President Donald Trump traveled to Toledo, Ohio on Thursday to rally his supporters ahead of the 2020 re-election.
Trump, who was impeached by the House of Representatives in December, spoke at the 8,000 capacity Huntington Center.
Trump was introduced by Vice President Mike Pence.
Watch:
President Donald Trump has worsened his relationship with Congress -- including some Republicans -- with the administration's shifting justifications for assassinating Iranian Gen. Qassim Suleimani, a former top official at the Federal Bureau of Investigation explained on MSNBC.
Frank Figliuzzi, who served as the assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI, was interviewed as the House of Representatives debated a War Powers resolution authored by Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MN).
The host played clips showing conflict justifications offered by Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the president himself.
Figliuzzi said, "we can no longer trust this white house even when the consequences are as grave as potential war to tell us anything approximating the truth."
"And what's really offensive to someone like me, that's been an intelligence professional, is they're trying to put the imprimatur -- the good face of our intelligence services -- on this, 'we have great intel.' No, you didn't have that intel, you're lying about it."
Figliuzzi then offered insight into what it is like for children to be raised by FBI agents.
"You know, Nicolle, I used to tell my kids, my two boys, when they were teenagers and they'd been out with the car for the night. The next day, I'd say, "Hey, how'd your evening go? Where were you? What did you do?' And if their account of it wasn't matching with my intel, with my sources and methods, I'd say, 'Give me the keys,'" he explained.
"That's what we're talking about in Congress right now with the War Powers discussion. this president can't be trusted with the keys to the car, to make good decisions," he explained. "This White House can't make good decisions, the president is hanging out with the wrong people. That's why you hear Nancy Pelosi talking about war powers authority."
Wallace, who worked in the George W. Bush administration that was notorious for their use of harsh interrogation techniques, said she wanted to do a whole show I Figliuzzi's parenting tips so she could use them on her eight-year-old son.
Watch:
George Conway joined with other "Never Trump" Republicans to form Project Lincoln, to attack President Donald Trump for defying GOP principles.
In their first ad, titled "MAGA Church," Trump's ignorance of Christianity, Jesus Christ and the Bible are all on display. Interspersed with footage of far-right evangelical pastors praying and praising Trump are the president's most anti-Christian statements.
"Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are revenging wolves." the ad quotes Matthew 7:15
The first clip comes when a CNN reporter asked Trump if he'd ever asked God for forgiveness, Trump didn't understand why he would ever need to.
"Why do I have to repent? Why do I have to ask for forgiveness?" Trump ranted when asked.
It was only the beginning of the ad. According to Conway, the 68-second clip is only the introduction of a much longer ad.
Check it out and the full video below:
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) on Thursday tried to distance himself from Lev Parnas, but found himself getting busted by a reporter for misstating his relationship with the indicted Rudy Giuliani henchman.
After Adam Klasfeld of Courthouse News asked McCarthy to describe his interactions with Parnas, the top House Republican downplayed his meetings with Parnas as a chance encounter.
"I guess I met him one time, he came to an event, took a picture," McCarthy said. "I do events every single day, I do pictures with thousands of people all the time. And the money, when we found out he donated it to the campaign, we donated it to charity."
Klasfeld, however, has found at least two separate events where both McCarthy and Parnas were in attendance.
"In the pictures below [with Parnas], McCarthy was wearing a suit," Klasfeld wrote on Twitter. "In the story linked here, McCarthy is wearing a tuxedo at a gala where Parnas and Fruman were honored."
Parnas in 2018 donated $2,700 to McCarthy's reelection campaign during a time when prosecutors allege he was funneling foreign money into the United States to make illegal campaign contributions.
Parnas would later become a central figure in Trump attorney Giuliani's campaign to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden.
Watch the video of Klasfeld and McCarthy below.
Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) fired back at Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA) on Thursday after he suggested that Democrats support terrorists.
During an interview with Duckworth on CNN, host Brianna Keilar noted that Collins had accused Democrats of being "in love with terrorists" because of their criticism over President Donald Trump's decision to kill an Iraqi general without consulting Congress.
"I'm not going to justify that with a response," Duckworth replied. "I left parts of my body in Iraq fighting terrorists. I don't need to justify myself to anyone."
The Illinois senator went on to says she was also "disgusted" with Collins for using Gold Star families as a political "pawn."
Watch the video below from CNN.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) still hasn't said when she will send articles of impeachment over to the Senate -- but chatter on Capitol Hill is betting that it will be done by the end of the month.
CNN senior Washington correspondent Jeff Zeleny on Thursday said he's heard talk from lawmakers that Pelosi wants to get the articles sent over to the Senate by early February at the latest.
"What I noticed over and over on Capitol Hill is they're looking at the date of February 4th," he said. "That is the date the president is coming over to give the State of the Union. Nancy Pelosi has reportedly told people she would like the trial to be underway so he is not cleared of this at the time he's in the House of Representatives."
Last year Pelosi forced Trump to delay giving his State of the Union address until the end of the government shutdown that he instigated in a failed attempt to get full funding for his long-promised wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Watch the video below.
Former Department of Homeland Security spokesperson David Lapan, under President Donald Trump, agreed that the president has an obsession with former President Barack Obama.
During an MSNBC panel discussion, host Chris Jansing asked if the president "has an inability to move on from Obama and Clinton."
Lapan explained both are true.
"He certainly has this thing about Obama and he just can't let it go," Lapan said. "It seems to underpin everything he does and says. It also does have an appeal to his base. It was one week ago tonight that we conducted the airstrike that killed Gen. Qasem Suleimani. In those seven days, the administration's messaging and its communications on this has been all over the map. This is the most momentous foreign policy and national security action this administration has taken, yet it can't clearly explain to the American public and to the broader public across the world what it did, why it did, what its strategy is and I don't think the president's speech yesterday lived up to that either. It didn't provide the clarity or the assurance that needed to be provided at that time."
Meanwhile, Republicans and Fox News are claiming that Democrats are defending Suleimani, something that has been proven false. What Democrats oppose is an escalation to the crisis in the Middle East and unending wars.
Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA) went so far as to say that Democrats "love terrorists."
"I don't think it resonates at all across America," said Lapan. "Again, it may resonate with the base. Those type of statements, ambassador you said, are clearly talking points that have been distributed. They have no basis in fact either, that's the other thing. It's easily debunkable that members of the Democratic Party have said things that show that they somehow are mourning the death. That's not been the case, it's not shown to be true that people have said that from the party. So, it's more example, again, of appealing to a certain segment of the population, not to the American public. And as I said before, this is serious business. It's life and death, this is national security. It's time to put partisan politics away and address this entire thing from a unity."
Watch the comments below:
The audience went wild on "The View" after watching a clip of Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) calling out the Trump administration's congressional briefing on Iran.
The Trump-friendly Utah Republican was furious when he left the briefing, where Lee said administration officials justified the assassination of Iranian general Qassim Suleimani, and told lawmakers not to publicly question their actions.
"I find that absolutely insane," Lee told reporters afterward. "I think it's unacceptable."
Host Whoopi Goldberg was relieved to hear the senator's angry response.
"Thank you," she said. "Thank you."
The audience apparently was, too, because they greeted Lee's remarks with sustained applause.
"We have all been waiting for someone else to not blame it on the Democrats," Goldberg said. "You can't blame this on the Democrats. This is what you saw and heard, you were in the room and you didn't buy it. Think of when next time you start questioning things, when people say, 'I'm not sure I buy this.' This is how people feel -- they heard it, they saw it. You saw it, you heard it, you didn't buy it."
"Thank you," she added, "because this gaslighting stuff really needs to stop. Everybody has to get on board. Is it good behavior, is it bad behavior? Did they not tell you what you needed to know? No, they didn't, and I'm so thrilled that finally somebody said, 'Okay, all right, this is a pile of doggy doo -- and this was a pile of doggy doo."
Co-host Abby Huntsman agreed.
"Mike Lee is my senator in Utah," Huntsman said, "and I know him very well, and he's actually one of the truest conservatives in Washington, D.C., and I saw that video yesterday and I thought, 'Thank you,' because he's speaking on what's best for this country."
"Here's the thing with Trump, when they're saying in that room believe our intelligence, there's stuff we can't tell you, that would be more credible if the president didn't say time and time again that he didn't trust or believe his own intelligence community," she added. "I'm sorry, but that's where you lose me. Yes, I might believe you, but when I see you in Helsinki standing next to Vladimir Putin undermining our intelligence community, saying you believe Putin over what our people are telling you, when you are tweeting out that you want the whistleblower's name public because it might make you look bad, that's when I don't trust any of this. That's when we have to say to ourselves, things are screwed up right now."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) attacked President Donald Trump for trying to inform Congress about a military action against Iran on Twitter. She said it was unacceptable.
"I do not believe, in terms of what is in the public domain, that they have made the country safer by what they did, and that is what our responsibility is," Pelosi said about the killing of Iranian Gen. Qasem Suleimani. "We'll have more discussion of this on the floor today at some length."
She recalled meeting veterans from the Battle of the Bulge, who said that they pray for peace, a sentiment she shared.
"We must avoid war," she continued. "And the cavalier attitude of this administration, it's stunning. The president will say, 'I inform you by reading my tweets.' No, that's not the relationship that our founders had in mind in the Constitution of United States when they gave power to the White House to do one thing in terms of our national security and to the Congress to declare war and to allocate resources and the rest."
Watch her comments below:
On Thursday, Vice President Mike Pence stated on Fox News that the administration acted on credible intelligence in ordering the strike against Iranian general Qassim Suleimani — even though none of it can be shared publicly — and added that contrary to speculation, the Iranians did in fact intend to hit their target when they launched the retaliatory missiles.
The problem with that, noted CNN correspondent Dana Bash, is that President Donald Trump and many of his supporters have been trying to suggest exactly the opposite.
"I just want to talk about for one second what Vice President Mike Pence just said, Dana," said CNN anchor Alisyn Camerota. "He just said that they have the intelligence to support that Iran fired those missiles intending to kill Americans. How can we trust that what he is saying there, since they have presented none of the intelligence to the American public and many of the lawmakers who have seen it dismiss the intelligence as being woefully scant?"
"Not just that," said Bash. "I've seen reporting, including especially at CNN, that says the opposite, that what Iran was doing was ... that they intended to send a message and not to kill anybody, to de-escalate. So if they are saying that, that will be important to back up, but it's curious that he would say that because it's the opposite of the message that the president and everybody else from the administration were trying to send yesterday, which is reel it back, reel it back."
Watch below:
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough hilariously mocked President Donald Trump for spending nearly one-third of his presidency loafing on the taxpayer's dime at one of his own properties.
The president has spent three out of every 10 days since his inauguration at a Trump-branded property, paid for by taxpayers, after complaining for years about President Barack Obama's golfing.
"Here you've got a guy who, again, is so lazy, he's taking one out of three days off as president, hanging out at a golf resort that taxpayers pay for so he can get richer while he's lazing around on the job playing golf," Scarborough said. "He is screwing working-class Americans who are paying him to not do his job at his resort while making him richer just sitting around in golf carts, waddling around playing golf."
"This is absolutely incredible," Scarborough added. "Have you seen him in the golf shirts? Have you seen him walking around lately? I mean, it is such a scam for people who are working 40, 50, 60 hours a week. They pay their taxes, and then they are paying the costs of the president of the United States taking a squad of people down to one of his resorts so he can lie around, play golf, eat, do next to nothing but occasionally kill an Iranian general and then they have to pay for it."
Scarborough said the president's loafing was all the more outrageous after he promised throughout his campaign to work harder than Obama, whom he constantly suggested was lazy.
"He criticized Barack Obama for playing too much golf," Scarborough said. "Have you ever seen Barack Obama's golf swing? He didn't play enough golf!"
Scarborough said the president doesn't even work hard on the days where he's not playing golf or swapping gossip with his private club members.
"Even when he's in the White House supposedly doing his job, you look at those schedules, his executive time, sometimes he doesn't even get into the White House until like 11 a.m.," Scarborough said. "(He) gets into the oval office at 11 in the morning for a meeting. The laziness is incredible. I've never seen a lazier guy at any time, not just in the White House, but anywhere. One out of three days he's off. He ambles into the White House sometimes at 11 in the morning. Laziest guy we've ever elected to the presidency."
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough slammed Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and other Senate Republicans for praising a national security briefing described by others as the worst they'd ever heard.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) were incensed by the Trump administration's "insulting and demeaning" Iran briefing, and the "Morning Joe" host slammed Graham for accusing the GOP pair of "empowering the enemy."
"Only in the age of Trump would actually reading the Constitution and believing Article I says, only in Donald Trump's Washington would a Republican senator call that empowering the enemy," Scarborough said. "Lindsey Graham's word about a fellow Republican, because he wanted to debate a strike, an airstrike, wanted to debate intel. Lindsey called that empowering the enemy and yet, it's Lindsey Graham and Donald Trump and the entire Republican Party who has been castigating and slandering the men and women of the FBI, CIA, NSA, you name it, every intel agency across Washington, D.C."
"It's hard to say that this is Lindsey Graham's most shameful performance," he added, "but I would say that accusing Mike Lee of empowering the Iranians because you want to actually defend the Constitution of the United States, that's up there."
Graham didn't just attack his fellow Republicans who were unsatisfied with the justification for assassinating Iranian general Qassim Suleimani, he praised President Donald Trump's strangely slurred speech about the escalating conflict.
"Lindsey Graham comparing Donald Trump's press conference yesterday to one of -- at least the Republicans believe, conservatives believe -- one of the great speeches in the second half of the 20th Century, one of the most significant, Ronald Reagan telling Mr. Gorbachev to tear down the wall," Scarborough said. "Does he need primary votes that badly?"
There is a strong déjà-vu quality to the protests that have recently erupted around the Brazilian comedy troupe Porta dos Fundos’s presentation of Christ as a gay man. In Netflix’s Christmas special The First Temptation of Christ Porta dos Fundos depict Jesus as a gay man who introduces his cross-dressing boyfriend, Orlando, to his family. Incongruities abound when Orlando, who wears massive amounts of makeup and a blonde wig, performs ‘Jingle Bells’ on a digital keyboard in Judea ca. 30 A.D., endearing himself to the holy family (and his relationship with Jesus).1
Of course, this is merely the nth iteration of the irreverent Jesus motif, with countless gay-Jesus memes being the most obvious manifestation. Hence, one would have assumed that irreverent comical presentations of Jesus no longer have the power to spark serious outrage. But this is where our short cultural memory bites us. Most people have now forgotten, but when Monty Python’s Life of Brian first came out in 1979, there were protests, petitions, and even street demonstrations, as well as widespread calls for boycotts in some southern states. Ireland and Norway banned the movie altogether.
I recount this history (and much more related to the theme of religion and humor), in my recent book Christianity and the Triumph of Humor, where I also trace the most frequently invoked motifs of irreverent comedy to their antecedents, some reaching all the way back to the Middle Ages. Indeed, some comical ideas surrounding the annunciation of Gabriel, Mary’s immaculate conception, Christ’s nativity, even the crucifixion of Christ have been the subject of comical treatments for centuries.
In that sense, the Porta dos Fundos comedy troupe is merely extending a comical tradition that goes back all the way to the Middle Ages. As I document in my book, late medieval nativity plays with comical interludes were so popular, they raised the ire of religious authorities and were ultimately banned in the 16th century. Some of these (essentially pious) plays would poke fun at an irate Joseph who feels cuckolded after Mary announces her unexpected pregnancy. Others would poke fun at shepherds bringing gifts to the wrong nativity, similar to early scenes in Life of Brian.
What Porta dos Fundos are doing is simply updating Monty Python for the 21st century; their fun at depicting Jesus as an awkward gay adolescent isn’t much different from Graham Chapman’s depiction of a bumbling savior manqué, Brian, who spouts lines from the Sermon on the Mount while on the run from the Roman police.2 More recently, Robin Williams mined Mary’s announcement to Joseph for his stand-up routine 20 years ago,3 while Rowan Atkinson depicted Jesus as a birthday clown pulling rabbits out of a hat.4
After Life of Brian, it seems Western Christian culture largely resolved itself to the triumph of humor over religious sanctimony. This is the thesis of my book, which details the steady progression of religious humor since Dante as it conquered one taboo after another until nothing sacred was left that couldn’t be poked fun at or mocked outright. People may think that Porta dos Fundos represent some kind of ultimate outrage or pinnacle of irreverence, but that’s far from the truth.
One could argue that Mark Twain’s anti-God satire and his comical stabs against religion were more daring 120 years ago than anything Porta dos Fundos is doing today. Or there’s The Book of Mormon, which contains the rousing, blasphemous anthem “Hasa Diga Eebowai,”5 which to anyone who cares, translates as “F*ck you God!” Or David Javerbaum’s hilarious play, An Act of God, that has God apologize for latent psychopathic tendencies by saying “I made mankind in My image, and I’m an asshole.”
So, when it comes to Christian religious comedy, one can always point to some work of comedy that’s more searingly irreverent, or reveal an earlier use of some comical motif that even today has the power to shock. All this goes to show that Porta dos Fundos is essentially just doing the old jokes in a new setting, and broadcasting them in a deeply religious, majority Catholic country, Brazil. However, if we trust history, then the Brazilians’ protests against the gay-Jesus comedy skit will be as effective (or ineffective) as the widespread protests against Life of Brian or the angry letter-writing campaigns against Jesus-as-loser on South Park. They may constitute a brief inconvenience and perhaps put a dent into the profitability of the Porta dos Fundos YouTube channel, but they’re unlikely to put a stop to the steady march of the triumph of humor.
For reasons that are beyond the scope of this article (but which are detailed in my book), Christianity has accommodated itself to the forces of comedy and has allowed humor to touch every conceivable religious topic, no matter how sacred. While it may be unwise to expose certain audiences to aggressive religious comedy, if one wants to be protected from offensive jokes directed at Christian objects of reverence, one does better by simply ignoring the offensive material than by riling against it—at least if one doesn’t want to be seen as comically repeating history.
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