The September 2019 US Politics Thread is great Great GREAT GR8

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.

Pence brings 8 SUVs to car-less island: https://eu.freep.com/story/news/politics/elections/2019/09/21/mike-pence-motorcade-mackinac-island/2403623001/

xp

He's the #1 person in Congress responsible for managing the whistleblower situation. We'll see whether he manages to do more than wag his finger in the general direction of the DOJ.

This is good and I'm not picking on her (Sanders is equally to blame although I'm not entirely sure he gets a "vote") but at some point Senate progressives will have to voice even a slight objection to Schumer's leadership and not one of them has broached it. https://t.co/UjGUzc1oVT

— 'Weird Alex' Pareene (@pareene) September 21, 2019

I think they’re finally going to impeach this motherfucker

This is perhaps not the best messaging strategy that the administration is rolling out here. Why is it ok for the president's children to have international business dealings but not the vice president's son? The secretary won't answer that. https://t.co/wqhg1y8tvw

— Shane Harris (@shaneharris) September 22, 2019

In parallel news:

The wall people are now climbing in minutes just for fun! It’s a tourist attraction now! No ropes needed! No ladders! They are timing who can do it the fastest! The current record is 45 seconds! pic.twitter.com/kT15dhuYmN

— Mike Mozart (@JeepersMedia) September 20, 2019

(May or may not be outdated fake news, sorry. But the Mnuchin turd is a fresh one.)

He is also a church-going Pentecostal.

further update to this: it turns out that the Australian PM attempted to bring his pastor and "personal mentor" as part of his White House delegation.

The pastor is Brian Houston, the founder of Hillsong, a megachurch operating in 19 countries from their base in Sydney's whitest suburban bible belt. Their first major expansion came when this pastor quickly took over his father Frank Houston's chain of charismatic churches in between the father's offering one of many victims of his sexual abuse in two countries a $10k hush payment (the offer was made in a McDonalds), and the father's conviction. Brian not only did not report this instance of abuse to the police when he became aware, but 16 years later a royal commission found that he had been covering up serial sexual abuse.

Brian and his family live tax-free with church assets, vehicles and expense accounts, and once spent more than half a $250,000 governmental grant intended for a local Aboriginal community on church employees and infrastructure.

The church operates several for-profit businesses, including: an international chain of coffee shops that has been used as a recruiting pipeline and also a supply chain to a prison / brainwashing centre for lesbian and pregnant and pregnant lesbian teens escaping abuse, and: a Trumpianly obvious chart-rigging scam wherein they have had their churches registered as record stores and report their own unaudited sales of their own praise recordings, which, mysteriously, regularly go to #1. Houston also has a motivational speaking business of his own.

In perhaps their first publicly-known sensible act in 30 months, the White House blocked Morrison from bringing Houston to his photo opportunities.

"creating to the corruption"

Next month's title?

If the Administration persists in blocking this whistleblower from disclosing to Congress a serious possible breach of constitutional duties by the President, they will be entering a grave new chapter of lawlessness which will take us into a whole new stage of investigation.

does sound like we are right on the precipice of initiating the sort of pre-investigative phase that potentially precedes the planning stage of a preliminary blueprint for conisdering impeachment proceeedings

https://www.speaker.gov/newsroom/92219

Bill Barr must be really shitting his pants golfing

thoughts and prayers

trump responded to winning russiagate by doing russiagate for real. dude's a fucking legend.

— mark (@kept_simple) September 20, 2019

hat tip simon

this is the most groundhog day shit though. seriously.

i've decided i don't give a shit anymore. peace out guys

Lol, you really chose the perfect week to return, træskib :) Good to see you, though.

hey fred, good to see you too. i really did try to register træskib but it was rejected by the obama death panel that runs this website.

treeship!! :D

Good to see you

Treezy!

Rudy doesn't even know how to stonewall anymore

Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani didn’t rule out the possibility that the president threatened to cut off aid to Ukraine over calls for an investigation into largely discredited allegations against former Vice President Joe Biden and his son.

Giuliani first said in response to a question on Fox Business Monday that Trump didn’t threaten Ukraine aid, but then added he “can’t say for 100%.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-23/giuliani-can-t-say-100-that-trump-didn-t-threaten-ukraine-aid

Well, I mean, Rudy can’t leave people with the impression that he’s a liar

i don't understand why trump & co want giuliani to go on tv ever

I mean he basically admitted that all the Russiagate stuff was true and nobody saw a single consequence so why not