost “like an apology from the United States government”.

As of July 9, 2017 anyone with ears or eyes knows who Natalia Veselnitskaya is. She is the “Russian government lawyer” whose meeting at Trump Tower with Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort as well as a former Russian intel officer who is now a U.S. citizen and registered lobbyist, and numerous other people, including a translator and a mysterious and rumored money laundering Russian real estate figure named Kaveladze.

This June 2016 meeting is the biggest political bombshell revelation in the quest to uncover any evidence of Trump Russia collusion in the 2016 presidential election. Hair raising information. This story is starting to burn very hot and the fire is getting closer to the Oval Office.

A group of Democrats in Congress are interested in the dealings the Trump campaign has had with the Russian government and they further are seeking information to learn if Veselnitskaya, the female attorney who came to Trump Tower a year ago described as “a Russian government lawyer” peddling dirt on Hillary Clinton, had any unethical connection with Jeff Sessions and the Trump administration that led to his decision to settle the lawsuit on terms so seemingly friendly to Prevezon.

The Prevezon case was being brought by Preet Bharara, the U.S  attorney for the Southern District of New York.  Mr Bharara was fired by President Trump after initially being asked to stay on post-inauguration. Bharara similar, to fired FBI Director James Comey,  has  stated that he was uncomfortable with personal overtures made by Donald Trump and surrogates.

The day prior to Bharara’s firing, Trump attempted to reach Mr. Bharara by phone and the prosecutor refused to speak to him or call him back, citing discomfort with Trump’s desire to ingratiate himself with a U.S. attorney.

Seventeen Democrats came together and sent a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions stating in part:”We write with some concern that the two events may be connected and that the DOJ may have settled the case at a loss to the United States in order to obscure underlying facts”

The lawmakers want to know if Natalia Veselnitskaya had any role in the Prevezon settlement talks, whether Sessions–who had been a Trump campaign advisor–knew of the 2016 meeting at Trump Tower, whether any Trump administration officials had contacted the DOJ about the case, and the Democratic lawmakers also asked for documents explaining the decision to abruptly settle a very strong case for a ridiculously low fine.  A soft settlement that none believe the Bulldog prosecutor Bharara would ever have settled for.  Suspiciously, the settlement was arranged within several weeks of Bharara’s firing.

The public rarely gets excited over dirty business dealings involving money laundering and a complex tax fraud scheme, but this “matter seems to intersect with too many key signposts of the burgeoning Trump-Russia scandal to ignore,” said Will Bunch in an article for Philly.com, which was one source used by Calamity Politics in the research for this post.

The early dishonesty by Sessions, regarding issues Russian,  is a broader *”mosaic of lies” that have permeated the Trump campaign and the subsequent Trump administration regarding their contacts with Russians.  The mounting number of secret contacts by Trump officials coming to light are making it increasingly difficult to believe those past and current dealings between the Trump campaign and their administration with the Russian government are honest and above board.

Sessions had by his own statement, recused himself from the Russian investigation and all things Russian.  However, there is no reason to believe that the disgraced Sessions recused himself from the Prevezon settlement, and as such the Prevezon settlement and Natalia Veselnitskaya have fallen into the growing abyss of the Russian-Trump conspiracy scandal.

I’m more and more convinced that these activities with the Russians originated in dirty money transactions and probable purchases/sales at Trump properties that were designed to launder ill gotten money out of Russia.  It is possible that there are salacious dossiers and ugly sex transactions by Trump, I have no problem believing that such information exists, unless of course it is boy-on-boy.  That dirty scenario would put an end to Trump. But, I think it all started because of money and Trump’s need to feed his hyper-expensive life style.

Donald Trump had tried to market everything from ties, to vodka, to steaks, to his name, and most of the ventures were a failure, most notably Trump University which got him in hot water with multiple states.  Several state AGs filed suit against Trump and his “scam” university.  The real estate business however, was tailor made for laundering large sums of money, millions and hundreds of millions of dollars per transaction.

So, in my view this is how it went down.  On one side you have an eager, not so law abiding guy who owes everybody in the world, and on the other side you have a group of foreign oligarchs bent on hiding skimmed money stolen from Russian sources. Such a perfect arrangement.  An evil marriage that has after a three decade plus relationship culminated in the installation of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States.

The information is being hemorrhaged out almost hourly.  It will take time but I believe that the disgusting relationship between Russia and all things Trump will be revealed. I’m not sure, but I believe that the greatest scandal in US history, involving possibly hundreds of individuals, is nothing more than a conspiracy to make more money.  You can never have too much money. Right?  I call it sick.  When money is more important that your  country, the sacredness of the vote, the near holiness of the U.S. Constitution you should be banished to that f’ing country you sold out to.

Explain to me why every American soldier serving this country doesn’t throw his gun down and demand an air line ticket home?  When you don’t know who your President is working with it’s time to cut the ties that bind. I will keep writing about the Russia scandal. It’s gonna be a rough ride. Join the Resistance.

Dar

75 Things To Smile About

75 Things To Smile About

D. S. Mitchell

It is Sunday afternoon and it is a perfect day on the North Oregon coast. The clouds are while cotton balls hanging over a blue ocean with cresting waves breaking gently against the sand.  Sundays are when I discard politics and look for reasons to smile.

So today this is what I came up with:

1.) Puppy love  2.) Wearing a man’s T-shirt  3.) Painted bead-board  4.) Skinny, crispy french fries 5.) Pale yellow and baby blue bedrooms  6.) Beach bonfires  7.) Misty mornings  8.) Good balance 9.) Day dreaming  10.) Sitting in the sun  11.) Having a canary in the house  12.) Remembering a locker combination  13.) Paper clips  14.) The cat sleeping in the fern plant  15.) Copper kettles 16.) Moonlight on water  17.) The crunchiness of French bread  18.) Mushroom hunting 19.) Picnic baskets loaded and ready  20.) Old Godzilla movies at midnight 21.) Finding the tool I need  22.) Turning off the faucet just as the water reaches the sink brim  23.) Achievement and set-back  24.) Tiny houses 25.) Wicker and lace  26.) Powdered doughnut holes with fresh perked coffee 27.) A secret journal  28.) A check at the mail box 29.) An old cabin in the woods  30.) Hide-an-Seek 31.) An approaching storm 32.) Sundance catalogue  33.) Childhood games  34.) Giving the peace sign, not the finger  35.) A new toothbrush 36.) Finishing a chore 37.) Filling a baked potato with butter, chives and sour cream 38.) Marx brother’s movies 39.) Chocolate fudge cake with chocolate and cherry cordial ice cream 40.) eBay 41.)Snowmobile rides 42.) Sweet dreams  43.) Stalagmites and stalagitates 44.) Ice fishing 45.) The smell of wood burning 46.) Back rubs and foot rubs 47.) A little self-love  48.) Fixing dinner with your partner 49.) New carpeting 50.) Old Sea Hunt episodes 51.) Arabian horses 52.) Finding a bird feather 53.) School plays 54.) The click of a spinning fan 55.) Remembering Mama 56.) A bike filled college campus 57.) Following a stone wall to its end 58.) Babies wearing boots and jeans 59.) Concerts in the park 60.) Machu Picchu 61.) Self confidence 62.) Wire baskets filled with vegetables 63.) The feel of corduroy 64.) Trains 65.) Cats 66.) Cartwheels, somersaults, and hand stands on the front lawn 67.) Historic places 68.) Tortoises 69.) Koi filled ponds 70.) Hot apple Empanadas 71.) Carte blanche 72.) Good posture 73.) A Denny’s breakfast of grease and goo 74.) Japanese lanterns floating on a breeze 75.) Touch football

No matter what is happening in Washington today, I will smile.

Join me mostly daily, as I autopsy the headline political news with an extra side of sarcasm and a double order of cynicism, but for dessert I dig into a big dish of hope, as I attempt to analyze and comment on the upside down world of U.S. politics.

Join the Resistance

Dar

Deeply Concerned

Deeply Concerned

By D. S. Mitchell

I am generally considered pro-active. I  tend to handle problems when they initially present themselves, not wait until I have a full blown emergency.  I learned this lesson from my mother, and it is a lesson that has served me well for my last 71 years of life. The Trump Administration, headed by Donald Trump, has not learned that lesson. And as such, we have a major set of scandals threatening to blow up this White House and its corrupt, narcissistic, Mafioso occupant.

Calamity Politics is a political blog bringing news to my readers with an often biting and sarcastic commentary that I hope is at least mildly amusing.  I pray daily for the Impeachment of Donald J. Trump and Mike Pence. Please join me in that prayer.

The last two posts from Calamity Politics have been about 1.)President Trump’s Conflicts of Interest issues in at least 30 separate cases, and 2.)Donald Jr’s. meeting with a Russian attorney in June of 2016

Although both scandals at first seem separate, after about a minute and a half  of thought,  I decided, No. These are very much the same story. The story of a family that believes they are above the law.  Corruption and coverup seem to come naturally to the Trump team. It must be in the genes.

Paul Krugman, writing for the New York Times on July 10, 2016 indicted the entire GOP, saying, “It’s not just Donald Trump: The whole GOP has become a post-truth party. And I see no sign it will ever improve.” Krugman continued, “Political spin used to have limits: Politicians who wanted to be taken seriously wouldn’t go around claiming up is down and black is white.”

In that same story, Krugman further asserted that “conservatives keep scaling new heights of dishonesty in their attempt to sell their reverse Robin Hood agenda, of tax cuts for the rich and pain for the poor.”

On July 13, 2017 Ross Douthat published an article in the NY Times veering back directly to Trump, blaming him personally for most of the negative press, “a good rule of thumb for dealing with Donald Trump: Everyone who gives him the benefit of the doubt eventually regrets it.”

The argument that Trump is a political neophyte and that he is still hanging onto the 1980’s vision of the two great powers co-operating and working toward a world of greater understanding has been dashed by the revelations of the last week from Donald Trump, Jr.

It is no longer arguable that there is a normal explanation for Trump’s seeming love affair with all things Russian.  Donald, Jr. in an admitted effort by the Trump campaign to gather negative information on Hillary Clinton met with Russian nationals.  Those attendees’ have now been shown to have serious links to the Russian government.  Several high ranking Trump campaign and family members were at the meeting, including Jared Kushner, Donald Jr., and Paul Manafort.

Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort had a meeting with “identified representatives  of the Russian government” in which, “it was explicitly promised that damaging information on Hillary Clinton would be supplied as part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

So, we know that the Trump insiders were willing to meet with an adversarial government, a government that is actively working world wide to undermine the power and influence of the United States.  The Trump team had every reason to believe any information provided in that meeting was likely to have been hacked–more specifically, stolen–to have come into Russian hands, in the first place.

A direct quote from the emails between Rob Goldstone and Donald Jr., indicate that Junior was not skeptical, but rather eager, and in fact enthusiastically welcomed the encounter saying, “if it’s what you say, I love it.” Never seeming to question, why would a foreign government want to help a particular candidate? What will be the eventual cost for such support?

To make it look even worse, the emails and statements by Junior did not come out until the pending  release by a media outlet of the same emails forced his release of the emails.  His story, flipped and flopped and has to this day not settled on the whole story or the whole truth.

Everybody in that meeting lied, or conveniently forgot about their little get together.  Douthat’s article states, “So while this is not direct evidence that the president of the United States was complicit in a virtual burglary, perpetrated against the other party during an election season,  is strong evidence that we should drop the presumption that such collusion is an extreme or implausible scenario.”

Just imagine that the Watergate burglars had been foreign hackers.  Think about it, seriously, when viewed that way, there is an entirely new image. Why does it seem different when the burglar has a crowbar to jimmy a window, or a burglar attacking from behind the screen of a computer.  My private information is actually far more valuable to me than a television set, a stereo, or a gold bracelet.

Is America Going To Accept Russian Interference In U.S. Elections?

Douthat concludes his piece, “anyone presuming his (Trump) innocence at this point should have all the confidence of Chris Christie awaiting his cabinet appointment….”

Finally, the conservative writer, and political analyst Charles Krauthammer  wrote for the Washington Post a scathing article on 7/14/2017 lashing out at the Trump administration saying, “Bungled collusion is still collusion no matter how you spin it.”

Krauthammer recounted that the White House for six months has claimed the Russian scandal was a ‘hoax’, ‘fake news’, ‘democratic hysteria’, nothing more than ‘innuendo’. “Yes, there had been meetings with Russian officials, some only belatedly disclosed. But, that is circumstantial evidence at best.”

Krauthammer continues, ” The evidence is now shown. This is not hearsay, not fake news, not unsourced leaks. This is an email chain released by Donald Trump, Jr. himself.  The Kremlin  is willing to share troves of incriminating documents from the Crown Prosecutor (error: Britain has a CP. Russia has a State Prosecutor.)”

When Donald, Jr., emailed back his willingness to meet, “he was in.” Once you’ve said, “I’m in,” it makes no difference that the meeting was a bust, that the intermediary brought no such goods.  What matters is what Donald, Jr. thought going into that meeting, as well as Jared Kushner and then campaign manager Paul Manafort, who were copied on the correspondence, invited to the meeting, and attended.”

Donald, Jr.,  told Sean Hannity that the meeting was “just a wasted 20 minutes, which was a shame.”

Krauthammer’s article asks, “A shame? On the contrary, a stroke of luck. Had the lawyer had real stuff to deliver, Donald, Jr., and the others would be in far deeper legal trouble.  It turned out to be incompetent amateur collusion, this was keystone cops collusion,   comically failed collusion. That does not erase the fact that three top Trump campaign officials were ready to play.”

“It may turn out that they did later collaborate more fruitfully.  We don’t know.  But even if nothing else is found, the evidence is damning.’

Krauthammer goes on to attack the Trump apologists who are claiming such interaction between the Trump campaign and the Russian government is “no big deal.”  First, the Trumpites have been telling us for six months that no collusion ever happened, and now they say: Sure it happened.  So, what? Everyone does it.”

“What’s left of your credibility when you make such a casual about-face?, Krauthammer asks.

Secondly, he states, “No, not everyone does it. It’s one thing to be open to opposition research dug up in Indiana.  But not dirt from Russia, a hostile foreign power that has repeatedly invaded its neighbors, that buzzes our planes and ships in international waters, that opposes our every move and objective around the globe.  What Donald, Jr.–and Kushner and Manafort–did may not be criminal.  But it is not merely stupid–it is also deeply wrong, a fundamental violation of any code of civic honor.

I leave it to the lawyers to adjudicate the legalities  of  unconsummated collusion.  But you don’t need to be a lawyer to see that the Trump defense — collusion as a desperate Democratic fiction designed to explain away a lost election–is now officially dead.”

Trump Issued A Tweet Claiming Donald Jr Is A Good Young Man.

Their stories change daily and sometimes hourly.  Head spinning deceit and lies to an unheard of extent. In fact, there seems to be no limit to the extent of the deception. A surrogate lines up “the story” and then one of the Trumps runs their car over the surrogates foot with a tweet, a statement, or an interview.

Trump has sent a Tweet from Paris blamed Loretta Lynch and the Obama Administration for wrongly allowing the Russian lawyer, Natalia Vaselnitskaya into the country.  Krauthammer swung back at Trump Tweets, calling it a “red herring the size of a whale.”

Is it all pathological? Or, are the shifting stories just an attempt to cover up an ever growing ugly scenario, that could get uglier and uglier.  With the Trump group it is hard to know. In fact, the two could easily overlap.

I have lived through 13 presidencies. That makes me really old and I have seen a lot. Some presidents I could ignore, while others I could not. I have for the most part felt we could survive a bad president, out of the thirteen there were a couple really bad ones, but the country survived and kept moving jerkily forward.

The Russians Are Here

But now, I’m deeply concerned. Not once did I ever doubt the patriotism of any one of those presidents.  Never once, did I suspect that the sitting president had interacted with a foreign power to win election to the highest office in the United States.  But now, I’m deeply concerned.  Never once have I heard a President deny an allegation for months and then when the lie was exposed the President said, “It’s politics, it’s a dirty business and everyone does it, it’s called ‘opposition research’.  Anyone would have taken that meeting.”

How do months of denials from the Trump block pivot from “nothing Russian going on here”, to suddenly in one tweet, morph into “everybody does it.”

I’m deeply concerned and I hope you are to. Join the Resistance. Do your part, call your elected officials, email the same officials, call them again, make your voice heard. Neighborhood organizing, and protesting back up your words.  Don’t give in to exhaustion or disappointment. The road is long and the challenges great, but together we can remove this cancer from the White House, but it will take work and commitment and a hell of a lot of phone calls.

Even Fox News commentator Chris Wallace seemed to question the Trump campaign activities saying, “This should not be Pro-Trump vs Anti-Trump.  If you are a fair minded person you ought to be concerned about the fact that we were repeatedly misled about what this meeting concerned.”

Wallace didn’t stop with that but instead encouraged “anybody who has inside knowledge  should come forward with every single contact they ever had with a Russian. Come clean, tell it now, let the chips fall where they may.  And in fact, if there’s no crime you’ll survive it.  It will be embarrassing but it is better than this trickle, this daily drip” of new undisclosed Russian contacts.

Join the Resistance

DarleneC