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babylonsister
babylonsister's Journal
babylonsister's Journal
June 2, 2019
Posted on Sun, Jun 2nd, 2019 by Jason Easley
Adam Schiff Says Trump’s Behavior Will Determine Impeachment
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) said the House isn’t there yet on impeachment, but if Trump keeps stonewalling investigations, they may impeach even if it fails in the Senate.
https://twitter.com/ThisWeekABC/status/1135184018645835781
Schiff raised two important points about impeachment
Impeachment is destined to fail in the Senate. Mitch McConnell is going to do the bare constitutional minimum if the Housse impeaches Trump. There won’t be a big long Senate trial. McConnell has stated that it is his goal to squash the impeachment charges as quickly as possible, so the idea that impeachment will provide a big trial and a spotlight on Trump’s crimes isn’t going to happen.
Secondly, the House may impeach anyway, if Trump continues on the path of his current behavior. The House may have no choice, but to impeach Trump. This path would be best for House Democrats and the country. Trump will make the impeachment decision for Democrats through his own conduct and decisions.
Impeachment is not a winning issue for anyone, and it good to see Democrats putting the country ahead of their own interests, unlike the White House, and doing the work of the American people.
Adam Schiff Says Trump's Behavior Will Determine Impeachment
https://www.politicususa.com/2019/06/02/adam-schiff-says-trumps-behavior-will-determine-impeachment.htmlPosted on Sun, Jun 2nd, 2019 by Jason Easley
Adam Schiff Says Trump’s Behavior Will Determine Impeachment
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) said the House isn’t there yet on impeachment, but if Trump keeps stonewalling investigations, they may impeach even if it fails in the Senate.
Rep. Schiff said on ABC’s This Week, “I think we’re going to do what’s right for the country, and at this point, the Speaker has not reached the conclusion, and I haven’t either, that it’s best for the country to put us through an impeachment proceeding that we know is destined for failure in the Senate. Now, that calculus may change if the president continues to stonewall, if the president continues to demonstrate his unfitness for office, there may be little additional cost to going through that process. It is, in a way, even if unsuccessful in the Senate, the ultimate form of censure in the House, but we’re not there yet, and if it is a close call, close calls go against putting the country through that.”
https://twitter.com/ThisWeekABC/status/1135184018645835781
Schiff raised two important points about impeachment
Impeachment is destined to fail in the Senate. Mitch McConnell is going to do the bare constitutional minimum if the Housse impeaches Trump. There won’t be a big long Senate trial. McConnell has stated that it is his goal to squash the impeachment charges as quickly as possible, so the idea that impeachment will provide a big trial and a spotlight on Trump’s crimes isn’t going to happen.
Secondly, the House may impeach anyway, if Trump continues on the path of his current behavior. The House may have no choice, but to impeach Trump. This path would be best for House Democrats and the country. Trump will make the impeachment decision for Democrats through his own conduct and decisions.
Impeachment is not a winning issue for anyone, and it good to see Democrats putting the country ahead of their own interests, unlike the White House, and doing the work of the American people.
June 2, 2019
The Rude Pundit
Proudly lowering the level of political discourse
5/31/2019
Two Days After Mueller's Statement, the Path Is Clearer Than Ever
There's one thing that the Democratic Party doesn't get. It's something that individual Democrats understand quite well and they reap the rewards from it. And it goes like this: People want to follow fighters. You can add to that: The fight needs to be absolutely clear. That can be policy based, as in Medicare for All or, if you're a fucking lying prickscab, "Mexico will pay for the wall." But it can also be tactical.
See, Democrats can have all the hearings they want. They can have all the subpoena fights the judicial system can handle. A dozen committees and subcommittees can have witnesses and experts testify about the criminality of the Trump administration. But no one is gonna give a single shit about those things except all the assholes who are constantly checking Twitter to see who "destroyed" who in a 3-minute video. (Note: Yeah, I'm one of those assholes, and it has made me seek the comfort of vicodin and vodka, a V&V cocktail that can straight murder you if you're not careful.)
What people can get their heads around is a single, simple concept: impeachment. It crystallizes all that other shit into a concept that is analogous to "fight." As in, "Holy Christ, Democrats are finally gonna stop being such punk-ass bitches and actually fight this dumb orange motherfucker who is wrecking the joint. About fuckin' time."
snip//
See, Democrats don't have to go after Trump for conspiring. They can go after his refusal to acknowledge that Russia did what our own investigations say it did. They can go after his refusal to get behind the efforts to protect the vote. They can go after his disturbing faith in Vladimir Putin. In other words, they can go after Trump for dereliction of duty, for violating his oath of office, and for being such an egomaniacal prick that the legitimacy of his election is more important than the legitimacy of our entire democratic system.
Impeachment would tie together so many threads for Americans. And, goddamnit, Mueller should testify before a House committee because we're not a reading people in the USA. Hell, just having Mueller repeat shit like a live podcast of his report would probably do more to turn the tide against Trump than all the printed words they can muster. (And he could answer whether or not he wanted the FBI post that Trump says he wanted.)
And Democrats better do this shit soon because Trump is listening to some nutzoid ratfuckers on this. Not only did he say in his mad rant yesterday that a court wouldn't "allow" impeachment (the Supreme Court has nothing to do with it until the trial in the Senate after impeachment, where the Chief Justice presides), he said to reporters, "Someday, you ought to read a thing called Article 2. Read Article 2, which gives the President powers that you wouldn’t believe. But I don’t even have to rely on Article 2."
Yeah, you can try to stop him now with impeachment or you can wait until he comes up with a pretext to shitcan the Congress while Republicans totally agree they should give him all the power.
The Rude Pundit: Two Days After Mueller's Statement, the Path Is Clearer Than Ever
http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2019/05/two-days-after-muellers-statement-path.htmlThe Rude Pundit
Proudly lowering the level of political discourse
5/31/2019
Two Days After Mueller's Statement, the Path Is Clearer Than Ever
There's one thing that the Democratic Party doesn't get. It's something that individual Democrats understand quite well and they reap the rewards from it. And it goes like this: People want to follow fighters. You can add to that: The fight needs to be absolutely clear. That can be policy based, as in Medicare for All or, if you're a fucking lying prickscab, "Mexico will pay for the wall." But it can also be tactical.
See, Democrats can have all the hearings they want. They can have all the subpoena fights the judicial system can handle. A dozen committees and subcommittees can have witnesses and experts testify about the criminality of the Trump administration. But no one is gonna give a single shit about those things except all the assholes who are constantly checking Twitter to see who "destroyed" who in a 3-minute video. (Note: Yeah, I'm one of those assholes, and it has made me seek the comfort of vicodin and vodka, a V&V cocktail that can straight murder you if you're not careful.)
What people can get their heads around is a single, simple concept: impeachment. It crystallizes all that other shit into a concept that is analogous to "fight." As in, "Holy Christ, Democrats are finally gonna stop being such punk-ass bitches and actually fight this dumb orange motherfucker who is wrecking the joint. About fuckin' time."
snip//
See, Democrats don't have to go after Trump for conspiring. They can go after his refusal to acknowledge that Russia did what our own investigations say it did. They can go after his refusal to get behind the efforts to protect the vote. They can go after his disturbing faith in Vladimir Putin. In other words, they can go after Trump for dereliction of duty, for violating his oath of office, and for being such an egomaniacal prick that the legitimacy of his election is more important than the legitimacy of our entire democratic system.
Impeachment would tie together so many threads for Americans. And, goddamnit, Mueller should testify before a House committee because we're not a reading people in the USA. Hell, just having Mueller repeat shit like a live podcast of his report would probably do more to turn the tide against Trump than all the printed words they can muster. (And he could answer whether or not he wanted the FBI post that Trump says he wanted.)
And Democrats better do this shit soon because Trump is listening to some nutzoid ratfuckers on this. Not only did he say in his mad rant yesterday that a court wouldn't "allow" impeachment (the Supreme Court has nothing to do with it until the trial in the Senate after impeachment, where the Chief Justice presides), he said to reporters, "Someday, you ought to read a thing called Article 2. Read Article 2, which gives the President powers that you wouldn’t believe. But I don’t even have to rely on Article 2."
Yeah, you can try to stop him now with impeachment or you can wait until he comes up with a pretext to shitcan the Congress while Republicans totally agree they should give him all the power.
June 2, 2019
They Know That America Isn’t Great
The Trump administration wants to rig the Census with a racist citizenship question because they know that where the country is weakest, and yet they portray themselves as fit to judge who is and who isn’t American
By Jamil Smith
The president may be a fool, but that doesn’t make him an ineffective racist. That would presuppose that it takes great talent to be good at hating people and furthering that hatred through policy. Donald Trump is quite adept at finding America’s weaknesses, a trait he shares with the Russians who helped him win the election. Both his White House and the Kremlin know just where to look first: America’s persistent racism. It is always easier to find holes in the boat and to punch new ones, than to devise methods for plugging them and keeping everything afloat.
One such weakness is the Census, which this administration has sought to weaponize as an undocumented immigrant address book for ICE and, as a consequence, a way to erode Hispanic and Latinx influence at the ballot box. We knew that the Trump administration’s proposed citizenship question for the 2020 Census was racist. But the ACLU revealed Thursday new proof that the question, which the group is now challenging before the Supreme Court, was explicitly crafted with the purpose of helping white people become more politically powerful.
Most everything Republicans do is to protect their power these days, and virtually all of them are white, so this isn’t a difficult calculus. Intent isn’t required for a racist act, but there still was plenty here. Thomas Hofeller — the late Republican strategist with a special talent for shaping racially discriminatory districts in places like North Carolina — “played a significant role in orchestrating the addition of the citizenship question to the 2020 Decennial Census” before his death last summer and intended to shape the citizenship question “in order to create a structural electoral advantage for, in his own words, ‘Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites.’” Hofeller also added that it “would clearly be a disadvantage for the Democrats” and successfully predicted that implementing the question would “provoke a high degree of resistance from Democrats and the major minority groups in the nation.”
snip//
Whoever is planning to replace this president has to not just plan for the considerable triage ahead. They have to fully understand that the America they want to lead into the future has a lot of structural weaknesses that are due purely to the consistent refusal of its powerbrokers to rid it of the identity-based inequities that have provided white men unearned advantages since day one of the republic.
Democrats, no matter how much they wish to sell the halcyon days of the Obama years or wish away the trauma of the present, cannot ignore the horror of that reality. Trump is showing it to them unvarnished. He is exposing every hole in the boat and punching out new ones every day. Any true patriot would understand that the kind of racism like what we see at work in the Census citizenship question is not what makes America great. It is sabotage.
They Know That America Isn't Great
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/census-rigging-trump-republicans-842846/They Know That America Isn’t Great
The Trump administration wants to rig the Census with a racist citizenship question because they know that where the country is weakest, and yet they portray themselves as fit to judge who is and who isn’t American
By Jamil Smith
The president may be a fool, but that doesn’t make him an ineffective racist. That would presuppose that it takes great talent to be good at hating people and furthering that hatred through policy. Donald Trump is quite adept at finding America’s weaknesses, a trait he shares with the Russians who helped him win the election. Both his White House and the Kremlin know just where to look first: America’s persistent racism. It is always easier to find holes in the boat and to punch new ones, than to devise methods for plugging them and keeping everything afloat.
One such weakness is the Census, which this administration has sought to weaponize as an undocumented immigrant address book for ICE and, as a consequence, a way to erode Hispanic and Latinx influence at the ballot box. We knew that the Trump administration’s proposed citizenship question for the 2020 Census was racist. But the ACLU revealed Thursday new proof that the question, which the group is now challenging before the Supreme Court, was explicitly crafted with the purpose of helping white people become more politically powerful.
Most everything Republicans do is to protect their power these days, and virtually all of them are white, so this isn’t a difficult calculus. Intent isn’t required for a racist act, but there still was plenty here. Thomas Hofeller — the late Republican strategist with a special talent for shaping racially discriminatory districts in places like North Carolina — “played a significant role in orchestrating the addition of the citizenship question to the 2020 Decennial Census” before his death last summer and intended to shape the citizenship question “in order to create a structural electoral advantage for, in his own words, ‘Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites.’” Hofeller also added that it “would clearly be a disadvantage for the Democrats” and successfully predicted that implementing the question would “provoke a high degree of resistance from Democrats and the major minority groups in the nation.”
snip//
Whoever is planning to replace this president has to not just plan for the considerable triage ahead. They have to fully understand that the America they want to lead into the future has a lot of structural weaknesses that are due purely to the consistent refusal of its powerbrokers to rid it of the identity-based inequities that have provided white men unearned advantages since day one of the republic.
Democrats, no matter how much they wish to sell the halcyon days of the Obama years or wish away the trauma of the present, cannot ignore the horror of that reality. Trump is showing it to them unvarnished. He is exposing every hole in the boat and punching out new ones every day. Any true patriot would understand that the kind of racism like what we see at work in the Census citizenship question is not what makes America great. It is sabotage.
June 1, 2019
6/01/19 5:00am
NYT Columnist: Fox Propaganda Is A Much Bigger Threat Than Facebook
New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo has it right: Fox News is far more toxic than Facebook memes. It is time for Democrats as a whole to recognize that.
By NewsHound Ellen
snip//
Yes, we should worry about Facebook, Manjoo writes, “but not at the risk of overlooking a more clear and present danger, the million-pound, forked-tongue colossus that dominates our misinformation menagerie: Fox News and the far-flung, cross-platform lie machine that it commands.”
“While Facebook moved quickly to limit the spread of the doctored Pelosi clip, Fox is neither apologizing for airing its montage nor taking it down, because this sort of manipulated video fits within the network’s ethical bounds.
And Fox has apparently persuaded us all to live with its lying, too. Even though it was the Fox Business clip, not the amateur Facebook segment, that President Trump tweeted to his millions of followers, it was somehow Facebook, Twitter and the digital world that came in for the biggest scolding from press critics.
I understand the fear about digital fakery. But to focus on Facebook instead of Fox News is to mistake the symptom for the disease.
The disease is an entrenched, well-funded, decades-in-the-making, right-wing propaganda network, one that exists to turn faintly sourced rumors into full-blown, politically convenient narratives. The propaganda network’s tentacles now infiltrate every form of media — magazines, books, talk radio, social networks — but it still finds its most profitable and effective outlet in the Murdochs’ cable empire.
And it is devastatingly effective: Just about every political lie that has dominated American discourse in the past two decades — the Swift Boaters and the birthers, death panels, the idea that undocumented immigrants pose an existential threat but climate change does not — depended, for its mainstream dissemination, on the Fox News machine."
more...
https://crooksandliars.com/2019/05/nyt-columnist-fox-propaganda-much-bigger?utm_source=social&utm_medium=facebook&utm_content=16142
NYT Columnist: Fox Propaganda Is A Much Bigger Threat Than Facebook
6/01/19 5:00am
NYT Columnist: Fox Propaganda Is A Much Bigger Threat Than Facebook
New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo has it right: Fox News is far more toxic than Facebook memes. It is time for Democrats as a whole to recognize that.
By NewsHound Ellen
snip//
Yes, we should worry about Facebook, Manjoo writes, “but not at the risk of overlooking a more clear and present danger, the million-pound, forked-tongue colossus that dominates our misinformation menagerie: Fox News and the far-flung, cross-platform lie machine that it commands.”
“While Facebook moved quickly to limit the spread of the doctored Pelosi clip, Fox is neither apologizing for airing its montage nor taking it down, because this sort of manipulated video fits within the network’s ethical bounds.
And Fox has apparently persuaded us all to live with its lying, too. Even though it was the Fox Business clip, not the amateur Facebook segment, that President Trump tweeted to his millions of followers, it was somehow Facebook, Twitter and the digital world that came in for the biggest scolding from press critics.
I understand the fear about digital fakery. But to focus on Facebook instead of Fox News is to mistake the symptom for the disease.
The disease is an entrenched, well-funded, decades-in-the-making, right-wing propaganda network, one that exists to turn faintly sourced rumors into full-blown, politically convenient narratives. The propaganda network’s tentacles now infiltrate every form of media — magazines, books, talk radio, social networks — but it still finds its most profitable and effective outlet in the Murdochs’ cable empire.
And it is devastatingly effective: Just about every political lie that has dominated American discourse in the past two decades — the Swift Boaters and the birthers, death panels, the idea that undocumented immigrants pose an existential threat but climate change does not — depended, for its mainstream dissemination, on the Fox News machine."
more...
https://crooksandliars.com/2019/05/nyt-columnist-fox-propaganda-much-bigger?utm_source=social&utm_medium=facebook&utm_content=16142
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Current location: Florida
Member since: Mon Sep 6, 2004, 09:54 PM
Number of posts: 171,065
