Month: December 2019

Just read the titles – Click for detail

The President’s Request for a Political Favor

The President Removed Anti-Corruption Champion Ambassador Yovanovitch

The President’s Hand-picked Agents Begin the Scheme

President Trump Froze Vital Military Assistance

The President Conditioned a White House Meeting on Investigations

The President’s Agents Pursued a “Drug Deal”

President Trump Pressed President Zelensky to Do a Political Favor

The President’s Representatives Ratcheted up Pressure on the Ukrainian President

Ukrainians Inquired about the President’s Hold on Security Assistance

The President’s Security Assistance Hold Became Public

The President’s Scheme Unraveled

The President’s Chief of Staff Confirmed Aid was Conditioned on Investigations

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Just read the titles – Click for detail

An Unprecedented Effort to Obstruct an Impeachment Inquiry

Constitutional Authority for Congressional Oversight and Impeachment

The President’s Categorical Refusal to Comply

The President’s Refusal to Produce Any and All Subpoenaed Documents

The President’s Refusal to Allow Top Aides to Testify

The President’s Unsuccessful Attempts to Block Other Key Witnesses

The President’s Intimidation of Witnesses

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From the US House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence:

The Trump-Ukraine Impeachment Inquiry Report

The impeachment inquiry into Donald J. Trump, the 45th President of the United States, uncovered a months-long effort by President Trump to use the powers of his office to solicit foreign interference on his behalf in the 2020 election. As described in this executive summary and the report that follows, President Trump’s scheme subverted U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine and undermined our national security in favor of two politically motivated investigations that would help his presidential reelection campaign. The President demanded that the newly-elected Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, publicly announce investigations into a political rival that he apparently feared the most, former Vice President Joe Biden, and into a discredited theory that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered in the 2016 presidential election. To compel the Ukrainian President to do his political bidding, President Trump conditioned two official acts on the public announcement of the investigations: a coveted White House visit and critical U.S. military assistance Ukraine needed to fight its Russian adversary.

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From driftglass:

Even as you read this, the next Big Lie that Republicans like Rick Wilson believe will save them is being mortared into place in plain sight, brick-by-brick, and with the enthusiastic support of the Beltway media,. And that Big Lie is that the GOP was a principled, sane political party which was doing just fine until Trump rolled into town with his Magic Meathead Mesmerizing Machine and somehow overnight transformed +60M principled, sane Republican voters into a mob reprogrammable bigots and imbeciles.

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From Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged:

The idea that 53% of Republicans in a recent poll think that Trump is a better president than Abraham Lincoln actually doesn’t bother me excessively because I drink an actual fuckton anymore have been watching Republican polls for a long time, and have observed the rise of poll-trolling and troll-polling. You know, the thing where Republicans, when questioned, will blame Obama for the Hurricane Katrina response or where pollsters will ask questions trying to cast a certain demographic (presumed knuckle-draggers) in a weird light by pointing up one weird and very click-baitable response. You can tell me Republicans by just 53% are defensive enough in support of Trump to compare him favorably to the guy on Mount Rushmore, the $5 bill and the freaking penny, and I’m going to basically shrug. (I will note, however, for posterity’s sake, that Trump invited this comparison. And outside of Republicans, he definitely does not compare favorably.)

Republicans are going to like the current Republican president. It isn’t brain science.

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From PZ Myers:

This video starts off with a Fox News interview in which a couple of apologists for Blackwater explain an incident in Iraq in which mercenaries “neutralized a threat” at an intersection, a very bland and seemingly everyday event in an occupied country. After seeing Fox misrepresenting the whole affair and calling the mercenaries heroes, the video reveals that this was the Nisour Square Massacre, in which a group of unprofessional gun-toting American assholes went on a murder spree, killing 17 civilians and blowing up vehicles left and right. Fox avoided mentioning the victims and was shockingly dishonest in their misrepresentation; this report pulls no punches and describes their murder.

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From News Corpse:

Fox News Affirms Its State TV Status with Slobbering Interview of Trump Campaign Shill

It’s getting more difficult with every passing day to differentiate between Fox News and the Republican Nationalist Party. And even though the network was created to serve as a propaganda vehicle for right-wing politics, the degree to which it has become the communications office of Donald Trump’s cult movement still manages to be surprising.

On Sunday morning Fox and Friends co-host Ed Henry “interviewed” Kayleigh McEnany, the press secretary for the Trump 2020 campaign. It was another in a frequent series of Trump campaign and administration officials appearing regularly on Fox News. They know they have an open door at Fox where they can deliver their disinformation at any time without interruption or dispute. And this booking was no exception. Henry asked a total of four question, and each one seems like it was written by some Trump PR hack, complete with hostile allusions to Democrats.

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From The Onion:

Facial Recognition Software Knows It Has Seen Man Before But Can’t Remember His Name

AKRON, OH—Wondering if it was possibly confusing the man for a different guy with a 10 mm nasal bridge and a right earlobe hanging 0.4 mm lower than his left, a Cognitec FaceVACS-VideoScan Unit #121 facial recognition camera expressed frustration Monday after focusing on a man it knew it had seen before and found itself unable to remember his name.

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From Michael John Scott MadMikesAmerica:

It’s now official! Republicans are nuts. More than half of these twisted Deplorables make him the most popular GOP president except for Bush shortly after 9/11.

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From Jonathan Bernstein:

Our current politics may be miserable. But there’s plenty of comic relief if you know where to look.

It’s been a miserable year for politics, really. Impeachment? There’s nothing fun in that. Still, those of us who follow this stuff all the time do find some amusement in it, and I like to compile a list of what political junkies have to be thankful for. In other words: Sure, things are terrible, but at least we can have a two-day story about whether the hero dog is a boy or a girl. Ready?

Stupid joke Twitter accounts. I’m afraid this one is losing steam, as politics Twitter itself has become a lot less fun than it used to be. But it was good to see that Representative Jim Jordan’s poor abandoned jacket has its own account.

All those presidential candidates. Seth Masket counts 44 people who have so far done candidate-like things this cycle. And that’s just the Democrats! A field of that size leaves plenty of room for the kind of goofy contenders who — assuming they don’t actually come close to winning — provide a little comic relief. This cycle, forget about the vanity campaign of Marianne Williamson, and enjoy the thoroughly unmemorable members of the House who somehow thought they could win.

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