Democrat and the Wall Cartoons

Wife of federal worker wins the lottery amid shutdown crisis

There was a gold lining for one family negatively affected by the government shutdown.
Carrie Walls, the wife of a federal worker who isn’t getting a paycheck because of the impasse, picked up a $100,000 check and a brand-new SUV after winning the Virginia lottery.
As 800,000 government workers lamented missing pay Friday, Walls, who served in the Air Force for 13 years, collected the top prize in the Virginia Lottery’s Ford Expedition Plus $100K promotion, the state lottery announced.
“I cried,” Walls told the Virginia Lottery of the moment she knew she won. “I couldn’t believe it.”
The Ashburn, Va., woman said the $100,000 is especially timely because her husband, John Walls, who works at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is currently furloughed. John is also an Air Force veteran, according to his Facebook.
In a picture posted by the state lottery, Carrie Walls, 35, can be seen beaming in the driver’s seat of a shiny white SUV, brandishing a check almost as wide as the car’s front door.
She’s planning on using the winnings to take her family to Disney World in Orlando, Fla., she said.
Walls bought the golden scratch-off on Dec. 4, two weeks before the shutdown began, and won out of 554,000 entries.
The odds of scratching to win the top prize in Ford Expedition Plus $100,000 are 1 in 1,387,200. The odds of winning any prize in the game are 1 in 4.16.

Trump mocks Elizabeth Warren with Wounded Knee reference over Instagram livestream

President Trump mocked Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who cracked open a beer on-camera and took some questions from her followers on New Year’s Eve in a spontaneous livestream posted on Instagram that channeled similar social-media efforts of the young and hip. (AP)

President Trump mocked Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., over her New Year's Eve Instagram livestream Sunday night, saying that the video would have been a "smash" if it had been done "from Bighorn or Wounded Knee instead of her kitchen."
Warren, 69, who had announced her candidacy for the White House earlier in the day, cracked open a beer and took some questions from her social media followers in an apparent attempt to channel the social media efforts of younger Democratic pols like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Beto O'Rourke.
Trump revived one of his favorite nicknames for Warren and even jabbed at her husband, saying he should have been "dressed in full Indian garb."
“Best line in the Elizabeth Warren beer catastrophe is, to her husband, ‘Thank you for being here. I’m glad you’re here’" The president said in a follow-up tweet. "It’s their house, he’s supposed to be there!”
In the video, the liberal firebrand had a craving for alcohol: “Hold on a second —  I’m gonna get me a beer,” she said, as she walked out of view of the camera.
“Um, want a beer?” she then asked as her husband, Bruce Mann, briefly entered the room.
ELIZABETH WARREN DRINKS BEER, GIVES 2020 THOUGHTS IN INSTAGRAM LIVESTREAM
“No, I’ll pass on a beer for now,” he responded. Then, matter-of-factly from across the camera as he left the kitchen, he offered a quick farewell: ”Enjoy your beer.”
Trump often has derided Warren for her claim of having Native American ancestry.
In October, Trump demanded Warren apologize for claiming Native American heritage as part of what he called a “fraud” against the public, mocking her recently released DNA test as ”bogus.”
The test results revealed Warren likely has trace amounts of Native-American ancestry. While she used the results to counter allegations she lied about that ancestry to get ahead in academia, Trump and other Republicans highlighted how diluted that ancestry was revealed to be.
WARREN ADMITS SHE'S NOT 'A PERSON OF COLOR' DURING COMMENCEMENT SPEECH
At a rally in July, Trump joked that he would pull out a heritage kit during a hypothetical presidential debate with Warren, and slowly toss it at her, “hoping it doesn’t hit her and injure her arm, even though it only weighs probably two ounces.”
Warren visited the early primary state of New Hampshire Saturday to deliver a message of economic populism and clean government.
This was Warren’s first visit to New Hampshire since launching her exploratory committee for the 2020 campaign. Besides advocating for reforms to health care, student debt, and the minimum wage, Warren touched on breaking news with a call for an end to the ongoing partial federal government shutdown, which is now the longest in American history.

Trump slams 'Jeff Bozo,' Washington Post over Amazon founder's divorce

President Donald Trump on Sunday coined a new nickname for Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and praised the "far more accurate" National Enquirer reporting that revealed Bezos' alleged affair at the expense of Bezos' own outlet, The Washington Post.
"So sorry to hear the news about Jeff Bozo being taken down by a competitor whose reporting, I understand, is far more accurate than the reporting in his lobbyist newspaper, the Amazon Washington Post," Trump tweeted. "Hopefully the paper will soon be placed in better & more responsible hands!"
Bezos, 55, announced his divorce from wife MacKenzie Bezos on Wednesday, and news of the billionaire's relationship with former television anchor Lauren Sanchez broke.
The Amazon CEO, worth a reported $136.4 billion, has reportedly been dating Sanchez, 49, for four months. The National Enquirer — a tabloid newspaper whose parent company had a practice of buying the rights to negative stories about Trump with no intention of publishing them — exposed the alleged relationship, and claimed to have followed the pair undercover for months.
Last month, federal prosecutors announced they had reached a “non-prosecution agreement” with American Media, Inc. (AMI), which publishes the Enquirer. As part of the agreement, AMI admitted it paid $150,000 to former Playboy model Karen McDougal for the rights to her story about having a sexual relationship with Trump "to suppress [McDougal's] story so as to prevent it from influencing the election.”
Prosecutors say the payment to McDougal was orchestrated by Trump's then-personal attorney, Michael Cohen, at Trump's direction.
Trump was reportedly close pals with AMI CEO David Pecker, who had pushed Trump for years to run for president and used the Enquirer to promote Trump's campaign. But Pecker flipped on Trump to cooperate with the feds and avoid being charged with campaign-law violations. Federal prosecutors in New York granted Pecker immunity in August in exchange for information in the investigation into hush-money payments by Cohen.
A lawyer for Bezos told the tabloid that Bezos "supports journalistic efforts and does not intend to discourage reporting about him."
Trump is often critical of the Post and criticizes unfavorable coverage which he dubs "fake news." Bezos bought the Post as an individual in 2013 and Amazon.com Inc. was not involved.

Graham 'hell bent' on filling next Supreme Court vacancy with conservative justice, amid Ginsburg health woes

South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham told "Fox News Sunday" that he is "hell-bent" on ensuring that the next Supreme Court vacancy -- whether it is ailing Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's seat or otherwise -- is filled by a conservative, regardless of what outrage follows from the left.
Graham, the new chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, emphasized that former Democratic Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid eliminated the Senate filibuster for federal appellate judicial nominees in 2013. Republicans later retaliated by eliminating the filibuster for Supreme Court appointments, meaning that a simple majority -- rather than a 60-vote supermajority -- is sufficient to confirm new Supreme Court nominees.
"My Democratic colleagues felt when they were in charge we should confirm judges by a majority vote," Graham told Fox News' Chris Wallace. "They changed the rules to accommodate President Obama. They tried to stack the court. They never thought [Hillary] Clinton would lose. So what you’re gonna have is Harry Reid’s and Chuck Schumer’s desire to stack the court on their Democratic watch has come back to haunt them."
Ginsburg will miss next week’s Supreme sessions and work from home, but her recovery from early-stage lung cancer surgery remains "on track" and no further treatment is needed, the court announced Friday. The 85-year-old’s absence this past week from oral arguments -- her first since joining the bench -- after her surgery in December sparked speculation about a possible departure and led to low-key planning by the White House for that scenario.
Following the contentious confirmation hearings of now-Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh, which were marked by a series of lurid, uncorroborated sexual misconduct allegations, Graham asserted that there would be "pushback from the left" regardless of whom Trump nominates.
"If there is an opening, whether it’s Ginsburg or anybody else, I will urge the president to nominate a qualified conservative and hopefully those people will get through – that person will get through," Graham continued. "And I expect it to be along party lines, and this is what happens when you change the rules. This has come back to bite ' em. I predicted it would. And we’ll see. I hope Justice Ginsburg serves for a long time. But if there’s an opening on this court, I’m going to be hell-bent to put a conservative to replace whoever steps down for whatever reason."
Pressed by Wallace as to whether it was appropriate to nominate a conservative to replace a liberal icon like Ginsburg, Graham again said liberals have only Reid to blame -- and he suggested Kavanaugh's treatment meant that all bets are off.
"They should’ve thought of that before they changed the rules," Graham responded. "They tried to destroy conservative judges. I voted for [Sonia] Sotomayor and [Elena] Kagan, understanding what I was getting, so this decision by Reid and Schumer may come back to haunt them, but I am dead set on making sure it is a conservative nominee. And elections have consequences. The rules of the Senate were changed not by me, by them, and we had to do it on the Supreme Court because they would not give us any votes to nominate anybody. And Kavanaugh was a fine man, they tried to destroy him. All this is going to come back to haunt them one day."
He added: "We don't need one Democrat to replace a liberal justice. And the reason that that's the case is because of what Harry Reid did. What he set in motion."
Separately, Graham asserted that President Trump is still ready and willing to make a deal with congressional Democrats to end the ongoing partial federal government shutdown, although the window is rapidly closing.
Graham suggested that the White House would likely approve a compromise that extended protections afforded to Temporary Protected Status (TPS) recipients who fled natural disasters, in exchange for funding for Trump's proposed border wall.

On the 20th day of a partial government shutdown, federal employees rally at the Capitol to protest the impasse between Congress and President Donald Trump over his demand to fund a U.S.-Mexico border wall, in Washington, Thursday, Jan. 10, 2019. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

"I just talked to him about thirty minutes ago -- he says, 'Let's make a deal,'" Graham told host Chris Wallace. "The plan is to do a deal. He is willing, in my view, to do wall-plus. Funding for the wall that we desperately need, that's been done in the past  -- see if we can do a deal around the TPS recipients. There's about 400,000. They're going to lose their legal status soon. He's willing to extend that."
Graham added that Trump would be willing to offer work permits to recipients of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program for those brought to the U.S. illegally as children -- a compromise the White House had backed last summer. However, Graham noted, Trump's planned rescission of the DACA program is working its way through the appellate court process, as several federal judges have ruled that the White House violated federal administrative law by ending DACA without offering legally sufficient notice or justification. (The Trump administration has primarily argued that DACA was unconstitutionally enacted by Obama's unilateral order.)
"The DACA recipients, they’re all tied up in court, but I think he would give them work permits for three years, one-time renewable, if he could get wall funding." Graham said. "I don’t want to speak for the president. I don’t want to lock him in. But I’m confident what I just described with a few other things would be a deal acceptable to the White House and a lot of Democrats, and I’m just so frustrated we can’t get in a room and hammer it out."
Graham on Friday urged Trump to invoke his presidential emergency powers to immediately begin construction of the wall without congressional approval.   The White House last week directed the Army Corps of Engineers to look at possible ways of funding border security, including potentially through the reallocation of unspent disaster relief funds, in a possible sign the administration is moving in that direction.

"What's [Trump] supposed to do, just give in? He's not gonna give in."
— South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham

The South Carolina senator told Wallace he's not worried about Democrats similarly invoking a state of emergency to bypass Congress, both because they would have a weaker legislative argument and because Republicans would likely be more willing to compromise to achieve a compromise solution.
Challenged by Wallace for his criticism of President Obama's use of executive authority to enact DACA as "presidential overreach," Graham responded that no emergency was declared to enact DACA. Should the White House move forward with an emergency declaration, it has a handful of legal routes to take. The National Emergencies Act grants the president broad authority to declare emergencies, and several federal laws then could clear a path for the White House to move ahead with building a wall.

One statute, 33 U.S. Code § 2293 - "Reprogramming during national emergencies," permits the president to "apply the resources of the Department of the Army’s civil works program, including funds, personnel, and equipment, to construct or assist in the construction, operation, maintenance, and repair of authorized civil works, military construction, and civil defense projects that are essential to the national defense."
Another law, 10 U.S. Code § 2808 - "Construction authority in the event of a declaration of war or national emergency," permits the secretary of defense, in a presidentially declared emergency, to use "funds that have been appropriated for military construction" for the purpose of undertaking "military construction projects."
Graham said reasonable Democrats -- including Delaware Democratic Sen. Chris Coons, who spoke to Wallace later on "Fox News Sunday" and suggested he is open to negotiation on the border wall -- would be willing to make a deal without forcing Trump to use those emergency powers. ("I agree with the advice that Lindsey Graham just gave to the President which is that he should reopen the government and we should spend several weeks negotiating over what we can all agree on," Coons said. "I personally don’t think that a border wall is .... immoral.")
But, Graham said, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- who has called the wall an "immorality" -- has unreasonably cut off negotiations by saying she would not give more than one dollar to Trump's wall under any circumstances.
"Every Democrat that I've worked with for about 10 years now has agreed to funding for barriers/walls on Obama's watch, on Bush's watch, and all of a sudden it's a bad thing on Trump's watch," Graham told Wallace. "What's [Trump] supposed to do, just give in? He's not gonna give in."
Graham concluded with his own possible last-minute fix to the partial federal government shutdown, which became the longest in the nation's history on Wednesday.
"I would urge him to open up the government for a short period of time, like three weeks, before he pulls the plug," Graham said. "See if we can get a deal. If we can’t at the end of three weeks, all bets are off. See if he can do it by himself through the emergency powers. That’s my recommendation. But I think the legislative path is just about shut off because Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the House, said ‘Even if you open up the government, I’ll give you one dollar for the wall.’ As long as that’s the case, we’re never gonna get a legislative package, no matter what the Senate does."