Lynna is your curator. How are you all holding up, America? Not well, I guess, since this is the hardest working thread ever. The frenzy is growing!
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Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Former Trump adviser tried to warn him about the debunked Ukraine conspiracy theory.
Followup to comment 1.
More details, from Steve Benen:
link
Trump seems to approve not just of violence, but of civil war to protect himself:
NBC News link
More details:
Link
Yay, new thread! Thanks!
In Republican news:
“New York Rep. Chris Collins is expected to plead guilty Tuesday to federal charges in an insider trading case in which he was originally charged in August 2018, according to court documents filed Monday and a person familiar with the matter.
His co-defendants – his son and another man – are set to change their pleas Thursday, according to court filings.”
A sixth Texas representative – Mac Thornberry – has announced his retirement.
“Expect the number of GOP House retirements to skyrocket between now and Thanksgiving. Many reasons for it, but the main one is that the faint hope the GOP had of retaking the House next year is basically gone in the eyes of Members.”
Kevin McCarthy appeared on 60 Minutes last night. It didn’t go well for him or Trump.
“Reminder: Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R–CA) has spent more than $245,000 at Trump properties since @realDonaldTrump was elected. Before Trump was elected: $743.93.”
Trump pressed for a “treason” probe targeting House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff:
Background and context:
Link
In Russia news:
“Pompeo announces new sanctions on Russian election meddlers; implicit rebuke to Trump’s skepticism.”
Specifically focusing on Prigozhin. I’d say it’s more likely to be others at State using the moment as an opportunity to get the sanctions through, which is smart.
“MOSCOW, Sept 30 (Reuters) – The Kremlin said on Monday that Washington would need Russian consent to publish transcripts of phone calls between U.S. President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.”
This is, needless to say, not the case.
From SC in comment 4:
Here’s an excerpt from that interview:
Followup to comment 7.
Cogent comments:
Link
Well, one would hope, but, no, I don’t think either Lindsey Graham or Kevin McCarthy will reconsider their blinkered and cult-like submission to Trump.
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian Brexit liveblog.
A flavor:
Populism!
Senators in both parties were left in the dark when it came to the Trump administrations delay of aid to Ukraine.
Link
Yesterday’s tweet o’ the day.
In Fox news:
“Fox News has learned that the Pentagon, State Department, and National Security Council were ‘unanimous’ in supporting the aid to Ukraine, and that Trump acted alone in withholding the aid over the summer.”
“Fox: Joe DiGenova & Victoria Toensing worked alongside Giuliani. Acc. to a top US official, the 3 attorneys were working ‘off the books’ & only the president knows the details of their work.
In tweet Sunday, Toensing denied. Wallace responded, ‘We stand by our story’.”
Significant news, and signals which should be worrying to Trump.
About the upcoming testimony from the whistleblower:
Link
I haven’t seen a Ted Rall comic in years, but this doesn’t seem nearly edgy enough for him. You could place this scene as a conversation between Mr. Burns and Smithers. I’m not saying Rall is losing his touch. I just wonder what that says about the Trump era. There is very little room left for satire at this point.
Daily Beast – “GOP Shows Russian Trolls How It’s Done With Whistleblower Smear”: “Trump has joined an army of conservative commentators in pushing a false story involving an obscure government form, a Trump official, and the whistleblower.”
Trump’s behavior is as erratic as ever, and perhaps more so of late:
Link
See comment 3 for more on Trump’s call for civil war.
I continue to find this hilarious. (Also, does this mean the person thinks the whistleblower is a House official?)
Putin reasserted his authority over Trump.
Link
From former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele:
https://twitter.com/MichaelSteele/status/1178674966138687489
Funny, and appropriate.
Question: I have not been able to see anything past comment #330 on the previous thread. I tried reloading, signing in and out, and using a different browser, but no success. Was there a problem with the thread?
Great thread from Ryan Lizza:
Here are two related comments from me in April about the book Many Are the Crimes.
Also, an interesting thread from historian Kevin Kruse about the response to Nixon diehards.
Interesting that the more Darth Cheeto tries to defend himself against accusations that he is unfit to be President, the more he demonstrates his unfitness for the job. And yet, the most we can hope for from Rethugs is an expression that they are “privately horrified” by his behavior, while in public they maintain their full-throated defense of him.
Every lackey who says they don’t see anything wrong with the Trumpster fire’s Ukraine call and subsequent coverup should be whacked on the nose with a copy of the Washington Post (the Times is too lightweight for the purpose) and then have their nose rubbed in the transcript. Really, if they cannot see the problem with soliciting political dirt from a foreign leader, they have no business in government.
Oh, JFC. “But her emails.”
Link
The Political Madness thread rolls along, racking up 500 comments per “chapter,” and then starting the next chapter at comment 1.
However, the freethoughtblogs system will automatically kill any thread that exists beyond a certain time limit. The Political Madness thread frequently exceeds that time limit. It takes several “chapters” to do so, but it hits the hard time limit and dies. If PZ doesn’t notice right away, I send him an email to alert him. PZ then resurrects the thread, giving it a new lease on life.
There were only 330 comments in the previous chapter when the Political Madness thread hit the wall.
Lynna, OM @24: Thank you for the explanation. I had gotten used to checking in daily for the latest outrageousness, and I was Jonesing for a fix. ;-P
Dahlia Lithwick discusses the wisdom of John Oliver:
Link
johnson catman @25: Ah, yes. I understand.
@ Lynna #26
That entire article is rich. Thanks.
Tweet o’ the day.
Dahlia Lithwick is a national treasure.
Philippe Reines: “odd to encourage civil war in a country where 65% hate your guts.”
AJ – “Egyptian activist Alaa Abdel Fattah rearrested amid crackdown”:
“Sad but accurate CNN banner: ‘TRUMP ATTACKS WHISTLEBLOWER, PUSHES CONSPIRACIES, WARNS OF CIVIL WAR AS IMPEACHMENT PROBE INTENSIFIES’.”
Here’s a shocker, Giuliani gets it all wrong.
Lawfare:
Giuliani Cannot Rely on Attorney-Client Privilege to Avoid Congressional Testimony
Much more at the link. Suffice it to say, Giuliani has no clue.
Update to #4 – CNBC – “GOP Rep. Chris Collins submits resignation ahead of plea change in insider trading case”: “Rep. Chris Collins, R-N.Y., submitted his resignation from Congress on the eve of his scheduled change-of-plea hearing in an ongoing federal insider trading case, a spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told CNBC on Monday….”
Collins’ resignation is effective today.
Trump freely admits that he has never done anything for which he would need forgiveness. You’d think that Evangelical Christians might notice this discrepancy between their deepest held beliefs about unworthiness, and their beliefs about their anointed one’s assumed holiness.That they are able to live in such complete denial about his Orangiosity is just mind-boggling.
Good reminder of Trump’s response to the indictments of Chris Collins and Duncan Hunter at the time: “Two long running, Obama era, investigations of two very popular Republican Congressmen were brought to a well publicized charge, just ahead of the Mid-Terms, by the Jeff Sessions Justice Department. Two easy wins now in doubt because there is not enough time. Good job Jeff……”
CNBC – “McConnell: ‘I would have no choice but to take it up’ if House votes to impeach Trump”:
Jonathan Norburg@37
Really? Hahahahahaha. No I would not think that. I am trying to recall if I ever would have.
A sidenote: I recommend the film They Shall Not Grow Old.
Jonathan Norburg @ 23
The Evangelicals and Trump have an understanding: He advances their policy goals, they’ll vote for him. Trump has nothing to lose and everything to gain from this arrangement since none of the Christian’s Right’s designs affect Trump negatively. Meanwhile, the Bible-beaters either claim that Trump is a “changed man” who has privately accepted Jesus so his past transgressions are forgiven, or that his a flawed-but-divinely-sent leader, like David or Cyrus, to do their god’s work despite his personal shortcomings. The only thing they care about is banning abortion, oppressing LGBTQs, and otherwise making the country into a theocracy. If they need the power of a “sinner” to do it… well, it was their god’s will.
Whoops… that should have been @ 37
Robert Maguire, CREW:
His international pals are also facing indictments, investigations, and anti-graft popular uprisings.
Trump’s telling the truth: he’s very focused on corruption.
“New Quinnipiac poll: Do you think President Trump should be impeached and removed from office?
NOW
Yes 47%
No 47%
LAST WEEK
Yes 37%
No 57%”
(My standard PSA.)
“‘We’re trying to find out’ who the whistleblower is, Trump told reporters just now.
The whistleblower is entitled to federal protections under the law.”
Andrew Bakaj, the whistleblower’s lawyer: “IC WB UPDATE: The Intel Community Whistleblower is entitled to anonymity. Law and policy support this and the individual is not to be retaliated against. Doing so is a violation of federal law.”
(I like that Bakaj prefaces his tweets with “UPDATE” and “BREAKING.” I also like his signature.)
“Do you think that President Trump believes he is above the law, or not?
Yes 56%
No 42%
Do you believe that President Trump abuses the power of his office?
Yes 54%
No 43%
—Quinnipiac poll”
Good news – Guardian – “Naga Munchetty: BBC reverses decision to censure presenter “:
@ 1 Lynna, OM
At this point I am deeply frustrated with what [Rudy Giuliani] and the legal team is doing and repeating that debunked theory to the president. It sticks in his mind when he hears it over and over again
Oh dear this is just what you didn’t want to hear about the president of the United States. It is not reassuring about Trump’s mental capacities at the moment.
@18 Lynna, OM
The Kremlin said on Monday that Washington would need Russian consent to publish transcripts of phone calls between U.S. President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin..
When the Daily Kos or some other news source actually points me to the Kremlin source then maybe I’ll believe this. I wonder if this is some garbled report of the comments of Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova who pointed out that with the leaking of th
e Ukrainian – US transcript that other world leaders, who presumably thought that they were speaking in confidence no longer will want to talk or meet with the U.S. head of state. https://tass.com/politics/1080408.
To be honest, I have almost no faith in US reporting just about any foreign political news, and especially anything related to Russia, Iran, China, or Venezuela.
jrkrideau@49, The Grauniad, Release of Trump-Putin transcripts needs Russian approval, Kremlin says, quotes Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov as saying “that the release of summaries or transcripts […] is .”
I find it ironic you’re referencing Tass, which is completely owned by the Russian government. As Media Bias / Fact Check puts it, “TASS has a very strong pro-Russian bias, especially as it relates to news regarding the Ukraine.”
The Onion, Trump Aides Investigating Whistleblower Struggling To Identify Single Person In CIA With Moral Principles (the Onion’s “edits” in {curly braces}):
Akira MacKenzie #42 Sadly, I must agree with you. Their hypocrisy knows no bounds. No president up until now has been “Christian” enough for them. What they really meant was that no president up until now had ever given them exactly what they wanted. The antiabortion issue prior to Trump was an issue to be used to rally the voters, not to actually fulfill. I currently see no way of peeling any of these voters away as they reject reason and logic out of hand. If Trump is impeached and convicted, we will get Pence in his place, who, while no personally corrupt, is just as noxious on the issues as the cheeto. I worry also about the significant minority who want a rat bastard for president. Many of them voted for Trump simply to see progressives get angry, and nothing he does matters to them so long as it angers the Liberals.
blf @ #50:
LOL, guess you can believe it now, jrkrideau!
jrkrideau is also known to have a pro-Kremlin bias.
Jesus, I go out for a bit and all hell breaks loose.
“News from the past 30 mins:
Rudy Giuliani subpoenaed.
WSJ: Mike Pompeo was on Trump’s Ukraine call.
NYT: Trump pushed Australian prime minister to help with probe he wants to undermine the Russia investigation.
Happy Monday!”
Here’s the NYT: “Breaking News: President Trump pushed Australia’s prime minister to help Attorney General William Barr in an investigation intended to rebut the Mueller inquiry.”
Also, “WP: AG Barr ‘has held private meetings overseas with foreign intelligence officials seeking their help’ in a DOJ inquiry ‘that President Trump hopes will discredit U.S. intelligence agencies’ examination of Russian interference in the 2016 election’.” This includes Barr’s mystery trip to Italy this past week.
Links at the links.
“Imagine this. The Justice Department is trying to discredit the US Intelligence Community conclusions. We are officially in crazy town.”
Preet Bharara re the Australia report: “That makes twice. Let’s get the readout of this call ASAP to see how ‘perfect’ it was.”
Jon Favreau: “The America First crowd is jeopardizing our national security by pressuring foreign governments to help them discredit our intelligence officials and rig our elections.”
Susan Hennessey: “Among the more alarming implications of this story is that the Attorney General is a fully-committed Fox News conspiracy theorist.”
There were signs of this earlier.
LOL.
More re Giuliani subpoena – TPM – “House Dems Subpoena Giuliani For Ukraine Docs”:
Links to the subpoena and list of requested docs atl.
“News: IC IG has posted a statement regarding its handling of whistleblower complaints.
‘The Disclosure of Urgent Concern form the Complainant submitted on August 12, 2019 is the same form the ICIG has had in place since May 24, 2018 …'”
Latl.
Unfortunately our PM in OZ is a Trump fan. Trump will not have had to coerce him so its not a strong point. Here in Australia it will piss a lot of us off but won’t be shocking.
[Bear in mind this was given at the end of the 19th century:]
From William James, “Exercises at the dedication of the monument to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the Fifty-fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Infantry, May 31, 1897”:
Atkinson’s statement @ #61 is civic courage in action.
Katharine Murphy, GuardianAU:
“Just in: Sebastian Gorka is traveling with @SecPompeo to Europe, @Abs_NBC reports. He was seen getting into a State Department van headed to Joint Base Andrews for departure.”
Reminder – from the previous iteration: State Dept.: “From October 1-6, @SecPompeo will travel to Italy, the Holy See, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Greece to meet with senior leaders and deliver keynote remarks at the U.S. – Holy See Symposium on Partnering with Faith-Based Organizations.”
Ben Collins: “I truly cannot tell you how many times InfoWars has said we’re about to be in a civil war, specifically tying it to Trump impeachment.
It helps with their neverending supplement and doomsday kit sale.”
“Flashback: Pompeo was asked last week by ABC whether he knew about the conversation between Trump and Zelensky. He demurred, saying he just got the report. We now know he took part in the call itself.”
Video at the link.
LOL what a dipshit.
Currently trending on Twitter: #ImpeachmentIsComing.
DanDare @ #62, because Only What Happens in Australia Counts, right? How arrogant can a country be?
:D
Here’s a good one. Evangelist Lance Wallnau, who I refer to as Lance Walnut, streamed a video over his Facebook page Friday in which he claimed impeaching Trump would overturn the will of 600 million Americans. I guess he must use some sort of Biblical math, not real world math like the rest of us.
https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/lance-wallnau-impeaching-trump-would-overturn-the-will-of-600-million-americans/
Unlike NZ, when the US says “jump!”, Oz says “how high?”.
(And ScoMo is a Pentecostal, BTW)
Guardian – “Austrian elections offer latest sign far right’s rise is faltering in Europe”:
I feel like this story wouldn’t be compete without this from Friday:
A political scientist argued that a ruthlessly corrupt and power-mad far-Right party was “much more dangerous in opposition” and that the center-Right could work with them. In Austria. In 2019.
John Morales (not the meteorologist):
I didn’t know that!
Guardian – “Bolsonaro tells students to read book by dictatorship-era torturer”:
Nauseating.
Guardian review: “Is The Politician the most annoying TV show of 2019?”
I think it’s fun.
“Ken Vogel is still one of the biggest hacks in all of media…”
Middle East Eye – “EXCLUSIVE: Twitter executive for Middle East is British Army ‘psyops’ soldier”:
AOC: “It’s wild to me how people crawled over my 60 mins interview with a fine-toothed comb to find any word or reason to claim I’m unfit for the job, yet here Kevin McCarthy (the GOP Leader!) is a bumbling, sloppy, dishonest mess & his mediocrity is accepted as a matter of course.”
Stacey Abrams and Crooked Media hit their $1 million goal for donations to Fair Fight 2020, and are now trying to raise $5 million by November 5th. Very important initiative against voter suppression.
“Man, you watch Fox for 15 minutes and it explains nearly everything about the sorry state of our politics and media right now.
The Murdochs have probably done more damage to the world over the last generation than anyone, anywhere.”
“What’s behind those redactions in this paragraph of the Mueller report??
House Dems want to know, and think what Trump said about WikiLeaks could play into impeachment.
This is according to a new court filing in the House’s lawsuit over Mueller grand jury details.”
The ongoing matters that would conceivably be harmed are unlikely to be ongoing under Barr.
Mother Jones – “Australia to Trump: Sure, We’ll Help You Pursue Your Political Vendetta”:
I’m thinking Mike Pompeo is the whistleblower…
Nah. Downer was fully integrated into the right wing Govt, so he has the dirt on the others. Can’o’worms and all that. Bad precedent.
(Heh. He was also the member for my current electorate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_Mayo), back in the day. His daughter ran twice, lost twice, which I liked because back when, it was a Liberal (read Repub Lite) stronghold.)
John Fleisher, I take it you are joking.
BTW: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/27/opinion/whistleblower-complaint.html
(NYT – Opinion
The Whistle-Blower Knows How to Write
His complaint offers lessons on how to make a point.
By Jane Rosenzweig
Ms. Rosenzweig is the director of the Writing Center at Harvard.)
New Yorker – “Mark Meadows and the Undisclosed Dinosaur Property”:
Wild. You really have to read the whole story. “Among the handful of countries where the vast majority of dinosaur fossils have been discovered, the United States is the only one where such bones, when found on private property, belong to the landowner, rather than to the government. ‘It is this legal structure that allows creationists to dig dinosaurs and pretend to be paleontologists’, Kirk Johnson explained. By keeping the land in the hands of young-Earth creationists, Meadows would insure that they could tell the story of any fossils found there.”
LOL.
Intercept – “Trump Attacked the Women of Color Who Led the Push for Impeachment. Then CNN Erased Them.”
“Last week I went through a list of some of the many things right-wing media wanted Obama impeached over….”
If you want some variety, I recommend keeping up with the Brexit/ Boris Johnson craziness.
I know Mercuns have more at stake in the impeachment/Trump soap opera, but Britain provides a kind of parallel evolution, like the thylacine.
Guardian liveblog: “Hong Kong protester shot in chest as China National Day demos intensify – live.”
birgerjohansson @ #92, I link to the Guardian’s Brexit liveblog almost every day (see #9 above) and we comment frequently about it, as you can see on the previous iteration, where I often point to the parallels you mention. In the iteration before that, you’ll find this request from me: “For the sake of my blood pressure, please just post the things you think of interest or concern without implying that others aren’t concerned about them. Thanks.”
Like, seriously, it’s an open fuckin’ thread. If you think something’s interesting, just post it.
“I don’t know who needs to hear this (AGAIN) but they idea that US intel was engaged in a global conspiracy to defeat Donald Trump does not really square with the fact that their only public involvement in the campaign was a press conference knifing Hillary in the closing weeks.”
Oh – here’s a link to today’s Guardian Brexit liveblog. :)
PERFECT.
Possibly emphasizing SC@94’s point — “[i]f you think something’s interesting, just post it” (to which I’d add credible sources are preferred†) — in Morocco, Moroccan journalist jailed for abortion that she says never happened:
† I myself have tend to alter the typesetting of excerpts to use for quotations of obvious or probable lies / stoopidity / distractions — regardless of who is being quoted — but am perhaps one of the few commenters to do so. Others (sometimes including myself) will place what they consider significant in boldface, which does not mean the commentator necessarily agrees with the boldfaced text / quote, only that they think it is significant (e.g., the main point or especially interesting). For that matter, simply excerpting an source does not mean the commentator agrees with any or all of the source or excerpted text, only that (paraphrasing SC) “it is something interesting”.
Re. SC (salty current)
-I considered including links, but there are so many head-on train collisions in European politics right now- especially in Britain- that I found it difficult to choose.
Boris grabbing a female employee?
Boris cheerfully lying again and again?
Having no remorse after a court found his prorougement of parliament illegal? It is like one of those buffe’s where you do not know where to start.
“#HongKong today this happened. Which ever side you are on in this debate this is pretty ballsy from these activists. We filmed them charging up these escalators under a hail of projectiles.”
This video and others atl.
Oh, shit, I just read the article SC linked to.
This is what I mean, the calamities get stacked on top of each other like aircraft circling a major airport, there is barely time to process them.
Five fantasies Trump is pushing about the Ukraine scandal — and the truth :
birgerjohansson @ #99, I know – there’s a lot! One day last week there were so many reports of lying, criminality, and corruption in the US that I think I missed the entire day of Brexit shenanigans. But the fact that there’s so much happening makes it even more necessary for as many people as possible to share things!
From the G liveblog (linked @ #96), reporting on the Tory conference: “Priti Patel, the home secretary, is speaking now….”
Excerpts at the link. Patel is actually terrifying.
No surprise here. Stonewalling is the order of the day.
WaPo:
Pompeo says State Dept. officials won’t show up for scheduled impeachment depositions this week
Oct. 1, 2019 at 8:27 a.m. PDT
It’s remarkable to contrast Patel’s vision with the one Corbyn offered at the Labour conference last week (described beginning here).
This is one of the reasons I tend to disbelieve arguments that the Right is ascendant. They have nothing to offer anyone except lies and propaganda, corruption, appeals to fear, austerity, authoritarianism, scapegoating, inequality, gross incivility,… Their ideas aren’t new like they ostensibly were in the 1930s and 1980s. They’re tired and shopworn and their results have been demonstrated.
“A new poll shows that two-thirds of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, support a 2% wealth tax on households worth over $50 million, which is the heart of Warren’s tax plan.”
Latl.
Snort! Quoted in full, Revenge of the Maybot: an extract from the former PM’s Alpine murder mystery:
Robert Oxley was Vote Leave’s media director, and is now a special advisor to the toxic (see, e.g., @104) minister Priti Patel (Vote Leave media head Robert Oxley joins Department for International Development).
Seaborne Freight was the cross-channel ferry fraud given a contract by failing grayling (a minster in maybot’s NKofE “government”) which had no ferries, whose terms & conditions were those of an on-line pizza catering firm, whose continental port (Ostend) said it could not possibly be ready, and so on…
Some readers’s comments:
● “Less of a three pipe problem, more of a well sized plantation.”
● “We hastily packed our bags and took a train to Brussels.
I’m sorry, there’s no way if Grayling was involved that they could be able to do that without suffering time table chaos, having to miss three consecutive trains before they could finally get on one and then be further delayed by unscheduled works on the line, I can only suspend my disbelief so much!”
(In reply) “We can take it as read that they will at some stage have had to pay a £260 surcharge each for having the wrong type of ticket.” (That would have been, perhaps, even better if it was a €260 surcharge…)
● “‘Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?’
‘To the curious incident of the Brexit deal negotiations with the EU.’
‘There are no Brexit deal negotiations with the EU.’
‘That was the curious incident,’ remarked Theresa May.”
● “The Downing Street Irregulars.”
(In reply) “They do resemble bowel movements”.
● “The Adventure of the Deadly Backstop” (I LOLed at this –blf)
Correct: “Under guise of accusing House Democrats of bullying, Pompeo pressures State Dept employees he let WH bully and intimidate not to testify.”
Here in France, Sarkoführer is possibly(? probably?) going to face trial, Appeals court orders former French president Sarkozy to stand trial for illegal campaign financing:
Andrew Sparrow at the G had a similar reaction to Patel’s speech:
Not much detail (yet?), Iran sentences man to death for spying for US:
† Gholamhossein Esmaili’s statement put in because I presume the charges are either exaggerated or invented in a (misguided?) attempt to put pressure on certain other nations.
CPJ [Committee to Protect Journalists] calls for release of jailed Egyptian journalists:
Also from the G:
G liveblog: “In an interview with Sky News, Boris Johnson has refused three times to deny having an affair with Jennifer Arcuri, the businesswoman whose company received sponsorship from a mayoral fund when Johnson was in City Hall.”
Khashoggi’s son defends Saudi against critics murder:
From text quoted by blf in comment 116:
JFC. Talk about evidence of guilt, evidence of guilty conscience, and evidence of mafia-like behavior.
Tierney Sneed, TPM:
Screenshots and link atl. Harvey and Ledeen should not be anywhere near government.
From SC @109:
Exactly. That’s what I thought.
Pompeo is on his high horse now, saying that he will protect the hard working employees of the State Department, no matter what. Sheesh. The sheer gall. The utter hypocrisy.
“Breaking: [Benny Gantz] cancels his meeting with @netanyahu that was set for tomorrow and negotiations between Blue and White and Likud, saying there is no point.”
“A federal judge yesterday chastised the DC US Attorney’s Office for dragging its feet on whether to charge McCabe, saying ‘while the matter hangs in limbo it does undermine the credibility’ of DOJ & the court.”
According to the WaPo headline, the judge gave them until November 15th to make a charging decision, which seems extremely generous.
Tweet thread o’ the day.
“Prosecutors suggested strongly they are gonna ask the judge to send Flynn to prison.”
Screenshots atl. Had Flynn been appropriately remorseful and not tried to pull anything at his first sentencing hearing, he would very likely have gotten no jail time.
Yes, a big bright loving vision for the future.
Pompeo’s letter is here. Near the end he says, “The Department also acknowledges receipt of the subpoena communicated by separate letter dated September 27, 2019 and intends to respond to that subpoena by the noticed return date of October 4, 2019.” I guarantee that right now he’s frantically digging up reasons he doesn’t have to comply with that subpoena.
John Morales (the meteorologist): “Saltwater bubbling up from Biscayne Bay onto Miami’s streets. Not a drop of rain for the past several days. #SaltLife”
Video atl. Also, I might have to restart my dormant blog to create a SaltLife feature…
People are feisty today.
Fundraising news from Democratic presidential candidates:
Link
The Atlanta Journal Constitution reported that new voters in Georgia “have registered in droves” since last year’s elections, and “many of the new voters are racial minorities or under age 30, both groups that are more likely to support Democrats than Republicans.”
Guardian – “Revealed: Jennifer Arcuri got visa from scheme run by former Johnson official”:
So “scheme” over there apparently doesn’t have the negative connotations it does here, I guess.
Trump and his lackeys are pushing a false story about whistleblower rules. They claim the rules were changed just before the whistleblower’s report was submitted. That’s false.
From the Washington Post:
Additional detail from Steve Benen:
How the Trump campaign is responding to the impeachment inquiry:
Link
Protect Democracy:
In populist news (from the G liveblog), “The chancellor, Sajid Javid, has dropped the strongest hint yet that he may be about to scrap inheritance tax….”
From Wonkette:
See comment 131 for debunking of the “changed rules” lie.
Link
More at the link.
Kate Irby, McClatchy:
From Wonkette: “Yay, It’s Bill Barr’s Super Cool Global Carmen-Sandiego-On-Bath-Salts Tour For Trump!”
Link
More at the link.
From the conclusion in the article reference in comment 137:
LOL – re #89:
RNC solicited money for Trump’s reelection with forms that look a lot like the official census
Oct. 1, 2019 at 6:25 a.m. PDT
Sorry, #140 is from Wash Post. I usually try to warn people.
“Three Chairs Statement on Secretary Pompeo Stonewalling House Impeachment Inquiry”:
Fascinating. The HK activists are working to reclaim Pepe the Frog.
TPM – “Your Road Map To Understanding The House Probe of Giuliani’s Ukraine Gambit.”
Marc Elias: “BREAKING: Judge strikes down key parts of 2017 Iowa voting reform law that disenfranchised voters (including signature match law). Big victory for @prioritiesUSA and the @PerkinsCoieLLP team.”
Politico – “White House ordered top-secret system upgraded to prevent leaks”:
Story contains quite a bit of useless WH spin.
Transphobes are Arseholes, Part <something in the millions>, Virginia teacher sues after being fired for refusing to call trans student ‘he’ (Grauniad edits in {curly braces}):
An aside (not really relevant), I assume the Grauniad means a “French language teacher” rather then a “teacher from France”. (I happen to live in France, but that is a coincidence; the Grauniad’s description is ambiguous.)
It sounds like both the Principal, and the Superintendent, have their heads screwed on fairly sensibly. And, for that matter, the school board — who fired the transphobe — is, at least in the (presumed) majority, also tending towards sensible.
Sorry asshole. Your rights ended where the student’s rights began.
SC@146, excerpts “Prior to the upgrade, officials could only see who had uploaded or downloaded material to the system but usually not who accessed which documents.”
That seems odd. Up to now I’d had the impression the system was “compartmented”, which is(? was? (my knowledge here is decades old)) spook-speak for (simplifying) a system where authorized users can only access data for which that have both the appropriate security clearance and a need-to-know. One requirement is(? was?) that all access attempts be robustly logged in a so-called “audit trail”. As such, it is (in principle) possible to determine who “saw” (or “modified”) each data-file. (“Saw” and “modified” are in scare quotes because the audit trail does not (and cannot) prove the individual read, understood, or actually changed the data. And on some systems, the audit trail is(? was?) quite had to process (use / analyze), albeit I presume that over the years that’s gotten better / easier.)
It’s not impossible it was a fairly bog-standard system to which physical (and logical) access was highly restricted — it’s known to have not been networked — but back when I was involved with this sort of system, we would have nonetheless insisted on having a (permanent) audit trail (and other precautions to try and ensure the validity of that audit trail). There are weaker variants of “compartmented”; however, as far as I can recall from back then, all but the weakest must have an audit trail. (On some of the weaker variants, the audit trail could be disabled or compromised.)
Anyways, I would have expected a “bin Laden” system to, its isolation not withstanding, be one of the stronger variants of “compartmented”, i.e., with a robust audit trail recording (among many things) who accessed what when and how. It’s a high-value target, and hence should be both protected from unauthorized access (and other risks) with forensic capabilities for when things do go “wrong”.
“Update on timing of Ukraine depositions from a committee official: Ambassador Volker has confirmed he will appear this Thursday. Ambassador Yovanovitch, who was previously scheduled for this Wednesday, will now be appearing on Oct. 11.”
Republicans flail as they seek coherent strategy against impeachment (Grauniad edits in {curly braces}):
blf @ #149, yeah, I find the whole article a bit confusing and have more questions after reading it. (For example, wouldn’t it be the same small handful of people who have access both before and after documents are entered in the system, making engagement with the documents once they’re in the system less informative?) I don’t have your knowledge, but I, too, would be surprised if the system didn’t previously have such an audit trail.
Did I?
SC@153, I think it was you… I looked for your(?) link, but could not find it (hence the vague reference), but perhaps I was mistaken… I definitely saw the video / tweeting some time prior to that article being published. (In any case, there is a link at the source.) Apologies if I erred here, both to you and to whoever did provide the link I followed. Sorry!
SC@152, “For example, wouldn’t it be the same small handful of people who have access both before and after documents are entered in the system, making engagement with the documents once they’re in the system less informative?” Not necessarily (if I am understanding this question correctly).
Prior to whatever being put into the system, the people with knowledge would be those who sat / listened in on the call (call them grpA), and then the people they informed (verbally or via notes / memos), grpB. Probably someone in grpB, e.g., a security-cleared clerk, entered what they were given into the system. Whilst both grpA and grpB presumably have the clearance and need-to-know, not all of them would necessarily have access to the system (the hypothetical clerk obviously does). The people who do have clearance, need-to-know, and access are grpC, which (presumably) overlaps with grpA and grpB, but which (also presumably) contains additional “new” individuals. (Actually, the hypothetical clerk is also in grpC.)
Upshot in this (simplified) model is you have three overlapping groups of people with the information, but only one of the groups has (access to) the information via the system.
Now, who, in which group(s), is the whistleblower (recalling they have some first-hand knowledge)? This, of course, presumes no-one else obtained the information, i.e., that it was successfully “confined” to just the people in grpA, grpB, and grpC. In a well-run operation, that should true (it was so confined), but we are talking about the Wacko House dalekocrazy here… further people obtaining some or all of the information — possibly without appropriate clearance or with any reason to know — seems (to me) fairly likely with this hive of eejits (presumably heavily infiltrated by genuine foreign spies).
blf @ #154, I took note because I initially thought of posting a link but I still connect Steele with this scandal and decided I didn’t want to share his gif of a woman in a bikini. I thought maybe I had later posted it without thinking or later remembering, but didn’t think I had. It’s possible that it was in one of the threads of a tweet I did post, though, since I definitely did see it. No problem.
Maybe you saw it on the Guardian US liveblog?
“IMPEACHMENT LATEST: After @SecPompeo told Ds his officials won’t comply w/their requests, State employees appear to be DEFYING Pompeo.
1st: Volker says he will testify. Yovanovitch too.
& now @karoun @John_Hudson report the State IG is coming 2 Hill tomorrow to turn over docs.”
Lock ’em all up until they talk.
What can Congress do if Mike Pompeo won’t cooperate with its impeachment inquiry?
By Amber Phillips
Oct. 1, 2019 at 1:43 p.m. PDT
A brief comment to the ongoing Tory Party conference.
There was an actual fistfight between two politicians, and one of them, a tory member of parliament, had to be thrown out. Classy.
NYT oped by Will Wilkinson – “Trump Has Disqualified Himself From Running in 2020”:
I completely agree with this. Trump is a cheat. Cheats at golf, cheats on his taxes, cheats customers and contractors, cheats the government, cheats the public, cheats at elections. He has no qualms about it at all, and will continue until he’s stopped. There’s no bigger threat to the republic. And it will only get worse for his enablers, requiring more and more self-abasement and dishonesty in exchange for less and less power and independence, and he’ll turn on them in a heartbeat.
@ #158
Do either of them still work for the State Dept? According to this “Volker quit the unpaid position with the State Department.” And I thought Yovanovitch was fired, but I can’t quite figure it out.
“CNN: State Dept inspector general has requested an urgent Hill briefing with relevant committees tomorrow related to Ukraine. The email that went to staff suggested it was urgent. A Congressional aid[e] described the State IG’s request as ‘highly unusual and cryptically worded’.”
tomh @ #162, as far as I know, Yovanovitch was fired as ambassador but still works for the State Department (and is a fellow of some sort at Georgetown). It sounds like Volker probably chose to resign in order not to be restricted by Pompeo in what he could say. Maybe Yovanovitch will resign as well; maybe she’ll dare them to fire her…. I don’t know what’s going on, but it does seem as though some at the State Department might be rebelling in Pompeo’s absence.
This is the same thing the other NYT reporters did with the new Kavanaugh revelations. And the paper seems to approve. So fucked up.
And they did it with the Declan Walsh story.
Garry Kasparov about strategy: https://twitter.com/Kasparov63/status/1178350853322919938
More re #163. I wonder if the State Dept. IG has already been investigating…
Each glimpse inside the White House is worse than the last.
NYT:
Shoot Them in the Legs, Trump Suggested: Inside His Border War
By Michael D. Shear and Julie Hirschfeld Davis
Oct. 1, 2019 Updated 6:33 p.m. ET
This article is adapted from “Border Wars: Inside Trump’s Assault on Immigration,” to be published by Simon & Schuster on Oct. 8.
Much more at the link.
“Sounds like a major briefing. These are the folks getting briefed tomorrow:
House Foreign Affairs
Senate Foreign Relations
House and Senate Appropriations, House Oversight
Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs
House and Senate intelligence committees.”
NBC – “More than 50 former female ambassadors call on administration to protect Yovanovitch”:
Oh, FFS – “Barr and Durham went to Rome in search of the mysterious Joseph Mifsud. Sounds like they just got a tape recording of the missing professor though. Bizarre goings on.”
“INBOX: Pelosi *and Schiff to hold a press conference tomorrow at 10:45AM ET.”
Solid FOIAing.
Trump just tweeted:
“As I learn more and more each day, I am coming to the conclusion that what is taking place is not an impeachment, it is a COUP, intended to take away the Power of the….
….People, their VOTE, their Freedoms, their Second Amendment, Religion, Military, Border Wall, and their God-given rights as a Citizen of The United States of America!”
“For context, former senior US intelligence officials tell @nbcnews while at the CIA, Pompeo was a bully to subordinates, driving some to quit or seek new assignments. ‘Throwing binders was a popular sport’, said one.”
“During their presser last week Trump said he hoped Zelensky could work things out with Putin.
Tonight, protests erupted on Maidan in central Kyiv over Zelensky’s backing of the Steinmeier Formula [capitulation to Russia re Donbass] with protestors chanting: ‘Zelensky out!'”
Damn.
Zeynep Tufekci is reporting from Hong Kong.
“This morning in Hong Kong, students are reported to have gathered outside the school of the high-school student shot yesterday in the chest by the police. Sending out the police to solve a political demand is, predictably, leading to a cycle of escalation.”
Popehat: “I worked with Steve Linick, the State Department’s IG who has requested an urgent briefing with Congress, in the 1990s at the USAO. Smart, honest, and not a guy to mess with.”
Oh! Lynna linked to the Michael Steele tweet @ #19.
“Cheong Wa Dae says N. Korea seems to have fired SLBM.”
Did the “Symposium on Partnering with Faith-Based Organizations” that Pompeo and Seb “My Mom Was David Irving’s Translator” Gorka are attending (see #66 above) even exist prior to five days ago? I can’t find earlier references to it, and the events seem ad hoc.
Hahaha.
Mimi Rocah: “To me, it feels like the walls are falling down around Trump so he & allies are acting desperate & pulling out all the stops. That makes it scarier but also more likely they get caught (as they have) & stopped. Like a sickness that needs to peak before it’s gone.”
Apropos of nothing, revisiting The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (pp.1102-4):
France24 – “Australian opposition call for release of Trump transcript”:
“If I’m reading correctly.”
Easy enough to translate that polly-speak, ain’t it? ;)
She speaks for us all.
I want to hug this tweet.
“Iraqis came out this morning,normal protest,demands were for a better life,jobs, services etc, the government forces decides to use live ammunition and brutally beat up/target peotesters. It’s 4 AM and major neighborhoods in Baghdad are filled with burning tires,country is angry.”
More re #184:
Damage control mode: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-02/scott-morrison-defends-call-with-donald-trump/11568296
TLDR: Cringe-worthy evasiveness.
SC@157, That seems likely. And speaking of confusion…
Seven days of Fox News impeachment coverage proves divisive — for its hosts (minor edits to the formatting (unmarked)):
Connecting the dots:
┌─>Ukraine<────┐
│ ^ │
│ │ │
│ Putin───>Giuliani
│ │ ^ ^
│ │ │ │
│ v v V
└───hair furor───>Barr
^
│
Fox
[very nice, blf!
Not much more effort to use HTML entities, such as right arrow (→ yields → ) or mdash (— —), given the amount you already put in.
e.g.
hair furor———→Barr](me@195, Yuck, that Ascii Art “connect the dots” didn’t work very well…)
Ukraine investigates prosecutor who gave Giuliani information on Biden:
Could be a local matter, could be retaliation, could be a fabrication — or any combination thereof…
Red Cross alarm over polio outbreak in Philippines after 19 years [of being polio-free]:
No discussion of analysis of why the vaccination rate is so low, other than the comment about the current authoritarian regime botching its handling of the dengue disaster. (I have not looked for further information on vaccination in the Philippines…)
re blf @195: I was picturing it more like a human centipede with Putin in the prime spot, the Orange Toddler-Tyrant firmly attached to him, and then Giuliani and Barr. YMMV.
“DOJ fails to assure judge that Trump call records will be saved”: “Rachel Maddow reports on an awkward moment in court when Justice Department lawyers would not commit to assuring a judge that the Donald Trump administration will not destroy any records of Trump phone calls with foreign leaders, risking an emergency order from the judge.”
Video atl. Judge Amy Berman Jackson (because of course) gave them until this afternoon to provide such assurances or she’ll issue an emergency order they “won’t like.” Possible they know some records have already been destroyed?
“It seems the DOJ lawyer did not want to make a personal assurance bc she knows she can’t control what WH does and didn’t want to stake her reputation on it. When lawyers can’t represent WH to court, the courts are going to have to haul WH officials in themselves.”
Sen. Schatz, yesterday: “I feel like tomorrow is going to be extremely impeachable.”
Guardian – “Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu faces pre-trial corruption hearing”:
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian Brexit liveblog.
Johnson is just concluding a thoroughly idiotic speech:
This morning: the State Department IG will be urgently briefing congressional committees about something related to Ukraine, and Pelosi and Schiff will be holding a press conference about something at 10:45 AM ET.
“Hi, @GOPLeader. This is the thanks you get for your slavering subservience to Trump and his lawlessness.
Trump privately says you botched your defense of him, the AP reports. You failed his greatness, and his people are letting the world know it:…”
Ahem. Quote at the link.
NPR – “Secretary of State Pompeo Confirms He Was On Phone For Trump’s Call To Zelenskiy.”
Surprised he found time to do a press conference in the middle of the major and not at all invented as a pretext to get him out of the country symposium.
Daniel Dale:
Transcript at the link.
Apologies in advance, Finland.
In India, Judge orders removal of #MeToo posts accusing Indian artist:
I’ve opted not to put Gupta’s statements in as I’ve no idea who is lying. The excerpted article is, in my opinion, interesting / relevant because of the judge’s orders, specifically, that the originator of the #MeToo claims be named (apparently mostly because Gupta says the claims are lies, rather than any actual evidence the claims are fabricated). I’m unfamiliar with this case and with Gupta, nor have I looked for further details.
SC@209, That reminded me of this (which was vaguely alluded-to in tht twittering), Make America Rake Again: Finland baffled by Trump’s forest fire raking claim (November 2018):
“A little more detail from [Lauren Fox] The State Department inspector general Steve Linick will brief and ‘provide staff with copies of documents related to the State Department and Ukraine’ this afternoon in a bipartisan closed-door briefing.”
So not until this afternoon.
MSNBC chyron right now: “Putin says he didn’t see evidence of pressure in Trump Ukraine call.”
So now they’re not only transcribing Trump’s lies into their chyrons and tweets, they’re doing it for Putin. That bodes well.
132,000 descendants of expelled Jews apply for Spanish citizenship:
Trump has nearly destroyed US refugee program, experts say:
Re #209, Finnish president Sauli Niinistö continues his strong approach to international PR work, dragging Finland into Trump’s attention at every opportunity. Of course, this meeting was scheduled long before the impeachment procedures began. Translating bits from a preliminary analysis at the Finnish public broadcaster’s news site:
“President Sauli Niinistö will visit on Wednesday at the White House, now turned into a hellish pit…The press conference may have a tense atmosphere [because of impeachment investigation]…Niinistö will have to watch his words carefully at the White House, both during the lunch and the presser…”
ttps://yle.fi/uutiset/3-10995646
The presidents are supposed to mainly discuss security and military cooperation in the Baltic Sea region. Honestly, I suspect Niinistö won’t so much have to watch his words as to work hard to get any genuine attention from Trump. (Maybe also dodge some flying peaches.)
The piece also interviews Atlantic Council researcher Hans Binnedijk on this:
https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2019/09/12/a-guide-to-how-the-us-and-finland-can-enhance-defense-cooperation/
“Dow off nearly 300 points early Wednesday as recession worries grip markets.”
lumipuna @ #216, when I read
I wasn’t expecting
I’d just taken a sip of water, and it took effort not to spit it out.
From the Grauniad’s current live States blog (quoted in full):
From CCN, Fact-checking Trump’s claim that Obama gave Ukraine ‘pillows and sheets’:
And some tidbits from a much longer DefenseNews article, Here’s what you need to know about the US aid package to Ukraine that Trump delayed (DefenseNews edits in {curly braces}):
The Times – “Donald Trump impeachment: President called Boris Johnson for help to discredit Mueller inquiry”:
That’s all I have access to.
Bloomberg – “Giuliani’s Ukraine Work Tied to Firm Whose Website Has Vanished”:
More at the link.
Re @216/@218, Just for fun, I ran that Finnish article, “Suomi kiinnostaa Yhdysvalloissa enemmän kuin koskaan” — Trumpin hallinnon asiantuntija odottaa Niinistön vierailun tiivistävän turvallisuusyhteistyötä (“Finland is more interested in the United States than ever” — Trump administration expert expects Niinistö’s visit to intensify security cooperation) through Generalisimo Google Translate. This is how it translated that first paragraph (and a bit more):
I think I prefer the “hellish pit” translation to “horn boiler”, albeit the later has some amusing possibilities…
There actually is such a thing called a “horn boiler”, or more accurately, an “acoustic cleaning horn”, which is apparently basically an air horn used to shake free built-up particles (e.g., soot). Application of horn boilers to Wacko House might possibly be faster and more thorough than impeachment…
From the Grauniad’s current live States blog:
“That call [from Trump to Johnson] on July 26 also was one day after Trump spoke to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky in the phone call that sparked the impeachment proceedings against him.”
“@BernieSanders is cancelling campaign events ‘until further notice’ after blockage found in an artery and 2 stents were ‘successfully inserted’ His campaign statement: ‘Sen. Sanders is conversing and in good spirits. He will be resting up over the next few days’.”
Best wishes for a quick recovery.
“Chairmen Cummings, Schiff, and Engel have released a memo informing House Oversight committee members that they are drafting a subpoena compelling the White House to produce key documents.
The subpoena will be issued on Friday, October 4, 2019.”
US attorney general ‘met Italian officials to discuss Russiagate’ :
Unexpectedly for 2019, it’s the year of the brooch.
Giuliani never disappoints.
WaPo:
‘Worse than McCarthy’: Rudy Giuliani suggests suing Democrats over Ukraine probe
Also in Italy, but not obviously political, Faces for fallen trees: the man behind Rome’s tree stump sculptures:
There’s a selection of images at the Grauniad’s article, and some of them are really neat. But be sure to check the gentleman’s account (see embedded link) for some really amazing works (albeit I suspect not all of them are in Rome nor part of the Troncomorto project).
blf #222, Just to nitpick on Generalissimo Google Translate, the title of that piece actually begins “Finland interests United States more than ever…”
Also, the idiom used is “tongue in the middle of mouth”, which means more or less the opposite of tongue-in-cheek. (The latter idiom also exists in Finnish.)
SC @228
PZ abruptly switches from Zebra Fish to Spiders and then Lady Hale wears a Spider Brooch while telling Boris Johnson that parliament has to be recalled. Coincidence? – I think not.
lumipuna@231, Thanks. The translated title didn’t quite seem to match the ghist of the translated article, so I was wondering. I couldn’t decide if the “tongue-in-cheek” was correct-ish or not, since it seemed plausible albeit unusual (not exactly according to protocol); e.g., the recent rant by the Luxembourg PM about brexit.
Peak NYT oped.
From the Grauniad’s live States blog (quoted in full):
Also from the live blog, a tidbit from the press conference which was enraged hair furor:
“trump now is at the ‘tweeting obscenities’
stage of anger and rage yeah this guy totally has it together”
militantagnostic @ #232, and where’s this all being shared?
Oh, right – the Web. Very suspicious.
Echoes of the Nixon tapes? The transcripts that could doom Trump:
As a practical matter, it’s important to secure — not just as a legal but as a practical matter — that server / system, its duplicates and backups. Nixon’s cronies managed to erase 18 minutes; hair furor’s cronies & dalekocrazy may be able to destroy everything.
Wild. MSNBC, naturally, is just airing Trump’s insane, dishonest rant (as he sits next to Niinistö) in full, with an insert in the corner of the screen showing the Dow dropping like a stone. Down almost 600 points now.
John Crace in the Grauniad on teh NKofE’s† PM’s blithering at the nasty part conference, More vacuity than vision in Johnson’s after-dinner chat to the faithful:
Some readers’s comments:
● “Thirty five minutes [of] having to endure the Great Waffle Machine.. Harpo Marx was more articulate than Boris Johnson.. and he just used an old brass horn and whistled..”
● “Somebody should tell him that he is supposed to be PM for the whole country, not a second rate stand-up for the 150k Tory members.”
● “Devoid of content, policy, principles and any sign of giving a flying one about the people of this country giving what he obviously plans to inflict on us”.
● “The highlight was watching the gradual realisation by the conference attendees that not only have they inflicted Johnson on the country, they’ve inflicted him on themselves too. The energy just leaked out of the room as he droned on.”
† NKofE — N.Korea of Europe. Both teh N.Korea in Asia and teh “U”K are nuclear-armed states operated by a paranoid entitled clique with no concern for others.
He’s still ranting. Once again, apologies to the people of Finland.
“Another great day for the ACTUALLY Trump Wants To Be Impeached takes.”
“White House foreign pooler @Gil_Paris says Finnish President Niiniströ also spoke in the Oval Office. A total of one sentence and no more than 8 words.”
This is an odd one in Al Jazeera’s so-called live blog (nothing like the Grauniad’s), Trump impeachment inquiry: All the latest updates (quoted in full, apparently dated today):
It’s not sourced, and my Generalissimo Google™-fu isn’t fu-ing, I cannot find either the source nor any confirmation. Loads on Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov saying the opposite (see @50), including the original(?) Reuters report, Kremlin says disclosure of Trump-Putin phone calls would need Russian consent.
Doesn’t mention Finland’s President Sauli Niinistö, but I presume this is that press event, from the Grauniad’s live States blog (Grauniad edits in {curly braces}):
From the G: “No 10 Downing Street has just confirmed that the government will seek another prorogation of parliament next Tuesday ahead of a new Queen’s Speech on October 14.”
A snippet:
Video, I hesitate to say, atl.
Heh. Stoopidity fixed before I got around to mentioning it here, in teh NKofE, Home Office in U-turn over NHS doctor facing deportation:
The earlier article, NHS doctor faces deportation over visa application error, points out “The Home Office initially refused to consider the evidence about her savings account when she later submitted statements and explained her mistake, because she had not included them in her original application.”
“I spent most of the morning watching interviews then-Congressman Mike Pompeo did during the years-long Benghazi investigation.
You may remember that, on May 9, 2014, then-Speaker John Boehner named Pompeo to the House Select Committee on Benghazi:…”
Some confirmation on that odd Al Jazeera note (see @244), from Reuters, Putin backs Trump in US domestic row, jokes about election meddling:
There are also confirming articles (possibly based on this Reuters report) from WSJ, CNN, and others.
“Confirmed: A source familiar tells me the State Department IG briefing on the Hill is about retaliation against State Department officials who are trying to cooperate with House Democrats.”
“Pompeo was so unpopular among many staffers at CIA for his bullying and outbursts that two well-placed sources tell us his security detail had an ‘Emancipation Party’ after he left.”
Trump Reaches His Impeachment Breaking Point In Front Of Finnish Prez:
I assume President Niinistö said that tongue-in-cheek (he writes tongue-in-cheek).
OMG I had forgotten about this.
JFC, the Orange Toddler-Tyrant may just have a stroke. What would he do if Pounce et.al. invoked the 25th amendment?
Whilst I don;t recognise all the Ozland(-specific?) references here, it’s nonetheless fairly self-explainatory — and perhaps not at all limited to Ozland — First Dog on the Moon in the Grauniad, Stay relaxed and comfortable, the government knows exactly where you are at all times always (cartoon), “The world can be a scary place”. First panel, transcribed one of the readers: “The world can be a scary place, that’s why this government is doing everything it can to protect decent, well frightened Australians from terror, baddies, vegans and fake news.”
“Please beam me up now, Scotty!” (albeit perhaps in Finnish, “Suojaa minut nyt, Scotty!” (according to Generalissimo Google™ Translate)): “The president of Finland as Trump rails against San Francisco, Los Angeles and the governor of California.”
And, Finland’s president seemed very unhappy to be sitting next to Trump:
Images at the links. I do hope the discussions between President Sauli Niinistö and the Wacko House occupant did not consist entirely of hair furor ranting.
The Republican war on science continues.
WaPo:
USDA relocation has delayed key studies and millions in funding, employees say
Oct. 2, 2019 at 4:00 a.m. PDT
The relocation of two Agriculture Department agencies out of the District of Columbia has delayed the publication of dozens of research reports, squelched early-stage studies and halted the release of millions of dollars in funding, USDA employees say.
At the direction of Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, two scientific agencies — the National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the Economic Research Service — moved to Kansas City this summer. Employees at NIFA manage a $1.7 billion portfolio of science funding. ERS is a federal statistical agency whose experts study agricultural trade, farming and rural America.
Staff numbers at both agencies have plummeted by about 75 percent since the relocation. At NIFA, the employees who approve the grant paperwork and release funds are gone. The publishing staff at ERS did not accept the reassignment to Kansas City. The flow of research and grants from these agencies has slowed, employees said, piled up behind the logjam of empty desks.
An internal ERS memo obtained by The Washington Post and first reported by Politico describes dozens of delayed ERS reports. Two USDA employees, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the document, confirmed the existence of this list, which was circulated among ERS managers in mid-September.
According to a statement that USDA’s press office provided Tuesday, “ERS has taken important action to ensure mission continuity and delivery of mission-critical work throughout the transition, and as a result, the agency is on track to complete its mandated and calendared projects.”
The nearly 40 delayed reports include studies into veterans’ diets, honeybee health and the opioid epidemic. Other reports address obesity, international markets and organic foods. These studies are completed but unpublished. Other ERS projects, in earlier stages, have been abandoned.
Laura Dodson, an economist and acting vice president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 3403, the union chapter that represents ERS employees, had been working on what was to be a two-year-long report on the herbicide dicamba. Soybean farmers use dicamba where weeds have developed resistance to another herbicide, glyphosate. But dicamba “has serious negative effects to neighboring farms who don’t plant dicamba-resistant seeds,” Dodson said. “It can essentially wipe out their whole crop.”
ERS is “one of the few places, if not the only place right now, that has field-level data on dicamba drift issues,” Dodson said. The scientists who would have been her co-authors left ERS. Dodson will be unable to complete the study alone.
At NIFA, program directors and grant reviewers ensured that unspent funds in danger of returning to the Treasury Department at the end of the fiscal year were successfully obligated (meaning the money has been designated for specific projects). But no staff remain at the agency who are able to approve the grant paperwork or authorize the funds’ release.
As a result, tens of millions of dollars in approved grants are in limbo, set aside for recipients but unreleased. Funds for projects supported by NIFA’s competitive grant program, the $400 million Agriculture and Food Research Initiative, also have been delayed.
USDA science agencies’ relocation may have violated law, inspector general report says
In this link Mick Mulvaney (acting Chief of Staff) applauded the result, saying, “It’s nearly impossible to fire a federal worker,” Mulvaney said. “I know that because a lot of them work for me, and I’ve tried . By simply saying to people, ‘You know what, we’re going to take you outside the bubble, outside the Beltway, outside this liberal haven of Washington, D.C., and move you out in the real part of the country,’ and they quit — what a wonderful way to sort of streamline government, and do what we haven’t been able to do for a long time.”
“Schiff spokesman Boland says whistleblower contacted Intel Cmte in advance of complaint. Says ‘This is a regular occurrence, given the Cmte’s unique oversight role..Committee staff appropriately advised the whistleblower to contact an Inspector General’
‘Like other whistle-blowers have done before and since under Republican and Democratic-controlled committees, the whistle-blower contacted the committee for guidance on how to report possible wrongdoing within the jurisdiction of the intelligence community’.”
Evidently this was reported in the NYT and so of course Trump, Fox, and the trollbot army are treating it like the scandal of the century.
“President Trump says he believes Rep. Adam Schiff may have helped write the whistleblower’s compliant because of reports that the whistleblower may have met with Rep Schiff before filing the complaint. ‘It’s all a scam’, Trump says.
To be clear, this is the NYT story: [NYT link]
And, there is nothing to suggest as of now that Rep Schiff helped write the whistleblower complaint.”
LOL.
Also, didn’t the NYT report earlier that the guy had tried to report through the CIA’s procedures and they…told the WH?
Josh Marshall: “The president doesn’t just need to be impeached. He needs to be sedated.
Sorry, Finland.“
#TrumpMeltdown trending on Twitter.
Matthew Rosenberg, NYT:
Rosenberg: “Despite what Trump claimed today, the @nytimes did NOT report that Adam Schiff helped write the whistleblower’s complaint. In fact, Schiff did not even know the whistleblower’s identity, officials told the NYT. Read our story here:…”
I’ll be so glad when this is over.
I’ll just point out that during his various orange-red-faced rants today, Trump reminded us that he is a “stable genius,” and that he did this without irony and without any indication of self-awareness.
At one point, the Finnish president had to interrupt Trump, saying, “I believe that question was for me.” That shut Trump up for about 30 seconds.
Whilst searching for on hair furor’s
ChinaFinland Syndrome meltdown, I stumbled across this, Trump’s PR Meltdown:Daniel Dale livetweeted the morning and afternoon press spectacles.
Trump’s insistence that the MEMCON is an exact transcription is making me suspect there’s more.
Also, re #266, someone buy Jeff Mason a drink.
“NEW: The Justice Department told White House personnel on Wednesday that they must preserve all presidential records, including any notes regarding President Donald Trump’s meetings and phone calls with foreign leaders.
—@kpolantz reports”
Pretty sure this was the policy before. Were they just waiting for the necessary items to be destroyed?
Andrzej Krauze in the Grauniad, Greta Thunberg’s battle to save the planet (cartoon): “Empty words from world leaders must be replaced by the kind of climate action advocated by the Swedish teenager”. Very powerful — well drawn, Mr Krauze!
Yahoo – “Nine dead as thousands protest across Iraq”:
Iran women married to foreigners can pass citizenship to children:
“I am told by spokespeople for both
@SenatorBurr and @MarkWarner that it would be standard practice for intel committee to tell a potential whistleblower to hire counsel and file a complaint with an agency IG or the IC IG.
Bipartisan. Both parties say this.”
Susan Hennessey: “This person followed the rules every step of the way. Schiff has followed the rules every step of the way. People are trying to pretend as if following the rules is proof of wrongdoing.”
Barack Obama as president was the picture of calm, grace, and dignity. Trump brings shame on the country. It’s horrifying to watch him with world leaders.
SC@271, Not just a policy, but mandated by law, Presidential Records Act (PRA) of 1978 (40 years ago).
According to the cited Ye Pffft! of All Knowledge article:
That’s based on this May 2019 UPI report, which seems relevant, CREW: Trump’s meetings with Putin, Kim broke the law:
I’m now wondering if some of the missing or (allegedly) never-made records are on the so-called “bin Laden” secure codeword system.
It may also be worthwhile for the impeachment investigation to talk to the interpreter who, allegedly, had his notes confiscated and threatened to keep quite by hair furor.
The Ye Pffft! article on the PRA also notes:
That would seem to further squish the lie that releasing a summary of the meetings with Putin would need Russia’s approval. Hair furor’s daleocrazy isn’t releasing such summaries (perhaps not even always making them?), but releasing them was common and expected practice.
“Raskin says ‘This is an irrelevant distraction from the matter at hand’
He says what the State Dept. IG brought to him doesn’t relate to Trump’s conduct re: Ukraine.
The IG turned over documents that contained mostly conspiracy theories, Raskin said.”
Bernie Sanders with the most Bernie Sanders tweet:
More re the packet the IG delivered to the committees. Very strange.
I don’t understand why anyone would have considered it urgent. Were the clues to reporters that this was about pressure and retaliation at State (see #251) part of a bait & switch/distraction from Pompeo revelations, a parallel story that just hasn’t come out yet, or evidence that someone got to the IG before the briefing?
“I’ve got to say, all this desperate flailing around in search of some kind of procedural faux pas by the whistleblower is pretty damn comical. IF HE DIDN’T CHECK BOX 28A ON FORM C19 NONE OF IT COUNTS! THOSE ARE THE RULES, PROBABLY!!!
(Checking the clock now to see how long it takes for some semi-literate who watched half an episode of Law & Order once to attempt to ‘educate’ me about their misunderstanding of the exclusionary rule.)”
Tweet o’ the day.
Hmmmm: “Dem source says the WH ‘sent an envelope to Sec. Pompeo … The envelope contained a bunch of TRUMP HOTEL folders. Those folders contained notes from interviews that took place at Rudy Giuliani’s NYC office with various Ukrainians about debunked conspiracies related to Ukraine’.”
SC@280/@278, Or Raskin is confused, deluded, or a Putin / hair furor shrill?
At the present time, the Grauniad’s live States blog expects the briefing is as reported by Reuters (Congress to get briefing on alleged retaliation against U.S. diplomats), about “‘potential political retaliation’ by department leadership against career officials over Ukraine”:
There are, of course, other possibilities.
A year ago today I posted:
I had forgotten that last part. They were ready to go with the public smears when they murdered and dismembered him while his fiancée waited outside. Chilling.
The Onion (the Onion’s “edits” in {curly braces}):
● ‘Are You The Whistleblower?’ Trump Boys Ask White House Janitor After Giving Him Serum Of All The Sodas Mixed Together: “Strapping the suspect to a chair and demanding to know if “he was the whistleblower, or else,” the Trump boys reportedly spent hours interrogating a White House janitor Wednesday after giving him a serum of all the sodas mixed together. “Well, well, well, Mr. Janitor, good luck keeping secrets from our awesome dad now that you’ve taken a sip of our super-powerful CIA brain juice,” said Eric Trump, prompting Don Jr to give the White House employee some more of the “truth sermon {sic},” which included a mixture of Diet Coke, Fanta, Sprite, Powerade, Minute Maid, and Mr Pibb, after the custodian refused to talk. […] At press time, Eric had reportedly begun to hyperventilate after accidentally taking a sip of the 30-ounce soda cup, letting out a huge burp, and realizing that he might have been the whistleblower the whole time.”
● Pompeo Clarifies Anyone In Country Can Listen In On Trump Administration Calls By Picking Up Phone, Dialing 9: “Explaining that his presence on a phone call where President Donald Trump reportedly asked the president of Ukraine to investigate political rival Joe Biden was completely above board, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo clarified Wednesday that anyone in the country can listen in on Trump administration phone calls by picking up their phones and dialing 9. ‘I’m not sure why the left-wing media and Democrats are so obsessed with the fact that I was on the Ukraine call when anyone in America can join simply by dialing 9 — just remember to hit the pound key afterward and it should take you right in,’ said Pompeo, further clarifying that while service was a little bit spotty in Alaska and some remote areas in the western states, any US resident with a phone could otherwise access every Trump administration call at any time. […] ‘We just ask that you stay on mute unless you have something meaningful to add, since it can get kind of chaotic in there. Heck, I was listening in on Trump’s calls with foreign leaders from day one of his administration, way before I was secretary of state. You can learn all kinds of things.’ […]”
blf @ #284, no, the briefing has been over for a while now. Raskin is a Dem on one of the committees. The Reuters and PBS reports about the IG urgently briefing them on retaliation were prior to the meeting. The people who were in the meeting all seem pretty perplexed.
Sanders’ senior communications advisor Mike Casca: “big thank you to @TeamWarren for sending dinner to our dc headquarters. the team is very grateful (and started with the cookies first).”
“Breaking: Trump’s Justice Department just asked a federal judge to block a subpoena for his tax returns.”
“So ends the much-vaunted independence and credibility of the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.”
OK, this is a possibility:
“Sen. Menendez: ‘We are just beginning to examine the documents provided by the State Department Inspector General, but they appear to contain long-debunked theories and false statements about the former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine and one of President Trump’s political opponent’
‘documents provide further evidence of a concerted, external effort to conduct a disinformation campaign against a career U.S ambassador … need to understand Secretary Pompeo’s role, given that it appears that he discussed these documents with at least one of his top aides’.”
The documents allegedly reached the State counsel in May. So could be this, especially if this garbage played a role in the firing of Yovanovitch. Or could be some weird distraction/bullshit cooked up by the Trump crowd (which could also prove a problem for them). I’m curious about the sources for the earlier reports that this was going to be about “retaliation against State Department officials who are trying to cooperate with House Democrats.”
“#TrumpMeltdown
128K Tweets”
…and rising.
Donald Trump’s bizarre logic damages US allies’ trust in intelligence sharing:
From the Grauniad’s current live States blog (quoted in full):
I love Mehdi Hasan, but it’s silly for him (and many others) to keep pointing to Pelosi’s earlier remark about Trump trying to “goad” the Dems into impeachment and presenting it as a sort of gotcha. As she said, events are what influenced her decision. Wherever you believe public opinion would be without the emergence of this massive scandal, it’s inarguable that the circumstances have changed dramatically since she said that in May.
Apparently, his aides feel Pence was too dense to know what was going on.
WaPo:
Trump involved Pence in efforts to pressure Ukraine’s leader, though aides say vice president was unaware of pursuit of dirt on Bidens
Oct. 2, 2019 at 2:51 p.m. PDT
Ah, the old The Vice President Is a Dimwitted Hayseed defense.
I sense a certain…tone in the piece (Ashley Parker was involved, right?):
“This is just a shocking, high-stakes, broad daylight brawl between Trump and Pence aides here. POTUS/VP relationships don’t recover from stories like this.”
Statement from Schiff, Engel, and Cummings on the State IG briefing.
“EXCLUSIVE: Former National Enquirer Editor threatens booksellers over Ronan Farrow exposé.”
“Tonight in Ukraine.
The protests have grown to thousands.”
Video at the link.
Does anyone know what the Ukrainian protesters @ #301 are chanting?
As one of the commentators note in @299, “That presser Raskin gave was pathetic then”. Which is, broadly speaking, an option mentioned in @284. As other commentators note, “so the White House is peddling conspiracy theories within other agencies in an attempt to target his political opponents”, and “the importance is not its content, but rather its provenance.” However, to be fair to Raskin, the Grauniad notes, at the end of ‘We’re not fooling around’: Pelosi and Schiff stand firm as Trump fumes: “[… Maryland congressman Jamie Raskin] said ‘there may be misconduct’ by the Pompeo and state department officials in distributing unsourced material.” The ghist I’m getting here is the IG was alarmed Wacko House and the dalekocrazy were — and still are — using obvious nonsensical & debunked conspiracy theories as the basis for action / inaction, as the reason for threats, and to guide foreign / diplomatic relations.
Sen. Schatz: “He did it. He said so. Don’t get it twisted waiting for another document, another piece of testimony and forgetting the plot. And the question is ‘what will congress, especially republicans, do about it?’ This isn’t about discovering a new ‘file’. We have everything we need.”
Ukraine’s nationalists rally against president over peace accord:
Erin Burnett on CNN just I think reported that Giuliani has said he supplied some of the documents that appeared in the State IG briefing. Possibly Raskin, along with many of us, thought it was so ridiculous and over the top (there are Trump Hotel envelopes in the packet and some labeled “The White House”) that it couldn’t possibly have been a real thing. So maybe Raskin just spoke prematurely? The whole thing is still weird.
Also, ew – Trump apparently has a crush on her.
“Ukraine’s nationalists rally against president over peace accord.”
I’m bothered by this headline. I wouldn’t want my country to be invaded and occupied by an expansionist regime, and I wouldn’t consider myself a “nationalist.” Also, “peace accord” gives it a positive spin.
Scotch whisky and French wine hit by $7.5bn US tariffs:
The mildly deranged penguin is hooping and hollering, this means there’ll be more cheese and whisk(e)y and cheese and vin and cheese available. Locally, that is…
Goddamnit, WaPo won’t let me read things even when I want to use up my free articles two days into the month.
“As was always obvious, the whole Flynn lied to Pence thing was always BS.”
Pence is an accomplished liar. The 2016 VP debate was a travesty – the media weren’t prepared for someone who could lie with that placid demeanor.
“The right-wing media ecosystem will spin off into alternate universes. They will slander good people upholding their oaths. Do not follow them down that path. That way lies madness. What matters is what the president did and what he directed others to do.”
for SC, re: #309
I was worried for a moment that it wasn’t sarcasm. It’s surprising how far that can go nowadays, before it becomes apparent.
A brief musical interlude
Admittedly, he does…. Well, whether or not he literally wants that, it doesn’t hurt him for us to be caught up in this, and in fact he only cares about himself, not this country or other human beings or decency or anything else.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t note the extent to which Pence is aided by epistemic injustice. He’s the quintessential straight cis white well-off Christian man, and as such is afforded extreme benefit of the doubt. Which he exploits.
cr @ #312, THANKS!
If you’re trying to give me Bible camp flashbacks, you’ve succeeded.
By the way, I don’t love concerts, and I can’t stand the corporate-sponsored “Global Citizen” festival, but I caught this performance and thought it was great fun.
“master baker” is a set-up for a joke, right?
“By the way, Rudy is admitting to manufacturing White House logos and sticking them on non-White House documents and pushing the real government to act on them.”
“…It seems pretty clear why Inspector General Linick thought this was an urgent matter.”
This is so nuts.
I was in Christian schools from preschool (evangelicals) through high school (Catholic, like my family) until I finally escaped to college. I had to spend several summers with the preschool Bible-thumpers too, since they had such a program for kids up to 8 or 10 — I didn’t like sports, and my parents needed to do something with me each summer. In some ways and as far as I know, they were better than the child molesters the RCC sent to my diocese….
I feel your pain.
Trump’s … aficionados might have a different favorite sing-along for all I know, and I don’t honestly understand them. I suppose they must be stable geniuses as well, if they can even purport to imagine the magnitude of his greatness. Or a bunch of petulant, childish assholes? Maybe both? Or perhaps “(d) Pat Buchanan”?
@ SC #309
I can still access WaPo in private mode (incognito on Chrome, which I use) though I have to log in with my free account each time (easy enough to automate). After 2 articles I have to close the window and open another but I’m surprised you’re having trouble.
Two different nutters in Ozland, both deluded loons, one an actual nazi. Only one has been dealt with:
● Naturopath who said bicarbonate soda cures cancer banned for life by health watchdog:
Woo-woo loons for magic sky faeries!
● Peter Dutton accused of sounding ‘like a dictator’ after urging welfare cuts for protesters:
Which is one reason I refer to the dolt as teh nazi-in-government. He’s also responsible for the worsening conditions in Ozland’s concentration camps in Manus and Nauru. He also promotes the discredited conspiracy theory white farmers in S.Africa are being “ethnically cleansed”, and on and on. And on… (He’s extremely probably a global heating catastrophe denier, albeit at the moment, I have no specific recollection one way or the other…)
blf, true enough.
But then, in the USA, they’d comparatively be bleeding heart socialists.
(Give us a bit to catch up!)
[not politics, but rather cultural differences. Tricky]
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-03/sa-police-officer-throws-rocks-at-wombat-in-video/11570502
By the end of the day yesterday, my brain was fried. But the Rudy Dossier story is also bizarre. I didn’t see Raskin’s original press round, but I saw him on both Chris Hayes’s and Lawrence O’Donnell’s shows, and he made perfect sense – it was the events he was describing that are bizarre.
It appears this is what happened: Giuliani compiled this propaganda packet in the spring, sorted in Trump Hotel folders and packaged in an envelope addressed to Pompeo in elaborate calligraphy and made to look like it’s coming from the White House. (Why the calligraphy? Why? Who thought to do that? Who actually did it? Why did they try to make the envelope look kind of like an official WH one? Why? It’s so bizarre.)
The packet was delivered to Pompeo in late April or early May. It contained John Solomon hit pieces, notes from Giuliani’s discussions with some characters from Ukraine, and other rubbish. It was all about conspiracy-theory attacks on Yovanovitch, Joe and Hunter Biden, and the Russia investigation.
It’s unclear what Pompeo made of it or to whom at State he distributed it or with what message. The State Dept. counsel’s office gave it to the State IG, Steve Linick. From the Schiff/Engel/Cummings statement:
Linick turned it over to the FBI, and it’s not clear what they made of it. The State Department issued a statement in support of Yovanovitch, but she was recalled on May 20th.
Needless to say, this is all ridiculously shady on Trump’s and Giuliani’s part, and not at all something that should be happening at the State Department.
Yovanovitch and Brechbuhl, who are State Dept. employees, were scheduled to be deposed by congress yesterday and next week, respectively, and Pompeo has been interfering. Yovanovitch’s deposition is now rescheduled for next week (the 11th), but I’m not sure about the status of Brechbuhl’s, which is supposed to be on Tuesday (the 8th). (Or that of EU ambassador Gordon Sondland, scheduled for the 10th.) Seems like Pompeo knows he can’t stop Yovanovitch or Volker from talking to congress, but really wants to block congressional investigators from getting Sondland or Brechbuhl under oath.
Volker’s deposition is today!
Ha – hours after I posted #269 – WaPo (obtained indirectly – I’ll have to work on my access issues when I’m not so distracted with other matters) – “Odd markings, ellipses fuel doubts about the ‘rough transcript’ of Trump’s Ukraine call”:
southpaw: “I’ll admit that I’m not prepared for the day, if it ever comes, when it’s revealed that the call summary clearly outlining an impeachable offense was a cleaned up version of something worse.”
“Australia’s Ambassador to the US, the honorable and amazingly-aptly-named Joe Hockey, responds to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC):
‘In your letter you made mention of the role of an Australian diplomat. We reject your characterization of his role’.
[link to Hockey’s tweet]
Sen. Graham had written to Australia yesterday outlining the conspiracy theory the Trump admin has been pursuing, including that the Australian diplomat ‘was… directed’ (Sen. Graham doesn’t say by whom) to contact George Papadopoulos and pass his info to the US’s FBI.
Does Graham know how crazy it is to write to a close US ally on Senate letterhead and off-handedly tell them that their former foreign minister was directed by parties unknown to sabotage a US presidential campaign? Here’s a link to the letter:…”
Sorry, Australia.
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian Brexit liveblog.
SC,
Heh. You do recognise diplomatic language when you see it, no?
(In case you were not aware, Downer was pretty high up. Party leader and foreign minister, with oversight over Australian intelligence and security services. Got a nice cushy job these days)
SC@307,
The demos in Ukraine may well be by the Ukrainian nationalist extreme right, which is a very real phenomenon. See for example these reports in The Guardian, and The Daily Beast. Whether Zelensky is right or wrong to accept the “Steinmeier Formula”, I don’t have the knowledge to judge, but with Ukraine highly dependent on Trump’s whims, he’s clearly in a very difficult situation.
Gandhi’s 150th birthday:
A little-remembered philosopher translated the Mahatma’s ideas of nonviolence for Americans https://www.rawstory.com/2019/10/gandhis-150th-birthday-a-little-remembered-philosopher-translated-the-mahatmas-ideas-of-nonviolence-for-americans/
John Morales @ #329, not sure what you’re getting at. Yes, “We reject your characterization of his role” is a polite, diplomatic way of dismissing Graham’s loony and insulting conspiracy theorizing.
Trump administration’s war on science has hit ‘crisis point’, experts warn https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/oct/03/science-trump-administration-crisis-point-report
Sorry, SC. Kinda like I wanted someone to correct me for a good reason for a change.
(Thanks)
KG @ #330, I’m aware of the far-Right in Ukraine, and have no doubt the nationalist Right actively opposes the move. But what I’ve seen, which admittedly isn’t that much, suggests that it’s a misleading generalization. These look like rightwing nationalists. This and #301 above don’t to me.
Absolutely. And so are the Ukrainian people.
More Ukraine video.
I’m at a disadvantage due to my lack of knowledge re language and symbolism. It’d be strange if they’re rightwing given that those I’ve seen sharing videos and information about the protests are on the Left.
It’d be strange if they’re rightwing
In their entirety, I mean.
SC@335,
In the first of your links@301, toward the left, you can see a red-and-black flag (horizontally divided, red above, black below). This is the flag of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, a WWII military formation which was led by members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists – Bandera Faction, which fought mostly against the Red Army, and indulged in extensive ethnic cleansing of Poles. So even if they don’t make up most of the crowd, the extreme right nationalists are certainly there, and able to wave their banner without opposition.
Chris Hayes responding to a tweet from Don Jr.: “Shifty Schiff the Soros-picked Congressman! No tropes here. No sir.”
KG @ #338,
I don’t doubt that they’re there. The BBC image seems to show that pretty clearly. But that does look like one person pulled out a flag for a few seconds in a large crowd. Like I said, I don’t know the situation well but don’t think “Ukrainian nationalists” captures the entirety of the demonstrations. Which seem relatively small so far, but Zelenskyy appears to be working to quiet people’s fears, nothing has really happened yet, and I’m sure people want to give him a chance and don’t want to create an image of instability. But I think people have good reason to be extremely apprehensive at best about the move under the circumstances.
“New USA Today poll:
Americans support House impeaching Trump by 45-38
They support Senate conviction and removal by 44-35 (!)
Note: 30% of Republicans say pressure on Ukraine to smear Biden is an abuse of power.
And it’s early. More will come out.”
Julia Davis in the Daily Beast – “Russians Praise Trump, Taunt Zelensky, as Ukraine Signs On to Peace-Plan Proposal”:
Guardian – “EU parliament: Boris Johnson Brexit plan not remotely acceptable”:
From my #342 above:
I’m sure Monica Lewinsky is thrilled about this.
From the G liveblog earlier:
I’m left momentarily speechless by the utter dishonesty of Johnson’s last remarks here.
CNN – “Republican senators echoed Biden in urging Ukrainian president to reform prosecutor general’s office”:
“i just want to note that they attacked obama with racism, smeared his wife and kids, demanded his birth certificate, questioned his faith, and not once did obama stoop to the level of screaming expletives and accusing the opposition of treason. not once. not a single day in 8 yrs
similarly they have accused hillary of literal serial murder, questioned her faith, said she committed multiple crimes — and never, ever this kind of public meltdown. ever.”
MSNBC, happy to air Trump’s helicopter-shouting routine live and in full. So he gets like 20 minutes to scream his lies basically uninterrupted, and they help him out by adding the lies to the chyrons.
Great job.
“President Trump, on the South Lawn, says Ukraine ‘should investigate the Bidens’. ‘I would say President Zelenskiy, if it was me, I would recommend they start an investigation into the Bidens’.
“Likewise,” he added, ‘China should investigate the Bidens’.”
Jim Sciutto: “In plain sight, Trump has now asked two counties to investigate his political opponent.”
“Any member of the House or Senate GOP have a problem with this? You should, or you should try a different line of work where you don’t take an oath to defend the Constitution.”
(This is very good.)
“Just to be clear, Trump is currently, this morning, calling on foreign leaders to investigate Biden in the midst of an impeachment proceeding about whether he has encouraged foreign leaders to investigate Biden”
By leveraging our foreign policy!
“I’ve lived in China & covered it for decades. It is an authoritarian country with no credible rule of law which imprisons & kills political opponents. For a US president to call on such a country to investigate an American is incredible. Will Republicans who know this object?”
TPM – “Prison Bars Haven’t Kept Manafort And Giuliani Apart”:
David Rothkopf:
Tweet o’ the day.
Bernie Sanders’ campaign isn’t giving any information about his condition or even location, and told the media that they couldn’t say whether any will be forthcoming today. There’s some informed speculation that he had a heart attack.
Oh yeah, this should work.
WaPo:
White House officials weigh appeal to Democrats in GOP districts to stop impeachment of Trump
By Rachael Bade andJosh Dawsey
October 3 at 9:00 AM
Because legislative victories are just around the corner.
Hair furor is now (indirectly?) attacking Greta Thunberg:
This is a bit confusing. It’s from Grauniad’s current live States blog, which seems to claim it’s hair furor, but the link provided (see previous paragraph) is to someone called “Kellie”:
This mysterious (to me) “Kellie” seems to be full-on dalekocrazed, judging by her short bio; Judging by her other comments, she’s a full-on global climate catastrophe denier, and completely deluded: Whoever this wingnut is, she’s getting a lot of pushback. As one example, “The transcript [sic], that was edited, still shows exactly what the Whistleblower said. If you knew ANYTHING about foreign policy or election law, you’d know that what he said is detrimental.”
Exactly: “It’s a videotaped illicit abuse of power. He’s not saying I did it. He’s doing it.”
I cannot say I’d ever heard of this before, but it seems very sensible, Pissoirs and public votes: how Paris embraced the participatory budget:
The US embassy in Ukraine sent out a “demonstration alert”:
‘He tried to have his cake and eat it’: how Trump’s Ukraine envoy lost his big gamble (Grauniad edits in {curly braces}, some Grauniad typos corrected without being marked):
The ghist I get from this is Volker is a not-dishonest eejit. He tried to do the more-or-less proper / legal / ethical thing, and somehow convinced himself teh dalekocrazy and hair furor would either not notice, accept / approve of that, or he that could fool them. Whilst I can almost understand the later (hair furor and much of the dalekocrazy are stunningly stoooopid), even back in 2017 people were apparently telling him he was naïve.
Adam Schiff: “The President cannot use the power of his office to pressure foreign leaders to investigate his political opponents.
His rant this morning reinforces the urgency of our work.
America is a Republic, if we can keep it.”
SC@391, The States embassy / consulates here in France routinely post such alerts. There’s nothing apriori sinister about them, albeit here they seem to be mostly redundant, bordering on the absurd. There don’t seem to be any current alerts for France, the last seems have been in August 2019:
Yeah, sure…
Sometimes they can be flat-out bizarre (this example, reported by the BBC, is from Ireland, July 2019), Longitude festival: Mystery over US embassy warning:
For feck’s sake…
Obvious stoopidity aside, these sort of alerts are potentially useful. I myself tend to consult multiple country’s services when traveling. The best alert I can recall — albeit a parody — was from Amnesty International (image).
me@364: SC@391 → SC@361…
(I must have been taken a sip of whisky about then…)
blf @ #364, huh? I know they’re a regular thing, and didn’t think there was anything sinister in this case. I thought it of note because it mentions demonstrations in several cities and suggests they’re expected to grow over the weekend. It’s been hard to get information about what’s happening there.
Kaitlan Collins, CNN:
The Sanders campaign is saying he’s recovering in a Las Vegas hospital, doing well, and in good spirits. Hasn’t needed any additional procedures. They expect him to be discharged and headed to Vermont by the weekend.
SC @342, It is so infuriating to read how, (to see how), Trump has weakened the Ukrainian president so much that Putin will now have his way. Russia will end up with big chunks of Ukraine. There will be “agreements” signed that pretend this land grab by Russia is okay.
re SC @367: OMFG!! I don’t know if anyone can be that lacking in self-awareness. He must be just doing the bidding of the Orange Toddler-Tyrant.
ABC – “‘Crazy to withhold security assistance’ to Ukraine for political campaign: Top US diplomat”:
Yeah, Sondland is a Trumper. I assume they’ll be deposing Taylor.
Lynna @ #369, I felt sick reading it.
johnson catman @ #370, I thought nothing could top Johnson claiming “Being outside the EU will allow the UK to go further” on standards (@ #345), but Pence just lapped him.
LOL.
“Trump-appointed US ambassador to the EU: ‘this isn’t a crime and also let’s stop creating a paper trail for our conversations about what is definitely not a crime’.”
WaPo is reporting that Volker told congress that Giuliani was warned that the Ukrainian claims about Biden he was hearing weren’t credible. I saw a clip earlier today in which Giuliani is talking about how Ukrainians just dropped the information in his lap. Because that’s not suspicious at all.
“Trump turning a WH (taxpayer funded) event on Medicare into campaign rally: ‘These are maniacs. Elizabeth, Pocohantas. When I used to hit her, I thought she was done. But she came back from the ashes. Now I’m gonna have to do it again because I don’t see Sleepy Joe making it’.”
“Kudos to [Shepard Smith] right now calling out Trump’s blatantly illegal acts & forcefully fact-checking the lies.”
Julia Davis’ summary of the new WaPo piece:
WaPo latl.
“BREAKING: Congress members Ted Lieu and Kathleen Rice just sent a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray asking him to investigate whether the @NRA’s CEO, Wayne LaPierre, attempted to bribe Donald Trump to oppose gun safety measures.”
Hillary Clinton: “Someone should inform the president that impeachable offenses committed on national television still count.”
“Breaking via WaPo: An IRS official has filed a whistleblower complaint reporting that he was told at least one Treasury Department political appointee attempted to improperly interfere with the annual audit of the president or vice president’s tax returns.”
Latl.
HuffPo – “‘Domestic Terrorist’ Christopher Hasson Pleads Guilty On Gun, Drug Charges”:
So, he had watched a lot of Fox Spews?
SC@366, US consular / embassy alerts range from being paranoid jokes to useful advice. Broadly, unless confirmed by independent sources, they should be considered “routine advice” only eejits (read: too many tourists from the States) would not already be aware of and prepared for.
From the G liveblog:
blf @ #384, I’m finding this exchange fairly annoying and slightly insulting. I’m not sure what you think I’m suggesting, but whatever it is I’m not suggesting it. You can have the last word.
johnson catman @ #383, from Wikipedia:
Could people maybe dial down the glib a bit?
CNN is relaying that the WSJ is reporting that Trump ordered Yovanovitch’s removal after complaints from Giuliani and others.
Guardian – “Jair Bolsonaro pictured with second accused in Marielle Franco murder case”:
Great news! – Guardian – “Scotland becomes first country in UK to ban smacking of children”:
Fascist, trashy, unbearably stupid.
WSJ link here.
“And there you have it. The president fired the ambassador to Ukraine because Rudy told him she was getting in the way Operation Get Biden.”
Sen. Schatz is one of the best people on Twitter.
“Trump’s executive order has some stealth provisions that would blow up Medicare as we know it….”
NYT:
CNN Rejects Two Trump Campaign Ads, Citing Inaccuracies
By Michael M. Grynbaum and Tiffany Hsu
Oct. 3, 2019
Updated 5:18 p.m. ET
CNN – “Trump raised Biden with Xi in June call housed in highly secure server”:
Everything he emphasizes publicly is a clue to something private he fears will be revealed. He’s been talking a lot about how he’s now calling the media “corrupt.” I don’t now if that’s just a new catchphrase or an attempt to deflect from Solomon’s involvement, but there could well be some revelation to come about his relations with rightwing media in the US or elsewhere.
Via CNN, the NYT is reporting that Volker and other diplomats drafted a statement with Giuliani for the Ukrainian president committing the Ukrainian government to investigate the bullshit conspiracy theories about the Bidens and the Russia investigation (which of course the Kremlin wants).
NYT link here.
Heh.
“Fired ambassador, withheld military aid, refusal of high level meetings – seems fair to say US-Ukraine relationship was completely taken over by effort to force leaders to get involved in US election.”
More re #371/374: “New NYT scoop adds a crucial detail to this text exchange—Sondland reportedly talked to Trump before he wrote back to the group.”
Volker’s deposition was 9 1/2 hours.
An interesting piece on Lawfare, concerning possibly Trump’s most impeachable offense–bribery.
The Constitution Says ‘Bribery’ Is Impeachable. What Does That Mean?
By Ben Berwick, Justin Florence, John Langford Thursday
October 3, 2019, 8:00 AM
There follows a detailed dissection of why Trump’s conduct meets, not just the Founders concept of bribery (at a time when no federal criminal code existed) but the modern statutory standard for bribery. Bottom line? “Trump’s attempts to use his immense foreign policy power for personal and political gain rather than the public good is a realization of the Framers’ worst fears and the very definition of impeachable bribery.”
WaPo Live Updates
Matthew Miller: “The scariest thing about this is how Trump has been able to corrupt the entire bureaucracy into doing things that would’ve been unthinkable three years ago. His removal from office is urgent.”
NYT reporter Michael Schmidt was just on Chris Hayes. He said the State Dept.. pushed by Trump and Giuliani, wanted Zelenskyy to publicly commit to the investigations so they’d be bound to actually do them. I think Trump didn’t actually care about any real investigations (aside from the possibility that they can toss up assorted random dirt); the announcement of the investigation is itself a huge political prize, and even if an investigation turns up nothing, its dragging on for months or years does the work of smearing (“raising questions,” “providing fodder,” etc.). We saw this with Hillary Clinton.
(Obviously now any such investigation of a Democratic candidate or perceived adversary – McCabe, for example – is discredited from the start.)
Ha – as I was posting #406, Josh Marshall was tweeting “Left unstated in Times piece abt Volker/Sondland memo is that if Zelensky had released it that likely wld have been all the Trumpers ever wanted or needed for validating all their whacko conspiracy theories.”
So are the New York Times and Washington Post going to call for Trump’s resignation or…?
Politico is reporting that Rick Perry will be resigning as Energy Secretary in November, and several reporters have said he just stated he’d cooperate with the Ukraine investigation. If the trollbots pointing to his alleged corruption (shocker) are any indication, he might actually be intending to cooperate.
“…Perry has drawn scrutiny because he led the US delegation to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s inauguration in May, instead of Pence.
Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J) earlier this week sent a letter to Perry requesting information about his activities and interactions in #Ukraine.”
Evidently, according to Nicolle Wallace on MSNBC, he said he would be cooperating yesterday.
This is possibly the most important tweet today.
From earlier: “BREAKING: Manhattan D.A. Vance comes out swinging against @TheJusticeDept for having ‘elected to insert itself’ in this litigation, calling the bid ‘audacious’ in a 3-page letter.”
Screenshot and link atl.
I’ve mentioned this before, but as reports of Republican silence roll in it should be said again. The US is (still) a democracy. The worst fate that would befall Republican senators or representatives who stood up for the country against Trump (setting aside those being blackmailed, and they’re not exempt, either) is losing a primary, losing an election, and probably some shunning and hostility from the cult (though far less than Democrats, journalists, and groups targeted by Trump have endured).
They’re not risking their lives, their security, prison. It’s the worst sort of moral depravity. And it increasingly leads to a situation in which speaking out would be genuinely dangerous for them and others. They’re willfully turning over everything in exchange for more fear and powerlessness. And they hate Trump’s guts. It’s truly perverse.
SC@356,
Bernie Sanders should withdraw his candidacy. In his own interests, but also because no 78-year-old with a serious health problem (and anything requiring urgent emplacement of cardiac stents is a serious health problem, as your link shows) should not be running for a top-level governmental or political post, if there’s any viable alternative. In this case, there clearly is: Elizabeth Warren. Warren’s far from perfect, particularly on Israel/Palestine, but anyone claiming she’d be no better than Trump, or any similar nonsense, is either a fool, or a Trump supporter pretending to oppose him. And she’s already ahead of Sanders in most polls, and well within reach of Biden.
The House committees last night released text messages among Volker, Taylor, Sondland, Giuliani, Yermak, and others. They were turned over by Volker at the time of his deposition. They show Taylor being honorable and concerned about Ukraine and the US, and Trump’s gang (including Sondland and a reluctant Volker) acting like a crime syndicate. They’re extremely damning, and Volker’s only the first witness.
A link to the messages, along with a strong letter from the three chairs, is at the link.
Atkinson, the ICIG, will testify today.
re SC @387: At the risk of getting on your last nerve . . .
How many on this list have NOT been mercilessly disparaged by Fox “personalities”? The point I was so glibly, but not so succinctly, trying to make was that Hasson was steered toward the people on his list by the constant lies and misrepresentations that Fox has perpetrated on the US.
.
I DO appreciate the time and effort you put into your posts here. I do not subscribe to a newspaper, I rarely watch the nightly news, and I don’t participate in social media such as Facebook and Twitter. I would not hear about some of this stuff without reading it here. Everything that is happening now in the US and the world is truly political madness. Everyone should be outraged at the abuses of our governments and the attempts to keep people from doing anything about it. It is enough to drive us insane. Sometimes, all I have to keep me from blowing a gasket is a smartass remark. My comment was not meant to make light of your post or the seriousness of the charges against Hasson.
Josh Marshall at TPM – “Big Trump/Ukraine Document Dump, Annotated”:
Note: the whole document dump is only 6 pages.
johnson catman @ #416:
I wasn’t saying his target list wasn’t originally derived from Fox propaganda, but that watching Fox wasn’t the research referred to. He’d compiled the names in a spreadsheet, and was researching their locations and security arrangements. I believe that was just the information made available at the time of his indictment, and suspect he had much more, but even that includes that he had Joe Scarborough’s and Mika Brzezinski’s home address. He’s a terrorist and was well along the road of planning his attacks.
Thank you for saying this. I get that for many people it’s a sort of defense mechanism, but it does get on my nerves. I think it was Yashar Ali a while back on Twitter announced that he’d block people responding to his tweets with variants of “Are you surprised?” Whole response threads would be that. I fear that it does tend to normalize what shouldn’t be normalized. Anyway, no hard feelings.
“For those catching up, Gordon Sondland is a hotel and private equity magnate and GOP megadonor from Oregon who Trump appointed Amb to the EU. Early Trump supporter. He also gave a mill to the Trump inaugural.”
(The inaugural donation was hidden behind four LLCs.)
“This sounds good. Chairman Adam Schiff has adopted GOP rules of procedure where staff conducts staff interviews, and obstructionists like Gym Jordan and Madman Meadows can’t screw up the deposition with their latest conspiracy theory, and witness harassment.”
And the staff tend to be better questioners.
“God how pissed must Sondland have been when he got that ‘as I said on the phone’ text.”
Taylor’s no slouch.
“Sondland taking 5 hours to respond, talking to Trump, and then replying ‘no quid pro quo’ shows 1) they knew what they were doing 2) knew it was wrong 3) settled on the ‘no quid pro quo’ defense before it ever became public.”
“That last text from Sondland is straight up knowing your mom picked up the other line and saying, ‘Why, Reginald, I would never smoke “marijuana” and I bristle at the insinuation. Please refrain from calling me at this number again’.”
Chris Hayes: “I’m still laughing at the sheer guilty desperation of Sondland’s texts. Basically, I want to be very clear we are not doing crimes here. Call me to discuss further.”
“As an aside to all this: The U.S.’s special envoy to Ukraine, Kur[t] Volker, worked simultaneously [in 2017] for the State Dept, and as a lobbyist for both Ukraine and Raytheon, which was selling missiles to Ukraine.”
Neal Katyal: “You can litigate for literally decades (as I have) and never see something in writing as damning as this and the other texts released last night. Unbelievable.”
Susan Hennessey: “People don’t put ‘I personally think the quid pro quo is a bad idea’ in a text without knowing what they’re doing. The unwritten clause is ‘For the record’.”
“The 2016 FBI investigation was purposefully kept quiet to avoid interfering with the election. But Republicans are now advertising a DOJ investigation into Biden, one year out from the 2020 election….”
As I said above, any “investigations” announced under these circumstances have zero credibility. They’re also disgraceful and more items for the impeachment file.
Some names for the US Legislative Hall of Shame: Cornyn, Graham, McCarthy, Meadows, Jordan, Johnson, Zeldin.
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian Brexit liveblog.
“Johnson will write to EU requesting article 50 extension, court told”:
Much better, MSNBC! Thank you for not airing Trump’s shouting lies at reporters on the South Lawn and just going to your WH correspondent for a summary.
TPM – “White House Will Refuse To Cooperate With Impeachment Probe”:
This is so ridiculous. It’s not like Pelosi’s avoiding a vote so her members can stay quiet. We know the House would vote for the inquiry because they’ve publicly said they support it. It would just be a waste of time, and as she says there’s no such requirement.
Oh, FFS, I think MSNBC is going to show the Trump South Lawn rant.
Update to #426: “Cornyn’s team says he was referring to the ongoing Durham investigation, per @StevenTDennis. That investigation is not known to involve Biden at all, it’s unclear if that has changed.”
Absurd and despicable.
Also, turns out MSNBC is just waiting for the rant footage, so no improvement there. I rescind my praise.
“IC IG Michael Atkinson arrived a bit ago for his second, closed-door interview with House Intel.
Lots of members in town for this. They’ll want to know about steps he took to establish credibility of whistleblower complaint — & get names of other witnesses he may have consulted.”
“Trump confirms visa-waiver programme for Poland, immediately raising the question of what he got in return from Warsaw.”
“Ukraine is to review legal cases including investigations into the energy company where Hunter Biden was on the board, as Trump had requested. Ukrainian prosecutor says there is no connection.”
I don’t know if Pelosi was worried it wouldn’t pass or what, but I thought they should have begun with a vote when she made her announcement, like all other impeachments, required or not. It could make a difference to judges when issues go to court, also.
It’s possible she didn’t want to make members in Trump-leaning districts go on record, which is a poor reason, IMO.
“Trump goes on rant about the UK, Australia and Italy plotting against him during the 2016 campaign.”
Video clip at the link. Everything about him is loathsome.
tomh:
But they’ve gone on record in public. They’re going on TV and doing town halls and writing opeds. There’s no question they’d vote for it. I don’t see why it should matter to any judge when it would just be a pro forma exercise.
WaPo:
Supreme Court to review ruling on Louisiana abortion law
Oct. 4, 2019 at 6:40 a.m. PDT
Hahaha – “‘I don’t even know most of these ambassadors. I don’t even know their names’, Trump said.”
Best of luck, Sondland! Giuliani was texting Daily Beast reporters after midnight claiming people at State were doing things he didn’t know about. Next up, probably: “Rudy went rogue.”
“I asked President Trump if he had ever asked any foreign leaders for corruption investigations of anyone who was NOT a political opponent of his. He said we’ll have to check that.”
Mitt Romney:
And so your next steps will be…?
To smile embarrassingly at the camera while having dinner with him shortly before endorsing him.
“Former Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi said on Friday he would sue George Papadopoulos over Papadopoulos’ allegations that Renzi had tried to undermine Trump’s 2016 campaign.”
Also, “By all appearances” as no business in that tweet. Doesn’t even make sense.
“Q3 hauls & change from Q2 hauls:
Sanders: $25.3M (+$7.3M)
Warren: $24.6M (+$5.4M)
Buttigieg: $19.1M (-$5.8M)
Biden: $15.2M (-$6.8M)
Harris: $11.6M (-$0.2M)
Yang: $10M (+$7.2M)
Booker: $6M (+$1.5M)
Williamson: $3.05M (+ $1.6M)
Bennet: $2.1M (- $0.7M)”
JFC, just what we need. Another billionaire businessman running for president.
Sorry, forgot the link to the Variety article: https://variety.com/2019/scene/news/oprah-winfrey-jennifer-garner-bob-iger-presidential-run-1203357367/
Trump and corruption: a few thoughts on that from Steve Benen:
Not just “a bit ironic”! Laughable. Trump is beclowning himself again.
Yep. That’s exactly what I thought. Trump is now deep into his repeat-it-until-it-becomes-reality phase. That will work for some of his cult followers. But a lot of people will see right through that. Can’t wait to see Rachel Maddow’s coverage of this Trump strategy.
Link
Watch what he does, not just what he says. Trump’s 2020 campaign launched a multi-million-dollar ad buy that targets Joe Biden, and that pushes the discredited conspiracy theory involving Biden and Ukraine.
They really think they have a winning hand that relies on pushing Rudy Giuliani’s debunked, half-baked, fucked up conspiracy theories.
The first ads will air in all of the early presidential primary states.
I am not well-versed in history, but I think that “among” is totally unneeded in that sentence and drop the “s” from “presidents”.
More ridiculous blather from Hair Furor:
Uh … say what now? The pharmaceutical companies are trying to impeach Trump for soliciting election-year help from foreign governments? I can’t.
Steve Benen can’t either:
Ah, the perfect descriptive phrase: “multilayered nonsense.”
Link
Followup to johnson cayman @449.
From Nicholas Burns, a career diplomat who has worked for Democratic and Republican administrations:
From four historians — Texas A&M’s Elizabeth A. Cobbs, Arizona State’s Kyle Longley, Colorado School of Mines’ Kenneth Osgood, and the University of Texas at Austin’s Jeremi Suri:
CNN Link
And that last statement was published before Trump announced from the White House’s South Lawn that, yes, he wanted both Ukraine and China to investigate his domestic political rivals.
V.P. Mike Pence is all in. He was up to his eyeballs in the scandal, and now you can see only a tiny bit of his white hair on the surface fo the swamp.
About Pence and “the appearance of impropriety”: the guy stayed at Trump’s property on the other side of Ireland when he was there to meet Irish leaders in Dublin. He helped Trump profit from that official visit.
Yesterday, Pence added: “The president made it very clear that he believes our other nations around the world should look into” [allegations Trump and Rudy G. made against Biden].
Pence also said: “Anyone that looks at the president’s transcript will see that Trump was raising issues [with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky] that were appropriate, that were of genuine interest to the American people.”
Bullshit alert. Gaslighting alert. Abject toadying alert.
A Fox News host had to issue a correction:
Link
Laura Ingraham has also featured Rudy Giuliani and his preposterous conspiracy theories on her show multiple times.
From Mark S. Zaid:
https://twitter.com/MarkSZaidEsq/status/1179886939996073986
“NEWS: GOP Sen. Ron Johnson tells WSJ that the U.S. ambassador to the EU told him in August that the status of aid to Ukraine was tied to Trump’s interest in having Kiev investigate certain matters. Johnson confronted Trump, who denied it.”
WSJ link at the link. Hasn’t stopped him from shilling for Trump for the past several days, somehow. There’s another tranche of texts coming out later today. Maybe he’s featured?
“Republicans are not speaking out publicly against Trump — that has not changed.
But in the last 24 hours or so, many senior Republicans who are very friendly with Trump have completely shut down and stopped defending Trump off the record.”
Rightwing supporters are attending the town halls of Democrats in order to disrupt the proceedings, and in order to make Democrats look nutty:
Link
From Hair Furor:
The rest of the story:
Tweet o’ the day.
Well that’s a good question: “Btw, why was Johnson part of the delegation that Trump sent to Zelensky inauguration[?]”
This is informative and nicely done.
Oh, Sondland: “Wow — staunch Trump defender Sen. Johnson now says SONDLAND told him there was a Ukraine quid pro quo, right before Sondland denied it unconvincingly in his texts with Taylor.”
“What’s increasingly clear
1) There was a very explicit quid pro quo
2) Trump and those around him thought that as long as they never said the words ‘quid pro quo’ and denied there was a ‘quid pro quo’ then they’d get away with it.”
LOL, this thread.
“The best part of this is that Johnson thinks this is exculpatory because he believes Trump told him the truth:…”
WSJ screenshot atl. OMG, it hadn’t occurred to me that Johnson could be that dense.
Josh Marshall: “The remarkable thing here is that RonJon is actually dumber than he is corrupt. So he doesn’t actually know who he is incriminating.”
“NEW: Treasury Inspector General to review handling of Trump’s taxes.”
NYT latl.
WaPo:
China vows not to ‘interfere’ after Trump asks for Biden probe
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said Friday that China “will not interfere in the internal affairs of the U.S.,” after President Trump urged Beijing to probe his political rival Joe Biden amid an impeachment inquiry in Washington.
“We trust that the American people will be able to sort out their own problems,” the Global Times, a party-affiliated newspaper, reported Wang as saying.
[…]
“I have a lot of options on China,” Trump said Thursday, “but if they don’t do what we want, we have tremendous power.”
WaPo:
China vows not to ‘interfere’ after Trump asks for Biden probe
Here is what Russian disinformation sites want us to believe about impeachment inquiries of Trump:
Link
Facebook Just Gave Trump Permission to Lie
The president’s 2020 campaign is taking advantage with ads spreading false claims about the Ukraine scandal.
More at the link.
Elizabeth Warren Just Released a Wide-Ranging Plan to Give Power Back to Workers
“The most progressive and comprehensive agenda for workers since the New Deal”
The quid pro quo is in the text messages.
Back in July:
From Volker:
From Sondland:
Many participants:
Link
Sheesh. Harassment and disparagement of journalists seeps from Trump’s swamp all the way down to CBP agents:
Booker calls on TV stations to not air Trump ad attacking Biden over Ukraine:
Wow.
“House Dems now targeting Mike Pence.”
Letter and list of requested documents at the link.
re SC @473: Even though this is painfully obvious to some of us, there are still people (coughDNCcough) who are willfully ignorant about this and think that those people can be swayed by a “centrist” platform. Fuck them.
johnson catman @ #475,
I was thinking this morning about how this whole episode hurts Biden’s campaign, but not in the way people might expect. His whole message is about how he can work across the aisle with these Republicans who were his friends and colleagues throughout his life. And now when Trump has criminally marshaled US foreign policy to attack him and promote insane conspiracy theories about him (and his family!), these people are not only abetting it but attacking the Bidens themselves. Nothing could be a bigger blow to his claims about the possibilities of bipartisanship going forward. Biden presents himself as a pragmatist but this so clearly shows how unrealistic and delusional his thinking is.
From Marco “The Deluded” Rubio:
From more reasonable sources:
Link
Right-wing smear networks are poised to attack any Republican who steps out of line on impeachment.
Link
NBC – “CIA’s top lawyer made criminal referral on whistleblower’s complaint about Trump conduct”:
More at the link.
From Wonkette:
Link
In case some of you are not familiar with Jim Wright, this post on Stonekettle.com is very relevant and pointed: http://www.stonekettle.com/2019/09/danger-close.html
.
A portion:
Meghan McCain Asks Rachel Maddow If She Knows Why Fox News Is So Much Better Than Anything She’ll Ever Do
More at the link.
Followup to 482.
Forgot to mention that video of Maddow responding to McCain is available at the link.
From Ben Mathis-Lilley:
From Dahlia Lithwick:
Much more at the link.
WaPo Live Updates:
Utah Democrat’s support for impeachment inquiry leaves just 9 Democrats not on board
“Bernie Sanders Had Heart Attack, Doctors Confirm.”
NYT link atl.
“CNN: EU ambassador Gordon Son[d]land is now scheduled to testify to three House committees on Tuesday, October 8th.”
WaPo Live Updates:
6:40 p.m.: Defense Secretary Mark Esper declines to give details of delay in aid to Ukraine
Second intel official considering filing complaint.
Link
Trump suspends entry for migrants who will “financially burden the United States healthcare system.”
Link
‘Me! Me!’: An aggrieved Trump spins an alternate reality as impeachment probe escalates.
Washington Post link
From NBC News:
Of course, William Barr’s Justice Department did not use the criminal referral to open an investigation.
From the Wall Street Journal:
“The man Trump put in charge of shaking down Ukraine carries a hand held buzzer to summon servants. Brought Jay Leno to Brussels parties. Blew off those who tried to rein in his operation by saying he only answered to one person: the president.”
Walter Shaub: “It’s even worse that that. These weren’t people he paid to be his butler and maid. These were State Department officials we all pay to represent our interests overseas. @USAmbEU is an example of the filthy rich buying positions for which they are unworthy.”
WaPo link at the link. Very populist.
Link to another WaPo piece – about Trump’s calls with foreign leaders.
Guardian – “US diplomat’s wife leaves UK after becoming suspect in fatal road crash”:
“Meanwhile in Athens police disperses protesters using batons and tear gas during a rally against the visit of US secretary of state, M.Pompeo. (video still image)”
Guardian – “EU dismisses weekend talks leaving Johnson’s Brexit plan hanging by a thread”:
Natasha Bertrand in Politico – “Justice Department hasn’t interviewed key Russia probe witnesses”:
Barr has basically spent the past several months on a corrupt Kremlin-promoted Grand Tour, using our public funds.