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Appearing on CNN on Friday afternoon, a former GOP county chair who operates a soybean farm in Ohio took some shots at Donald Trump after he told Iowa rally attendees that their farms would go to hell if he is not re-elected in November this year.

"They dont care about the farmers," the president told the crowd in Des Moines. "You should love Trump, with what I've done. We're going to win the great state of Iowa, and it's going to be a historic landslide, and, if we don't win, your farms are going to hell, I can tell you right now. 'Sell, sell,' they'll be saying. 'Sell!'"

Speaking with host Anderson Cooper, Chris Gibbs who is also considering a run against Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) as an independent, all but rolled his eyes at the president's comments.

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Absolutely cowardly! Ex-Tea Party lawmaker delivers brutal verdict on GOPs impending Trump acquittal - Raw Story

Unilevers tea party may be winding down.

The consumer goods giant has kicked off a strategic review of its global tea business that could lead to the sale of famous brands such as Lipton and PG Tips.

The review comes as consumers brew less black tea which accounts for two-thirds of Unilevers tea segment and drink more herbal varieties instead, company officials said Thursday.

Weve not reached a conclusion and all options remain on the table, Unilever CEO Alan Jope said on a conference call with analysts.

Unilevers US-listed shares rose 3.7 percent, to $59.85 on Thursday.

Unilevers tea segment has seen growth in emerging markets and its premium herbal brand Pukka has performed well, according to the company, which said it has the worlds biggest tea business.

But sales of black tea which generates about $3.3 billion in yearly sales around the world for the company have dropped in developed markets for several years because of changing consumer tastes, Unilever said. The company also owns the Tazo and T2 brands.

We have really seen this trend play out, Jope said. Its not a short-term thing. Its a long-term trend over a decade.

Unilever announced the review despite denying that it was weighing a sale of its tea segment in November after the Telegraph newspaper reported that it would put the business on the auction block.

The company had just launched a review of its portfolio that month and wanted to clamp down on speculation about the future of its tea business, Jope said Thursday. He indicated that the review thats now underway may not necessarily lead to a sale.

When were thinking about these things, well communicate transparently, Jope said.

With Post wires

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Unilever weighs sale of tea brands Lipton and PG Tips - New York Post

There are many theories about when it was exactly thatRepublicans lost their minds. Some will point out, correctly, that the strain of reality-freeconspiracy-mongering that defines the Donald Trump presidency dates back at least to the era of Joseph McCarthy and the John Birch Society. Others will note Richard Nixon's reliance on the "Southern strategy,"which helped remake the GOP into a white ethno-nationalist party that was capable of nominating Trump. Still others will point to the Tea Party, which was reported at the time as somehow an anti-tax movement, but now looks clearly likea panicked, racist reaction to the election of Barack Obama, and resulted in a purging of any moderate or reality-based impulses in the Republican ranks.

But whenever it started, I think it's safe to say that the upcoming votes in the Senate impeachment trial,in which the Republican Senate majority will hold tight to prevent any witnesses from testifyingand will then vote to acquit Trump, will mark apoint of no return for the Republican Party.

Even considering how lost to reason and reality Republicans have been for years now, there's something final and official about going on the record to register their collective belief that facts don't matter and that democracy, to them, is little more than an obstacle in the way of their efforts to maintain power.

That Republicans would pull together to turn the Senate trial into a sham aimed at covering up Trump's crimes has been regarded as a foregone conclusion from before the moment thatSpeaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced the impeachment inquiry months ago. Despite this, I suspect it willbe a gut punchall the samewhen the entire Republican Party comes together to "acquit" Trump despite the inarguable evidence that he is guilty.

They are not voting to declare the president innocent of the charges against him, since that is clearly absurd.They are voting to announce that,in their eyes, there's no limit to what can or should be doneto maintain the Republican hold on power.

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Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., all but admitted as much Thursday, in a series of tweetsacknowledgingthat the accusationagainst Trump that he withheldmilitary aid and political support for Ukraine in order to force that struggling nation's president to help himcheat in the election "has already been proven." ButTrump's behavior, Alexander claimed, was merely "inappropriate" but "does not meet the U.S. Constitution's high bar for an impeachable offense."

This is, of course, nonsense. As the constitutional expert Pamela Karlan,who testified before the House in December, argued, the founders literally created the impeachment powers to mitigate "the risk that unscrupulous officials might try to rig the election process."

Alexander openly giving his blessing to presidentsusing their powers of office to cheat in elections or to Republican presidents, anyway illustrateswhy the twin votes to shut down witness testimony and to acquit Trump should be understood as the consummation of the GOP's long courtship with authoritarianism.

This will be the final note of a long process in which the Republicans allowed argumentsin the Congressional Record, most notably from fabled defense lawyerAlan Dershowitz, defending apresident's "right" to cheat in elections, and then affirmed this belief with a formal vote.

Dershowitz is now running around, making incoherent claims that he wasn't arguingwhat he said he was arguing, but that hardly matters. His case forpresidential tyranny was made on the Senate floor, and his attempts to claw it back in the media don't carry anywhere near the same weight.

For those of us who have watched Republicans closely throughout this process, what has been striking is the shamelessness and bad faith on display, as they have competed to be the biggest lickspittle to the wannabe fascist smearing his fake tan all over the White House.

Was it Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, openly bragging about how he was coordinating with the Trump defense team to rig this sham of a trial?

Was it Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas starting a podcast about impeachment dedicated to licking Trump's shoes, despite the fact that Trump spent the election calling Cruz's wife ugly and accusing Cruz's dad of murdering JFK?

Was it Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky using the trial as an excuse to air the name of the whistleblower who first reported Trump's bribery scheme, a move clearly meant to suggest to intimidateother federal employees out of stepping forwardwith information about Trump's crimes and corruption?

Was it Sen. Susan Collins of Maine working herself into an outrage over Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., accusing Republicans of being a bunch of quislings who let Trump control them, even though the upcoming miscarriage of justice proves Schiff correct?

Perhaps trying to decide who is the worst of them is a little like trying to pick which cat turd inthe litter box stinks most. It doesn't much matter at the end of the day. What matters is that the entire basketof Republicans is thoroughly corrupt and divorced from any concern for reality or decency, and this week they're making it official.

Why are they all so rotten to the core? The answer lies in looking at the gulf between the power Republicans have and thevotes they actually get. Trump won the2016 election because of the quirks of the Electoral College, even though Hillary Clinton got nearly 3 million more votes. In 2018, Democrats in Senate races got 12 million more votes than Republicans, yet Republicans gained seats.

Republicans have structural and geographic advantages that allow them to stave off the threat of actual democracy, but they fear that this won'tlastforever. As never-Trumper Evan McMullin noted on Twitter:

Republicans in the Senate are affirming and supporting Trump's schemes to cheat in 2020 for the simple reason that they believe they can't win without cheating. They've already been using legal and quasi-legal methods to cheat tearing apart campaign finance laws, defanging the Federal Election Commission, passing voter suppression laws, wild gerrymandering schemes but Trump has now opened that final door to outright criminal conspiracies to cheat in elections.

In 1974, Richard Nixon resigned for doing pretty much the same thing Trump did: His goons were running an illegal scheme to help him cheat in the 1972 election, and he was engaged in thecover-up. Nixon resigned not because he wanted tobut because congressional Republicans, or enough of them anyway, believed that the rule of law mattered more than maintaining their party's political power. Republicans worked with Democrats to expose evidence that led to Nixon's downfall.

Nowadays, the opposite is true: Republicans are working to conceal evidence, and when they can't conceal it are arguing that it doesn't matter what Trump does anyway. In votingto block witnesses and then to acquit a clearly corrupt and criminal president, they are making it official: Cheating in elections is no crime, so long as you're on their side.

There is no turning back now. Republicans will, of course, continue to pretend they're anything but the party of corruption and cheating, but the veneer of plausible deniability has been stripped away. Theirparty's last vestiges legitimacyare gone, and they know it. In fact, they're voting on it in the Senate sometime on Friday.

What this means for the rest of us is still not clear. There will be an election in November, and a newly emboldened Trump will probably concoct more criminal conspiracies to cheat in it. Hemay very well win. Ifhe doesn't win, it's entirelylikely that he'll reject the election results and refuse to leave, launching a new and much more dangerous episode in our slow-unfolding constitutional crisis. Senate Republicans, having already signed off on his cheating, may conclude there's no reason to stop now, and find some excuseto back his illegal rejection of the election results.

There is no longer any reason to believe Republicanswill balk at anything that allows them to hold onto power. I do mean anything.

How far this goes, and whether our democracy can still be dragged out of this dark pit,is still unknown. But the history books will almost surely mark the end of this sham trial as the day that Republicans, who long ago made a mockery of their historical legacy as the party of Abraham Lincoln,reached the point of no return.

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Voting to acquit this noxious criminal is the point of no return for the Republican Party - Salon

Ten years ago, U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, bucked the GOP party establishment by waging a write-in campaign which ended with her re-election. Now Im not referring to how she votes in the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump when I say this, but Americans would benefit that kind of independence today. Because the polarization thats poisoning our democracy wont end with removing him from office.

And its not as simple as sending a Democrat to the White House.

But a moderate Democrat like Amy Klobuchar with a Republican running mate like Murkowski has at least a fighting chance to change the tone to our political discourse.

I dont seriously expect this to happen. But let me explain the idea through two relevant Alaskan stories that begin with a Democrat from Connecticut.

In 2006, Sen. Joe Liebermann lost his primary race to a more liberal candidate. But he stayed on the general election ballot as an independent and was re-elected with help from Republican party members and voters.

After Sen. John McCain had secured the Republican party nomination for president two years later, he initially wanted to nominate Liebermann as his running mate. But he was warned that choosing him would divide his party. So instead, McCain selected Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

A decade after his losing the presidential election, McCain admitted he regretted not choosing Liebermann. But the remorse felt by Steve Schmidt, the chief strategist for his campaign, is more revealing. In an interview he gave four years after the race, hed said Palin was creating a divisive message for the national stage when we need leaders in both parties to have a unifying message.

By winning a three-way race with crossover support from Democratic voters, Murkowski replicated the first part of Liebermanns story in 2010. But more to the point, the necessity of her write-in campaign began by losing the primary to a polarizing Tea Party candidate who Palin had endorsed.

Now lets jump to Alaskas 2014 race for governor.

Byron Mallott and I are rising above partisan politics to form the independent team of Walker-Mallott for governor and lieutenant governor, Bill Walker wrote soon after he and Mallot joined forces. To make that happen, Mallott had to withdraw from the ballot as the Democratic party nominee for governor. And Walker, a lifelong Republican who had entered the race as an independent, agreed to drop his party affiliation.

Now its likely both would have been on the losing side of a three-way race. And its true they only served one term. But if oil prices hadnt collapsed, theres a good chance they would have been re-elected.

In any case, what really matters is after they won, they formed a bipartisan cabinet. And brought all but the most stubborn party members together to seek the best path forward for Alaska.

Unfortunately, the Republican base resented Walkers partnering with Democrats. Polarization followed in the form of obstructionism by the Republican senate majority. And after three years, Democrats pushed back by wanting their own candidate for the 2018 race.

And what did we get. A governor whose hasnt been able to keep the campaign promises that got him elected.

An analysis of a potential Sen. Bernie Sanders presidency by David French helps explain why Gov. Mike Dunleavy hasnt succeeded. Writing at The Dispatch, a conservative online magazine, he argues that the peoples revolution Sanders promises wont materialize because vulnerable Democrats from purple states wont cooperate to enact the largest and most consequential government expansion in the nations history on a bare majority vote.

In Dunleavys case, its been a bipartisan house majority and bipartisan cooperation in the senate that formed the centrist barrier to budget cuts he hoped would extensively shrink government. But the part that really matches Frenchs argument is the familiar pattern of overpromising and underdelivering. And thats teaching a generation of polarized, angry activists that politics does not work.

It wont work until we accept that the true art of democracy is crafting the sensible compromises that moves society toward progress. Sure, sometimes its taken too long. But being stuck in a stalemate is worse. So, if we want our government work again, we ought to at least have a conversation about putting a bipartisan team in the White House.

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Opinion: The true art of democracy - Juneau Empire

My friend Dawn surprised me with a gift a framed photo. Pictured around a tea-party table are the two of us, our Marmees, Dawns sister, Kerri, her niece, Gentry, and my daughter, Kristen.

That photo tugs at me with a magnetic pull. I placed it on a bookcase shelf, and I cant pass it by without stopping for another look.

But, wait. Youre still stuck on Marmees. As in, what is a Marmee?

The original Marmee is the mother of the March sisters in Little Women, Louisa May Alcotts classic novel. Chances are youve seen one of the four screen versions (three films and one mini-series). The latest Little Women has been in theaters for a while now. I liked it, but its not my favorite.

The acting was superb, but the conservative in me didnt like the way director Greta Gerwig took the liberty to add not so subtle liberal messages to Alcotts classic. If right-leaners put an obvious dose of conservative spin on, say, The Handmaids Tale, left-leaners wouldnt like it either.

Still, I seldom allow politics to influence my attitude toward entertainment. Left or right is not the reason that the version of Little Women playing in a theater near me is not my number one pick.

The 1994 film starring Susan Sarandon and Wynona Ryder is my favorite Little Women. Sarandon and I stand like boxers in opposite corners of the political spectrum, but shes a gifted actress and Im, well, not a gifted actress.

Little Women is about mothers and daughters. The women pictured in the frame Dawn gifted me are mothers, daughters and granddaughters. Once upon a time before I had children of my own five of the women in that photo started holding mother-daughter get-togethers.

We meet for lunch. We go to dinner. We enjoy mother-daughter (and granddaughter) tea parties. And we go to movies.

The mother-daughters have no qualms about walking out on a movie that is offensive. We arent quiet when someone or something in a film makes us laugh or cry. We will see movies more than once if we really, really like themfilms like Grease.

We have seen that classic multiple times, but did not hesitate to go again way back when it returned to theaters for its 20th anniversary. The mother-daughters bought tickets for a weeknight and soon discovered that we had the theater all to ourselves just us.

We stood up in our seats and sang out loud with John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. We danced up and down the aisles. Never did it occur to us that an employee was required to man the projection room. It mattered not. Oh, what a night.

We were talking about Marmees and a photograph, which has everything to do with a movie Little Women. Louisa May Alcotts maternal character was not Mother, Mom, Mum, or Mommy. She was and is Marmee.

In 1994, after watching the story of the March sisters and their Marmee play out onscreen, we daughters and granddaughters dubbed the two queen mothers of our group, The Marmees. For 26 years and running, the Marmees theyve remained.

We need to schedule a tea party (or dinner or a movie), Ill say to Dawn and Kerri.

Lets check with the Marmees and see what they say, is always their answer mine, too, when the dialogue is reversed.

Little Women 1994 is my favorite because I saw it with the mother-daughters. The photograph Dawn gave me brings that memory to mind, as well as other good times past and the promise of more to come.

It reminds me that relationships are the key ingredient to true fulfillment in this thing we call life. Dawn and Kerri are sisters of my heart. After all, we share two Marmees.

Genny McCutcheon can be reached at genrmac@gmail.com or follow her on Twitter @VievesVine.

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The mother-daughters | Columns - WV News