US Politics, February 2020. They want to kill your cows.

I'll hop right on murdering and deporting people.

There are currently 12 states trying to make it illegal for medical professionals to provide affirming care to trans teens, and even more states fighting to keep LGBT people unprotected by anti-discrimination law, and a Supreme Court that is in all likelihood about to rule that gender identity and sexual orientation are explicitly not protected by Title VII. And no conceivable Congress for the foreseeable future is going to do anything about that. So I'll keep my own counsel about what analogies are and aren't apt.

And, not for nothing, but despite being Jewish you are a cishet white man and can be completely invisible.

and there is a point in any fight where flight is the only safe manner to survive. i have no issue with that.

I think it's easy to assert but difficult to know with certainty how one will/won't/might respond if shit were to get truly dire. I would guess, knowing both my cellular loathing of injustice and general haplessness wrt doing anything real about it, I would almost certainly be the bullet-riddled corpse they're talking about when they ask 'okay, anyone else wanna be a hero?'. But who really knows.

xxp I didn't ask you to! I don't know what morally superior mantle you're trying to claim, but go nuts. It has nothing to do with me.

my gf has brazilian and italian citizenship, and i'm not sure how viable either those options are in the face of creeping fascism. and by that i mean i'm literally ignorant, particularly wrt italy.

At least Italian citizenship gives you access to the rest of the EU.

^ah yes very true. and even though she grew up in Brazil and all her family is there, she’d def go to Italy were she inclined to leave the US.

though hey maybe it won’t be up to her if GOP has it’s way

as a non-student of trans rights and a supporter of a group supporting migrating trans persons, i want morally improved conditions of lots of shit, that’s the best claim to morality i’ll venture.

my tendency is to believe that coordinated allies for moral battles are better than uncoordinated flight, though that is sometimes the only answer.

but despite being Jewish you are a cishet white man and can be completely invisible.

if you mean "not go to synagogue where I routinely wonder what I would do if someone burst in to murder us all" ok sure. that invisibility is predicated on essentially erasing a part of myself, which I refuse to do.

but we shouldn't fight, I get you feel threatened and that's totally legit and I want to support you and do what I can to make you and others feel safe, we are in this together.

xps

she’d def go to Italy were she inclined to leave the US.

no fascists racist homo/transphobes in Italy lol

i’m am with you both, peace. privilege does (mis)inform me as it does many.

(FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT)

you're right, Shakey, that was a shitty take by me. I have friends who attend Tree of Life in Pittsburgh and wasn't really thinking. My apologies.

no worries, hugs all around

/she’d def go to Italy were she inclined to leave the US./

no fascists racist homo/transphobes in Italy lol

;and I suspect that would stand even if Bolsanaro wasn’t in power)

There's nowhere else either of us could claim citizenship, but we've discussed trying to emigrate to the Netherlands as it seems to be very trans-friendly even compared to other EU countries.

Everyone with the capacity for caring about the well-being of people they've never met is hurting right now, and that's gonna manifest in a variety of ways (not all of them pleasant), so it always does my heart good to see the general tendency toward comity 'round these parts. Even when nothing else is doing the trick, that gives me hope that we can push through this shit.

Voting Republican to be made illegal

profiles in courage

Sen. Murkowski on the Stone sentencing revision: "I don't like this chain of events ... The President weighs in, all of a sudden, Justice comes back and says change the deal. I think most people in America would look at that and say hmm, that just doesn't look right."

— Jeremy Herb (@jeremyherb) February 12, 2020

"tut tut"

it might look bad, it might even be blatantly illegal, but is it impeachable? impossible to say

HMMMMMMMMMM

The Constitution is very clear about the Senate's role in such matters, and fortunately all that we are called upon to do is judge how concerning this type of behavior is. And let me be absolutely clear, I am deeply concerned.

Surely there's nobody that still thinks this election will be fair or that anyone other than Trump could possibly win. The outcome has already been determined.

Please scroll back 24 hours for responses to your post so that we don't all have to relive the past 24 hours.

i am unsurprised by the username attached to that post

The outcome has already been determined.

FP'd

The outcome has already been determined.

https://i.imgur.com/0OXKK25.jpg

Barr to testify before House Judiciary on March 31, Nadler says. https://t.co/JxAPDCu1GM

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) February 12, 2020

He won’t show up for that

Just curious, how will they transcribe said testimony when Barr just sits in a chair doing this for sixty minutes

https://ak7.picdn.net/shutterstock/videos/4224037/thumb/11.jpg

Chairman Nadler: First, the chair would like to thank the distinguished Attorney General and welcome him to this hearing. Before we proceed, do you have you any statement you would like to read into the record?

Barr: (The witness remained silent, extending the middle fingers of both hands aloft in the direction of the Chairman.)

mar 31 seems...remote

The Founders conceived of a President running amok and legislated for that. They did not conceive of people below him and to either side not giving a damn.

— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) February 11, 2020

they also conceived that we would have used our mechanism for removal successfully at least one by now.

*once

but they wrote the provisions shittily so

Then for the rest of eternity they will try to prosecute any Dem prez as soon as they're out of office on some er trumped up charges.

a) big fucking whoop

b) if the expectation of later scrutiny keeps future presidents from criming relentlessly in office, yay

c) it's impossible to predict what the GOP will even be or stand for once they're not in inexplicable self-created thrall to a crazed void of narcissism and outwardly-directed self-hatred. can they return to a fake image of being moderate or sensible after this? they're certainly unlikely to find a replacement figurehead of such reprehensibility that he or she can hit the pavlovian stimulus for Trump's base. especially one who's had the advantage of the television advertising a completely bullshit version of them for 30 years. the two-party system is a tumour, and hollowing themselves out for Trump might lead to a collapse afterward. (if youth support for the likes of Bernie Sanders and AOC leads to the evisceration of the existing DNC, double bonus.)

but they wrote the provisions shittily so

the provisions didn't anticipate mass political parties, so

The Founders conceived of a President running amok and legislated for that. They did not conceive of people below him and to either side not giving a damn.
— Richard M. Nixon

Anyone else notice that this tweet from this source seems a bit cockeyed?

they wrote the provisions shittily

governance eventually comes down to people making decisions. when the governing people are shitty, so is the governance. I'm not sure what system they could have devised that would have worked any better, given the people currently operating the system.

let's review what the constitution says.

"The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors. Unless, that is, a majority of the most powerful 100 people in the country want to keep getting elected. In that case, no Impeachment shall be possible, and you may proceed directly to Article III."

Aimless, presumably RMN did not consider his actions "amok"

the two-party system is a tumour, and hollowing themselves out for Trump might lead to a collapse afterward.

GOP been changing from Buckley type dweebs to Deplorable meatheads over last few decades. There will be a party that caters to that ~44% of the country that's ruled by fear and paranoia, the Dunning-Kruger types, the simpletons who want simple solutions to complex problems, etc.

will be a party that caters to that in foreseeable future

feel like a broken record but the problem doesn't stem from Trump or from GOP, but from the millions of fuckers who vote them into office

One side has decided to win by breaking the game, and will use any illegal or irregular method (propaganda, abuse of power, stacking courts, destroying the administrative state, voter caging and purging) to get that done.

The other side wants to both play the game and win the game, by election. I’m not sure it’s possible.

As Bitecofer says, Republicans know they are playing “for keeps.” This is correct.

Who here thinks the house should impeach the MF again? I mean, he clearly didn't learn any lessons and is back to committing crimes. I get that it's basically pointless (the Senate seems hell-bent on endless Trump fellatio), but the alternative ("wait until November") seems irresponsible.

Yeah, impeach him every time he crimes imo. It's not like any other major governing can get done by Congress this year.

that ~44% of the country that's ruled by fear and paranoia, the Dunning-Kruger types, the simpletons who want simple solutions to complex problems, etc

Like I kinda said in that post, Trump has been a case not just of handing the bell to the dogs, but effectively transforming the broadcast news media into a PA system for the bell, and playing MAX/MSP loops of the bell all day.

No other individual is going to be able to replace that blast of hate/fear as effectively. It's very likely that micro-Trumps will do well in deep Republican constituencies, but it's also likely that this will decrease party unity. Even a fraction of Trump's self-interest, let alone his narcissism, will make it very hard for these types to effectively caucus. I'd expect to see a lot of these types succeeding as independents after Trump: his rally-attending-type base want the reckless buffoon figure, they don't want the nonentities subsuming themselves to him.