At the risk of stating the obvious, the July 2019 US Politics Thread is horse-sh*t

TBF I'm sure he'd say the same about books and grooming products and psychotherapy and all kinds of other American goods and services he's never had any use for.

If anybody taxes them, it should be their home Country, the USA.

so nobody's told him what "tariffs" actually are, then

They told him but, what, are you gonna not intently watch that squirrel as it scampers around the White House lawn while a bunch of boring nobodies are blah blah blahing in your ear about something stupid and official-sounding?

I’m, this is the president of the United States we’re talking about here. I think we can be very confident that the president of the United States knows what a tariff is, and that even if he didn’t, at least one member of his circle of advisors/family/television hosts would quietly bring him up to speed, especially considering how central they are to his thinking on international trade and the economy.

Excuse me.

Haaaaaahahahahahahahhaahhahahahqggahqqaaaahahahahhaa

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cB-iSmNVCGyO6995qlALPj3KVs6sNKey/view

http://i.imgur.com/9CMc0aq.png

teetotaler who eats expensive steaks burnt to a crisp and doused in ketchup has opinions about wine

well you know what opinions are like, especially his

I'm continually surprised that no one has slipped some hooch into his Mr. Pibb prior to a public appearance.

Days of Wine and Yams

Charles Pierce is nobody's fool, so I wonder about the ripples this would make.

they haven't changed their calculus, they're slow-walking it methodically so that any impeachment efforts line up with the election and are backed by court rulings

DIA analysts say North Korea may have produced 12 nuclear weapons since the first Trump-Kim summit. Wow. https://t.co/tn2mLZSoCU

— Josh Rogin (@joshrogin) July 26, 2019

ha.

Why on earth would they not have done that? I'm sure their ICBM program has been very busy analyzing the data they got from all those test launches and designing and building new prototypes, too.

After all, they never made any specific promises not to do that and the US has done little more than demand that they stop, without offering any concessions in return, but instead making empty threats that could only be fulfilled by causing a completely pointless global catastrophe.

aimless, do you know anything about love? trump has fallen in love. he received a letter, and he sent a letter, and now he and Kim are in love. love isn't about numbers or machiavellian or incentives or motives or politics. love is not "trust and verify". love is just trust. also all that news is fake, NK hasn't made any weapons

i'm voting for trump now btw

Anybody else reading The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un? Despite its snarky title, it's a really well researched and interesting book.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/house-takes-step-towards-impeachment-with-mueller-doc-demand

somwhat buried in a request for docs but: "House Democrats are investigating whether to impeach President Trump, according to a Friday petition for a D.C. federal judge to release grand jury information from the investigation of former special counsel Robert Mueller.

“This Committee is conducting an investigation to determine whether to recommend articles of impeachment,” the filing reads.

House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler (D-NY) sent the petition for a tailored array of information from the Mueller investigation to D.C. chief judge Beryl Howell, who will decide whether to release the protected material to Congress."

"A word you don't hear too much is the word 'England,'" Trump says while touting the benefits of Brexit.

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) July 26, 2019

somwhat buried in a request for docs but: "House Democrats are investigating whether to impeach President Trump, according to a Friday petition for a D.C. federal judge to release grand jury information from the investigation of former special counsel Robert Mueller.

“This Committee is conducting an investigation to determine whether to recommend articles of impeachment,” the filing reads.

House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler (D-NY) sent the petition for a tailored array of information from the Mueller investigation to D.C. chief judge Beryl Howell, who will decide whether to release the protected material to Congress."

― akm, Friday, July 26, 2019 4:34 PM (twenty-one minutes ago)

I posted this upthread but I'm glad TPM ran its own story.

Called it:

/By Thursday morning, the Turning Point spokesman said, the group had identified the staffer responsible for turning Leazott’s design into a trending topic. He called the incident a last-minute oversight, the result of a quick online search to find a second high-resolution photo of the presidential seal to place behind Trump. He said the mistake was “unacceptable.”

“We did let the individual go,” the spokesman said. “I don’t think it was malicious intent but nevertheless.”/

The next two paragraphs:

Leazott doesn’t buy it. He thinks whoever was responsible had to know exactly what they were looking for. He believes the person dug up the image he created and used it intentionally.

“That’s a load of crap,” he said in response to Turning Point’s explanation. “You have to look for this. There’s no way this was an accident is all I’m saying.”

So this SCOTUS ruling just removes the injunction?

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday handed President Donald Trump a victory by letting his administration redirect $2.5 billion in money approved by Congress for the Pentagon to help build his promised wall along the U.S.-Mexico border even though lawmakers refused to provide funding.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-wall/u-s-supreme-court-lets-trump-use-disputed-funds-for-border-wall-idUSKCN1UL2S7

wtf? the framers very clearly reserved to Congress the right to appropriate money for the purposes it instructed the executive branch to administer, so if this was resolved on Constitutional grounds, the SCOTUS screwed the pooch. But, knowing how craven Congress has been about delegating powers to the executive in the past 50 years or more, they probably put some shitty law on the books that authorizes presidents to fuck around with the budget pretty much any way they please.

what prevents trump from declaring another national emergency and taking another 5 billion from the pentagon (which i've heard has a budget of...multiple billions of dollars) in a few months, in perpetuity?

^^^hates freedom

hating on Baltimore now

A good Twitter thread (about the Baltimore tweets, but also about how Trump's melted cheese brain "absorbs" "information"):

Trump's attack on Rep. Cummings is a straight recitation of a Fox segment. "Living conditions at the border are better than most areas in his district, the city lined with abandoned building and trash on the streets."

Left, Fox & Friends, 6:18 a.m.
Right, Trump, 7:14 a.m. pic.twitter.com/w5OniqHgW6

— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) July 27, 2019

I can’t believe you just said that about melted cheese

shameful lactose intolerance itt

so much for the lactose-tolerant left

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/25/danielle-stella-republican-ilhan-omar-charged-felony-qanon-trump

This idiot has crazy eyes

i live for this stuff

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/07/this-appears-to-be-eric-trumps-incredibly-depressing-youtube-playlist.html

haha

My immediate takeaway is that Eric Trump's playlist, however you may feel about its contents, betrays a curiosity far surpassing that of his father.

Do you think Donald ever made a thing with his own hands (be it a restored Camaro or a crudely-rendered half-naked lady), or exhibited any interest in the process of doing so?

Happy Saturday!

i would think a man with such short fingers would steer as far clear of handicrafts as possible

I don't understand why this isn't getting more attention:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/why-were-moving-forward-impeachment/594931/

We have now filed a petition in court to obtain the grand-jury documents referenced in the special counsel’s report. In that filing, we have made clear that we will utilize our Article I powers to obtain the additional underlying evidence, as well as enforce subpoenas for key witness testimony, and broaden our investigations to include conflicts of interest and financial misconduct.

about fucking time

I don't understand why this isn't getting more attention

because our attention circuit-breakers have already flipped

and maggie haberman and chuck todd can only deal with what's directly in front of their faces

i know there's a cliche about losing cronkite, and that it's absolutely a different media era, but will no one of importance just come out and say what's obvious?

We have now filed a petition in court to obtain the grand-jury documents referenced in the special counsel’s report. In that filing, we have made clear that we will utilize our Article I powers to obtain the additional underlying evidence, as well as enforce subpoenas for key witness testimony, and broaden our investigations to include conflicts of interest and financial misconduct.

about fucking time

― Karl Malone, Sunday, July 28, 2019 5:43 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I guess by their estimation they had to wait until Mueller had testified before they took further action.
Some stuff got confirmed in that hearing but probably very little to the mythical man in the street and certainly not to the mediated customer.
But this should already be underway and should have been from the moment that the Dems could use authority to do so.
Would just seem to add to the stereotype of them being utterly wishy washy not to have this ready to run as soon as they could and not put faith in the hero on a white horse that Mueller never saw himself as. & I really wonder what level of obligation he had to feel constrained by the DOJ ruling that came down the night before the testimony. Seeemed like something he could have just ignored as easily but he'd have to have the volition to do so.
& I'm kind of surprised that somebody who had put in the work of the last couple of years wouldn't feel a wish to elucidate his findings. But I'm not that familiar with Mueller beyond the last couple of years. Sounds like that might be contrary to his character unfortunately.

Mueller strikes me as the type who has extremely sharply defined ideas of duty, right and wrong, which ideas include extreme deference to 'duly constituted authority', as it is constituted through laws, courts and legal opinions, or legally defined chains of command. All his actions have been above reproach, according to this strict, legalistic worldview, and absolutely no one's political interests were served by his investigation or report, which is an amazing feat akin to performing surgery on fleas.

Echo chamber coming

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/28/director-of-national-intelligence-dan-coats-is-expected-to-step-down-nyt.html

Tuck Choad more like

great burn by...Al Sharpton??

"If Donald Trump really thinks I'm a con man, he'd nominate me for his cabinet. But he doesn't believe that" - Al Sharpton

— Politics1.com (@Politics1com) July 29, 2019