US Politics May 2019: " If I was burned at the stake, I would ask for a mirror"

Please tell me if there's a better place to put shit like this

Holy crap lmao:

"Just $185 of the roughly $652,000 that House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer raised for his re-election fund from January through March came from [small] contributions." https://t.co/ROpQB6xytn

— Alex Kotch 🔥 (@alexkotch) May 15, 2019

he shoulda learned to game those numbers like Cuomo does

breaking: the $185 in small contributions to Steny Hoyer came from a single mistaken transaction on Venmo, when Pam Jergins, intending to pay an acquaintance for some housepainting work he did over the weekend, accidentally sent money to Steny Hoyer instead of Steny Boyer

i'm gonna do a morbs and abandon the politics thread, enjoy yourself

― american bradass (BradNelson), Friday, May 17, 2019 4:04 AM

[posts again]

― american bradass (BradNelson), Friday, May 17, 2019 4:20 AM

flawless impersonation imo

C'mon

As tensions between Iran and the United States increase in the Middle East, the Pentagon briefing room is being used to host Gene Simmons of Kiss. pic.twitter.com/NauZ0bfkgm

— Idrees Ali (@idreesali114) May 16, 2019

Ok, I am finally coming around to this all being a simulation.

He commands an army iirc

House passes Equality act; eight Republicans break party line.

every now and again i remember that in the actual world we live in, the president's lawyer was convicted of paying off a porn actress that the president was cheating on his wife with, and went down for it, and the president's response was to talk shit about him on Twitter

extremely cool and very normal and totally not shameful or embarrassing at all for republicans to support someone like that

That may be true, but at the same time, who among us does not retain a lawyer who was convicted of paying off a porn actress that we were cheating on our wife with, and went down for it, and then talked shit about him on Twitter?

I’m still fond of the one where the president was caught on tape bragging about how good he is at sexually assaulting women, and then, to kind of make up for that, he hired all the women his opponent’s husband cheated on her with to sit in the audience at their debate.

And then got elected

The People spoke.

Sadly, what The People were saying got badly garbled via transmission through a faulty line installed in 1786.

I’m still fond of the one where the president was caught on tape bragging about how good he is at sexually assaulting women, and then, to kind of make up for that, he hired all the women his opponent’s husband cheated on her with to sit in the audience at their debate.

― d'ILM for Murder (Hadrian VIII), Saturday, May 18, 2019 12:07 AM (thirteen hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Believe it or not, I remember this. What a prankster.

hey you liberals wanted a sexual revolution and now you got it and you’re complaining idgi

This Iran thing...

Why bother creating a bullshit justification if you’re just gonna bypass congress, just go for it

uh yeah

from last year

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-iran-alqaeda/study-questions-iran-al-qaeda-ties-despite-u-s-allegations-idUSKCN1LN2LE

sic can you post the end of that url for us, thx

Aren't they backing away from Iran escalation now?

Weirdly enough, Trump seems to have been a moderating voice in this instance.

Maybe he's setting up a golf course there.

Trump's ultra-belligerent talk can distract people from the fact that, instinctively, he knows getting involved in a war is risky, dirty, dangerous, and hard work. Remember, he attended a military academy for a while and the distaste for that experience is evident. He's OK with other people taking those risks, facing those dangers, and doing all that work, so long as he can stay totally uninvolved with it, but now that he is president he'd have to get dragged into any wars he starts. He could blunder and stumble his way into a war, but he won't do it coolly and with forethought.

I'm not entirely sure what this thread from a Republican congressman means, but I'm guessing his twitter account got hacked...

Here are my principal conclusions:
1. Attorney General Barr has deliberately misrepresented Mueller’s report.
2. President Trump has engaged in impeachable conduct.
3. Partisanship has eroded our system of checks and balances.
4. Few members of Congress have read the report.

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) May 18, 2019

Justin Amash was the only republican that didn't come off as a maniac during the Michael Cohen questioning.

He sucks 94% of the time but i’ll give him this: he’s the guy that internet libertarians think Rand Paul is

Reports say he's going to be pardoning legit war criminals on Memorial Day.

I could swear Cobra Commander used to be more subtle than this about his wholesale devotion to evil.

sic can you post the end of that url for us, thx

sorry to report that you in fact posted a url, not a secondary piece of code that undermines stet's ability to have the site pay for itself, or that funds a company that actively subverts Western democracy, on this heartbreaking post-election day

As Trump attacks first Republican to call for impeachment, Mitt Romney says: 'The American people are just not there'

mittens, leading from behind

He could blunder and stumble his way into a war, but he won't do it coolly and with forethought.

i think there's a third way (or maybe a subset ounder blundering and stumbling) that involves other people (like john bolton) deliberately steering the US into a massive conflict, just because there's one else speaking with authority in the room. as of a few days ago, trump was saying that he "disagreed" with some of the policies in iran, which is interesting because he's the president, and he can change the policies with iran anytime he wants. so who is in charge? i assume it's people who know things like, i don't know, what the major cities are in the area, or what languages are spoken, or what historical reasons for the conflict. things that donald trump will never know. it's a dangerous situation to be in, especially when the idiot who should be in charge is prone to overreactions like his tweet from 10 minutes ago:

'If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran. Never threaten the United States again!'

Listened to a podcast about this today. War with Iran would be a disaster. The other threat is Iran blowing up Kuwait and Saudi Arabia’s desalinization plants and millions of people dying of thirst.

https://geopoliticsalert.com/millennium-challenge-us-navy-lost-simulated-war-iran

No posts in two days, huh

Everyone - not just here, but everywhere - is so fucking burned out on the whole having an openly criminal president thing. House leadership is holding closed door meetings about whether to impeach after McGahn’s no show (Pelosi still opposes) and no one gives a shit. We’re all just waiting to cast our vote in November 2020 I guess

I mean, I get not posting here, too. Just kind of bizarre, like looking back at a 1974 ILX thread and no one’s mentioning the whole Nixon thing

Hard to stay engaged as a Democrat when the House Democrats prefer smelling their own farts to taking any real action to save us.

*bullshit deleted*

they want the people to lead, it’s fucking nervy and scary, hoping it’s all in my head.

and also as the media/pollsters attempt to prenominate someone conceivably a surer loser than Hillary Clinton

Sorta feels like a 'in case of complete untethering of institutional norms, break glass' sitch at this point tbh, everybody waiting around for someone else to use the little hammer. Except the hammer is rapidly melting so...y'know.

I'd rather have silence than howls of despair.

Judge Amit Mehta wrote this yesterday:

hese words, written by President James Buchanan in March 1860, protested a resolution adopted by the U.S. House of Representatives to form a committee—known as the Covode Committee—to investigate whether the President or any other officer of the Executive Branch had sought to influence the actions of Congress by improper means.

Buchanan “cheerfully admitted” that the House of Representatives had the authority to make inquiries “incident to their legislative duties,” as “necessary to enable them to discover and to provide the appropriate legislative remedies for any abuses which may be ascertained.” But he objected to the Covode Committee’s investigation of his conduct. He maintained that the House of Representatives possessed no general powers to investigate him, except when sitting as an impeaching body. Buchanan feared that, if the House were to exercise such authority, it “would establish a precedent dangerous and embarrassing to all my successors, to whatever political party they might be attached.”

Some 160 years later, President Donald J. Trump has taken up the fight of his predecessor.

Everybody's been posting about G.o.T. and Charlie Watts, duh.

some of my deleted bullshit was about need for big performative marches, very aimed at gop. Some dems are sad and scared and soft, need vigorous encouragement on their own platforms. but with a trump given any - even none- results of too much vigor could be bad on the street. so pressure builds.

PORTER: Do you know what an REO is?

CARSON: An OREO...

PORTER: No, not an OREO. An REO.

CARSON: Real estate...?

PORTER: What’s the “O” stand for? pic.twitter.com/zGwHfhajJC

— Dan Zak (@MrDanZak) May 21, 2019

One big reason for the slowdown in the politics thread is that there's not much of anything new coming out of Congress, either legislatively or investigatively. The Mueller report was successfully quashed, mainly because Mueller did not subpoena Trump and failed to make a forthright finding of obstruction, allowing the Republicans to quash it in the media, because the media of 2019 is a far different animal than the media of 1974 and it cooperated fully in the Republican subterfuge.

Talking about the administration policies has become nearly impossible, because this administration has no policies to speak of, only whims. The Iran stuff is so utterly confused and conflicting that you can't say anything about it that fits a detectable pattern of thought or intention. The escalated trade war with China hasn't yet flowed into the economy and the administration regularly contradicts itself on trade policy. It's stagnation on the one hand and chaos on the other and there's not much left to say past that.

yep, your last sentence there sums it up very nicely. which is why, for instance, I'd put the odds about equal of waking up one day to war with Iran and waking up one day to learn of a "really great, really beautiful deal" with Iran that puts us back in the exact same spot with them as we were in 2016.

As democracies go, it sure seems awful arbitrary.

House Judiciary Committee just subpoenaed Hope Hicks

i guess their plan is to hold the entire trump administration in contempt

they'd better pick up the pace

countdown to Trump coming up with a complimentary nickname for everyone who has been held in contempt by congress, ie, how 'the deplorables' became a badge of honor for idiots

the Held in Contempt panel is going to be amazing at CPAC 2019