The September 2019 US Politics Thread is great Great GREAT GR8

He has always depended on the kindness of slavs.

I vaguely recalled a previous Trump use of "tippy-top." Turns out it was in this all-timer (from the 2018 Easter Egg Roll):

"I want to thank the White House Historical Association and all of the people that work so hard with Melania, with everybody, to keep this incredible house or building, or whatever you want to call it — because there really is no name for it; it is special — and we keep it in tip-top shape. We call it sometimes tippy-top shape. And it’s a great, great place."

I took my kids to the march today in SF. HUGE turnout!

same (well at least til 11:30am).

Our nuclear is tippy-top. But what about the cyber? Is it bigly?

yeah SF March was pretty big (I was getting my lunch, I got work to do!)

xps

omg i totally forgot about bigly

xp

I am watching this somehow turn into a story about Biden and am going to pass out.

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) September 20, 2019

unbelievably bad politician

“Vice President Biden, it looks like Donald Trump tried to use government funds to bribe a foreign country into digging up dirt on you! What do you say about that?”

“I swear I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Uh...” https://t.co/erP1ecBum9

— Daniel Radosh (@danielradosh) September 20, 2019

probably senate hearings in a week about why the Hunter Biden investigation was prematurely dropped

Better response from Biden:

NEW: Biden releases statement on reports of Trump's call with Ukraine president.

"If these reports are true, then there is truly no bottom to President Trump’s willingness to abuse his power and abase our country." pic.twitter.com/OPKMPV49Wt

— Henry J. Gomez (@HenryJGomez) September 20, 2019

well, not so much biden as it is biden's team that has been desperately trying to get him to shut the fuck up

get real, bigly was 'big league'

still awaiting Shakey comment on p4reene tweet re Grancy

I can't see tweets on ilx anymore for some reason

feel like mostly it's a blessing tbh

This story about Hunter Biden wound up being extremely prescient.

Especially this exchange, about the author of Clinton Cash/Breitbart editor Peter Schweitzer using the same funnel-to-the-New-York-Times playbook, and almost pulling it off once again.https://t.co/qhYbB4Ek5K pic.twitter.com/B4lvIdXDEP

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) September 20, 2019

so did anyone ClimateStrike today?

― a Mets fan who gave up on everything in the mid '80s (Dr Morbius)

i did! it ruled tbh

― american bradass (BradNelson)

otm

10k or so in the streets, three hours of organising and activities in a park then a march to City Hall where teenagers spoke for a couple more hours. Turnout suppressed by local school boards refusing to allow kids out. Separate protest uptown for tech workers, bcz Seattle.

https://i.imgur.com/V80dk0P.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/6bsPt1m.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/TRz9xBi.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/eSoGqms.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/GBzpEjm.jpg

(80,000 turned out at home in Sydney, estimated 300k across Australia - biggest protests since the Iraq invasion in 2003)

Pelosi negotiated solely w/ White House on drug prices and wasted a year

but you stay insulated

All children of politicians from the House on up should be exiled to a comfortable private island for the duration of their parents' political careers.

also children of Baltimore mayors

Worst concept for a reality tv show, ever; unless there are lots of snakes.

Biden obviously does not have a great track record in stopping Hunter from making bad decisions but this seems like a bad decision a bit more effort should have gone in to stopping.

The bones of the story are potentially extremely serious. Biden was effectively given responsibility for Ukraine policy / implementation by Obama. A deeply corrupt energy company hired his minimally-qualified failson to their board on a huge salary. A corruption investigation started to look at the energy company. Biden pressured the Ukrainian President to sack the prosecutor leading the investigation, threatening to withhold $1bn in loans if he didn’t. That’s all pretty much objectively true.

What’s also true, though, is that Biden pressured Poroshenko into sacking the prosecutor because he was terrible/corrupt, never charged anyone and was blocking serious anti-graft reform. The energy company was also protected directly by Poroshenko, for his own dodgy financial reasons, so no lobbying would have been needed.

Ultimately, it doesn’t look like Biden did a thing wrong but it’s hardly surprising it hasn’t just blown over. It definitely looks bad if you only know the outline.

Contrarian point: It does not look weird at all in outline, since any logical outline would include the fact that, as you said, Poroshenko was terrible/corrupt. It's just that it's the right-wing outline is being pushed.

Australian political journalists in Washington DC today are extremely surprised to discover how the senile, very stupid president speaks with his own mouth, as opposed to being translated into semi-coherent sentences by US political journalists:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/sep/21/scott-morrison-scrambles-to-contain-political-mushroom-cloud-after-trump-raises-nuclear-option-with-iran

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/20/as-a-foreign-reporter-visiting-the-us-i-was-stunned-by-trumps-press-conference

two masters of standing normally at the peak of their game pic.twitter.com/eKLZIJQIlp

— henno (@jrhennessy) September 20, 2019

trying not to think about maccas engadine

So they're going ahead with the attempted war then?
Is congress saying anything about the deployment that was announced in several places last night.
Nothing like incurring debt to help t pay off his own personal ones is there?
& didn't he have to raid military funding to pay for his favourite folly, so is there much over to help pay for this.

biggest protests since the Iraq invasion in 2003)

did not know when I posted this that the president had already asked our PM, today, on camera, to join the US in an invasion of Iran

sic, I'm sure this has been discussed on other threads (and probably should be), but what happened with that "climate change election" a few months ago? Will people on streets now be enough to pressure the government to implement or rethink policies that were effectively voted against then?

Oh, and that second link you posted in particular was incredible:

In most circumstances, presenting information in as intelligible a form as possible is what we are trained for. But the shock I felt hearing half an hour of unfiltered meanderings from the president of the United States made me wonder whether the editing does our readers a disservice.

I’ve read so many stories about his bluster and boasting and ill-founded attacks, I’ve listened to speeches and hours of analysis, and yet I was still taken back by just how disjointed and meandering the unedited president could sound. Here he was trying to land the message that he had delivered at least something towards one of his biggest campaign promises and sounding like a construction manager with some long-winded and badly improvised sales lines.

This is how I have felt about US news media since watching the campaign debates in .au; even listening to a few minutes of NPR news over here gives the impression that my skull has been opened and several kindly but untrained nurses are gently lifting the contents out to pack in cotton wool, as they slowly, carefully ensure that they do the best job of pretending that the president said several coherent massive dangerous lies, without reporting that they are lies, let alone representing how far from hinged the actual sentences were.

As for climate action: Two and a half years ago, the now-PM brought a lump of coal into parliament so that the government MPs could fondle it and loudly jeer at the opposition that it is so safe that ppl can touch it. He is also a church-going Pentecostal. The opposition has reacted to Morrison’s two-seat majority in that election by announcing that actually the government isn’t right-wing enough, and we should make the concentration camps tougher & make it legal to tell gay ppl to burn in hell again & sell even more native people’s land to foreign mining countries for $1. You can probably triangulate any reaction to the protests between those points, and note how very effective the 2003 protests were at keeping Australian troops and taxpayer $ out of Iraq as further example.

well said, sic

Update from one hour ago:

'Beam us up': Morrison announces $150m to aid Trump's Moon-to-Mars mission

(Help! - I feel like I’m trapped in a bizarre nightmare where Australia’s PM is a cliche repeating, climate science denying fundamentalist. Please tell me it’s not real 🤯 #auspol) https://t.co/4gMMLE7PdE

— Andrew Laird (@ReclaimAnglesea) September 21, 2019

australia sounds like it sucks, its good that u have patty mills, tho

we just make them in the kitchen afaik

lmao

15 tweets (not including retweets) in the last 10 hours, all about Ukraine. Clearly there's nothing to the story.

As if in response to that Guardian link from upthread, Jennifer Jacobs of Bloomberg News quotes Trump verbatim on Twitter:

KEY TRUMP QUOTE:
"The conversation I had was largely congratulatory, was largely corruption, all of the corruption taking place. It was largely the fact that we don't want our people, like Vice President Biden and his son creating to the corruption already in the Ukraine.“ pic.twitter.com/yojLgXRaM6

— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) September 22, 2019

Telling Trump comment on speaking to sons:

“And now (Biden) made a lie when he said he never spoke to his son. I mean give me a break, he's already said he spoke to his son and now he said yesterday very firmly. Who wouldn't speak to your son? Of course you spoke to your son." pic.twitter.com/xwnq05C0mO

— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) September 22, 2019

It amazes me how fucking stupid this dude is

It's not illegal if someone else may have done something at some point.

he spoke to his son!
WHO WOULDN'T SPEAK TO HIS SON?
Of course he spoke to his son!

tbf On any given day he probably doesn't know how many children he has, or if he even has children.

At this point, the bigger national scandal isn’t the president’s lawbreaking behavior - it is the Democratic Party’s refusal to impeach him for it.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) September 22, 2019

Pelosi is Robert Duvall in Colors & AOC is Sean Penn.

BIG THIS AM: @RepAdamSchiff says that w/Trump-Ukraine-reports, "we very well may have crossed the Rubicon here.”

"I have been very reluctant to go down the path of impeachment …. but ... that may be the only remedy that is co-equal to the evil that that conduct represents.”

— Rachael Bade (@rachaelmbade) September 22, 2019

I've seen a bunch of commentators who should know better arguing with AOC's tweet. It's amazing how many supposedly smart people don't grasp how badly Pelosi and Congress are failing right now.

Pelosi is Robert Duvall in Colors & AOC is Sean Penn.

― Jersey Al (Albert R. Broccoli), Sunday, September 22, 2019

exactly the analogy I was looking for

the schiff quote is weird because he was literally on cnn this morning saying “I want to make sure before we go down this road that we could persuade the public that this was the right thing to do”

Have to imagine the pressure on these weaklings has ratcheted up quite a bit over the last couple days.

Schiff's usually pretty good, despite the goggle-eyed expression.