Impeach Trump Y/N

for sure, NPR is a continual let down of "evenhanded" coverage these days, it's almost a performance piece

the trump/fruman/parmas "get rid of her" tape is now public

whereas the "grab her pussy" tape has been public for over three years now.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emmaloop/trump-tape-yovanovitch-take-her-out-parnas-fruman-giuliani

trying to stay positive about things, where i can, so i'll note that this is very good timing. this is directly relevant to the impeachment proceedings, it is now public, and to not admit it as evidence in the "trial" is indefensible. yes, i know most of the GOP will vote to keep it out of the trial anyway. but it makes that decision more painful for them, at worst, and there's a chance that it could split off a few GOP votes for admitting evidence/witnesses

it's also kind of fascinating to have an hour long recording of trump candidly sharing his views with crooks, in a Nixon tapes kind of way

lots of golf talk, how surprising

these nimrods guffawing at every shit-for-brains utterance

It’s also mildly instructive that Parnas apparently is not bright enough to voice-record, so just used his camera app to make a video, with the phone face down on the table

Not that it makes a difference at all but I think it’s Fruman

well i'll tell you what, the next media session with the press secretary is going to be pretty intense, i don't...oh wait

^Jan 2021

xp more astounding yet that whoever is in charge of such things is perfectly cool w ppl having phones in the room at all much less on the table

when Rudy Giuliani is your cybersecurity czar

Republican Sen. Mike Braun said he hopes the impeachment process will “be instructive” for President Donald Trump’s conduct if he’s acquittedhttps://t.co/KJds56rkoe

— POLITICO (@politico) January 26, 2020

*bloodcurdling scream*

it will instruct him for damn sure, that the worst a Republic Senator will ever do is frown at him briefly, no matter who he shoots on Fifth Avenue.

Trump Tied Ukraine Aid to Inquiries He Sought, Bolton Book Says

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/26/us/politics/trump-bolton-book-ukraine.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

trump never even met bolton. i mean, maybe at a fundraiser or something, but

bolton is a democrat!

trump is not a racist!

At another point, Mr. Trump, while indulging a familiar lament — that other countries are not trading fairly with the United States — unleashed a tirade against the European Union.

“The European Union is a group of countries that got together to screw the United States,” Mr. Trump told his guests. “It’s as simple as that.”

Mr. Trump continued: “And frankly, they’re probably worse than China in a sense, just smaller. They’re worse than China in the sense of barriers.”

“But the European Union is really bad,” he said. “You know it doesn’t sound like it. You know, the European Union, we’re all sort of from there, right? But the European Union is brutal. But we’re changing that rapidly, too. They can’t even believe it.”

“The European Union is a group of countries that got together to screw the United States"

Uh, the United States more or less imposed the European Steel and Coal Community, the original precursor to the EU, on Europe in 1951 during the post WWII era. The European Common Market, created by the Treaty of Paris in 1959, was vigorously applauded by the USA as in complete accord with US interests during the Cold War. When the EU was formed, the USA was ecstatic to see its long-held foreign policy goal of a united Europe coming so much closer to fruition.

Tangentially as a crossword addict I was intrigued when the ECU (an actual historical French monetary unit) was floated as an EU standard.

But I was frkn _ecstatic_ at the idea of the EMU (European Monetary Unit), purely because I loved the mental image of the European version of Fort Knox: millions of emus strutting cluckingly about, waiting to be employed to do their part in a trade-rich transnational economy.

... are we the baddies?

Is there a bombshell counter anywhere online? https://t.co/OuJzRDWUmF

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 27, 2020

lol Ken Starr is so horrible at this!

Haha, I guess his non-yelliness is welcome, but I feel like I'm being sermonized by an elderly pastor.

the Jonathan Edwards of a new generation

something tells me that trump and every single GOP senator are finding starr incredibly inspiring and insightful, leading them to even more new perspectives on how trump has done nothing wrong

Tuning in to the Democrats last week, I must confess it felt like listening to an evangelical radio station. I can only assume the Republicans sound the same and then some.

From what I gather so far the defense is
1 impeachment is mean
2 everybody agreed on Nixon, not so here

It's kind of crazy how many people on Trump's team have been involved in covering up for sexual predators. Starr, Dersh, Jim Jordan ...

makes sense - how many different things do we experience that involve one person speaking for an hour at a time without commercials, without interruption or interaction by others? it's pretty much impossible in 2020,
because anything that can attract mass attention is monetized. sermons and these impeachment proceedings are one of the few exceptions

xp to "I must confess it felt like listening to an evangelical radio station."

both pastors and ken starr would look better if they put a giant Pennzoil logo running down their armsleeves

also if they were struck by lightning mid-sermon.

BREAKING:

Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) said that he had been reading “Gone with the Wind” when I asked what he thought about the weekend’s Bolton news, but added that it “remains to be seen” whether the Senate should hear from Bolton.

When asked why wouldn’t the Senate want to hear from a firsthand witness, Roberts conceded that “that’s a good question.”

Has anyone thought to just...ask McConnell why he wouldn't allow witnesses? I'll bet it's a thing he just hasn't really thought much about and if you asked him he would just get real pensive with like a faraway look as the notion finally sank in for the first time. 'Huh...why wouldn't we allow witnesses?'

update: 50% achieved, 2 targets remain

Democrats, who control 47 votes, need the support of four Republicans to effectively commandeer the trial and force the Senate to consider calling witnesses. But of the four Republicans who have suggested they are open to doing so, only two — Susan Collins of Maine and Mitt Romney of Utah — said on Monday that the Bolton report persuaded them that witnesses were needed.

A third, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, said he was “curious,” but was otherwise noncommittal. The fourth, Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, was similarly vague.

of course, you gotta watch out for Manchin, who may need to vote with republicans now so that he can have the advantage in his re-election in 2024, so that perhaps in the future he can be there to vote with democrats during important votes

It's all just so nakedly debased. Like a detective showing up to work with a shiny new lunchbox and saying, nah, we don't need to investigate that lunchbox warehouse heist, it'll work itself out. I'm talking one of those lunchboxes with the full-size canteen and everything.

update: 50% achieved, 2 targets remain

2 likely not possible because no one wants to be 51. it will be more than 51 or fail.

operation "two birds with one stone"

we're gonna need a miracle

It's a relief to finally see the NYT run "GOP in Disarray" headline.

these op-ed writers in the NYT seem to believe there's a better way:

Yet Republican members of the Senate have signaled that they intend to uphold Mr. Trump’s unprecedented decision to block all of this material.

But it turns out they don’t get to make that choice — Chief Justice John Roberts does. This isn’t a matter of Democrats needing four “moderate” Republicans to vote for subpoenas and witnesses, as the Trump lawyers have been claiming. Rather, the impeachment rules, like all trial systems, put a large thumb on the scale of issuing subpoenas and place that power within the authority of the judge, in this case the chief justice.

Most critically, it would take a two-thirds vote — not a majority — of the Senate to overrule that. This week, Democrats can and should ask the chief justice to issue subpoenas on his authority so that key witnesses of relevance like John Bolton and Mick Mulvaney appear in the Senate, and the Senate should subpoena all relevant documents as well.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/27/opinion/john-roberts-impeachment-witnesses.html

trump lawyer finally getting down to the burisma/hunter biden details now

The Biden/Burisma thing is just so perplexing. Even if everything the Trump people have intimated is true, so what? How does that exonerate Trump? What does that have to do with Trump? Have they ever even given a shitty reason for investigating Biden? It's all so Lionel Hutz. "Hunter Biden got a job at Burisma. Burisma! Ergo, we kept hundreds of millions of dollars from Ukraine because they didn't investigate him. I rest my case."

It's not so perplexing when you consider they don't have to defend Trump, just provide enough cover for the Senate to acquit without too much damage. Muddying the waters and both sidesing it may be their best option.

Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.), an influential conservative in the Senate, has spoken with several colleagues in recent days about possibly summoning just two witnesses to President Trump’s impeachment trial, with one called by Republicans and one by Democrats, according to three Republican officials.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/toomey-proposes-a-one-for-one-witness-deal-in-trump-impeachment-after-bolton-revelations/2020/01/27/ec405d5c-414b-11ea-aa6a-083d01b3ed18_story.html

i dare the republicans to call rudy

Is Collins still able to pull that little stunt? I thought the way she always caved on every bluff kind of undermined her credibility.

Stuck on the Republican show and tell for the last half hour so missed Starr. Did i miss anything?
Sounds from what I'm hearing now as though its just been doubling down on wghat in normal circumstances would be long since debunked irrelevant stories.

Is your America broken?

Even if everything the Trump people have intimated is true, so what?
How does that exonerate Trump?

it doesn't. the president is accused of holding back taxpayer funds to a military ally for a personal political favor. the biden stuff is immaterial to the thing trump is being accused of. they know that.

What does that have to do with Trump?

because most people don't care about the technical, legal scope of the accusations or proceedings. it's more about the perception of right vs wrong, who is corrupt, who is fighting against corruption. trump's lie has already resulted in a bunch of people who think that trump was acting patriotically in ukraine to expose the corruption of the bidens (and by extension, all evil democrats). but the real value in muddying the waters is in all the other people who reduce the whole impeachment down to "it's trump vs biden, and they're both wrong" or "i don't know exactly what's happening, just that it involves biden and trump and biden's son"