Barr to jail, Trump to impeachment

[_Some Schmo]

This kind of blatant and gross bigotry...

I really wish you would learn the definition of words before using them.

ETA: Essentially, I could accuse your post of blatant bigotry, based on the way you're using the word.

[_Some Schmo]

...wildly broad intolerance and deep seated fuming hatred of other american citizens/human beings has played a huge role in dividing this country to it's current unbridgeable position...

When you talk about "wildly broad intolerance and deep seated fuming hatred of other american citizens/human beings" are you talking about the way certain people regard gay people? Immigrants? African Americans? Muslims? Women? Atheists?

Just curious.

[_Gunnar]

There is a internal process to refuse to seat Senators Gunnar, but that process is a non-starter in this case. Barring some kind of electoral catastrophe for Republicans in 2020, he will be re-elected. You mostly just have to wait for him to die.

From what I have gathered from current news sources, the chances the Republicans will experience such an electoral catastrophe in Kentucky are far from negligible. McConnell is reportedly the least popular Senator in the U.S., and has a 55 % disapproval rating even in Kentucky. I don't think it is an unreasonable hope that he will be finally voted out of office next year. The downside of that is that that still gives him about 15 or so more months to cause further damage to our democracy.

[_subgenius]

...wildly broad intolerance and deep seated fuming hatred of other american citizens/human beings has played a huge role in dividing this country to it's current unbridgeable position...

When you talk about "wildly broad intolerance and deep seated fuming hatred of other american citizens/human beings" are you talking about the way certain people regard gay people? Immigrants? African Americans? Muslims? Women? Atheists?

Just curious.

I think the poster was talking about those who are "intolerant" in general...like you with white people who have jobs, or you people who live in rural america without colleg loan debt....your brand of "wildly broad".

[_EAllusion]

There is a internal process to refuse to seat Senators Gunnar, but that process is a non-starter in this case. Barring some kind of electoral catastrophe for Republicans in 2020, he will be re-elected. You mostly just have to wait for him to die.

From what I have gathered from current news sources, the chances the Republicans will experience such an electoral catastrophe in Kentucky are far from negligible. McConnell is reportedly the least popular Senator in the U.S., and has a 55 % disapproval rating even in Kentucky. I don't think it is an unreasonable hope that he will be finally voted out of office next year. The downside of that is that that still gives him about 15 or so more months to cause further damage to our democracy.

McConnell is relatively unpopular in Kentucky, but Presidential elections tend to have significant coattails for their party and Trump is extremely popular in Kentucky. Likewise, something else that makes a politician fairly unpopular in Kentucky is being a Democrat, and McConnell is going to have the good fortune to run against one of those.

It's not impossible for him to lose, but McConnell is a strong favorite to win even in a perfectly fair election environment. And you might not have one of those.

[_Brackite]

What Actually Happened Between Joe Biden and Ukraine, Explained
Hint: It’s not what President Trump wants the media to believe

President Trump has all but admitted he asked the Ukrainian government to investigate a political opponent, and there’s plenty of reason to believe he threatened to withhold Congress-approved aid if the country were to refuse to comply.
For Trump and his allies, however, the real scandal is not Trump’s actions in the Ukraine. The real problem here is about Joe Biden.
Specifically, the president and his surrogates are pressing the media to investigate Biden’s connection to the ouster of a prosecutor there. “Sleepy Joe Biden … forced a tough prosecutor out from investigating his son’s company by threat of not giving big dollars to Ukraine,” Trump tweeted Sunday night. “That’s the real story!”


https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/p ... et-888662/

[_EAllusion]

"Investigate political opponent" is already a euphemism for "fabricate a case against." The Biden story had already been pretty thoroughly debunked. Ukraine doesn't haven't anything to investigate. The call to investigate a signal to find something to make Trump happy. i.e. Make something up / cast a shadow over. Trump is already benefiting from positive media spin that is near ubiquitous in mainstream sources that want to be "fair" by choosing the framing of investigation over a more apt description.

Trump withheld Congressionally appropriated military funding from Ukraine set aside to help them fight Russian aggression in order to pressure them into making a case against his main political opponent in order to help his election chances.

This is so, so much worse than Watergate. If this kind of thing flies as within the scope of Presidential power, it's hard to think of ourselves as a democracy.

[_EAllusion]

I think this spells out clearly what the country faces and the choice Democrats have to make:

The fact that Donald Trump tried to force the president of Ukraine to inflict political damage on Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 election is a crime and a colossal abuse of office, but it also presents institutional challenges to Democrats and the press that neither appear equipped to overcome. And the stakes are no longer hypothetical, but will flatly determine whether Trump gets carte blanche to cheat in the 2020 election.

We can see traces of the dysfunction in Democrats’ continued reluctance to begin a full-throttled impeachment inquiry, and in the storyline unspooling in the political media that this scandal might hurt Biden, or benefit Trump politically. Indeed the failures feed off each other in a toxic way.

To understand why, it’s important to describe the scandal clearly, and imagine a proportional response to it.

With hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid on the line, Trump repeatedly hounded the president of Ukraine to work with his henchman, Rudy Giuliani, to manufacture a disinformation campaign against Biden, cloaked in the seeming legitimacy of a Ukrainian law-enforcement investigation. His demands didn’t come out of nowhere, either. Trump involved himself directly in a project Giuliani had been working on since the spring, largely out in the open, perhaps frustrated at Giuliani’s lack of progress.

That was late July, and we only learned about it in September because at some point an anonymous whistleblower decided it needed to come to light. As it happened, and in the months since, the top echelons of Trump’s administration either passively tolerated the crime, or actively participated in it. The vice president participated; the State Department reportedly facilitated meetings between Giuliani and Ukrainian officials. There are very few if any clean hands.

And this is a version of events that basically nobody disputes. Trump won’t frame it this way or call it a crime or a shakedown, but he has admitted to all the alleged facts, as did Giuliani, and the specifics of the conversation came to light from what appear to be defensive leaks, meant to put the cleanest-possible gloss on the story while the whistleblower complaint remains concealed. We still don’t know if Trump made his threat to withhold aid explicit, or if he promised additional bribes should Ukraine play along. What we already know, what is undisputed, is Trump’s most positive spin—and it is devastating.

In a world that hadn’t gone crazy, real impeachment proceedings would already be under way for all manner of past and ongoing crimes. But imagining this were the only thing we knew about Trump’s corruption, the appropriate response would be for the House to use all of its powers, as aggressively as possible, to bring the rest of the story to light and then impeach the president; it’d be for the FBI to investigate Giuliani (and, inevitably, Trump) for conspiring to defraud voters and violate campaign finance law.

It is within Democrats’ power to hold Trump officials in contempt and detain them as they testify before Congress until the whistleblower materials they’ve subpoenaed are delivered. They can pledge to freeze the director of national intelligence and attorney general office budgets until their officials cooperate fully with House investigations. They can refer Giuliani and Trump to the Justice Department for criminal investigation and haul FBI Director Christopher Wray up to the Hill under the expectation that he’d disclose whether he’d opened such an investigation. They could subpoena Giuliani himself, and hold him in contempt if he refuses to appear or answer questions about his conversations with the Ukrainians. These and other steps might pry the materials loose, or corner Trump into pardoning Giuliani, which would itself be an impeachable offense.

In that world, the fundamental unacceptability of what Trump had done, and his ongoing efforts to cover it up, would be the commanding facts of American politics. In the world we inhabit, none of these things has happened. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi still will not use the word “impeachment.” In a letter to House Democrats she warned that if “the Administration persists in blocking this whistleblower from disclosing to Congress a serious possible breach of constitutional duties by the President, they will be entering a grave new chapter of lawlessness which will take us into a whole new stage of investigation.” Over the weekend, Trump and his top cabinet officials poured into the void to contest the very notion that Trump had done anything wrong. Trump threatened and slandered the whistleblower. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo placed their boss above the law, and fanned debunked Biden smears.

This may come as a relief to legacy news outlets, which can safely treat the Ukraine scandal with less urgency than it merits—if Democrats aren’t making as much noise as possible about it, why should reporters?—and balance it out with stories like “Scrutiny over Trump’s Ukraine scandal may also complicate Biden’s campaign.” Or by covering Trump’s increasingly unhinged and dishonest attacks as though they might be rooted in some kernel of truth. Along the way more and more journalists, Democrats, and regular voters will absorb the euphemisms that we have already seen applied to this story: That Trump merely sought an investigation of Biden, that his goal was to obtain “opposition research” from Ukraine. On our current path, the plain reality of what has happened will be lost to millions of voters in a miasma of scandal and dueling accusations, with no easy way for them to discern true ones from fabrications.

Democrats may wish that journalists would sort this out for the public for them, but they are feeding the very institutional flaws that inhibit journalists from covering one-sided scandals without fear or favor by refusing to respond to it as the emergency they all know it is. They have Trump caught red handed trying to deny the country a free and fair election, and if they—the ones who stand to suffer the most direct injury from such a crime—won’t rise in their own defense, no one else will either.

[_Jersey Girl]

Waitaminute. Have transcripts of the call been published?

[_EAllusion]

Waitaminute. Have transcripts of the call been published?

No. They're stonewalling that. Impeachment proceedings provide the legal tools to forcibly get them. They can be subpoenaed. This assumes the Supreme Court would uphold the law on that front, which they almost certainly will not in a 5-4 decision.

But it's not really necessary to get that at this point. What they've preemptively admitted to is bad enough.