Category: Uncategorized

 

President Trump: I’ve had conversations with many leaders.
They’re always appropriate.
 
From Cato’s Julian Sanchez:

 

 

From PZ Myers:

The whistleblower’s letter is now available to be read online. I’m hoping this becomes a historic document and isn’t just swept under the rug, as the Republicans and president would like.

The president is corruption personified.

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From Infidel753:

Pelosi’s declaration of an impeachment inquiry is a good move both practically and politically. On the practical side, it will broaden the House Democrats’ legal powers to investigate Trump — which is why I’ve always supported it. On the political side, it should, at least for a while, take some of the pressure off of House Democrats to proceed to an actual impeachment.

For anyone not familiar with my objections to an impeachment, here’s a summary:

(a) Impeachment can’t remove Trump from office. Removal would take at least 20 Republican votes in the Senate, which isn’t going to happen because Senate Republicans are afraid to anger Trumpanzees whose votes they depend on for re-election.

(b) After “acquittal” by the Senate, Trump would bleat endlessly that he had been exonerated and that all the accusations against him had been exposed as fake news, a dastardly Democratic plot, etc. This would sound plausible to millions of swing voters who don’t pay close attention to politics. Thus an impeachment would probably make Trump’s re-election more likely.

(c) Impeachment would threaten our House majority. Many House Democrats represent purplish districts in which a vote to impeach would be a definite liability next year. Impeachment is generally unpopular with the voters — including with many Democrats and independents, not just Republicans.

It’s clearly (c) which has loomed largest in Pelosi’s resistance to impeachment. She’s been accused of doing the politically expedient thing rather than the right thing, but keeping that Senate majority is important. A lot of lives will be ruined or lost if Republicans recover full control of the government.

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From Max’s Dad:

Do we? Really? Just another crime committed by the Thug in Chief, shaking down the Ukrainian President to go get Joe Biden if he wants his missiles “for defense”. Ya know that $400 million? Well I directed my bitch chief of staff to hold that up for now. I also want you to work with my consigliori lawyer and my enforcer Attorney General to get this “favor” done for me.

Goddamn, this guy has always been a mafia boss, running around New York deadbeating out on his bills, putting the screws to government, making racist statements about young black men, bragging about the height of his building as 3000 people lay dead, filing bankruptcy whenever convenient and running a scam foundation that lined his pockets (which may really be why he goes to prison). The fact that normally decent men and women on the right have stood on this hill of toxicity keeping the wolves at bay is really amazing. NOw is when real people step up and say NO MORE!!

Will that happen? I doubt it.

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From author John Scalzi at Whatever:

Back here in the US, folks on the left have been riding Nancy Pelosi on the subject of impeachment basically since the moment she got the gavel back, and are exasperated that it’s taken her this long to start an inquiry. I certainly sympathize, since Trump is objectively a terrible president, incompetent as balls and also corrupt in a way we haven’t seen in the White House in most people’s lifetimes (yes, even worse than Nixon). But Pelosi isn’t stupid, and she knows a thing which people on the left sometimes forget, which is that impeachment isn’t actually popular with most Americans, and also, Republicans, while institutionally corrupt, are both not actually stupid, and also really good at winding up their base about how THEY ARE UNDER ATTACK FROM THE SOCIALIST FEMINIST PELOSI AND HER ALLIES IN THE FAKE NEWS. Pelosi also knows that no president that’s been impeached has been removed from office, and that when Clinton’s impeachment trial was done, he was more popular than when it started.

All of which is to say that I suspect Pelosi recognizes, more than most people, the political hazards of an impeachment inquiry. They are significant and they are substantial, and, bluntly, if the Democrats fuck it up, they hand Trump a gift going into an election year… and we all know what the capacity of Democrats to fuck up even sure things is. She also recognizes that the Senate is in Republican hands and that in these benighted days, the chances of them removing a Republican president, even one as manifestly corrupt and incompetent as Trump, are slim approaching none. So the only realistic victory scenario here is to have an impeachment inquiry come up with something that is so unambiguously corrupt and unlawful that when the Republicans in the Senate vote to keep Trump in the White House — and they will — they slit their own political throats in the process.

Which is, uhhhhh, a lot.

So while I’m delighted that Pelosi has finally pulled the trigger on an impeachment inquiry, I am from a purely realpolitik view sympathetic regarding her reluctance to do so before now. And even now it’s far from a slam dunk.

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From Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit:

Before you spew at the screen and begin typing furiously, bear with me.

As it stands now, the election is going to be a contest with one overriding question: Do you want Trump in for another four years? Regardless how much the Democrats may beat up each other in the primaries, the signs are that the losers will suck it up and campaign vociferously for the nominee. Independents largely seem to despise Trump. Women don’t like him. For minorities, the polls are trending to the point that the margin of error about who doesn’t like Trump will encompass the unborn and the dead.

In sort, all of the other issues, such as climate change or health insurance or immigration or anything else will be shuffled off to the side. Not a lot of people will care about them.

The only way that the GOP can get the issues of the day in the minds of the voters will be to push out Trump. Pence may be a tool, and maybe someone else will be run, but they’ll at least get to fight about other issues. For much as the Democrats then may want yo yell about Trump and what he did, the GOP can say “in the final analysis, we helped get rid of him, so let’s move on.”

Trump has given the GOP a way to do that.

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From The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser:

Evangelicals are taught that God speaks to them in a still small voice. In 1 Kings 18, the great Baptist preacher Elijah participated in a God Duel between Jehovah and Baal that was meant to prove once and for all that his God was the one true and living God. After Elijah’s God rained fire down from heaven, proving that he alone was God, Elijah had Baal’s false prophets — liberals, Democrats, atheists, Muslims, Catholics, and the like — slaughtered.

In I Kings 19, we find King Ahab telling Hillary Clinton — also known as Jezebel — “of all that Elijah had done, and withal how he had slain all the prophets [of Baal] with the sword.” Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah with this message:

So let the gods do to me, and more also, if I make not thy life as the life of one of them by to morrow about this time.

In other words, Jezebel told Elijah: I’m coming for you hotshot, and when I find you, I am going to slit your throat from ear to ear. Elijah, being the tough Baptist preacher that he was, stood up to Jezebel and said, Bring it on, bitch. Me and my God will whip your ass, and that will be the end of you! Not really. Baptist preachers are tough guys when surrounded by fawning, adoring crowds on Sundays, but Elijah was all alone, so he did the only thing he could do — run! In fact, Elijah, the greatest Baptist pulpiteer of the ninth century BCE, was so depressed that he pleaded with God to kill him. (1 Kings 19:4) After Elijah had spent 40 days in the wilderness, the Lord — one of the Christian Gods — questioned Elijah’s commitment to the one true faith. Elijah replied:

I have been very jealous for the Lord God of hosts: for the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.

Poor Elijah.

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From The Borowitz Report:

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In a shakeup that White House insiders said was a long time coming, one of the voices in Rudy Giuliani’s head has resigned.

The resignation, which was officially tendered on Saturday morning, seemed inevitable after the former New York mayor made an appearance on CNN Thursday evening in which two of the voices in his head appeared to be in open warfare with each other.

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From Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger:

Start Impeachment Proceedings Now!

Anyone who has been paying attention has to know that Donald Trump has broken the law, and he should be impeached and removed from office. He colluded (conspired) with Russia to subvert the 2016 election, and he committed at least half a dozen acts of obstruction of justice in trying to kill the Mueller investigation. This was all after violating campaign finance law by paying off a woman he had sex with to protect his presidential candidacy.

Any of those things individually is worthy of impeachment. And I have been very disappointed in most Democratic members of the House of Representatives (including Speaker Pelosi) for their refusal to start impeachment proceedings.

I understand why the Republicans defend Trump. They put their party and their own political futures above the Constitution and their country. But Democrats are supposed to be better than that.

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From Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged:

It is still a little amazing to me that Saudi Arabia, whose defense spending is pretty enormous, managed to have half their petroleum capacity imperiled by a drone strike (which was temporary damage) from either the Houthis or Iran (or on behalf of the Houthis by Iran, or the Houthis with Iran’s help–whatever)–because shouldn’t they have more hardened defenses around an obvious target like that, given the length of time they have been engaging on war with Yemen? (Or was reporting on this incident a little magnified?)

I don’t know. I have a hard time understanding why Saudi Arabia is waging genocide in Yemen and why the US has continued being complicit with that, I only know that Trump used a veto to keep sending weapons to Saudi Arabia— and the reaction of Donald Trump, on a day when the talk was all about whether he tried to extort a foreign leader into investigating a potential political rival, was to announce that the US was now going to send US military personnel.

Because the oil was hurt, you guys. Thoughts and prayers for the oil.

I’m just saying that the timing is interesting, is all.

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