The September 2019 US Politics Thread is great Great GREAT GR8

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

at minimum, he always contradicts himself and comes off as agitated and defensive. many times he accidentally ends up incriminating donald trump.

he's gonna lose in 2020, refuse to lose office, and all the Dems are gonna do is write a sternly-worded letter

many times he accidentally ends up incriminating donald trump.

counterpoint: Donald Trump cannot commit crimes

i mean, from the start trumps' comms strategy seemed like the kind of thing that would catastrophically backfire, but you know

that's when we lure him into the Executive Office Building with a p0rn star

tbf people I read did make a big deal when Rudy went to Ukraine months (weeks? days?) ago, just as they did when Trump said there would be nothing wrong with accepting help from a foreign power. The fact that both of those things happened and then they did just what they said they were going to do, *after* the Mueller stuff, which was investigating largely the same sort of shit, and yet here we are, shows how fucked up this all is. And yeah, because the only reason we're here is because Asshole et al. did just what they said they were going to do, and the Dem leadership just watched them do it, just as they're watching them do it again now.

but they're watching them HARDER now

An institutional setup where the president needs 60 senate votes to pass a law, 50 senate votes to confirm an ambassador to Peru, but only 34 senate votes to enjoy impunity for law-breaking seems flawed.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) September 22, 2019

it's fucking stupid

the whole premise of the mueller investigation was that it would have been bad if trump actively sought the assistance of a foreign power to win an election. mueller said the evidence was inconclusive. but now trump has actually, openly and admittedly done just that. and he may have even tried to use military aid as leverage.

yeah but hunter biden tho

yeah so what? who cares ? xp

Something else I was wondering about is all the "acting" positions in this administration. That means none of them have received congressional confirmation - maybe not even vetting? - so does that mean that none of them are beholden to formal rules and regulations that official confirmation imposes?

i'm not sure. it seems like absolute chaos over there. i imagine rules and regulations are being flouted -- or not understood -- constantly

in any case, with this whistelblower thing, i think pelosi will need to at least change the way she talks about impeachment going forward. she can make a political argument if she wants, that it would be bad for democrats and for the country to go through that process just to have it shut down in the senate. but there is no more argument that trump hasn't met the standard of impeachable conduct.

i'm telling pelosi this next time i see her at union pool

a little OT, but if this vaping ban happens, it's going to have a real negative impact on the local economy here in Austin, and surely many other places as well.

A fascinating @andrewvandam piece on the "vape shop" business, showing:
1) It has been the fastest growing retail segment since 2009
2) Nevada and Oklahoma vie for vapingest state
3) All the recent growth is now at risk https://t.co/gJGBz19dWb

— Damian Paletta (@damianpaletta) September 23, 2019

it's be the first time in a long time that pelosi has supported anything union-related amirite xp

funny little tidbit about the timing of trump's call with ukraine where he asked 8 different times for them to investigate hunter biden, a clear political favor, while mysteriously withholding $250M of military at the same time (juts by pure coincidence, of course):

he did all this the day after mueller testified and it was clear that he wouldn't suffer any consequences for all the shit he had already done

it's one important reason to impeach: arguably there should be some sort of demonstration that there are consequences for being a corrupt piece of shit

by the way, in a totally unrelated matter, how is pelosi doing in her efforts to support the "next generation" (actually they need to skip 2-3 generations) of democratic leadership? when it's time to elect the next speaker of the house, after the election that will serve as the check on trump's corruption because pelosi wouldn't do jack shit, will we be looking at pelosi and stoyer again, shaking our heads wondering why there isn't someone under the age of 135 to take the helm?

I'm running for leadership iirc

i wish you good luck, but you're going to have to deal with tim ryan-momentum

that guy is a FREIGHT TRAIN, there is no stopping him

i am sympathetic to pelosi. she feels responsible for holding the party together and for protecting democrats in vulnerable districts.

but also, wtf nancy. it's been time to move toward impeachment for like, several years now

i liked the way that Tom Malinowski (D - NJ) put it in an NPR interview i heard yesterday:

BLOCK: Let me ask you, congressman. There are a number of Democrats and voters who are saying, you know, where is the party's spine in all of this? This is a president who has been, they say, running roughshod over your legislative authority with total impunity. What do you say to that?

MALINOWSKI: I think it is absolutely imperative for the House of Representatives to use every power we have under the law to get to the bottom of this and, if it is true, to hold the president accountable. I do not accept the notion that the only remedy to this kind of lawless behavior is another election. I do not want to live in a country where a president who wins an election can do whatever he or she wants for four years.

BLOCK: And very...

MALINOWSKI: That is not American democracy.

that is all that needs to be said, imo. i hear pelosi talking about laws that need to be written once democrats are back in power to prevent this kind of thing from happening. that's great. go ahead and do that. but corrupt pieces of shit can always come up with NEW ways to be corrupt. the important thing is to hold them accountable at moments when they are openly committing crimes. like RIGHT NOW.

i think it's weird that trump is saying he is willing to release the transcript. maybe he is just fucking with us because other officials are trying to prevent its release. because it sounds like the transcript would be damning

While I understand where everyone is coming from with these calls for impeachment, I think Trump knows that he's overstepped his mandate and if we're just patient I think this can be a real teachable moment, perhaps the moment when he finally matures into the role and becomes president. Let's give him a chance. He just might surprise us! (gives self Colombian necktie)

Graham also wants him to release the transcript, apparently

i think it's weird that trump is saying he is willing to release the transcript. maybe he is just fucking with us because other officials are trying to prevent its release. because it sounds like the transcript would be damning

― treeship., Monday, September 23, 2019 10:53 AM (twelve minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

trump is willing to release the transcript to a "respectable source" and have that person interpret the news. not the same thing as releasing the transcript. this is exactly what nixon tried to do, share the his white house tapes to conservative dem john stennis, who would then give his report on the tapes.

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/trump-eyes-page-nixons-watergate-playbook

The only reasonable response to the President’s effort to force Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 presidential election is to demand the President resign and be prosecuted for criminal abuse of power after he leaves the White House. The President has deserved to be impeached for years. But last week’s revelations have an immediate bearing on the President’s foreign policy team and his top advisors at the White House.

...

The point is that something this egregious happened. It directly involved in the President in explicit demands to a foreign leader. Some or all of the President’s top advisors and certainly his top foreign policy team (National Security Advisor, Secretary of State, et al.) knew this was happening. And they were apparently okay with it. At a minimum, they allowed it to happen and participated in it and made no attempt to stop it. There is only a story because some unknown whistleblower decided to blow the whistle. Just as importantly, a Trump appointee, Inspector General Michael Atkinson, decided to force the matter by informing Congress of the existence of the whistleblower complaint even though administration officials prevented him from disclosing its substance.

This all has pretty dramatic implications beyond this one bad act. Many have assumed or at least left open the possibility that the President’s advisors keep him from participating himself in the most egregious wrongdoing. Maybe he has underlings like Rudy Giuliani or Corey Lewandowski do things outside government channels. Maybe the Saudis just know he’ll be happy if they pump millions of dollars into one of his hotels. We hear that the President often makes outrageous or nonsensical suggestions in staff meetings. But his advisors know to discreetly ignore these directives.

Apparently none of this is the case.

This new episode suggests that the President can personally commit the most egregious wrongdoing, clearly impeachable offenses, in full view of his most senior advisors, and we hear nothing about it. We only know about this because of this whistleblower, who is him or herself now being attacked publicly as a Deep State partisan. Could Trump have made financial demands of Gulf monarchies to help his private businesses? Could he have asked Vladimir Putin for election assistance in 2020? Given that the demand on Ukraine was considered acceptable and is now being affirmatively defended, there’s no reason to think that these actions wouldn’t have been deemed acceptable and within the President’s purview as well.

Why would a demand for election assistance from Ukraine be acceptable and ones of Russia or Saudi Arabia wouldn’t? Why would demands for assistance to his personal businesses be worse than ones for election interference? (To me, they’d be less problematic. The President profiting personally from the presidency is wrong but it’s less damaging to the country than preventing a free and fair election.) Clearly I can hypothesize any kind of wrongdoing and say that it’s now possible and that his team would go along with it. But that’s the point: whatever in extremis guard rails we may have been thinking existed, at least for what the President does in full view of the chiefs officers of state, clearly don’t exist.

We know the President wants to do all manner of bad acts and sees nothing wrong with them. This new development suggests he probably has, that his top advisors know about those bad acts and decided it was okay.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-whole-team-is-in-on-it

i continue to dumbly believe (or in a more positive way, i continue to believe what i am very clearly seeing with my own eyes) that this whole thing is so over the line and egregiously long that pelosi will be FORCED to do something about it, which is apparently what she wants

Leaving aside the fact that nobody on ILX wants him to be the nominee, could Biden realistically continue as a candidate with impeachment hearings into Trump trying to leverage his son's alleged corruption going on? I don't think he's actually done anything wrong but it would be months of press coverage that seems like it would swallow his campaign whole.

he certainly can. and i think there's a decent chance that all of this will BOOST his candidacy (if he responds reasonably, which he probably will not). he is going to have a ton of attention focused on him because of this, and there are a lot of people, particularly democratic voters, who will naturally rally around a person that trump is attacking.

That’s a good question. It’s the kind of case—like the “emails”—that is hard for the public to quickly grasp so it will likely linger over him like a cloud. “People are saying...”