The September 2019 US Politics Thread is great Great GREAT GR8

Yeah, and fuck them for being turds.

if this whole thing relies on them subpoeneing and requesting documents and testimony it won't work, Trump will just stonewall and refuse to deliver anything/claim executive privelege. As I said way upthread, the only way this works is if the Dems cultivate a rat/source within the White House that leaks/volunteers info. Otherwise this will get tied up in court and the SC conceivably sides with Trump after months and months of delay.

out on a limb here, but my suspicion is this wouldn’t be moving forward if something of that nature wasn’t already in place

i just did a really loud joker laugh that my former colleagues @mmfa are very familiar with as i read this headline https://t.co/szcWAKQhH7

— Oliver Willis (@owillis) September 27, 2019

Sex won't age me. Alcohol won't age me. Finishing A Little Life won't age me. Explaining things will.

― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, September 27, 2019 12:14 PM (two hours ago)

<3

you love to see it etc
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/463445-federal-judge-blocks-trump-administration-from-detaining-migrant-children

lol Rudy was going to speak at a Kremlin-supported thing for cash, with Putin reportedly in attendance, but ... Rudy had to cancel. Sad-face.

How much is Putin enjoying all this?

a borschtl and a peck

And a hug around the neck.

Volker just quit his Ukraine envoy job. I guess something came up?

broken but a student newspaper!

What a scoop by the student newspaper at ASU! Three sources have now confirmed this news to CNN: https://t.co/zKDjgbGifD

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) September 27, 2019

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/carl-bernstein-sources-say-william-barr-preparing-to-deliver-evidence-of-a-deep-state-conspiracy

oh fer chirst's sake

That's literally the only site reporting this

They’re going to try something like this though. Trump and Giuliani already laying the groundwork.

Alleging myriad conspirators at the highest level of government worked for Stalin

They already have tried it. It hasn't caught on.

xp not helpful, as usual

still surreal to see citations like this

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

(that's from the subpoena for mike pompeo)

I mean, if the definition of "deep state" is essentially "career government employees," then sure, most of the government is "deep state" and there are probably some "deep state" actors concerned about Trump. Ironically, not least by Trump essentially fostering his own deep state of shadow government conspiracy theories and enablers. I heard a hilarious NPR piece about the Crowdstrike/Ukraine theory yesterday, where the reporter conceded the conspiracy theory is virtually impossible to unravel because it is so batshit and nonsensical and based on invented bullshit.

Re crowd strike: they simply performed bot and hack protection for the dnc, attacks that were coming from
The Ukraine, no? And somehow In trumps moms ghis became “crowd strike has hilary’s server in the Ukraine”?

tumps mom hgris

derp state amirite

xpost As they tried to explain on NPR (because it is inexplicable), Crowdstrike, which I guess is American and based in CA, was hired to look into the DNC hack. The owner of Crowdstrike may be Russian-American, but somehow, in the game of telephone that is the right wing conspiracy theory echo chamber, it was surmised/guessed/invented that the owner of Crowdstrike or the person that bought Crowdstrike was actually Ukrainian (he's not), and that he was actually the one interfering in the 2016 election, not the Russians. Ergo, the mysterious key-to-it-all server (which does not exist, because all that stuff was apparently stored in various since-decommissioned cloud servers) must be in Ukraine. It's entirely bullshit, and impossible to disprove, because it was invented. Both fascinating and sad.

https://www.npr.org/2019/09/27/765186504/what-the-cybersecurity-company-crowdstrike-has-to-do-with-the-trump-ukraine-matt

CORNISH: So CrowdStrike is an American cybersecurity firm. Their name first came up in the news back in 2016 during the election. Why?

BRODERICK: They were the firm brought in by the DNC to investigate the hack that took place in 2016. And they're most known for being the firm that debunked the initial idea that it was conducted by a lone hacker. They were the people who basically said this was done by two groups of Russian-backed hacking outlets.

CORNISH: So they introduced the idea of it being a cyberattack, basically, from another country, foreign intervention rather than a random lone wolf.

BRODERICK: Yes. They're sort of the ones that started the whole idea of collusion with Russia.

CORNISH: Now, how does Ukraine come in?

BRODERICK: It's very confusing, but let's see what I can do here. So on the Internet, things move really fast. It's like a huge game of telephone. So once this firm caught the attention of the far-right online, they discovered that it was owned by a Russian American man who had previously done some work for a think tank called the Atlantic Council. It's a D.C.-based think tank, sort of works alongside NATO. And it's a pretty innocuous place. It does research on misinformation and digital warfare, things like that.

And there's a Ukrainian oligarch who was on one of the advisory boards for the Atlantic Council. And it seems somewhere along the line, the Ukrainian oligarch became the owner of CrowdStrike. This is not true, of course. But when things are moving so fast online, facts start to combine together, and it becomes very confusing.

CORNISH: So the idea is people who are on the far-right, conspiracy theorists, went looking for a connection, went looking to say, who are these CrowdStrike guys? And once they do enough looking, they're able to find a Ukrainian oligarch who they say, aha, this is the connection. So what about this server that the president implied was somehow in Ukraine? I mean, he - on this call talked to Ukraine's leader and brought up CrowdStrike. What would he be looking for?

BRODERICK: It's a common misconception that there is some sort of missing server from the DNC hack, but it's not true. The hack involved 140 cloud-based servers, and they were all decommissioned in 2016. There was no single server that was, you know, stolen in the dead of night and smuggled to the Ukraine or something. This was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of both the technology involved and the firm involved. And trying to make sense of it is almost impossible because it's not really a logical idea.

CORNISH: You reached out to CrowdStrike. They said, look, we have nothing to do with this. But can I ask, in Ukraine, would Ukraine's president know what President Trump was talking about?

BRODERICK: I have to wonder what the Ukrainian president was thinking when he heard it.

Bill Barr must really get his rocks off on the power that comes from high office and being the 'indispensable man' for the most powerful individual in the world, because he is so obviously willing to do whatever stupid shit Trump asks him to do in order to get into and remain in that position.

Definitely telling that Trump fired Dan Coats *three days* after the Ukraine call, and that Coats immediately suggested his successor Sue Gordon gtfo, which she did, under clear duress.

yeah ok that's what I thought. i work with bot protection and DDOS defense systems all the time in my job. Glad to know my assumption was correct. I feel for anyone who works at that company to get dragged into this shit.

This morning I wondered if the 'whistleblower' and the whistleblower's sources are the same people who released that statement ... 2 years ago? about people in the WH trying to keep Trump from his worst impulses. Though I wonder how many people survived in their jobs around the WH after that happened.

xxp how is Bill Barr himself not “deep state” by any definition?

There is a kind of karmic hilarity to the fact that in order to protect Trump, his staff centralized the materials that could doom him in a highly classified system that can't be erased or manipulated without a record of access by a very small number of people.

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) September 28, 2019

So I don't know that anyone can answer this, but what would it take legally-speaking to pull all this stuff from the super-secret server? Is there any real way to show that these calls don't contain material that needs to be protected?

Only one thing is known - a bunch of people over the age of 120 will determine the answers

They are trying to stop ME, because I am fighting for YOU! pic.twitter.com/xiw4jtjkNl

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 28, 2019

"the democrats want to take away your guns, they want to take away your healthcare, they want to take away your vote, they want to take away your freedom, they want to take away your judges, they want to take away everything"

sorry to post attempted propaganda, but look at what he reteweeted earlier:

Sen. Graham: “to impeach any president over a phone call like this would be insane”https://t.co/pBdQzqhVGx pic.twitter.com/wbS9JKVsUl

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 25, 2019

graham looks AWFUL there! how is that not worse than nixon during the debate with JFK? he looks like he's shitting the entire time, he obviously doesn't believe anything he's saying. it's crazy how many people seem to trust "lindsey"

At what fucking point will Fox and the GOP look at each other and be like “hey, maybe time to cut him loose.” What kind of future do they see in this? Utter nihilism.

They're hoping they can prove laws don't matter. The future they want is corporate fascism with the rule of law and democracy utterly destroyed. They do not know how to cling to power in any other way because a sizable majority of Americans want something different.

As with all of Lindsay Graham's public utterances, I hope his responses to the media were to the liking of whoever has a gun pressed to his mother's temple.

Michael Keaton to play Lindsay in the inevitable Trump biopic

good morning!

would it take legally-speaking

This is always been sort of a "how many divisions has the pope" situation. Basically, everyone in the Executive Branch works for the President. Almost certainly, everyone who holds a gun does. Currently, they are not going to exercise force against their boss, even theoretically. As long as that remains the case we need public opinion, and the abstract appeal to abstract concepts like "rule of law."

Those concepts are cherry-pickable in the extreme. The cultural right (which is pretty well-armed) loved them in the Obama era and now? Not so much. Now they see judges as "tyrants in black" and the House majority as illegitimate, so they have no reason to respect rulings coming fro. Either of those sources.

The biggest issue as I understand it is that classified server is super-secret double-probation top-tier classified, so it's not just a matter of dumping it out. The abuse of power in this instance is that there is by all means stuff in there that really probably *should* be there - secret kill lists, etc. - but these turds dropped in stuff that had no place there.

Optics:

The only two Secretary of States in history to be subpoenaed during impeachment inquiries https://t.co/D1YSvy0KwI

— Adam Blickstein (@AdamBlickstein) September 29, 2019

kissinger never recovered iirc

Kissinger looks like he's waiting for a chance to belch after his meal of a kindergarten-aged child an hour earlier.

Kissinger looks like he is contorting himself to hide in a giant vase that only he can see, and Pompeo looks like he is pretending he can't find him.

Anyway, per what reasonable people have pointed out:

Anyway, the “what if we fire up their base” conversation makes sense in a *midterm,* when both parties’ vote tends to decline; anything that wakes up the other team is bad.

In a presidential year, the other team is turning out anyway.

— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) September 29, 2019

The president has retweeted a bot that takes his tweets and retweets and rewrites them to be about sharks pic.twitter.com/jiobGi0Jem

— Josh Billinson (@jbillinson) September 29, 2019

i wonder how much historians will point to this presidency as the beginning of the end of american hegemony