US Politics, November 2019: These people are truly sick.

https://i.imgur.com/vE7NrWq.jpg

https://www.instagram.com/p/B5HemK_H2f9/?utm_source=ig_embed

for party of Law and Order they sure do tolerate (or even encourage) a great deal of corruption & other "rule bending" from their ppl, while the freewheeling godless Dems don't to anywhere near the same degree

― A True White Kid that can Jump (Granny Dainger), Thursday, November 21, 2019 11:58 AM (ten hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time."

Wilhoit.

He would be center-left in Denmark.

i feel relieved that justice will finally be served

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/11/lindsey-graham-biden-investigation-senate-impeachment

Backtracking a bit because I'm curious: the standard Republican talking point against this is that it was legitimate to investigate the Bidens over this, and that there is evidence of Ukraine meddling in the election in some way. So I tracked down the article that spurred this, by Vogel in Politico. Has this all been widely debunked? It seems to have but Vogel stands by his reporting.

The Biden thing and the alleged Ukrainian interference thing are pretty much completely unconnected afaict.

The latter hasn’t been debunked, as such, but the importance / significance has been questioned.

The Ukrainian interference Trump spoke about was the 'server' thing, which is completely debunked. And insane. It seems beyond doubt that someone in Ukraine spoke to someone about what a piece of shit Manafort and Trump is, no?

I know this is duh obvious but the thing is, IT DOESN'T MATTER.

If the Bidens were up to no good, if Ukraine interfered, that's a matter for our own DOJ.

Even cracking the door to this as part of the converstaion is a terrible mistake.

this slate piece explains ukrainian "interference" really really well, for the curious

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/11/impeachment-hearings-underscored-cost-of-trumps-narcissism.html

The server thing was bizarre but not what Vogel was talking about,

There are main two elements to the broader allegations - that the Ukrainian government was giving information to Andrea Chalupa when she was working as a consultant for the DNC and that the Ukrainian security services conducted a campaign against members of Trump’s staff.

The problem with Chalupa, from both sides, is that she’s, to put it mildly, an unreliable narrator. She massively hyped up the nature of relationship with her sources, the importance of the information she allegedly received, her relationship with the DNC, etc, in a way that has ended up backfiring. She’s an odd character - not far off being another Louise Mensch conspiracy nut. There isn’t really evidence that she was in a position of any authority or any way to verify she was asked by someone at the DNC who was to tap up the embassy,

The other part is pretty murky. Manafort’s emails and phone logs were hacked and released by someone. The ledger of alleged payments made to him appeared more or less out of nowhere and has never been used as evidence in any criminal trials in Ukraine, despite the fact that it contains similar alleged payments to scores of other people. It seems plausible the security services put both out there.

What that doesn’t do, however, is prove anyone from the DNC asked them to or encouraged it.

*two main elements* I am typing on a train, gah.

This is terrible but I got to "Andrea Chalupa" and stopped reading because I now really want Taco Bell

Yes, they’ve just launched in the U.K. and there are big adverts everywhere saying IT’S CHALUPA TIME. It’s very distracting.

my Trump fanfic ships her and Matthew Calamari

was very sad that my twitter post @tacobell, devin nunes, devin nunes' cow, and alexandra chalupa asking that Nunes step down and become a spokesperson for Taco Bell got no traction.

Thanks ShariVari for the decent synopsis; yes I understand the crowdstrike bullshit very well since I work with a competitor of theirs and know exactly what their engagement was and how that works. I was uncertain about the Chalupa and Manafort shit. also it seems...somewhat irrelevant.

That Slate piece is excellent, and seems so common sense for anyone who has any.

The Ukrainian "interference," as I understand it, is mostly that they, like everyone, expected Clinton to win, so planned on that; as Hill indicted, if Trump insisted on holding a grudge against everyone that was anti-Trump, there wouldn't be any countries left to work with. But Russia, as Hill stressed yesterday, works as a chaos agent, and would have worked against any leading US candidate to foment confusion and conflict. The way I heard Russia described yesterday was as a Super PAC of interference, distributing money and support to a bunch of secondary players. (Hill, fwiw, said she thinks Christopher Steele got played.)

The server conspiracy stuff, on the other hand, is total bullshit.

And, btw, that's not to say that Trump Inc. didn't try for Russian help, or that Russia didn't offer it. They were just too inept to take advantage of it, leading to mess investigated by the Mueller Report. The reason the Ukrainian stuff is a bigger deal is that Trump Inc. can't claim ignorance or innocence. It was a concerted effort to fuck things up not as a DIY pre-election Trump Tower meeting snafu but wrapped up directly with US policy through the official power channels.

We used to have a fat cat named Tallulah that my sister in law called Chalupa.

the most infuriating thing about these hearings and all the other ones is the Republicans' assumption that it's somehow a sign of liberal bias to think that Trump is a giant dumbass

This is an interesting tidbit regarding what may happen during a Senate trial. I don't know how likely it really is, but this plus some of the rumors I'm seeing that Trump wants a full blown trial makes me think the Senate phase may be more consequential than it initially appeared.

This changed my take of what a Senate trial will look like. Dramatically. https://t.co/gkrRtT8CGp via @TPM

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) November 22, 2019

already know exactly how the trial is gonna go

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

also it seems...somewhat irrelevant.

It’s not particularly relevant to whether Trump committed a crime, should be impeached, is a dumbass, etc. If you’re going to take a consistent line on whether state interference is a big deal, it’s probably not great but Trump and Poroshenko pretty much kissed and made up afterwards.

In his capacity as a defence lawyer (lol) Giuliani is probably within his rights to advance it as a grand conspiracy against Trump, in the same way people advance theories of a grand conspiracy against Weinstein, etc.

xpost If all this shit comes down to Roberts calling balls and strikes, then expect another public "for the good of the country" dump akin to the 2000 election.

already know exactly how the trial is gonna go

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

― frogbs, Friday, November 22, 2019 8:45 AM (thirteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

the? china? connection???

my question about that TPM article is, would House subpoenas of Bolton, Mulvaney, Giuliani and Pompeo have any weight in the Senate trial? Would Roberts have to rule on them? Because I don’t see how the republican-controlled Senate itself would have any interest in voting to compel their attendance

Peggy Noonan came off the sauce long enough to bang this out:

What became obvious in the hearings was the sober testimony from respectable diplomats—not disgruntled staffers with nutty memoirs but people of stature who don’t ordinarily talk—about how the administration operates. It became clear in a new and public way that pretty much everyone around the president has been forced for three years to work around his poor judgment and unpredictability in order to do their jobs. He no doubt knows this and no doubt doesn’t care. Because he’s the boss, they’ll do it his way.

But we saw how damaging this is, how ultimately destructive, not only to coherence and respectability but to the president himself.

After Thursday’s hearings I felt some free-floating sympathy for high Trump appointees who joined early. You can say they knew what they signed up for, but it’s human to have hope, and they surely had it when they came aboard. They were no doubt ambitious—they wanted a big job—but they probably wanted to do good, too. They were optimistic—“How bad can it be?” And there would have been vanity—“I can handle him.” But they couldn’t. He not only doesn’t know where the line is; he has never wanted to know, so he can cross it with impunity, without consciousness of a bad act or one that might put him in danger. They were no match for his unpredictability and resentments, which at any moment could undo anything.

As to impeachment itself, the case has been so clearly made you wonder what exactly the Senate will be left doing. How will they hold a lengthy trial with a case this clear? Who exactly will be the president’s witnesses, those who’d testify he didn’t do what he appears to have done, and would never do it?

we already know exactly how the trial is gonna go

https://i.imgur.com/TeHNHnr.gif

xpost How I read it is that the House can issue those subpoenas, and Roberts can rule on their legality - the fast version of what would happen if they were issue now and slowly made their way to the SC - but a Senate majority could in theory vote *against*/override any ruling by Roberts. Is that right?

I don't even know if Roberts has any power except to "preside" and pick a nice gown based on Gilbert and Sullivan like his old boss Rehnquist did.

You can say they knew what they signed up for, but it’s human to have hope

Hope for Trump to actually be a decent president? LOOOOOOOL, they're craven opportunists, every one of them.

xxp that was my reading of it too

After Thursday’s hearings I felt some free-floating sympathy for high Trump appointees who joined early. You can say they knew what they signed up for, but it’s human to have hope, and they surely had it when they came aboard. They were no doubt ambitious—they wanted a big job—but they probably wanted to do good, too.

oh yeah, in early 2017, Scott Pruitt looked at himself in the mirror, adjusted his tie one more time, slipped on his suit coat, and "i want to do good. i am leading the charge for the protection of the environment and human health." then he stepped outside and ran into betsy devos, who made was similarly proud about how she was going to improve education for low-income students. then they saw ben carson, earnestly asking a stranger on the street if he knew what HUD was and where this HUD might be, because he knew he worked there now and he wanted to do good there. then they all stepped into the hired car together and laughed demonically for half an hour while chugging blood

i wish i had noonan's sense of wonder. this impeachment case is clear! what's left for the senate to do? laaaaaah deee daaaaah! OH, what could this be? is this a pigeon? is it the golden hour again? i can't stop dreaming of ronald reagan's chiseled body!

Hope for Trump to actually be a decent president?

Hope that because he's a fool with a short attention span they could do their jobs without interference. I don't think they were crazy to hope this. For plenty of people in the federal government, it's true.

Noonan wrote Reagan's honeyed words, so there's nothing, not even Popov vodka, that can't persuade her to see the promise of a male Republican

xp while for people like Pruitt and DeVos, it was more "because he's a fool with a short attention span I can easily use him to accomplish my goal of crushing Americans I don't approve of," which in DeVos's case has basically been true and in Pruitt's case would be true if he weren't, even by these guys' standards, a colossal idiot and fuckup.

pruitt got what he wanted, and his successor is carrying out his vision without the public controversy

I'd say as a general thing that there's a charitable read on Noonan's perspective wherein people are rarely the villains of their own stories and they often unaccountably believe they're doing the right thing even when their actions demonstrably harm others. But my own less charitable perspective is that the Trump administration is and has been disproportionately filled with bad actors who would gleefully self-identify as such if asked. Demons draped in flesh, if you will.

don just can't quit vlad :(

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/11/trump-russian-conspiracy-theory-fox-friends-fiona-hill-crowdstrike-ukraine.html

When he says “the server” does he mean the “DNC” server? I don’t understand this theory. Why would it physically be in Ukraine?

high Trump appointees

personally I always smoke a righteous doob before accepting a position of public trust

They physically took hold of the server after they hacked it? Why not just take it in the first place?

The same reason why Clinton literally had to dip her emails in acid. Clearly the Ukrainians neglected to acid wash their server.

I don’t understand how this is convincing MAGA country when it’s super half baked

MAGA country doesn't/can't read. Like the GOPers who didn't read the transcripts etc. Ignorance is bliss. It's like the fight scene in "They Live."

MAGA country already believes this, they don't need convincing

Why even make a theory then?