US Politics, October 2019 — I guess statement you could say with thread. I made a thread. The thread was PERFECT.

splinter had its issues, but i'm not going to cheer for the continual shrinking of the internet

lol, that video is the exact caricature of what godfearing midwesterners fear about NYC

come on now... aside from the skyscrapers, everything in that video is available on tap in the heartland... the giant sport utility vehicles, supercilious politicians, and full-throated invective from the hoi polloi

not so much shrinking as just consolidating into one monolithic boring cube

I don’t think any of thosw kinja sites are going to survive to be honest. Maybe like the Onion.

Hope I’m wrong. I don’t read Jezebel or Deadspin but they seem like significant parts of the Internet.

I've linked to two Splinter stories in my storied career.

Don’t let a private equity company shut down your blog alfred

I've linked to two Splinter stories in my storied career.

That's two more than I've ever finished reading.

How do his fans read this stuff and not think just a little bit that he might be a whiny bitch?

IMPORTANT: Fruman and Parnas' lawyer (former Trump lawyer John Dowd) just laid out all of their connections to Trump world (in his famous Comic Sans letter).

It's not just Giuliani but DiGenova, Toensing -- and they even helped with Trump-related legal work. >>> pic.twitter.com/ITnTGvrhHu

— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) October 10, 2019

Ah, wait, I see it was paraphrased upthread. Still, fun to read the original text as it were.

This is new, on the other hand.

NEW: Giuliani associates Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who were just arrested on campaign finance violations, have been subpoenaed by House Democrats after they refused to comply with a request for voluntary cooperation: https://t.co/vpE8TJXscf

Story: https://t.co/7qH8oE8q0s pic.twitter.com/nE8zPZMkPW

— Zoe Tillman (@ZoeTillman) October 10, 2019

lol, that video is the exact caricature of what godfearing midwesterners fear about NYC

per the talk upthread about what to do now that the white house is flatly refusing to cooperate with impeachment, a nyt op-ed from this morning provides some options:

So what should the House do instead? Let me suggest two ways that it can play some constitutional hardball of its own, matching the White House’s aggressive tactics.

Refusal to comply with a duly authorized subpoena from Congress constitutes contempt of Congress. Contempt of Congress is a crime, and there is a mechanism for referring such cases to federal prosecutors. The problem, of course, is that federal prosecutors answer to the attorney general and, through him, to the White House, and they refuse to prosecute contempts committed by executive officials. In recent decades, congressional houses have sought a court order requiring executive officials to comply with their subpoenas, but that has all the problems described above.

The House should instead put back on the table the option of using its sergeant-at-arms to arrest contemnors — as the person in violation of the order is called — especially when an individual, like Rudy Giuliani, is not an executive branch official. Neither house of Congress has arrested anyone since 1935, but it was not uncommon before that point (and was blessed by the Supreme Court in 1927). Indeed, on at least two occasions, the second in 1916, a house of Congress had its sergeant arrest an executive branch official. (In that case, the Supreme Court eventually ruled against the House, not because it did not have the power to arrest for contempt, but rather because the offense — writing a nasty public letter to a House subcommittee — could not properly be understood as contempt of Congress.)

Facilities in the Capitol or one of the House office buildings can be made into a makeshift holding cell if necessary. Of course, arrestees will ask the courts to set them free, but the case should be relatively open-and-shut against them: They will have committed a contempt in refusing to turn over subpoenaed materials, and the House has the power to hold contemnors. Moreover, time would work in the House’s favor here: The unpleasantness of being in custody while the issue was being litigated might make some contemnors decide to cooperate.

The House arresting someone would be explosive and clearly should not be undertaken lightly. But the very explosiveness of it would be a way for the House to signal the seriousness of White House obstructionism to the public. Moreover, having arrest as an option of last resort might also make less extreme options more palatable.

One of those less extreme options would be using the power of the purse. The government is currently funded through Nov. 21. There is nothing stopping the House from putting a provision in the next funding bill that zeros out funding for the White House Counsel’s Office. House leadership could announce that, so long as the counsel’s office is producing bad legal argumentation designed for no purpose other than protecting the president from constitutional checks, the American people should not have to pay for it.

Of course, the Senate could try to strip that rider, or President Trump could veto the bill, but if the House held firm, their choice would be to mollify the House by turning over subpoenaed information, accept the defunding of the counsel’s office, or accept the partial government shutdown that would come with failure to pass the appropriations bill.

In the end, whether the House wins that fight, like whether it wins a fight over arresting a contemnor, would be a function of which side best convinces the public. But President Trump is deeply unpopular, and the public supports impeachment. If necessary, the House should be willing to have these fights.

these guys are all gonna lie in front of a judge without question

i don't know, a bunch of corrupt selfish dudes can be made to turn against one another

Republicans In Cages? I like it!

i suggest mitch mcconnell's office as a makeshift holding cell

i want to live to see a world in which the central park five collectively take out a full page ad in the NYT calling for the death penalty for dear leader

^yes. do it in the post, too and i'll send 173 USD to the GoFundMe

(NY Post)

one monolithic boring cube

You will be assimilated. Resistance is feudal, um, futile.

splinter had its issues, but i'm not going to cheer for the continual shrinking of the internet

― It is my great honor to post on this messageboard! (Karl Malone), Thursday, October 10, 2019 11:17 AM (forty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

No, and especially not when it's another casualty of G/O Media, which has ineptly run the former Gawker Media properties. Maybe G/O editorial director Paul Maidment is right and it was purely a "business decision," but when he and CEO Jim Spanfeller have longed to rid Deadspin of its own political commentary, one wonders.

timely repost of this hamilton nolan article from 2018, today: https://splinternews.com/the-working-persons-guide-to-the-industry-that-might-ki-1824148959

this is also relevant


https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/the-adults-in-the-room-1837487584

Jim Spanfeller, the CEO of this company, meanwhile, is best known for growing Forbes.com in the mid-2000s, around the time this website was born. While he was not responsible for the “contributor network” that made Forbes a journalistic laughingstock, he set the stage by demanding increased output at all costs (up to 5,000 stories a day by the end of his tenure). The clickbait and SEO plays and sleazy monetization schemes rejected by Gawker Media were the entire point. Content mills The Active Times and The Daily Meal, which Spanfeller launched and later sold to the Tribune Company at a trivial price, ran the same playbook, and many of his ideas for growing revenue at this company (implementing slideshows to juice pageviews, clogging story pages with ever-more programmatic ads at the expense of user experience) were taken straight from that era—more than a decade ago, or approximately an eon in internet time. The only idealistic belief at Gawker Media was that a journalistic enterprise could make money without scamming people; the guiding principle at Forbes and sites of its ilk was that scams are good as long as they make money.

Who knew?

US Attorney just now said Parnas and Fruman had one way international tickets.

— Shimon Prokupecz (@ShimonPro) October 10, 2019

AKA perfect tickets.

scams are good as long as they make money

this is Randian free market ideology in a nutshell

it seemed like a good time for some soul searching abroad, and you can't truly do that with a roundtrip ticket

if the president does it, it's not illegal if it makes money, it's not a scam

lol why wouldn't they just buy roundtrip tickets and...not use them

i'm shocked that "adults in the room" article is still up.

Even if they were round trip, though, it’s still a slightly suspicious move to be leaving the country the day before you’ve been asked to testify to Congress

Were they flying to Argentina? That would have been perfect.

Vienna

lots of rumors flying around that they were tipped off after Barr met with SDNY yesterday

Imagine the psychic shock of being right on the cusp of escaping culpability in your misdeeds forever only to wind up in jail instead. Imagine how the tableau of sipping pina coladas on some remote island would continue to linger and taunt as you're sitting on a thin mattress staring through those unforgiving bars. Just imagine how much dirt you'd be willing to spill for just the slightest chance that you might someday get to do a little boogie boarding in that warm tropical surf.

pardons for all, let's not kid ourselves

Tell that to Manafort.

Imagine the psychic shock of being right on the cusp of escaping culpability in your misdeeds forever only to wind up in jail instead. Imagine how the tableau of sipping pina coladas on some remote island would continue to linger and taunt as you're sitting on a thin mattress staring through those unforgiving bars. Just imagine how much dirt you'd be willing to spill for just the slightest chance that you might someday get to do a little boogie boarding in that warm tropical surf.

*read in the voice of Walter Cronkite*

as you're sitting on a thin mattress staring through those unforgiving bars

Yeah much as it would gladden my heart to think so, I doubt these guys will be Shawshankin' it for long.

lol

xpost

I guess the timeline is this?

SDNY told Barr yesterday that they going to arrest these guys.

Rudy had lunch with the guys yesterday.

They buy tickets to Vienna and are arrested at airport yesterday evening.

Just wait a couple hours, I'm sure Rudy will fill in any of the details you might have missed.

Giuliani: 'Of course I told them to flee the country. I bought them the tickets myself.'
Todd: '...I can't believe you're admitting to aiding and abetting these...'
Giuliani: 'I never said that. I said that I told them to turn themselves into the police. Get your ears checked, Chuck!'

that's not at all how it happened, that is an outrageous lie, and that is exactly how it happened and anyone would do the same in those circumstances, you fake media liars

...and what about Hillary's emails

I wonder if OJ ever thought to ask the Ukrainian president if he knew the whereabouts of the real killer.

Geraldo is en route to Kyiv, hot on the trail of Al Capone's vault

"(If) I Did It!" by Rudy Giuliani