Mike Pence: Almost as bad as Trump but he might not get us killed

[Cartmann99]

Quote

The first signs of tensions emerged in recent weeks when it was revealed that Pence’s doctor, Jennifer Peña, was among the more than 20 people who spoke with the Senate Veterans Affairs committee about concerns about the conduct of Ronny Jackson, Trump’s White House doctor, who subsequently withdrew him nomination to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs.

But Pence’s team quickly sought to demonstrate fealty to Trump. Peña, they noted, was assigned to him by the White House Medical Unit, and was not a handpicked member of Pence’s staff. Days after Jackson withdrew his nomination, Peña resigned.

Wait a minute, wouldn't Pence having a female doctor be a violation of his rule never to be alone with a woman other than his wife? 

[GreyhoundFan]

52 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

Wait a minute, wouldn't Pence having a female doctor be a violation of his rule never to be alone with a woman other than his wife? 

I'm sure Mother chaperones him for his appointments. Maybe she even takes him out for ice cream afterwards, if he's a good boy and doesn't cry.

Edited May 18, 2018 by GreyhoundFan

[Cartmann99]

5 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I'm sure Mother chaperones him for his appointments. Maybe she even takes him out for ice cream afterwards, if he's a good boy and doesn't cry.

This is why I love you.

I'm so going to hell. I'm imagining Pence's poor doctor chasing him around the office trying to do a prostate exam, while Mother clutches her pearls and faints on the floor. 

[AmazonGrace]

 We will not rest. Doing nothing is so hard work

[GreyhoundFan]

Cue the vomiting emoji: "Vice President Pence speaks to the Southern Baptist Convention: ‘Our administration will always stand with you’"

Spoiler

DALLAS — Vice President Pence delivered a hybrid campaign speech and sermon before thousands of representatives of the Southern Baptist Convention on Wednesday, boasting about the Trump administration’s actions on North Korea negotiations, tax cuts and more in his speech to the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

“Today on behalf of the president, I want to say thank you. Thank you to the Southern Baptist Convention for the essential and irreplaceable role you play in America,” said Pence, who is an evangelical Christian and generally popular in this conservative evangelical denomination. “I’ll make you a promise: This president, this vice president and our administration will always stand with you.”

Some attendees at the Southern Baptists’ annual meeting had protested that Pence should not have been invited. Several delegates made motions that Pence’s time slot should be filled instead with prayer or that all politicians should be barred from addressing the annual meeting, but those motions were denied or delayed Tuesday.

Reaction to Pence’s speech was mixed. While many applauded while Pence spoke — particularly when he spoke about abortion and Israel — others sat with hands folded. Key leaders in the denomination complained afterward that he had focused too much on partisan politics.

J.D. Greear, the North Carolina pastor elected president of the denomination Tuesday in a decisive vote, reacted immediately after the vice president’s speech. “I know that sent a terribly mixed signal,” he wrote on Twitter. “We are grateful for civic leaders who want to speak to our Convention — but make no mistake about it, our identity is in the gospel and our unity is in the Great Commission. Commissioned missionaries, not political platforms, are what we do.”

Brian Kaylor, a Baptist pastor who is not a member of the Southern Baptist Convention and who researches the intersection of politics and religion, said Pence’s heavy focus on praising President Trump was a surprising deviation from previous Republican leaders who have addressed the convention over the years.

“This speech will define this gathering for them,” Kaylor said. “It was so over-the-top partisan.”

He said previous Republican presidents and vice presidents addressed political issues and praised their administrations’ successes. “But it’s framed differently,” he said. “. . . This was all about Trump. Trump is the singular strong leader. Trump is the one doing this or that. I was surprised how strong he came down on the tone.”

Many attendees agreed:

During the speech, when Pence opened with greetings from Trump, the room erupted in applause and one loud shout of, “Four more years!” Pence drew the most sustained ovations when he mentioned the Trump administration’s action of moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and when he described Trump as “the most pro-life president in American history,” two extremely popular issues among evangelicals.

Pence also hit on other topics of interest to the religious audience — the Trump administration’s desire to repeal the Johnson Amendment, which bans tax-exempt churches from campaigning for candidates, and the fight against the Islamic State — and also subjects with less obvious religious aspects. He touted Trump’s tax law and the low unemployment rate, and he spent the beginning of the speech talking about the recent meeting between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

“While strong American leadership has accomplished much,” Pence concluded in that segment, “[Trump] and I both know that the righteous and fervent prayers … can accomplish much more. So let’s all pray. Let’s pray for peace for the Korean people and the world.”

Toward the end of his address, Pence sermonized more, dwelling on the mass shooting last year at a Southern Baptist church in nearby Sutherland Springs, Tex. The faith of the survivors inspired him, Pence said.

He called the Southern Baptist Convention “one of the greatest forces for good anywhere in America.”

Immediately after Pence’s address, Texas pastor Kie Bowman began the convention sermon — a prominent spot that was supposed to go to Baptist leader Paige Patterson. Patterson was fired last month from the presidency of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary when it came to light that he had allegedly not reported a rape to authorities after he was told of it, and he eventually abdicated the sermon slot. But his absence has loomed large at this convention, where delegates voted Tuesday to adopt resolutions against abuse of women and extramarital affairs.

Many attendees are still angry that Patterson was fired. On Wednesday afternoon, the convention will debate a motion to fire the seminary board of trustees that fired Patterson.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Pence turns VP’s office into gateway for lobbyists to influence the Trump administration"

Spoiler

Vice President Pence has transformed his office into a new entry point for lobbyists seeking to influence the Trump administration across federal agencies, according to federal records and interviews.

About twice as many companies and other interests hired lobbyists to contact the vice president’s office in Pence’s first year than in any single year during the tenures of Vice Presidents Joe Biden and Richard B. Cheney, filings show.

Among those lobbying Pence and his staff were representatives of major drug companies and energy firms, as well as businesses seeking favorable tax treatment. Many others have contacted his office on more obscure regulatory matters such as a Medicare billing dispute, technology regulations at the Department of Education and regulations at the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the records show.

The approach has allowed Pence, a former congressman and Indiana governor, to emerge as a key ally for corporations inside the Trump White House even as the president vows to “drain the swamp.”

At the core of the operation is a feeling of extended family that courses through Pence’s inner circle, which includes friends, donors and former staffers who are among the lobbyists in regular contact with the vice president’s office.

In several cases, the relationships are mutually beneficial, with lobbyists who have charged clients millions of dollars to access his office donating money to Pence-backed political causes.

Few examples better illustrate the dynamic than Pence’s bond with Bob Grand, a veteran Republican lobbyist whose firm billed corporate clients $3.3 million over the first 15 months of the Trump administration for lobbying that involved the vice president’s office.

Grand helped Pence decide to join the Trump ticket in 2016 and then became a regular visitor at the White House, a repeated guest on Pence’s government plane, and a major financial backer — including as co-host of a Capitol Hill event Thursday night for the congressional campaign of Pence’s brother, Greg Pence.

At times, it is hard to decipher when Grand is operating as a friend, a donor or a lobbyist. When Grand traveled on Air Force Two last year, on a flight decorated with balloons and streamers to celebrate Pence’s birthday, the vice president’s political action committee, Great America, paid for his ticket. A subsequent flight with Pence back from Indiana will be paid for by President Trump’s reelection campaign, according to Pence’s office.

“You call in and say, ‘Who do you talk to? Who is the contact?’ ” Grand said of his professional relationship with Pence’s office. “That is a lot of what it is.”

Federal records illustrate the dramatic increase in the lobbying community’s focus on the vice president. A total of 236 lobbying clients reported contacting Pence’s office in 2017, almost twice the 120 that approached Biden’s office in the first year of the Obama administration, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. 

By comparison, the number of lobbying clients reporting contacts with President Trump’s office was essentially unchanged — rising by less than 1 percent — from President Barack Obama’s first year in office.

Pence’s aides view the assistance they provide to lobbyists as part of a broader effort to cut red tape in the federal bureaucracy.

“The vice president’s policy staff regularly takes meetings with representatives from the private sector — including registered lobbyists, whose activity is publicly disclosed and regulated — to discuss policy,” said Alyssa Farah, Pence’s press secretary. “Hearing the real-world impacts, positive or negative, to individuals or businesses is a key input to the deliberative process behind President Trump’s agenda and making the federal government more accountable to the American people.”

In some cases, Pence has served as a kind of second White House chief of staff on regulatory issues, given his extensive knowledge of how the government works and the president’s relative lack of interest in policy details, according to current and former Trump administration officials.

Pence was also responsible for staffing many of the federal agencies that lobbyists seek to influence. One other lobbyist who interacts with Pence described the vice president’s office as a key entryway to reach officials such as Seema Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, who worked for Pence when he was governor of Indiana. A spokesman for Verma said the agency gets requests for meetings “in many different ways.”

“His staff is very accessible,” said the lobbyist, who, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing future access to the Trump administration. “If you can’t get high up in the West Wing, they are your best bet.”

The actions taken by Pence and his staff as a result of lobbying are not disclosed in federal filings, and more than a dozen companies that have hired people to contact his office declined to comment on the role of the vice president or what their lobbying spending accomplished. 

Lobbyists with multiple clients that reported approaching Pence’s office include several people who, like Grand, have close personal ties to the vice president.

William Smith spent more than 13 years as Pence’s chief of staff before founding the lobbying firm Sextons Creek. He has lobbied Pence’s office for clients including the National Biodiesel Board, the American Camp Association and the Affordable Housing Tax Credit Coalition. Sextons Creek did not register as a federal lobbyist before 2017, when it listed Pence’s office as a point of contact for 11 of its 14 clients, their fees totalling $784,750.

Victor Smith was appointed by Pence to serve as Indiana’s commerce secretary and is now a principal at Bose Public Affairs Group, whose clients include Ford Motor Company, a Transportation Security Administration contractor and Express Scripts, and a pharmacy benefits manager. In 2017, Bose’s client list grew by 12 from 2016 to reach 31, and seven of its clients had contacts with Pence’s office.

And Jeffrey Miller of Miller Strategies was an adviser to Energy Secretary Rick Perry, is helping Pence’s effort to raise money for Republican midterm candidates and has lobbied Pence’s office on behalf of Energy Transfer Partners, the developer of the Dakota Access Pipeline, as well as two electric utilities, the Southern Company and FirstEnergy Service.

William Smith, Victor Smith and Miller did not respond to requests for comment.

Employees of those three firms and Grand’s firm, Barnes & Thornburg, billed clients for $6 million in the first 15 months of the Trump administration for efforts that listed Pence’s office as the focus. Three of those firms also contributed $50,950 to Great America and to Pence’s brother’s congressional campaign. Greg Pence’s campaign and Great America recently signed a joint fundraising agreement. Employees of Grand’s firm have so far given $21,600 to the Greg Pence campaign, more than any other employer, according to public records.

“I ask all my friends, whether they are clients or not, to give money to Greg Pence,” said Grand, who splits his time between Washington and Indianapolis. “He is a wonderful guy.”

The vice president has taken an unconventional approach to fundraising in the early years of the administration, forming a leadership committee to fund his own political efforts and staff, in addition to his work for his brother’s campaign and fundraising for the midterm elections. On Wednesday, Pence was the keynote speaker at a $3.2 million fundraiser at the Trump International Hotel in Washington. In attendance were nearly three dozen Republican lawmakers from districts vulnerable to Democratic takeover this fall.

In some cases, donations to Mike Pence’s political causes can provide a platform for companies seeking to influence federal policy. The CEO of the ethanol processor POET, Jeff Broin, a donor to Great America and Greg Pence, was invited to a roundtable discussion convened by Pence at the Trump International Hotel this year, where he made a pitch to government officials for expanding the use ethanol in gasoline.

POET is one of at least three firms involved in the ethanol industry that have been lobbying the vice president in an effort to preserve or expand the amount of biodiesel used in the nation’s gasoline supply. “We have been friends for years,” Broin said of Pence in an interview at the time with an industry publication. Efforts to reach Broin and his firm’s lobbyist, David Bockorny, who is also a donor to Pence’s causes, were not successful.

In some cases, the connections between Pence’s staff and the lobbyists contacting them can be deeply interwoven. Phil Cox is a Pence donor and a partner of Great America’s director Marty Obst, and he disclosed billing $132,000 to lobby Pence’s office and other parts of the administration on behalf of pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly about new drug-price controls in Japan. Pence has played a central role in trade negotiations with Japan, traveling there twice as vice president. 

Pence’s chief of staff, Nick Ayers, who meets with lobbyists on occasion, recently sold his political consulting company to Cox for an undisclosed sum, according to the vice president’s office. Cox did not respond to a request for comment.

The circle of influence can be seen in the example of an Indiana-based summer carnival company that needed help navigating the federal bureaucracy last year.

That business, North American Midway Entertainment, hired Grand last year to lobby Pence, the president’s office and the Department of Labor, after the company found itself denied its traditional allotment of seasonal H-2B visas for foreign workers to operate its rides.

After later receiving a batch of hundreds of emergency visas, company owner Danny Huston made the maximum allowable donations to Great America and Greg Pence’s campaign.

A spokeswoman for Huston discussed the companies frustrations over visa allocations but stopped responding to questions when asked about the lobbying of Pence.

Grand, whose firm reported $130,000 in billings from Huston’s company, said in an interview that he was professionally obligated not to comment on his work for specific clients, who do not want publicity for their efforts.

“If you are a business guy and you can get this resolved and move on with your life, do you want to be on the front page of The Washington Post?” Grand said.

But Grand said it should come as no surprise that he has better access to the vice president’s office now than he did during the Obama administration. “Joe Biden’s staff is not going to take my call,” he said, noting that he was never invited to a White House event by Obama. 

Grand has been an ally of Pence’s since they met after Pence graduated from law school in the late 1980s. Grand worked in Florida on behalf of George W. Bush during the 2000 election recount, and Pence encouraged him to join the national finance team at the Republican National Committee. “People are allowed to have friends,” Grand said.

In 2017, his firm registered to lobby for 68 clients, doubling his roster from the 34 clients in the previous year. Of the 68 clients, lobbying disclosures for 26 list the vice president’s office as a point of contact.

In October 2017, Grand’s lobbying firm also reported contacting the vice president’s office on behalf of the Democratic Party of Albania and the Congress of Guatemala. The firm was paid a total of $218,423 by those two clients in the preceding six months, according to disclosures. The firm reported contacting Pence’s office in an effort to set up meetings with a delegation from each country.

Grand said he tried to help companies work their way through a regulatory process he called “100 percent abusive” to the private sector. As an example, he said, a corporate client he declined to name had been hurt by a personal dispute between an employee and a regulator. 

“All I had to do was get in front of the right people and say the guy you don’t like is no longer with us,” Grand said. With that, he added, an 18-year-old conflict faded away.

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[Howl]

On 6/15/2018 at 8:44 AM, GreyhoundFan said:

"Pence turns VP’s office into gateway for lobbyists to influence the Trump administration"

  Reveal hidden contents

Vice President Pence has transformed his office into a new entry point for lobbyists seeking to influence the Trump administration across federal agencies, according to federal records and interviews.

About twice as many companies and other interests hired lobbyists to contact the vice president’s office in Pence’s first year than in any single year during the tenures of Vice Presidents Joe Biden and Richard B. Cheney, filings show.

Among those lobbying Pence and his staff were representatives of major drug companies and energy firms, as well as businesses seeking favorable tax treatment. Many others have contacted his office on more obscure regulatory matters such as a Medicare billing dispute, technology regulations at the Department of Education and regulations at the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the records show.

The approach has allowed Pence, a former congressman and Indiana governor, to emerge as a key ally for corporations inside the Trump White House even as the president vows to “drain the swamp.”

At the core of the operation is a feeling of extended family that courses through Pence’s inner circle, which includes friends, donors and former staffers who are among the lobbyists in regular contact with the vice president’s office.

In several cases, the relationships are mutually beneficial, with lobbyists who have charged clients millions of dollars to access his office donating money to Pence-backed political causes.

Few examples better illustrate the dynamic than Pence’s bond with Bob Grand, a veteran Republican lobbyist whose firm billed corporate clients $3.3 million over the first 15 months of the Trump administration for lobbying that involved the vice president’s office.

Grand helped Pence decide to join the Trump ticket in 2016 and then became a regular visitor at the White House, a repeated guest on Pence’s government plane, and a major financial backer — including as co-host of a Capitol Hill event Thursday night for the congressional campaign of Pence’s brother, Greg Pence.

At times, it is hard to decipher when Grand is operating as a friend, a donor or a lobbyist. When Grand traveled on Air Force Two last year, on a flight decorated with balloons and streamers to celebrate Pence’s birthday, the vice president’s political action committee, Great America, paid for his ticket. A subsequent flight with Pence back from Indiana will be paid for by President Trump’s reelection campaign, according to Pence’s office.

“You call in and say, ‘Who do you talk to? Who is the contact?’ ” Grand said of his professional relationship with Pence’s office. “That is a lot of what it is.”

Federal records illustrate the dramatic increase in the lobbying community’s focus on the vice president. A total of 236 lobbying clients reported contacting Pence’s office in 2017, almost twice the 120 that approached Biden’s office in the first year of the Obama administration, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. 

By comparison, the number of lobbying clients reporting contacts with President Trump’s office was essentially unchanged — rising by less than 1 percent — from President Barack Obama’s first year in office.

Pence’s aides view the assistance they provide to lobbyists as part of a broader effort to cut red tape in the federal bureaucracy.

“The vice president’s policy staff regularly takes meetings with representatives from the private sector — including registered lobbyists, whose activity is publicly disclosed and regulated — to discuss policy,” said Alyssa Farah, Pence’s press secretary. “Hearing the real-world impacts, positive or negative, to individuals or businesses is a key input to the deliberative process behind President Trump’s agenda and making the federal government more accountable to the American people.”

In some cases, Pence has served as a kind of second White House chief of staff on regulatory issues, given his extensive knowledge of how the government works and the president’s relative lack of interest in policy details, according to current and former Trump administration officials.

Pence was also responsible for staffing many of the federal agencies that lobbyists seek to influence. One other lobbyist who interacts with Pence described the vice president’s office as a key entryway to reach officials such as Seema Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, who worked for Pence when he was governor of Indiana. A spokesman for Verma said the agency gets requests for meetings “in many different ways.”

“His staff is very accessible,” said the lobbyist, who, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing future access to the Trump administration. “If you can’t get high up in the West Wing, they are your best bet.”

The actions taken by Pence and his staff as a result of lobbying are not disclosed in federal filings, and more than a dozen companies that have hired people to contact his office declined to comment on the role of the vice president or what their lobbying spending accomplished. 

Lobbyists with multiple clients that reported approaching Pence’s office include several people who, like Grand, have close personal ties to the vice president.

William Smith spent more than 13 years as Pence’s chief of staff before founding the lobbying firm Sextons Creek. He has lobbied Pence’s office for clients including the National Biodiesel Board, the American Camp Association and the Affordable Housing Tax Credit Coalition. Sextons Creek did not register as a federal lobbyist before 2017, when it listed Pence’s office as a point of contact for 11 of its 14 clients, their fees totalling $784,750.

Victor Smith was appointed by Pence to serve as Indiana’s commerce secretary and is now a principal at Bose Public Affairs Group, whose clients include Ford Motor Company, a Transportation Security Administration contractor and Express Scripts, and a pharmacy benefits manager. In 2017, Bose’s client list grew by 12 from 2016 to reach 31, and seven of its clients had contacts with Pence’s office.

And Jeffrey Miller of Miller Strategies was an adviser to Energy Secretary Rick Perry, is helping Pence’s effort to raise money for Republican midterm candidates and has lobbied Pence’s office on behalf of Energy Transfer Partners, the developer of the Dakota Access Pipeline, as well as two electric utilities, the Southern Company and FirstEnergy Service.

William Smith, Victor Smith and Miller did not respond to requests for comment.

Employees of those three firms and Grand’s firm, Barnes & Thornburg, billed clients for $6 million in the first 15 months of the Trump administration for efforts that listed Pence’s office as the focus. Three of those firms also contributed $50,950 to Great America and to Pence’s brother’s congressional campaign. Greg Pence’s campaign and Great America recently signed a joint fundraising agreement. Employees of Grand’s firm have so far given $21,600 to the Greg Pence campaign, more than any other employer, according to public records.

“I ask all my friends, whether they are clients or not, to give money to Greg Pence,” said Grand, who splits his time between Washington and Indianapolis. “He is a wonderful guy.”

The vice president has taken an unconventional approach to fundraising in the early years of the administration, forming a leadership committee to fund his own political efforts and staff, in addition to his work for his brother’s campaign and fundraising for the midterm elections. On Wednesday, Pence was the keynote speaker at a $3.2 million fundraiser at the Trump International Hotel in Washington. In attendance were nearly three dozen Republican lawmakers from districts vulnerable to Democratic takeover this fall.

In some cases, donations to Mike Pence’s political causes can provide a platform for companies seeking to influence federal policy. The CEO of the ethanol processor POET, Jeff Broin, a donor to Great America and Greg Pence, was invited to a roundtable discussion convened by Pence at the Trump International Hotel this year, where he made a pitch to government officials for expanding the use ethanol in gasoline.

POET is one of at least three firms involved in the ethanol industry that have been lobbying the vice president in an effort to preserve or expand the amount of biodiesel used in the nation’s gasoline supply. “We have been friends for years,” Broin said of Pence in an interview at the time with an industry publication. Efforts to reach Broin and his firm’s lobbyist, David Bockorny, who is also a donor to Pence’s causes, were not successful.

In some cases, the connections between Pence’s staff and the lobbyists contacting them can be deeply interwoven. Phil Cox is a Pence donor and a partner of Great America’s director Marty Obst, and he disclosed billing $132,000 to lobby Pence’s office and other parts of the administration on behalf of pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly about new drug-price controls in Japan. Pence has played a central role in trade negotiations with Japan, traveling there twice as vice president. 

Pence’s chief of staff, Nick Ayers, who meets with lobbyists on occasion, recently sold his political consulting company to Cox for an undisclosed sum, according to the vice president’s office. Cox did not respond to a request for comment.

The circle of influence can be seen in the example of an Indiana-based summer carnival company that needed help navigating the federal bureaucracy last year.

That business, North American Midway Entertainment, hired Grand last year to lobby Pence, the president’s office and the Department of Labor, after the company found itself denied its traditional allotment of seasonal H-2B visas for foreign workers to operate its rides.

After later receiving a batch of hundreds of emergency visas, company owner Danny Huston made the maximum allowable donations to Great America and Greg Pence’s campaign.

A spokeswoman for Huston discussed the companies frustrations over visa allocations but stopped responding to questions when asked about the lobbying of Pence.

Grand, whose firm reported $130,000 in billings from Huston’s company, said in an interview that he was professionally obligated not to comment on his work for specific clients, who do not want publicity for their efforts.

“If you are a business guy and you can get this resolved and move on with your life, do you want to be on the front page of The Washington Post?” Grand said.

But Grand said it should come as no surprise that he has better access to the vice president’s office now than he did during the Obama administration. “Joe Biden’s staff is not going to take my call,” he said, noting that he was never invited to a White House event by Obama. 

Grand has been an ally of Pence’s since they met after Pence graduated from law school in the late 1980s. Grand worked in Florida on behalf of George W. Bush during the 2000 election recount, and Pence encouraged him to join the national finance team at the Republican National Committee. “People are allowed to have friends,” Grand said.

In 2017, his firm registered to lobby for 68 clients, doubling his roster from the 34 clients in the previous year. Of the 68 clients, lobbying disclosures for 26 list the vice president’s office as a point of contact.

In October 2017, Grand’s lobbying firm also reported contacting the vice president’s office on behalf of the Democratic Party of Albania and the Congress of Guatemala. The firm was paid a total of $218,423 by those two clients in the preceding six months, according to disclosures. The firm reported contacting Pence’s office in an effort to set up meetings with a delegation from each country.

Grand said he tried to help companies work their way through a regulatory process he called “100 percent abusive” to the private sector. As an example, he said, a corporate client he declined to name had been hurt by a personal dispute between an employee and a regulator. 

“All I had to do was get in front of the right people and say the guy you don’t like is no longer with us,” Grand said. With that, he added, an 18-year-old conflict faded away.

 

There are so many reasons that Pence, in his very own way, is as vile as Trump.  This is just one of them. 

[AmazonGrace]

Mike drop: 

 

[Audrey2]

1 hour ago, AmazonGrace said:

Mike drop: 

 

Why, because we just lock you up and take away your children instead of killing you at the border?

This is so illogical it hurts my brain. I'm so thankful my ancestors were able to come. I just wish we could have some retroactive immigration bans. Are your descendents going to be complete assholes who destroy the U.S.? DENIED!

[GreyhoundFan]

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmericanRose]

LOL. Oh Pence. Trump leads nothing.

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[AmazonGrace]

Handmaids protest Mikey: https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/100-Handmaids-To-Greet-Vice-President-Mike-Pence-in-Philadelphia-488891301.html

What is his job anyway? does he do ANYTHING beyond attending fundraisers?

[AmazonGrace]

 

[onekidanddone]

47 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

 

There are only five people there  The rest are just holograms and smoke and mirrors tricks. These crisis actors are paid by Hillary Clinton’s emails  

 

[K'Z'K]

8 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

does he do ANYTHING beyond attending fundraisers?

Of course he does. He also spends taxpayer money to dramatically walk out of sporting events and glare at foreigners. He also gazes adoringly at Trump, wishing Trump would look at him the way Trump looks at Putin.

[Cartmann99]

Pence does get to cast a vote in the Senate if there's a tie, and obviously if something happens to Trump he takes over, but other than that, he's like one of those models on The Price is Right whose job is to look orgasmic over a refrigerator with a built-in icemaker.

[GreyhoundFan]

From Frank Bruni: "Mike Pence, Holy Terror"

Spoiler

There are problems with impeaching Donald Trump. A big one is the holy terror waiting in the wings.

That would be Mike Pence, who mirrors the boss more than you realize. He’s also self-infatuated. Also a bigot. Also a liar. Also cruel.

To that brimming potpourri he adds two ingredients that Trump doesn’t genuinely possess: the conviction that he’s on a mission from God and a determination to mold the entire nation in the shape of his own faith, a regressive, repressive version of Christianity. Trade Trump for Pence and you go from kleptocracy to theocracy.

That’s the takeaway from a forthcoming book by the journalists Michael D’Antonio, who previously wrote “The Truth About Trump,” and Peter Eisner. It’s titled “The Shadow President: The Truth About Mike Pence,” it will be published on Aug. 28 and it’s the most thorough examination of the vice president’s background to date.

I got an advance look at it, along with a first interview about it with D’Antonio, and while it has a mostly measured tone, it presents an entirely damning portrait of Pence. You’ve seen his colors before, but not so vividly and in this detail.

The book persuasively illustrates what an ineffectual congressman he was, apart from cozying up to the Koch brothers, Betsy DeVos and other rich Republican donors; the clumsiness and vanity of his one term as governor of Indiana, for which he did something that predecessors hadn’t and “ordered up a collection of custom-embroidered clothes — dress shirts, polo shirts, and vests and jackets — decorated with his name and the words Governor of Indiana”; the strong possibility that he wouldn’t have won re-election; his luck in being spared that humiliation by the summons from Trump, who needed an outwardly bland, intensely religious character witness to muffle his madness and launder his sins; and the alacrity with which he says whatever Trump needs him to regardless of the truth.

In Pence’s view, any bite marks in his tongue are divinely ordained. Trump wouldn’t be president if God didn’t want that; Pence wouldn’t be vice president if he weren’t supposed to sanctify Trump. And his obsequiousness is his own best route to the Oval Office, which may very well be God’s grand plan.

“People don’t understand what Pence is,” D’Antonio told me. Which is? “A religious zealot.”

And D’Antonio said that Pence could end up in the White House sooner than you think. In addition to the prospect of Trump’s impeachment, there’s the chance that Trump just decides that he has had enough.

“I don’t think he’s as resilient, politically, as Bill Clinton was,” D’Antonio said. “He doesn’t relish a partisan fight in the same way. He loves to go to rallies where people adore him.”

There’s no deeply felt policy vision or sense of duty to sustain him through the investigations and accusations. “If the pain is great enough,” D’Antonio said, “I think he’d be disposed not to run again.”

So it’s time to look harder at Pence. “The Shadow President” does. It lays out his disregard for science, evident in his onetime insistence that smoking doesn’t cause cancer and a belief that alarms about climate change were “a secret effort to increase government control over people’s lives for some unstated diabolical purpose,” according to the book.

It suggests callousness at best toward African-Americans. As governor, Pence refused to pardon a black man who had spent almost a decade in prison for a crime that he clearly hadn’t committed. He also ignored a crisis — similar to the one in Flint, Mich. — in which people in a poor, largely black Indiana city were exposed to dangerously high levels of lead. D’Antonio told me: “I think he’s just as driven by prejudice as Trump is.”

During the vice-presidential debate with Tim Kaine, Pence repeated the laughable, ludicrous assertion that Trump would release his tax returns “when the audit is over” and falsely insisted that Trump hadn’t lavished praise on Vladimir Putin’s leadership — though the record proved otherwise.

The book says that in a high-level briefing about Russian interference in the 2016 election, Pence was told that intelligence officials hadn’t determined whether that interference had swayed the results. He then publicly claimed a finding of no effect.

At Trump’s urging and with taxpayer money, he and his wife, Karen, flew to a football game in Indianapolis just so he could make a big public gesture of leaving in protest when, predictably, some of the players took a knee during the national anthem.

And, following Trump’s lead, he rallied behind the unhinged former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio. In a speech he called Arpaio a “tireless champion” of the “rule of law.” This was after Arpaio’s contempt-of-court conviction for ignoring a federal judge’s order to stop using illegal tactics to torment immigrants. The conservative columnist George Will seized on Pence’s speech to write that Pence had dethroned Trump as “America’s most repulsive public figure.”

You can thank Pence for DeVos. They are longtime allies, going back decades, who bonded over such shared passions as making it O.K. for students to use government money, in the form of vouchers, at religious schools. Pence cast the tiebreaking vote in the Senate to confirm her as education secretary. It was the first time in history that a vice president had done that for a cabinet nominee.

Fiercely opposed to abortion, Pence once spoke positively on the House floor about historical figures who “actually placed it beyond doubt that the offense of abortion was a capital offense, punishable even by death.” He seemed to back federal funds for anti-gay conversion therapy. He promoted a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.

“He is absolutely certain that his moral view should govern public policy,” D’Antonio told me.

D’Antonio then recounted two stories that he heard from college classmates of Pence’s after the book had gone to bed, so they’re not in there. One involved a woman in Pence’s weekly college prayer group. When she couldn’t describe a discrete “born again” experience, “he lectured her on her deficiencies as a Christian and said that she really wasn’t the sort of Christian that needed to be in this group,” D’Antonio said.

Another involved a college friend of Pence’s who later sought his counsel about coming out as gay. D’Antonio said that Pence told the friend: “You have to stay closeted, you have to get help, you’re sick and you’re not my friend anymore.”

According to D’Antonio’s book, Pence sees himself and fellow Christian warriors as a blessed but oppressed group, and his “hope for the future resided in his faith that, as chosen people, conservative evangelicals would eventually be served by a leader whom God would enable to defeat their enemies and create a Christian nation.”

I asked D’Antonio the nagging, obvious question: Is America worse off with Trump or Pence?

“I have to say that I prefer Donald Trump, because I think that Trump is more obvious in his intent,” he said, while Pence tends to “disguise his agenda.” D’Antonio then pointed out that if Pence assumed the presidency in the second half of Trump’s first term, he’d be eligible to run in 2020 and 2024 and potentially occupy the White House for up to 10 years.

Heaven help us.

 

[Soulhuntress]

Indiana is one of five states with no hate crime law.  If you were friends with the congregants of Shaarey Tefilla surely keeping friends safe would be a thing you do if you have a smidgin of decency and if you are being Christ to them...... 

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

 

[Botkinetti]

So even at 40 pence was a smug , arrogant asshole. This does not surprise me. The obsession with Disney movies that he shares with so many of the religious right continues to this day. Their intense fear that young girls see women using their brains and ingenuity to make their own decisions comes through in any of their writings. That this fear and panic is making them try to change laws to force the country to look how they want it to is scary as hell.