#entire campaigns have begun and ended in that span

[blujayonthewing]

the passage of time is so fucked. felix is brand spanking new what the hell do you mean that was two years ago

[mythriteshah]

The Sultan’s Dream

“Nyra… Glacius…  It has been a journey of ten-thousand malms since we stepped foot upon Eorzea.  I was but a simple lordling that wanted to make a name for himself, with nothing but my two greatest companions – my best friends – by my side.  You two were always there.  Through my triumphs and my failures, you were all I had to depend on.

Yes, I have my Angels to watch over and safeguard myself and the Regalia, but even they are not always around – unlike you two. ‘Tis not often I am given an opportunity to simply enjoy the scenery and share my thoughts; there are few whom I trust enough to divulge my deepest secrets.  And to tell you the greatest truth of all, Nyra & Glacius… I’m tired. My time spent in Eorzea was one filled with so much turmoil that I would not even wish such a life on my worst enemies. And although I’ve brought the Regalia to a shining age of prosperity, I had still suffered a great deal since I first became an adventurer.

All this conflict is for the cloudkin.  I’ve already cavorted with enough primals to live three full lives.  And the repeated incursions of the Garlean Empire are evolving into quite the proverbial broken record.  There are numerous other adventurers and ‘heroes’ strewn about the realm to make an army; what’s one merchant-lord in the grand scheme of things?

We’ve played our part on this grand stage of imbeciles, Glacius.  Nyra. But now it is time for the curtains to descend.  I am done fighting and tempting fate – I’ll grow old doing this for so long. ‘Tis time we returned back home to where we belong.”

Thiji reflected back on his speech he gave to his two most trusted companions some summers ago.  While he has gained and lost much throughout his time as an adventurer, he was tolerant of the outcomes and made peace with them.  Of course, there are certain moments in time he wish would have changed for the better.

His confrontation with the Harriers and their leader in the heart of Snowcloak, though successful in its objective, costed Thiji the life of the only Angel who ever loved him – Mamai Mai, who was given the title of “Lady” posthumously.  She insisted on accompanying the then Mythrite Prince and his comrades-in-arms in his assault, offering her pugilistic skills to the table. Unfortunately, she was waylaid unexpectantly by what may as well have been a sub-zero blast of cold by the Lady of Frost.  Thiji may have withstood the brunt of it, but Mamai was not so prepared, and she fell as a result.  This was the beginning of a martial awakening within Thiji, for this event catalyzed his ascent – or descent, to some – into the path of the Dark Knight.  This would later be realized in its fullest when he battled against the fourfold master of the blade in His home turf: Ravana, Lord of the Hive.

“Martial perfection”, the Amalj’aa called it.  The apex of one’s skill for which all Amalj’aa seek to strive.  This concept stuck close to Thiji as he eventually took up the sword and shield, continuing his adventures as a Paladin during the campaign to liberate Ala Mhigo.  When he had faced off against the Lady of Bliss, whose Qalyana dreamers were coaxed into summoning their false deity due to threats from the Garlean Empire, he had received word from Nyra, who bore a message from one of his Angels informing him that his then-Sultana, Nanago Nago - whom was with child and under the care of Sarielle - had succumbed to her own avarice, consuming gratuitous amounts of aether from his weapons collected throughout his journeys during the Dragonsong War.  The resulting effulgence – combined with her own innate powers as an Astrologian – caused her and their unborn child to perish in a stellar explosion, effectively removing them from existence.  Another crushing loss – greater, even, than the one incurred from losing Mamai. Thanks to the laws of time and space, no one but he and his Angels know of this event.  Once more unhinged, Thiji found new strength in not only his martial, but his magical prowess, effectively dispatching of the Lady of Bliss, though at the cost of his own blade and board… and his soul crystal, which he casted away with his armor following the battle.

It always seemed passing strange that the Dunesfolk nobleman from the Near East would gain new strength and prowess by leaps and bounds at the expense of some tragedy – this only further added to his eccentricity.  He was a calm individual, but was incredibly vindictive – especially if one ever crossed his Angels, whom he cared for so dearly.  Others may not have picked up on the cause of these… awakenings, but Thiji was more than aware of it.  Some days following the Largesse, when he was alone in his Aldenard Branch office, he gazed upon a glistening blue greatsword of exquisite make.  It was made by a Dragoon friend of his who had a fascination for all things Allagan, and upon the length of the blade was an engraved sentence:

“As long as you make it out of a battle alive, you're one step closer to fulfilling your dream.”

More than just pretty words to the Mythrite Sultan.  He had experienced many battles and came out of each intact.  Even now, as the kingpin of the Higuri Regalia, Thiji had even conquered a battlefield which extended beyond the physical: the realm of high fashion. He toiled for many winters to get to where he is now; to be the titan of aesthetic and philanthropy which has earned the respect of many (and, for some reason, the ire of some).  Yet therein lies the problem:

What dream remained?

Sure, Thiji Higuri was a man of ambition and intellect.  But he had not enjoyed the pursuit of a dream since the assault on Djanan Qhat.  Ever since he was a child, he was spellbound by a particular play, and never missed a single showing.  Thiji had experienced it so many times that he could (and probably still) recite the entire script verbatim.  It was a tale of romance and tragedy; of a powerful sorceress with a good heart who stood up for a broken country’s people, and the solitary man who rose up to defend her:  the Sorceress’s Knight.

A dream he may have fulfilled after the Dragonsong War, but was snatched away prior to Ala Mhigo’s freedom. It was a sensitive topic, and seldom brought up in the Mythrite Sultan’s presence, lest an Angel earns his anger. Why keep the claymore, then, if he had no dream to pursue?  What other meaning could the decorative sword have to Thiji if he is a man bereft of that driving force?

The evening following the Largesse, the Mythrite Sultan was no longer present at the Aldenard Branch. He had begun making for the Main Branch for reasons as of yet unknown – probably to oversee the release of the Blessed Wardrobe’s second clothing line.  As usual, his Advisor, Veeveena Veena, was present in his chambers, enjoying some Winter Lassi as she gazed upon the moon with that lovely smile on her face.  It was yet another peaceful night in Radz-at-Han, and though she has seen the view many times, it was no less breathtaking to behold for the Near Eastern flower.

Veeveena took a few sips of her drink as the winds suddenly began to rise.  The trees amidst the emergent layer of the jungle which could be seen from the city began to sway and billow, and would eventually cause a whisper or three to blow through the balcony.  The sudden shift in temperature caught her off guard as the Dunesfolk woman let out a soft gasp, stumbling somewhat, but maintained her posture as the numerous jewels and decorations on her sampot clinked like wind chimes against her body.

“This breeze…” she whispered to herself.  “Could it be the North Wind?  Has he arrived in Radz-at-Han?”  The sheer thought of meeting the elusive debonair was too enticing to resist, and Veeveena would quickly down the last of the lassi, enduring the brain freeze that would follow.  As swiftly as she could, she doffed her garb to put on some evening attire before making her flight from the Main Branch Headquarters.  Forgoing the usual method of taking the bridge out from the city, she utilized her fans to conjure wind-aspected aether to propel herself upward, gliding down gracefully toward the canopy.

Meanwhile, as Veeveena made her way to the rivulet, a lone figure was seen dancing about.  It was shrouded entirely thanks to the shadows cast by the dense canopy beneath Menphina’s light.  The figure’s movements were seamless, effortlessly transitioning into fouettes, sliding along the waters from one side to the other as they froze over, striping the rivulet with bands of ice.  All throughout was the sound of steel ringing through the night air, and that same icy wind began picking up once more as the figure gathered aetherial energy for a brief moment before soaring from one end of the river to the other in a twirling flourish.   Upon reaching the apex of the jump, it performed a flawless jete, the silvery moon cloaking the figure all the while as if the spectacle was taken straight out from a painting. The concealed terpsichorean was releasing the stored energy as it did its finish, resulting in an arch of slick ice to form over the rivulet.  Sticking the landing with one final twirl into a plie, it detected movement within the trees.  It did not bother to take the time to discern the incoming presence, and instead fled the scene with a blinding dash into the forest floor.

When Veeveena had finally emerged, the figure she believed to be the North Wind was nowhere to be found. All that she beheld was the stark scenery of a partly-frozen rivulet, the banks dotted with shards of frost, and an arch spanning its breadth.  “This is beautiful… but the North Wind could not do this,” she thought, as she felt the scintillant snow particles kissing her face.  While she was awestruck at the sight, Veeveena had to report this occurrence to her peers.  Without wasting another moment, she contacted the Angels at the Main Branch, who would then arrive within the bell.

The “S” Trio (Sena, Sona, Suna) and the “L” Trio (Lena, Luma, Lina) were investigating the area as Veeveena brought them up to speed on what happened to the best of her ability. Sosona was easily able to deduce that the lingering aether was not the result of a primal’s thanks to her aetherometer obtained by the Scions of the Seventh Dawn (who, when asked about how she acquired them, stated that they didn’t seem to be using them anymore anyway);  Lelena and Lilina, with their own unique abilities, further deduced that the culprit was not using the ambient aether or the influence of a construct; Luluma and Susuna had also come to the conclusion that the focus area was away from any wildlife or beastmen, so none were harmed from the result of this… phenomenon.

What really stood out, however, was Sesena’s observation after gazing upon the frozen arch for several minutes:

“Hey, Angels… do any of you feel… different?” she asked them.  “Miss Veeveena?”

“Yes,” she replied. “I thought I was the only one who felt such… emotion from this scene, so I did not address it.”

“Miss Veeveena’s right… I don’t feel all that chipper,” Lilina commented, holding a hand to her heart. “It’s not… aether sickness, but when I gaze upon this scene, I’m seemingly overcome with… sorrow.  But it’s a sort of… beautiful sorrow – like a dying maiden being held in her lover’s arms before the last flames of life fade from her eyes…”

The other Angels absorbed Lilina’s words, taking in the scenery, watching the snow particles dance in the air.  The longer they remained, the more these senses seemed more profound.  They may have been involved in many conflicts both small and large, but the Angels were no strangers to emotion – especially ones as palpable as what they were experiencing.  They felt tranquility… yet sadness; bliss… yet loss.  It was as if they were traversing a thin line between positive and negative emotion.

“I’ve heard tales of his prowess, Angels, but I don’t think even the North Wind is capable of something like this,” Sesena commented.

“Whomever it is,” Sosona began, “they’re damn good at expressing themselves.”  The Angels remained for a while longer, until the icy spectacle would be whisked away by an errant gust of wind, freeing the rivulet from its frozen state in a cloud of diamond dust.

From atop the city in the Main Branch Headquarters, a Lalafell woman veiled in mythril blue and silver watched silently from her vantage point.  Lady Mimizo, the Valide Sultan, was surprisingly awake during this bell, her face obscured by one of her fans.  But for what reason was she spying on the Angels?

As Nyra flew to her side, Mimizo looked over her shoulder to find a slumbering Thiji, who seemed to be well into his sleep, a rare smile of content made visible on his face.  His mother would grin in kind as she gave a kiss to the owl’s cheek.

“[I am indebted to you, Nyra.  Thank you for keeping this secret for so long.  But soon, the Angels will have to know. Until then, pray hold your tongue a while longer],” Mimizo whispered to Nyra in their native tongue.  She would bow her head before taking wing, flying off into the night sky.  Mimizo gazed upon the vestiges of the ice particles swirling into the heavens, enjoying the sight for a moment before quietly leaving her son’s bed chambers.  She would return to accompany her husband before the Angels would make their way back to report this event to the other branches.

“May your dreams bring you the bliss you so rightfully deserve, my beloved son…”

[thewreckkelly]

NEWS ……. BREAKING NEWS …….. BREAKING NEWS ……BREAKING NEWS ……

THE DESTRUCTION OF THE LIBERAL WEST COAST

A new Crowdfunding push on the dark web by a team of disgruntled Republican activists - who purposely fly under the radar - has begun to receive major traction. 

The fund is controlled through a Central America tax efficient corporation and according to their manifesto seeks to raise $250,000,000 for the purpose of developing, manufacturing, locating, implementing and managing a series of underground low frequency sonic wave emission cones at strategic points along the 750 miles of the San Andreas Continental Transform Fault Line.

To date the fund has used money raised to commence the purchase of 39 parcels of land spanning the Pacific and North American plates. Formal registration of ownership of these parcels have been filed in the name of Ron T Laddump acting in the capacity as nominal majority shareholder of FTL IBC, a Belize registered corporation. 

FTL IBC is also behind the purchase of 10 A-Level Barge Marine drilling rigs which are currently docked in a private yard at Manzanillo, Mexico.

A source close to the corporation, who has asked to remain anonymous, told the Examiner that the group controlling the project are American patriots from all over the country who are ‘sick and tired’ of Liberal constitutional abuse the West Coast of America exerts over ordinary people throughout the US. The States of California, Washington, Oregon, New Mexico and Nevada are the primary targets of the operation.

Freely available technology developed by and used in military applications for the acceleration of opencast mining has been applied in the creation of over 200 suitcase sized units - that can be activated remotely from a distance of up to 500 miles using standard GSM signal station resource pinging. 

These devices are in the final alpha stage of testing and are projected to be ready to be buried 100+ feet below the surface of land and sea at strategic points along the fault line before year end. The units are each capable of causing minor plate shifts when triggered according to our source and units can be repeatedly triggered. 

Individually the effect of triggering low frequency elastic sonic waves emitting samples of ‘Hello it’s Me’ would register in the region of 0.8 on the Geneva Emotional Scale - which on the surface would result in minor tremors for periods of up to 3 minutes.

The effect of a chain of units being triggered with the entire Rundgren catalogue could cause a major right lateral shifting of the plates and result in a measurement on the Richter Scale never seen before according to a leading US Sonic Geologist. The potential for significant earthquakes and tsunami’s culminating in the collapse and submerging of vast tracts of the West Coast cannot be ruled out according to experts.

While the FTL IBC corporation has been in existence for nearly eight months much of the funding has come in the last three weeks through a private offshore email campaign to State lists of individuals who have signed and donated to various online petitions supporting fraudulent voting practices by George Soros, Antifa, BLM and degenerate Hollywood left leaning celebrities during the November election.

Our source on the inside of FTL IBC commented; ‘There are up to 75,000,000 patriotic Americans who have demonstrated the desire to drain the swamp and we see this as the way to achieve it with their financial help’

The Examiner reached out to State and Federal authorities for comment.

[diskwrite-ffxiv]

Timeline: Leading up to 4.5 MSQ

First Commander Bleiswys Junghberkwyn was a woman of routine. On the sixth and a halfth bell each morning, she was in her office. By six and three quarter bells she expected a crisp copy of the latest Harbor Herald and a hot cup of tea- usually an Ishgardian blend with a single cube of sugar only on the side- delivered quite promptly to her desk.

At the seventh bell she switched from the newspaper to whatever memos or reports had accumulated from the evening before, and at seventh and a half bells her secretary, Corporal Hemmet Green, was to enter her office for the daily briefing which generally went fifteen minutes or more. 

It was generally acknowledged amongst the officers that served beneath her that the morning routine wasn’t something you interrupt. It wasn’t that it couldn’t be done, for the Commander always told her officers that to them her office was an open door- but in these early bells unless she deemed the matter important enough it didn’t matter how calmly the Commander carried herself. Through the entire thing she oozed a layer of irritation that made her displeasure vividly real. 

This could be easily accommodated except for one simple fact. Green’s daily briefing frequently ran long. And in the event the Commander had an eighth bell meeting, there were days the gap between it and the briefing was scarcely long enough to say, “How do you do?” You could wait until after of course, but the Commander was a busy officer- and if you reported directly to her, so were you.

So, more often than not the officers beneath her found themselves faced with a choice. Either they threw themselves at the mercy of their Commander’s hectic schedule and hoped they could squeeze an appointment into a suitable gap, they delivered a message and waited for her to call on them, or they could interrupt the routine and hope for the best.  

So it was that Ojene stood before Green’s desk with pocket chronometer in hand after the sixth bell, watching as the minute hand ticked from forty-five to forty-six.

It was a wide room, ensconced in the administrative wing of the First Squadron offices. One side of the room was given to sweeping cabinets full of records and files. Some were copies of laws and documents, while lockable drawers held relevant documents for whatever cases lay on the military legal docket. Windows spanned across the other side, their rectangular panes set in a subtle curve that fit the cylindrical wrap of the Coral Tower itself.

A center pathway cut through the room with a wide limestone arch at its end, framed by two Maelstrom banners, leading to the trio of commanders whose individual offices lay just beyond. And astride the pathway itself were six desks split half and half on either side. Even at this early bell half of them were already manned.

And so was the one Ojene lingered in front of- even if at this precise moment it was empty.

To the secretaries and filing clerks at their desks who thrust themselves into their morning business, Ojene was simply a familiar face waiting patiently for Corporal Green to return. But as she locked an eye on the ticking face of the chronometer, it was her breathing she focused on above all else. For the steady rush of air was the only way to batten down the thunderous cascade of intent that roared through her chest. The one that carried her here, from the moment she awoke. As if through a pane of glass it surged, demanding she spring to action, but in these few minutes she needed patience.

And so, to distract herself she turned her eye to the other desks. It was strange, in this liminal moment, to watch the officers work. It had been just a few scant moons since she’d come back from a diplomatic voyage to Doma- the moons-long trip she’d taken with the First Squadron Ninth Levy, the very levy her husband ran. And she’d returned to the final approving stamp of a promotion she knew she deserved, with all the extra duties that came with it. She’d only just found her routine, reclaimed old familiarity and struck a fresh stride. But now as she stood here waiting there was a sort of distance to this place, already baked in by the knowledge that her Maelstrom duty would once more send her far afield.

The chronometer ticked forty-eight, and she’d only just pocketed it when Corporal Green emerged from the rear archway. He was a bit short for a Midlander, with mousy brown hair and freckled olive cheeks that drew deep dimples every time he smiled wider than a twitch. 

“Ah- Legalman,” he said, and there were no dimples in the smile he treated her with. Even as he shuffled back to his desk, there was a distracted jitter to his eyes that pulled his gaze this way and that. A harried sort of look- one shared by so many in the Coral Tower today. The weight, Ojene supposed, of a once-more escalating war.

As he stopped at his chair- but didn’t yet sit- he asked, “What can I help you with?”

Ojene leaned forward, but she kept a few respectful ilms from the desk. “Does the Commander have an eighth bell meeting today?” she asked.

“Ah- let me see.” Green claimed his seat and slid open the main desk drawer to his right elbow. He produced a slim leatherbound book. A few thin strips of cloth of various colors dangled out from between the parchment sheets, and his fingers slid to the orange one. Deftly he flipped the ledger open, and at the very top was marked today’s date. 

Ojene’s eyes shot across the list, making every effort to peer around his fingers as they slid down the page. She spotted it before he stopped, and as he tapped the scrawling ink set just above a faintly etched line, her heart sank.

“Indeed she does,” Green continued. “It’s all to do with the Brooks trial, I believe.”

“Oh-” Ojene’s chin lilted upwards. “I forgot that was tomorrow.”

“Yes, she’s due to be in meetings til the first hearings at the tenth bell- do you need anything?” As he peered up at her, his squint drew an involuntary wrinkle in the bridge of his nose.

With a grating noise that rustled from the back of her throat, Ojene hesitated. Like wildfire the beat in her chest surged, but above its inexorable push wound a single thread of logic. It would make more sense to wait, it said. To slot in an appointment rather than risk interrupting Junghberkwyn’s morning routine with a personal matter. 

It was right, she knew, and yet- to barricade these feelings was to lock a herd of aurochs in her chest. Her hands curled at her sides, and through her nose she forced a long steadying breath. On stillness, she focused. Through the moment, Green watched her. Waiting for an answer- but this was fine. She would give the correct response. She would wait. She would-

“Is that Suinuet I hear out there?” called the Commander’s voice from around the bend. “Go ahead- send her in.”

It surprised them both. Green’s brows darted towards his crimped hairline. Ojene straightened where she stood, and an unconscious hand smoothed down the front of her uniform. But after a beat, Green cracked a smile. This time, his dimples showed.

“There you go,” he said. 

Commander Junghberkwyn’s door was already open, as it usually was at this point in the routine. And though she had a full view of the hallway, she didn’t look up from the Harbor Herald until Ojene stepped in. 

It was a spacious office, as to be expected of an individual of the First Commander’s rank. The white limestone floor gave way to polished wood in a wide oval that kept the massive desk at its centerpiece. Shelves symmetrically lined the walls on the left and right, and between the records that filled them darted the occasional small curiosity from across the star- most of them from the New World. And behind the desk itself framed a massive array of ceiling-high windows. East-facing, they poured the haze of dawn through rectangular panes, cascading a golden fringe across the Commander’s hair so vivid it nearly blotted out the faint sections where its maroon color had begun to give way to age. Bleiswys Junghberkwyn was not as old as Ojene- or even Sylbfohc for that matter- but she’d served the martial interests of Limsa Lominsa for just as long as he had. 

A single dark eye, its iris so deep brown it was almost black, turned up at Ojene- the other was ensconced by a wide eyepatch. Edges of scars poked out on either side, then etched down Junghberkwyn’s cheek and finally ended somewhere across her throat. An old injury, that if rumor was true was responsible for the permanent rasp that trapped the undertones of her voice.

With a smack of her lips after a hasty sip of tea, Junghberkwyn set both cup and newspaper down and gestured forward. “You can close it.”

Ojene shut the door, and the woman before her leaned forward, twining her hands atop the desk.

“You wanted to speak to me?” Junghberkwyn said.

“Yes.” Forsaking the trio of chairs that cluttered before Junghberkwyn’s desk, Ojene opted to stand there at attention, her hands neatly folded behind her back. “As you know ma’am, the war has once more been ramping up on the front between the Garlean Empire and the newly reformed nation of Ala Mhigo.”

Ojene hesitated. The sharp scrutiny of Junghberkwyn’s eye rested inexorably on her face, but so far her characteristic cloud of irritation at routine’s interruption hadn’t collated anywhere Ojene could see. And so- after a pause she continued. 

“With my previous service the way it stands,” Ojene said, “I believe I could best serve Maelstrom interests from the front. I know my record wasn’t something you were as familiar with in the last campaign to liberate Ala Mhigo, but everything past and present shows when it comes to fighting Garleans I’m a valuable asset in the thick of it. I would like you to send me back to Ala Mhigo and the line at Ghimlyt.”

“And presumably,” Junghberkwyn muses, “you would like me to lend you to Ostulmsyn once again?”

“Ah… yes.” There was a subtle ripple of motion that threatened to marr Ojene’s stonelike stature- but she forced a small twitch through her shoulders and the sensation subsided. “That would suffice.”

With a deep wheezing sigh, Junghberkwyn leaned back. Her steepled fingers trailed to the very edge of the desk, and she regarded Ojene through a long, silent pause.

“I am quite aware of your record,” she said at last. “I wouldn’t lend you to other commanders so often if it weren’t the case. There are those of us in this Grand Company whose skill sets are too wide for a narrow box, and I acknowledge that you are one of them. You’ve got your experience, and all else aside the commanders you worked with in that prior campaign spoke highly of you, and so yes- I agree with you. You would be an asset on the front.”

“That being said-” Junghberkwyn continued, and a wrinkle marked the broad slope of her nose, “I’ve already thought this out. And the answer is no.”

A rush prickled Ojene’s skin, as if a cold glop of something unpleasant slapped onto her neck and rivuleted down her back. It took a moment for her to find her breath again, swallowed sharply by disbelief. “I… beg your pardon ma’am, you’re… declining my request?”

“Indeed I am, Suinuet. Because I’ve been thinking about this for some time.” At once, she leaned forward, and her single eye narrowed. “We’ve all been hearing about the resurgence of the war for weeks. But through all this time I never expected you to walk in here and ask me this- that is until the news I learned last night. Do you want to guess what I heard?”

When Ojene didn’t answer, Junghberkwyn drew herself up in her chair. “Tell me what you think I heard,” she demanded.

A muscle flexed in Ojene’s cheek, and as her jaw rolled her fingernails dug into her palms. “The First Squadron Ninth Levy’s deployment orders,” she said, her voice clipped, “wasn’t it?”

“Right you are!” One finger stabbed forward. “Because I knew you wouldn’t want to go anywhere until that very moment! Your entire career since you signed on good and proper, whenever that levy’s commander gets posted somewhere, you jockey to go along with him. You’re right that you would be an asset up there, but it’s got nothing to do with why you swiving asked.”

One eyelid twitched rapidly as Ojene fought to keep her expression steady, but the rushing in her veins thrummed. “It’s hardly the only reason. I would be invaluable up there.”

“Which is all well and good, except I need you here. I can’t go replacing all my captains because they decide to rush off to the war. Someone has to keep this damned country running, and you know what? For us-” one hand cut a sweeping circle through the air, “that often means staying put.”

Ojene’s fingernails drew a sharp bite into the flesh of her palms, but she hardly noticed. “I understand your position, ma’am,” she forced. “But if we don’t defend this country and our allies when the Garleans push in, then we won’t have a country before long. I should be out there- protecting us!”

But Junghberkwyn’s eye flashed. “I did not push you up to captain just so you could run off at every foul wind.” She loomed forward, and her painted lips curled in a toothy snarl. “You’re my captain. Not his!”

A taut silence snapped between them. At last, Junghberkwyn leaned back. “Anything else?”

“No. Ma’am.”

“Dismissed,” the Commander said, but Ojene was already turning on her heel to go.

As a steady clack of footfalls swept his way, Corporal Green looked up. The dimples on his face died, shriveling just as fast as his smile. He bent his head back to his hasty outline of the day’s agenda, for it only took one look at Legalman Suinuet’s face to decide it was better to let her pass without a word. 

At the egress of her wake, Green’s eyes met the corporal’s across from him, and between them passed a silent, unexpressed shrug. Without comment, the two of them went back to work.

[manjuhitorie]

Hitori-Atelier Message Project

Communication is what spins this globe, word by word. Interactions, interconnection, trying to piece together the things you love right… A new Hitorie project has begun! During the time span of the tour they’re collecting messages. A special photo will be gifted out to everyone who sends one in. It’s for all mobile Hitori-Atelier fansite members, which is only 330 yen a month for a bucketload of content old and new... Please consider joining here...  Official description is as so: All participants who contribute a message throughout the span of the tour will receive a special photo including the setlist. All participants are also eligible for a chance to win a physical setlist paper signed by the band, 3 winners. We look forward to hearing your thoughts on the tour, album, or anything you may want to say to Hitorie. ~Campaign Duration~ From 9/3 (Tuesday) at 12:00 AM ~ To 11/20 (Wednesday) 12:00 AM JST. ✴︎One application per person ✴︎After the campaign ends, the special photo will be sent to the email submitted to the HITORI-ATELIER. ✴︎The results of the lottery will be sent to the email submitted to the HITORI-ATELIER, winners contacted for confirmation. ✴︎For those with spam filter settings on, please add the domain “hitorie.com” to the list of safe senders. “ Here is the how-to 101! Click the following link and continue on to the form! >>>GO!<<< Nickname [            ] Message [             ] Mail address [            ] Confirm mail address [            ] SUBMIT The fat red link at the bottom is the submit button! Make sure to copy-paste your message into the box from a separate note to keep it safe and swift... ...

Seeing the members and staff open to honest love and hate and the entire scope of sentience, is really nice to me. Rich soil is what blossoms the seeds so, all opinions gotta be orphaned up like the perlite to the parched! Like open ears to open hearts!! “We don’t know where we’re going but for now we thought it was best to just perform as see where it takes us”: those were Shinoda’s words upon the tour announcement, so... I’m guessing they’re looking for messages now because they’re unsure on what how to handle the band going forward. They need our help! wowawa was someone who kneaded the concept of the moment and having a free empty mind, who seemed to hold a few Buddhist beliefs not just to be snazzy, but because they truly spoke to him so... I think his energy is still lingering in the air all around here also, and if of the “3 poisons” in Buddhism “attachment” is one of them, I guess unlike him I’ll be halted from samsara for a little longer... Those 3 members... I hope that’s okay with ‘em.... I’m going to continue reporting on the Hitori-Escape tour concerts! I’m going to see what happens there! Then formulate what I think I can say to help them find the best route for everybody... THOUGH FUCK IT, Unlike the letters for the Memorial Service, this is way less heavy so SLAM SOME SHIT DOWN I’m 100% positive that English or any native language would be accepted! That said, if you want the staff to understand you without abandon or Google translate etc., I can try to translate anything from ENG to JP for you if any one reading this would like..! This goes without saying but please keep any applications mannerly and respectable...💪 GOD SPEED! 🔥

[throne-of-games]

Jonsa AU - The Kennedy’s 3/?

The blood on Sansa's pale skin had long since begun to dry as she sat in a flimsy chair in an ill-lit back hallway of the hospital. Goosebumps peppered her exposed arms though she could feel no chill. She couldn't feel much of anything.

A muffled ringing in her ears kept her detached from the goings-on around her. In spite of the chaos, Sansa felt oddly still. Like a pebble stuck at the side of a river. The world flowed on around her yet there she sat, motionless.

She had always heard that when a person was close to death, their life flashed before their eyes. Sansa wondered if that were true for her husband, if he had rewatched their lives in snapshots as she had though she had not been the one targeted.

They had spent years together, shared two children and yet as she watched it all replay in front of her eyes she could focus on only one instance in particular.

Compared to the span of their lives it was a mere blip, a blink of an eye, a heartbeat. But it played over and over in her head, on a terrible loop, the words so clear and close it was as if they were being spoken that very moment.

It had been only the night before, after the gala, after Jon, after her husband’s wordless request that she stay and carry out her duty and her uncharacteristic refusal. He’d been waiting for her when she’d returned from the gardens that spanned the length of their property.

She entered their sitting room and resigned herself to the forthcoming storm, the sharp, cutting looks that only his violet eyes seemed capable of delivering.

It was strange that this charming, powerful man could inspire such devotion, such fire in his people but when displeased could become so cold and withdrawn as if he knew the effect he had on the people around him, knew how they craved the warmth he radiated. Even Sansa—try as she might— could not resist the pull, the need to please him.

But it seemed there would be no loaded silence this time, no piercing looks to illustrate his disappointment. He surprised her by gesturing for her to sit, pouring himself a drink and offering her one, to which she declined out of habit. 

"I know you're disappointed with me. Because I didn't stay," she'd said to his back as he poured scotch into a crystal glass.

"Disappointed, yes. But not surprised."

"Do I dissapoint you that often?"

He'd turned around with a wry smile. "No, my love. Though, I think you know that." Aegon had sat opposite Sansa, his eyes locking on hers. They were not cold as she'd been expecting. "You're unhappy."

His words had surprised and irritated her. She'd been taken aback at being confronted so bluntly about the state of her happiness.

"Does it matter?"

“Doesn’t it?” Her husband had swirled the amber liquid around in the glass before taking a gulp. He’d sighed and she could see the weariness in him, a rare glimpse of the toll that this life had taken on him as well. “It was so good in the beginning. We were so good. Do you remember?”

“Of course,” she’d replied. They had always been good together. A good team. When they’d first married he had stressed to her how important it was for them to always present a united front, that it was the only way to keep them safe, keep their family safe.

The beginning...before things had gotten so complicated. Before she’d realized this wasn’t the kind of life she’d been so sure she’d wanted, before the string of other women, before Jon. Was there ever really a before when it came to him? He’d always been there, just on the peripheral, out of sight but never out of mind.

She could tell where her husband’s thoughts had taken him, thinking of all the wrongs between them as she had been. He didn’t apologize for his sins and she wouldn’t ask him to. It wasn’t their way.

She'd rose from her seat then, as if she could've escaped the conversation by putting distance between them.

"I've always done what you've asked of me. I know the expectations. And you were right, you did give me everything you promised."

A golden world, he'd said.

Sansa's eyes closed. "But I was so young and naive then. I couldn't have known..." She shook her head, wishing she could go back and tell herself all that she knew now, wondering if it would change anything. "I do love you."

"I know,” he’d said, standing and setting the glass down on the table next to him. “But not like you love him."

She'd wanted to refute it but the words had stuck in her throat. Aegon had not waited for an answer from her, as it was not a question. He’d left the room without another word.

She hadn't seen him again until the next morning. They were to fly to the Stormlands to begin campaigning for reelection. Aegon had insisted on driving through the streets of Storm's End. He wanted to see the people.

They cheered for him as they always did and he looked out among them with such warmth that Sansa could not help but be enraptured by him, by the love he so clearly had for his people.

Then he'd turned to her, his smile more radiant than the sun itself and she could remember the beginning, how she'd fallen for him so.

And in a split second, everything had changed. That beautiful smile was wiped away as blood and bits of brain matter rained down around them. A mere second was all it took for their world to come crashing down.

The buzzing is Sansa's ears intensified before it ceased entirely as her attention was brought back to the present. Her eyes focused on the figure that had come to stand in front of her. Out of the corner of her eye she could see her husband’s advisors rushing towards them, desperate for any news. "I'm sorry, what did you say?"

The doctor in front of her looked exhausted, defeated. "We did everything we could Mrs. Targaryen. I'm so sorry. The president is gone."

[aion-rsa]

Saving Private Ryan: The Real History That Inspired the WW2 Movie

https://ift.tt/3cXjCBF

The events as they’re presented in Saving Private Ryan would never happen that way. This was my grandfather’s terse review of the Steven Spielberg movie back in 1998. He would know. After serving in the Pacific Theater throughout the war—being there from Pearl Harbor to Saipan, and then Okinawa—he carried a quiet lifelong interest in documentaries about the World War II American experience. And he had little time for Hollywood sentimentality.

“Eight guys for one man during D-Day? Never would’ve happened.”

Indeed, the idea of eight men being potentially squandered during the largest seaborne invasion in history is probably a flight of fancy by Spielberg and screenwriter Robert Rodat. Nevertheless, there is a poignant, mostly heartbreaking truth which informs Saving Private Ryan’s fiction. The context can be absurd at times, with Tom Hanks’ Capt. Miller leading a group of U.S. soldiers behind enemy lines to find one paratrooper, Pvt. Ryan (Matt Damon), after his three older brothers died in battles around Europe. However, the idea of the U.S. military wanting to prevent an entire family from being wiped out?

That cuts to the heart of War Department policy near the end of the Second World War. Here are a few of the true stories which inspired Saving Private Ryan’s Hollywood narrative.

The Sullivan Brothers

Near the beginning of America’s entry into World War II, the family of Thomas and Alleta Sullivan from Waterloo, Iowa endured a tragedy so all-encompassing that it made national news. In November 1942, all five of their sons, George, Frank, Joe, Matt, and Al Sullivan, died after the sinking of the light cruiser USS Juneau in the Pacific. The youngest of them, Al, was aged 20, with oldest brother George being one month shy of his 28th birthday.

Before their deaths, the U.S. Navy already made it a policy to separate siblings upon enlistment, but it was never strictly enforced. And as George and Frank had served in the Navy before, they wanted to take the three younger brothers under their wing. All five volunteered to enlist in January 1942, shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. But they did so only upon the written stipulation that they serve on the same ship.

“We will make a team together that can’t be beat,” George Sullivan wrote to the military. “We had 5 buddies killed in Hawaii. Help us.” The Navy granted that wish, putting them on the Juneau, which soon headed to Guadalcanal where an Allied campaign began in August to wrest the island from the Empire of Japan.

The Juneau participated in a series of naval engagements before the ship was struck by a Japanese torpedo on Nov. 13 during a naval battle near the Solomon Islands. The cruiser was forced to withdraw, and later that day it traveled with other damaged U.S. warships toward the Allied rear-area base on Espiritu Santo. The Juneau was the lone vessel not to make it there. Torpedoed again, this time by Japanese submarine I-26, the cruiser’s ammunition magazines were struck by the blast and the ship exploded, sinking immediately.

It would be several days before there was any attempt to search for survivors.

At the time of the sinking, Capt. Gilbert C. Hoover of the USS Helena deemed it unlikely anyone survived the Juneau’s explosion and considered it reckless to look for survivors, thereby exposing more wounded ships to the unseen Japanese submarine. The other ships did not turn back. Instead the Helena signaled a nearby B-17 bomber to tell headquarters to send other aircraft out to search for survivors. However, the bomber could not break radio silence and did not report the sinking until the plane landed.

The bomber’s report went unnoticed for more than 48 hours under paperwork. By the time naval staff realized the clerical error, the more than 100 initial survivors of the Juneau’s sinking had long begun to see their numbers dwindle. This included several of the Sullivan brothers.

Of the 100 or so men who went into the water after the Juneau sank, only 10 were alive when a PBY spotted them eight days later. All five Sullivans were gone. According to those who did survive, Frank, Joe, and Matt died instantly on the second torpedo’s impact. Al drowned the next day. George, meanwhile, survived for four or five days before delirium set in, apparently caused by hypernatremia (a high concentration of sodium in the bloodstream). As a result, he jumped off the raft he was sharing and was never seen again. He was one of many who died from exposure to the sun, starvation, dehydration, and of course shark attacks.

Their parents Tom and Alleta did not know any of this for months. The U.S. Navy deemed it necessary to keep the Juneau’s loss classified, so as to not provide crucial information to the Japanese. But as days became weeks, and then months, parents of all the sailors grew fearful when communication with their children stopped.

After one anxious letter by Alleta was sent to the Bureau of Naval Personnel, inquiring about a rumor that all five Sullivan boys were dead, no less than President Franklin D. Roosevelt responded.

“As Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, I want you to know that the entire nation shares in your sorrow,” Roosevelt wrote. “I offer you the condolences and gratitude of our country. We who remain to carry on the fight must maintain spirit, in knowledge that such sacrifice is not in vain.”

The day before the letter arrived on Jan. 13, 1943, the Navy informed the Sullivans their sons were dead. When Tom Sullivan asked the approaching chief petty officer which son had died, the Navy man responded, “I’m sorry. All five.”

The brothers left behind a younger sister named Genevieve, as well as Al’s widow and son (Al was the only brother married). It became an international story, with Roosevelt sending another letter, and Pope Pius XII sending a silver religious medal and rosary with a message of condolence to the Catholic family. Alleta was there when the Navy launched a new destroyer, USS The Sullivans, in 1943. She and her husband also became regular speakers for the war effort in the following years.

As a result of the Sullivans’ sacrifice, plus another family’s suffering, the newly named Defense Department soon implemented the Sole Survivor Policy. But before that happened there were…

The Borgstrom Brothers

Alben and Gunda Borgstrom of Thatcher, Utah were already touched by tragedy before the Second World War. The parents of 10 children, seven boys and three girls, one of their sons had already died in 1921 from a ruptured appendix at the age of 10. When World War II began, five of the remaining six sons either volunteered or were drafted into the war: LeRoy Elmer, Clyde Eugene, twin brothers Rolon Day and Rulon Day, and Boyd Borgstrom.

Over the span of about five months, four of the brothers died all over the world. The oldest of them, LeRoy, was only 30 while twin brothers Rolon Day and Rulon Day were aged 19 when they died on different sides of the English Channel.

Clyde, 28, was the first to die in March 1944, struck by a falling tree while clearing land for a new airstrip on the Solomon Islands in Guadalcanal. His older brother LeRoy followed three months later when he was killed in action while fighting in Italy. Rolon Day died in August when the bomber he was on experienced engine failure and crashed in Yaxham, England. Rulon Day, meanwhile, was reported as missing in action after an attack on Brest, France, a port city in the Brittany region held by the Germans. He was later found gravely injured, and soon died from combat wounds on Aug. 25, 1944.

Even before a mortally wounded Rulon Day was discovered, his parents had already gathered the support of neighbors and Utah congressional leaders to petition the U.S. military to release their last surviving son, Boyd, from service. The petition was successful, and Boyd was transferred home to the U.S. and thereafter discharged from the Marines with a special order of the Commandant of the Marine Corps., Gen. Alexander Vandegrift. Further the Borgstroms’ youngest son Eldon, who was not yet old enough to serve in the military in 1944, was exempted from the draft and military service.

A funeral service was held when all four deceased brothers’ remains were returned to Utah in 1948. During the service, their parents were presented with three Bronze Star Medals, one Air Medal, and one Good Conduct Medal. The loss of the four Borgstrom Brothers, like the five Sullivans before them, triggered the official adoption of the Sole Survivor Policy.

The Sole Survivor Policy

Implemented in 1948, the Sole Survivor Policy is a Defense Department directive which describes a set of regulations to be observed by the U.S. military in all its branches. The policy is designed to protect the sole survivor of families from combat duty or the draft if the son or daughter in question has siblings who already died in combat.

Read more

Movies

How the Secret of Saving Private Ryan’s Power Lies in its Portrayal of the Enemy

By Mark Allison

Movies

Jaws: Why the USS Indianapolis Speech is Steven Spielberg’s Favorite Scene

By David Crow

However, the policy is entirely voluntary. Which means the designated “sole survivor” of a family in the military must apply to be sent home by commanding officers. Additionally, it only applies during peacetime, and not in times of war or national emergency as declared by the U.S. Congress. But since Congress hasn’t officially declared war since 1942, it’s pretty much been in place in perpetuity, although each branch of the military has its own special provisions for the regulations.

While it would not have been implemented during the events of Saving Private Ryan—in fact, several of the fallen Borgstrom brothers would still be alive during the events of the film—its creation would have already been on the minds of the top brass when something like the Pvt. Ryan situation occurred. However, even if the Sole Survivor Policy had been in place by ‘44, Damon’s James Ryan would still need to apply to return home (which he did not want to do in the film)…. and that paperwork probably would not have been processed during the middle of a massive invasion.

Still, it makes for a great movie.

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[abbottikeler]

The Ikelers: A Family Chronicle, 1753-2018 (Part I)

The following brief history spans some ten generations of Ikelers, from the first day in the New World for immigrant German brothers, Hieronymus and Conrad Eichler, in the 1750s, to the youngest of the clan, Rosa and Levin Ikeler, fraternal twins born in Brooklyn in 2014.  These pages incorporate much new information and correct much misinformation from my first research efforts in the summer of 2006.  I’ve tried to keep the focus not only on key personalities and events but also on the historical context in which they’re embedded, in the hope that such an approach will bring the following family chronicle more fully to life.

As with any genealogical narrative, however, there’s a caveat that must be entered: numerous questions remain unanswered; numerous gaps remain unfilled.  With luck and energy and ever more efficacious information tools, perhaps one of you, my curious, Ikeler-related readers, will someday solve all the outstanding mysteries of our family past.

Keeping that in mind, let me share with you what it is we do know as of 2018.

The First Ikelers in America The ship’s manifest and the oath of allegiance to King George II, sworn at the Government Courthouse in Philadelphia on September 8, 1753, contain the signatures of Hieronymus and Conrad Eichler among those of some sixty other adult males who sailed from Hamburg and the Isle of Wight the previous July.  The documents tell us the ship was the St. Michael, under the command of a British sea captain, Thomas Ellis, Esq.  Hieronymus, 28, was accompanied by his wife, Justina, and their two sons, Conrad, 5, and Wilhelm, 3; Hieronymus’ brother Conrad, 21, brought only his bride, Catharina.

We do not know where exactly in northern Germany the brothers came from, nor who their parents were.  The records of those who emigrated from Hamburg to the British colonies, housed for centuries in the city hall, were unfortunately destroyed by allied bombing in World War II.

We can make some educated guesses, however, about their livelihood and their motives for taking ship to the new world.  If they came from the Hamburg parish of St. Michael and worshipped, like many of their shipmates, at the Lutheran Cathedral there, they were most likely unskilled or semi-skilled laborers (Hieronymus signed his own and his younger brother’s name; Conrad merely made his mark).  If they came from a village within a few days journey of Hamburg, they were almost certainly tenant farmers, or the children of tenant farmers.  Their surname, fairly common still in Germany, derives from the German word for oak and may suggest the family’s original occupational identity (woodsman, cabinetmaker, carpenter, etc.) or possibly its place of origin (near an oak forest) in medieval times.  

As for the brothers’ motives for leaving Germany, several factors were probably in play.  Given the depressed economy in the northern German states throughout the first half of the 18th century and the grim working conditions of tenant farmers on landed estates (comparably to those of share croppers in the American South before World War II), the prospects for young married men of their class were bleak.  

My German-born daughter-in-law, Katja Ikeler (b. 1985, nee Suehling), has discovered another phenomenon of the times that doubtless encouraged their departure from the old world.  The British were actively recruiting able-bodied German, Swiss and Dutch families to resettle in the 13 colonies so they might provide cheap service and labor to the resident English population through indenture, and later (as independent farmers) bring great tracts of the wilderness under cultivation, thereby displacing the troublesome native Americans.  The British employed scores of itinerant, bilingual agents to travel from village to village, address congregations of working-class men in town halls and churches, and entice the locals to emigrate—offering them visions of land-owning in a country that yielded bountiful harvests with a minimum of labor.  German landlords were, of course, fiercely opposed to British interference with their tenant farmers--breaking up meetings when they could, and warning potential emigrants there would be no work for them if they should return.  Still, the British campaign (begun in the 1730s and continued right up to the Revolutionary War) brought more than 30,000 continental Europeans, mostly Germans, to the middle colonies.  At the peak of the effort, in 1753, some nine English sailing ships were in constant service carrying immigrants from Hamburg to Philadelphia, delivering nearly 200 new arrivals to the Philadelphia docks every month.  It was at the end of that same summer that the six members of the Eichler family trooped down the gangplank onto American soil.

Puzzlingly, aside from the two sets of signatures affixed by Hieronymus and Conrad that day, there is no evidence of the family’s whereabouts for the next seven years.  That can only mean one thing: the Eichlers, like the overwhelming majority of German immigrants to the 13 Colonies, allowed themselves to be sold into indentured service in order to pay for their passage.  Whether it was a Philadelphia merchant or a local farmer who successfully bid for their labor that day on the docks, we do not know.  Nor do we know to how many different masters the individual family members were contracted, though it is likely more than one.  No documentation on the Eichlers’ servitude has yet surfaced, but I can quote a couple of examples of similar contracts from the same year and place, in each case the passage money going directly to the captain of the vessel:

“Catherina Boon in consideration twelve pistoles paid Benjamin Shoemaker for her passage from Holland indents herself servant to Joseph Marshall of Phila. bricklayer for four years from this date, customary dues.” “John Jurg Gottschalk in consideration nine pistoles paid Benjamin Shoemaker for his passage from Holland indents himself servant to John Ecker of Lancaster County yeoman for two years and three months from this date, customary dues.”

Except for the prospect of eventual freedom and the “freedom dues” they received at the end of their contracted time (enabling them to purchase a modest piece of land), indentured servants were indistinguishable from slaves.  They could not vote, travel, buy or sell anything.  They were subject to physical punishment with no recourse in law, and women who became pregnant regularly had the length of their servitude extended for a year or more.

Circumstantial evidence suggests the Eichlers were indentured for seven years, since both wives, Justina and Catharina, had no more children until 1760, and Hieronymus, according to the records of a Lebanon, New Jersey merchant, bought a wagonload of farm tools and barn materials between 1760 and 1763.   It is also only in the 1760s that Hieronymus and Conrad Eichler appeared as members of a congregation—the Zion Lutheran Church in New Germantown (renamed Oldwick in 1918), New Jersey.  

It’s entirely possible that the “Conrad” here is Hieronymus’ son, then in his late teens, rather than his brother, since the elder Conrad fathered no children after 1760 and appeared frequently on the muster rolls of those enlisted in the British army right up to his death at the end of the Revolutionary War.  It is also at the Zion Church that the younger Conrad baptized all three of his daughters in the 1770s, with Hieronymus and Justina as witnesses each time.

Certainly the church seemed to play a central role in Hieronymus’ life.  His Christian name (Jerome in English) is not only that of a well-known saint and a celebrated Lutheran cleric in the 16th century, but also means sacred one, or one in holy orders.  That he chose to move to the vicinity of the Zion Church as soon as his indenture was up was probably no coincidence either: from 1759 through 1760, the congregation boasted Henry Melchior Muehlenberg, the founder of Lutheranism in America, as their temporary pastor.  In the same year, Hieronymus’ last child was born and appropriately named Jerome.  Even in middle age, when the ride from his farm to the Zion Church apparently grew too arduous for him to make every week, Hieronymus joined some 25 other local German farmers in founding a satellite congregation in a nearby log cabin where they could worship in German three Sunday out of every four.

It is, in fact, the document that includes his name among the original members of that primitive church—members active between 1775 and 1780—that offers us the last evidence he was among the living.  His younger brother, Conrad, again according to the muster rolls of the British army, died in camp near Charleston, South Carolina on 26 August 1780, probably of disease or fever, after years of participating in the southern campaign against the colonials.  Conrad was 48 years old.  Most likely Hieronymus, nearing sixty, died soon after on his farm in New Jersey.  Thanks to a map recently discovered by Jim Ikeler, we now know where that farm was in Hunterdon County—several miles south of New Germantown, in Tewksbury Township, beside Rockaway Creek.

About this first generation of Ikeler men, born and raised in Germany, we have (as you can see) teasingly little information.  About their wives, almost nothing.  Where exactly were they indentured?  When did Hieronymus, Justina and Catharina die?  Where are they buried?  All questions others must someday answer.

[srbachchan]

DAY 3445

Jalsa, Mumbai                    Sept 2/3,  2017                Sat/Sun 12:07 am

Birthday - EF Rajiv Laffey .. on September the 3rd of the year 2017 and may we all wish him the very best ever .. love

And so the attempt to invite and in sense incite the Ef to write a BLOG for me failed .. it is of no regret and certainly one that cannot be implemented by any force of imagination ..

But those pictures were of podium shared with the VVIP’s of the State ; the Chief Minister , the Leader of Shiv Sena Shri Uddhav Thakeray and several others that are working so diligently and effectively in the Swachh Bharat Campaign, making it more user friendly in a sense .. getting to understand that garbage should not be sent off to garbage dumps, but become a value instead .. converting it in residence into compost and making use of it as manure for the gardens and plants ..

AND when you have these dignitaries speaking glowingly about you at a public platform it does become a very embarrassed moment .. one where it is difficult to shout out to them to STOP, or  .. be in possession of that ‘don’t know where to look’ smile and get away from it all  !!!

That was what the entire first half of the picture competition was at yesterday’s LOST & Forgotten blogpost !!

The second half was symbolic .. the dark clouds were a reflection of the mood .. the mood when you miss out on something that you possess, in great regard, and suddenly it slips away unannounced .. !!

There were some very interesting inputs on this .. but for them to be made content on the Blog, would not have very prudent .. 

And so another day has ended .. and another begun .. in peace and harmony and a gentle calm to be able to look at the other side of the AAARRRGGHHH ... lost post last night .. !!

So to begin with  ..

 .. a gentle smile as I prepare to off load a number of pertinent lines in praise of the product I endorse and be the Ambassador of .. these are differently practised elements in the course of the day work .. one that involves the switching off of one plant and initiating another .. the power plant that steals signals from the ‘i dunno where’ and brings it on for the camera, watched assessed, conferenced over, and scrutinised by that ‘chaukadi’, चौकड़ी who sit grim faced in front of monitor screens and pass judgement in the finalised outcome ... DARE YOU ARGUE OR DISAGREE WITH THEM .. they be the cat’s whiskers !!

There are those moments then,  when as the next camera positioning is being set, to trundle along to the other side and perform stationary acts that give credence to the product on sale :

acts in front of still cameras with a million people looking on to justify the correct facial expressions and hand positioning .. vital to say the least .. I mean an error could affect the entire campaign ..

And several of them in different modes of combat ..

.... and by then the shot for camera in motion is set and you return to perform in voice and movement ..

idling time for all to be in preparation .. and to start all over again .. measuring focus distances selfi wise too ..

जितनी भरमारी , जितनी लोढ़ आजकल के समाज में उत्पन्न हुई है , content को लेकर , शायद इससे पहले कभी ना हुई हो ।। समाचार चित्रों ख़बरों की प्यासी ये दुनिया , तरसती है की कुछ मिले देखने पढ़ने को  ।। और फिर ये तो निशित हो जाता है की क्या, कहाँ, कैसे, उसे प्रस्तुत करना चाहिए  ।। 

Content is KING , was a phrase I had heard many moons ago, and now find its relevance even more .. this generation that has little time span graph, needs immediate and massive material instantly .. all modes of presentation therefore need to be designed accordingly .. and that be the motive of all creative process today .. some succeed, most do not .. but all know the reason why ..

AND THE biggest and the largest confirmation for the execution of such is NOTICE .. if there be no notice be doomed .. it matters not how it is noticed, but notice it must be ..

SO .. when the attitude and desire is small and facing insignificance .. the methodology is the oft repeated one .. get onto the shoulders of them that are visible .. and there you are .. !!

Not a very difficult philosophy to discard .. it works all the time .. in life in society at work at the turnstiles .. everywhere .. !! we are blessed that we are alive to witness this great change that occurs each hour in this part of the world .. I am certain it occurs more often elsewhere too ..

" काश ऐसी भी हवा चले कौन किसका है पता (तो ) चले " ~

from my dearest Ef and their thoughts .. so beautiful and prosaic .. !!

point to be noted My Lord  ..

Amitabh Bachchan

[shanedakotamuir]

The 4 main conservative defenses for Trump against impeachment, explained

President Trump attends a “Keep America Great” rally in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on October 10, 2019. | Brendan Smialowski /AFP/Getty Images

Only one of them makes sense.

President Donald Trump withheld hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid from the Ukrainian government, seemingly to push lawmakers to announce an investigation into the son of a potential political opponent and his work with a Ukrainian energy company. That much, at least, is clear. As is the fact that Trump has an 89 percent approval rating with Republican voters.

That’s why most Republican lawmakers aren’t going to change their minds on the impeachment of President Trump. While some in Congress might privately think that Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukrainian officials to “do him a favor” and investigate former Vice President Joe Biden was a bad idea, they won’t say so in public.

Because, quite simply, Trump is the president. He’s giving them what they want politically, the economy appears strong and, most critically, he is far more popular and powerful than they are.

But House Republicans and many Trump-supportive conservative and right-leaning writers and pundits have largely attempted to avoid saying as much.

Rather, together with constantly shifting responses to specific testimony, they appear to have developed three basic defenses for Trump as House impeachment hearings continued: He was “too inept” to have intended to do what he is being accused of doing; what he did was actually good; and his actions were bad, but not impeachable.

But some congressional Republicans and conservatives have begun saying another, perhaps most accurate, defense of Trump out loud: Whatever he did, it doesn’t matter — not to “normal people” and not to the Republican Party.

1) “Impeachment for incompetence would disqualify most of the government”

The first basic defense of Trump regarding Ukraine is the simplest: Trump lacked the intent and the basic competence to get a quid pro quo deal with Ukraine done. And without intent (legally defined as a conscious decision to commit an illegal act), some argue that what Trump did may have been bad and dumb, but not criminal — and thus, not a “high crime or misdemeanor.”

As elucidated by the Wall Street Journal editorial board in October:

... it may turn out that while Mr. Trump wanted a quid-pro-quo policy ultimatum toward Ukraine, he was too inept to execute it. Impeachment for incompetence would disqualify most of the government, and most Presidents at some point or another in office.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham seemingly agreed, telling CBS News earlier this month that the administration appeared “incapable” of forming a quid pro quo, thus rendering the entire impeachment discussion null and void.

"It was incoherent," Sen @LindseyGrahamSC says of Trump's Ukraine policy. "They seem to be *incapable* of forming a quid pro quo." pic.twitter.com/rdZxyIazNj

— Steven Portnoy (@stevenportnoy) November 6, 2019

Conservative pundit Ben Shapiro made similar arguments on his podcast, saying on October 7 that Trump would make a fantastic client for a defense attorney because “Trump doesn’t have requisite intent for anything. The man has the attention span of a gnat ... if you are his defense lawyer, his best defense to ‘he had a plan in Ukraine to go after Joe Biden’ is ‘dude doesn’t have plans.’” And on November 11, Shapiro argued, “I don’t think he’s had the level of intent necessary to eat a hamburger.” I reached out to Shapiro, but he was unable to comment on Wednesday.

And after all, military aid to Ukraine was eventually restored. So according to this argument, the actions for which Trump is facing impeachment (withholding aid for selfish reasons) never actually happened. Per National Review’s Rich Lowry, “The best defense Republicans can muster is that nothing came of it. An ally was discomfited and yanked around for a couple of months before, ultimately, getting its defense funding.”

And his magazine’s editorial board argued earlier this month, “It has to matter that, at the end of the day, the harm of this episode was minimal or nonexistent. The Ukrainians got their defense aid without making any statement committing themselves to the investigations.”

It’s true that intent matters — in criminal proceedings. I spoke with Ken White, a criminal defense attorney and former US attorney, who told me, “Intent is very important in court, and for many of these crimes, from witness intimidation to bribery, prosecutors must prove corrupt intent. If we were in federal court, litigating criminal charges against the president, I think the “Trump is just Trump” defense would be colorable and tricky to overcome.

“With normal humans, when they act like Trump you can infer corrupt intent; the defense is that you can’t make that inference with Trump because he acts that way all the time, reflexively.”

But White added two caveats. “First, that’s a matter of proof. A jury could still reject it and see corrupt intent. Second, this ain’t federal court.” Impeachment, after all, is a political process, not a legal one.

And as to the argument that funding to Ukraine was indeed restored, the Cato Institute’s Gene Healy pointed out in October that an unsuccessful or “incompetent” attempt to commit an impeachable act doesn’t make it less impeachable:

The Nixon crew botched most of the schemes it undertook, from the Watergate caper to the attempt to audit the president’s political enemies. That didn’t save Richard Nixon from being driven from office via the impeachment process.

2) “Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani deserve praise”

Some of Trump’s defenders are taking an entirely different approach and stating that Donald Trump’s actions were not only defensible, but good. In the words of Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) (who criticized Lt. Col. Vindman for having “opinions counter” to the president), “it’s perfectly within the purview of the president’s authority” to base military aid on the assurance of an investigation into corruption (or more accurately, the announcement of an investigation).

They argue that the government of Ukraine was corrupt and Trump was elected to fight corruption — ergo, of course he would resist sending aid to Ukraine. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) put it this way: “Corruption is not just prevalent in Ukraine. It’s the system. Our president said time out, time out, let’s check out this new guy.”

.@RealDonaldTrump and @RudyGiuliani deserve praise for pushing for accountability because these officials seem to have zero concern about Ukraine's collusion w/Obama admin targeting America's election in 2016 -- and the Biden cover-up...

— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) November 20, 2019

As Washington Examiner writer Byron York wrote in a piece entitled “What if Trump was right about Ukraine?”, supporters of this line of logic argue that while perhaps Trump’s actions weren’t the best, he had real and genuine concerns about Ukraine’s government and its alleged efforts to collude with the Clinton campaign and influence the 2016 election.

Those efforts are based on allegations that Ukrainian officials, concerned about former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s work for a pro-Russian political party, attempted to assist the Clinton campaign and harm the Trump campaign. Right-leaning media outlets have focused serious attention on those allegations since 2017.

For example, the Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway argued on Fox News in October of this year, “You have people who have already admitted that people affiliated with the Ukrainian government worked with the Democratic National Committee’s contractors to help Hillary Clinton in the 2016 campaign,” arguing that Ukraine and the DNC took part in actual collusion, unlike Russia and Trump’s campaign.

York writes that if the allegations were true, Trump’s actions make sense. “If [those concerns] were even mostly legitimate, then Trump defenders could say: “Look, he had a point. Even if one thinks he handled the issue inappropriately, the fact is, what was going on in Ukraine was worrisome enough for a United States president to take notice.” Quoting former US Special Representative to Ukraine Kurt Volker, York concluded, “The president said Ukraine ‘tried to take me down.’ He wasn’t wrong.” (It’s worth noting that other conservatives disagree.)

This was the argument that Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a writer at National Review who published “The Case for Trump” earlier this year, made to me, saying that it made sense for Trump to be suspicious of Ukraine. He asked that I quote him in full.

“Trump is a businessman and he does not want to give much military aid in general, and naturally not to corrupt governments who have in the past, according to Politico, tried to interfere in the 2016 election.”

“Trump naturally takes the past Ukrainian efforts, again according to the 2017 Politico report, to harm his election effort, as a personal affront given they reportedly sought to stop Trump from becoming president and yet wanted him to reverse the Obama policy of no military aid once he was elected (which he did).”

“Once more, we are left with a supposed thought crime of considering delaying aid in exchange for Ukrainian promises of investigating 2016 interference in an American election—which never happened, but was actually reified by earlier suspension of actual Ukrainian investigations in 2016 (and possibly of Hunter Biden) and refusal to arm the Ukrainians.”

But this argument has problems of its own. Fiona Hill and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, both of whom served on Trump’s National Security Council, testified earlier this month that they had seen no evidence that the government of Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election. Hill added in testimony Thursday, “I refuse to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternate narrative that the Ukrainian government is a US adversary, and that Ukraine — not Russia — attacked us in 2016.”

The Politico piece to which Dr. Hanson referred during our conversation notes that while some Ukrainian officials supported Clinton, their efforts were “far less concerted or centrally directed than Russia’s alleged hacking and dissemination of Democratic emails,” which was a “top-down” effort. And according to documents obtained by BuzzFeed News via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, one of the main sources for allegations that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election — including allegations that they, not Russia, hacked the DNC — was Manafort himself.

3) “Impeaching a president is the most extreme and anti-democratic remedy”

But other conservatives have argued that Trump’s actions, even if tied to an “understandable and justifiable” desire to investigate allegations of Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 election, were improper, inappropriate, or just plain bad.

As Townhall.com and Fox News commentator Guy Benson told me, those involved in the alleged quid pro quo “were up to something that stunk.” “They misused and abused their power,” he said. “It’s serious and it should be taken seriously.

But in his view, impeachment is a step too far. “My case against impeachment and removal is that it rises to a thermonuclear option that has never been detonated before. Doing so based on this, so close to an election, in a president’s first term, would do enormous damage.”

Rather, he favors censure, a “very rare tool” last used against President Andrew Jackson in 1834 that would, as he wrote in October, “represent a severe and formal condemnation from the people’s branch, and would constitute a stain on the president’s term in office.”

Daily Caller founders Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel have also argued that impeachment is too harsh a punishment for Trump. In an op-ed in October where they stipulated that “Donald Trump should not have been on the phone with a foreign head of state encouraging another country to investigate his political opponent,” they then wrote, “Impeaching a president is the most extreme and anti-democratic remedy we have in our system of government.”

And they added:

The facts are out there for the American people to weigh as they make their decision. How about we let them sort all this out? There’s no need to come up with thin excuses for a purely partisan impeachment process when we have an election right around the corner.

I spoke to Patel, who told me, “Nancy Pelosi was right for all those months when she repeatedly said that to undo that election without bipartisan support based on clear criminal behavior would tear the country apart. We are on the eve of a new election where the American people can once again vote on Trump and this time they can weigh for themselves Trump’s behavior in this Ukraine affair. That’s a much better solution.”

Thoughts after day one: Trump’s mention of Biden on his 7/25 call was inappropriate. I’ve said that all along. However, nothing I heard today leads me to change my mind : impeachment goes too far. Let the voters settle this. One party, partisan impeachment is not the answer.

— Ari Fleischer (@AriFleischer) November 13, 2019

4) “No one cares”

But an even simpler defense of the president is one being made by Carlson on his Fox News show and by others within the conservative movement, and it actually doesn’t require defending the president at all.

Instead, Republicans are arguing that the entire process is a “distraction.” Moreover, they’re arguing that it doesn’t matter what Trump did or didn’t do because the Senate won’t vote to impeach the president and the average American doesn’t care.

As Townhall.com writer Kurt Schlichter wrote earlier this week, “We’re too busy working, too focused on our 401(k)s going through the roof and on [Trump] flipping circuit courts like a boss, to care about the latest outrage to end all outrages.” I reached out to Schlichter and will update if and when I hear back.

On the November 15 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, Carlson argued, “normal people” — “someone with kids and a job and a marriage you care about” — aren’t thinking about impeachment and would rather “the buffoons on TV would stop yapping about Trump 24/7 and talk about something relevant.”

It’s an argument being made by Republicans both inside and outside of the administration. For example, White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham tweeted that instead of impeachment (which was “boring” and a “waste of time”), “Congress should be working on passing USMCA, funding our govt & military, working on reduced drug pricing & so much more.”

With record low unemployment and record high wage growth, Democrats know they can't beat President Trump in 2020. Democrats need to #StopTheMadness and get back to work for the American people.

— PA GOP (@PAGOP) November 20, 2019

This argument seems somewhat self-refuting — after all, tweeting or writing or saying on national television that no one cares about impeachment would imply that someone, somewhere, decidedly does.

But for the GOP, it is perhaps the most revealing. Not of the sentiment of the average American — 70 percent of whom believe Trump’s actions regarding Ukraine were “wrong” — but of the Republicans. Because they are well aware that within a slimmed-down Republican Party that has largely excised his enemies and detractors through retirements and election losses, Trump is the only available lodestar.

And so for them, it doesn’t actually matter what Trump did with regard to Ukrainian military aid: whether he intended to hurt Joe Biden’s presidential hopes, whether he was genuinely concerned about corruption, or whether he did something that constitutes an impeachable offense. Trump is all they’ve got.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/338QAa3

[gracieyvonnehunter]

The 4 main conservative defenses for Trump against impeachment, explained

President Trump attends a “Keep America Great” rally in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on October 10, 2019. | Brendan Smialowski /AFP/Getty Images

Only one of them makes sense.

President Donald Trump withheld hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid from the Ukrainian government, seemingly to push lawmakers to announce an investigation into the son of a potential political opponent and his work with a Ukrainian energy company. That much, at least, is clear. As is the fact that Trump has an 89 percent approval rating with Republican voters.

That’s why most Republican lawmakers aren’t going to change their minds on the impeachment of President Trump. While some in Congress might privately think that Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukrainian officials to “do him a favor” and investigate former Vice President Joe Biden was a bad idea, they won’t say so in public.

Because, quite simply, Trump is the president. He’s giving them what they want politically, the economy appears strong and, most critically, he is far more popular and powerful than they are.

But House Republicans and many Trump-supportive conservative and right-leaning writers and pundits have largely attempted to avoid saying as much.

Rather, together with constantly shifting responses to specific testimony, they appear to have developed three basic defenses for Trump as House impeachment hearings continued: He was “too inept” to have intended to do what he is being accused of doing; what he did was actually good; and his actions were bad, but not impeachable.

But some congressional Republicans and conservatives have begun saying another, perhaps most accurate, defense of Trump out loud: Whatever he did, it doesn’t matter — not to “normal people” and not to the Republican Party.

1) “Impeachment for incompetence would disqualify most of the government”

The first basic defense of Trump regarding Ukraine is the simplest: Trump lacked the intent and the basic competence to get a quid pro quo deal with Ukraine done. And without intent (legally defined as a conscious decision to commit an illegal act), some argue that what Trump did may have been bad and dumb, but not criminal — and thus, not a “high crime or misdemeanor.”

As elucidated by the Wall Street Journal editorial board in October:

... it may turn out that while Mr. Trump wanted a quid-pro-quo policy ultimatum toward Ukraine, he was too inept to execute it. Impeachment for incompetence would disqualify most of the government, and most Presidents at some point or another in office.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham seemingly agreed, telling CBS News earlier this month that the administration appeared “incapable” of forming a quid pro quo, thus rendering the entire impeachment discussion null and void.

"It was incoherent," Sen @LindseyGrahamSC says of Trump's Ukraine policy. "They seem to be *incapable* of forming a quid pro quo." pic.twitter.com/rdZxyIazNj

— Steven Portnoy (@stevenportnoy) November 6, 2019

Conservative pundit Ben Shapiro made similar arguments on his podcast, saying on October 7 that Trump would make a fantastic client for a defense attorney because “Trump doesn’t have requisite intent for anything. The man has the attention span of a gnat ... if you are his defense lawyer, his best defense to ‘he had a plan in Ukraine to go after Joe Biden’ is ‘dude doesn’t have plans.’” And on November 11, Shapiro argued, “I don’t think he’s had the level of intent necessary to eat a hamburger.” I reached out to Shapiro, but he was unable to comment on Wednesday.

And after all, military aid to Ukraine was eventually restored. So according to this argument, the actions for which Trump is facing impeachment (withholding aid for selfish reasons) never actually happened. Per National Review’s Rich Lowry, “The best defense Republicans can muster is that nothing came of it. An ally was discomfited and yanked around for a couple of months before, ultimately, getting its defense funding.”

And his magazine’s editorial board argued earlier this month, “It has to matter that, at the end of the day, the harm of this episode was minimal or nonexistent. The Ukrainians got their defense aid without making any statement committing themselves to the investigations.”

It’s true that intent matters — in criminal proceedings. I spoke with Ken White, a criminal defense attorney and former US attorney, who told me, “Intent is very important in court, and for many of these crimes, from witness intimidation to bribery, prosecutors must prove corrupt intent. If we were in federal court, litigating criminal charges against the president, I think the “Trump is just Trump” defense would be colorable and tricky to overcome.

“With normal humans, when they act like Trump you can infer corrupt intent; the defense is that you can’t make that inference with Trump because he acts that way all the time, reflexively.”

But White added two caveats. “First, that’s a matter of proof. A jury could still reject it and see corrupt intent. Second, this ain’t federal court.” Impeachment, after all, is a political process, not a legal one.

And as to the argument that funding to Ukraine was indeed restored, the Cato Institute’s Gene Healy pointed out in October that an unsuccessful or “incompetent” attempt to commit an impeachable act doesn’t make it less impeachable:

The Nixon crew botched most of the schemes it undertook, from the Watergate caper to the attempt to audit the president’s political enemies. That didn’t save Richard Nixon from being driven from office via the impeachment process.

2) “Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani deserve praise”

Some of Trump’s defenders are taking an entirely different approach and stating that Donald Trump’s actions were not only defensible, but good. In the words of Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) (who criticized Lt. Col. Vindman for having “opinions counter” to the president), “it’s perfectly within the purview of the president’s authority” to base military aid on the assurance of an investigation into corruption (or more accurately, the announcement of an investigation).

They argue that the government of Ukraine was corrupt and Trump was elected to fight corruption — ergo, of course he would resist sending aid to Ukraine. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) put it this way: “Corruption is not just prevalent in Ukraine. It’s the system. Our president said time out, time out, let’s check out this new guy.”

.@RealDonaldTrump and @RudyGiuliani deserve praise for pushing for accountability because these officials seem to have zero concern about Ukraine's collusion w/Obama admin targeting America's election in 2016 -- and the Biden cover-up...

— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) November 20, 2019

As Washington Examiner writer Byron York wrote in a piece entitled “What if Trump was right about Ukraine?”, supporters of this line of logic argue that while perhaps Trump’s actions weren’t the best, he had real and genuine concerns about Ukraine’s government and its alleged efforts to collude with the Clinton campaign and influence the 2016 election.

Those efforts are based on allegations that Ukrainian officials, concerned about former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s work for a pro-Russian political party, attempted to assist the Clinton campaign and harm the Trump campaign. Right-leaning media outlets have focused serious attention on those allegations since 2017.

For example, the Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway argued on Fox News in October of this year, “You have people who have already admitted that people affiliated with the Ukrainian government worked with the Democratic National Committee’s contractors to help Hillary Clinton in the 2016 campaign,” arguing that Ukraine and the DNC took part in actual collusion, unlike Russia and Trump’s campaign.

York writes that if the allegations were true, Trump’s actions make sense. “If [those concerns] were even mostly legitimate, then Trump defenders could say: “Look, he had a point. Even if one thinks he handled the issue inappropriately, the fact is, what was going on in Ukraine was worrisome enough for a United States president to take notice.” Quoting former US Special Representative to Ukraine Kurt Volker, York concluded, “The president said Ukraine ‘tried to take me down.’ He wasn’t wrong.” (It’s worth noting that other conservatives disagree.)

This was the argument that Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a writer at National Review who published “The Case for Trump” earlier this year, made to me, saying that it made sense for Trump to be suspicious of Ukraine. He asked that I quote him in full.

“Trump is a businessman and he does not want to give much military aid in general, and naturally not to corrupt governments who have in the past, according to Politico, tried to interfere in the 2016 election.”

“Trump naturally takes the past Ukrainian efforts, again according to the 2017 Politico report, to harm his election effort, as a personal affront given they reportedly sought to stop Trump from becoming president and yet wanted him to reverse the Obama policy of no military aid once he was elected (which he did).”

“Once more, we are left with a supposed thought crime of considering delaying aid in exchange for Ukrainian promises of investigating 2016 interference in an American election—which never happened, but was actually reified by earlier suspension of actual Ukrainian investigations in 2016 (and possibly of Hunter Biden) and refusal to arm the Ukrainians.”

But this argument has problems of its own. Fiona Hill and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, both of whom served on Trump’s National Security Council, testified earlier this month that they had seen no evidence that the government of Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election. Hill added in testimony Thursday, “I refuse to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternate narrative that the Ukrainian government is a US adversary, and that Ukraine — not Russia — attacked us in 2016.”

The Politico piece to which Dr. Hanson referred during our conversation notes that while some Ukrainian officials supported Clinton, their efforts were “far less concerted or centrally directed than Russia’s alleged hacking and dissemination of Democratic emails,” which was a “top-down” effort. And according to documents obtained by BuzzFeed News via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, one of the main sources for allegations that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election — including allegations that they, not Russia, hacked the DNC — was Manafort himself.

3) “Impeaching a president is the most extreme and anti-democratic remedy”

But other conservatives have argued that Trump’s actions, even if tied to an “understandable and justifiable” desire to investigate allegations of Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 election, were improper, inappropriate, or just plain bad.

As Townhall.com and Fox News commentator Guy Benson told me, those involved in the alleged quid pro quo “were up to something that stunk.” “They misused and abused their power,” he said. “It’s serious and it should be taken seriously.

But in his view, impeachment is a step too far. “My case against impeachment and removal is that it rises to a thermonuclear option that has never been detonated before. Doing so based on this, so close to an election, in a president’s first term, would do enormous damage.”

Rather, he favors censure, a “very rare tool” last used against President Andrew Jackson in 1834 that would, as he wrote in October, “represent a severe and formal condemnation from the people’s branch, and would constitute a stain on the president’s term in office.”

Daily Caller founders Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel have also argued that impeachment is too harsh a punishment for Trump. In an op-ed in October where they stipulated that “Donald Trump should not have been on the phone with a foreign head of state encouraging another country to investigate his political opponent,” they then wrote, “Impeaching a president is the most extreme and anti-democratic remedy we have in our system of government.”

And they added:

The facts are out there for the American people to weigh as they make their decision. How about we let them sort all this out? There’s no need to come up with thin excuses for a purely partisan impeachment process when we have an election right around the corner.

I spoke to Patel, who told me, “Nancy Pelosi was right for all those months when she repeatedly said that to undo that election without bipartisan support based on clear criminal behavior would tear the country apart. We are on the eve of a new election where the American people can once again vote on Trump and this time they can weigh for themselves Trump’s behavior in this Ukraine affair. That’s a much better solution.”

Thoughts after day one: Trump’s mention of Biden on his 7/25 call was inappropriate. I’ve said that all along. However, nothing I heard today leads me to change my mind : impeachment goes too far. Let the voters settle this. One party, partisan impeachment is not the answer.

— Ari Fleischer (@AriFleischer) November 13, 2019

4) “No one cares”

But an even simpler defense of the president is one being made by Carlson on his Fox News show and by others within the conservative movement, and it actually doesn’t require defending the president at all.

Instead, Republicans are arguing that the entire process is a “distraction.” Moreover, they’re arguing that it doesn’t matter what Trump did or didn’t do because the Senate won’t vote to impeach the president and the average American doesn’t care.

As Townhall.com writer Kurt Schlichter wrote earlier this week, “We’re too busy working, too focused on our 401(k)s going through the roof and on [Trump] flipping circuit courts like a boss, to care about the latest outrage to end all outrages.” I reached out to Schlichter and will update if and when I hear back.

On the November 15 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, Carlson argued, “normal people” — “someone with kids and a job and a marriage you care about” — aren’t thinking about impeachment and would rather “the buffoons on TV would stop yapping about Trump 24/7 and talk about something relevant.”

It’s an argument being made by Republicans both inside and outside of the administration. For example, White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham tweeted that instead of impeachment (which was “boring” and a “waste of time”), “Congress should be working on passing USMCA, funding our govt & military, working on reduced drug pricing & so much more.”

With record low unemployment and record high wage growth, Democrats know they can't beat President Trump in 2020. Democrats need to #StopTheMadness and get back to work for the American people.

— PA GOP (@PAGOP) November 20, 2019

This argument seems somewhat self-refuting — after all, tweeting or writing or saying on national television that no one cares about impeachment would imply that someone, somewhere, decidedly does.

But for the GOP, it is perhaps the most revealing. Not of the sentiment of the average American — 70 percent of whom believe Trump’s actions regarding Ukraine were “wrong” — but of the Republicans. Because they are well aware that within a slimmed-down Republican Party that has largely excised his enemies and detractors through retirements and election losses, Trump is the only available lodestar.

And so for them, it doesn’t actually matter what Trump did with regard to Ukrainian military aid: whether he intended to hurt Joe Biden’s presidential hopes, whether he was genuinely concerned about corruption, or whether he did something that constitutes an impeachable offense. Trump is all they’ve got.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/338QAa3

[timalexanderdollery]

The 4 main conservative defenses for Trump against impeachment, explained

President Trump attends a “Keep America Great” rally in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on October 10, 2019. | Brendan Smialowski /AFP/Getty Images

Only one of them makes sense.

President Donald Trump withheld hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid from the Ukrainian government, seemingly to push lawmakers to announce an investigation into the son of a potential political opponent and his work with a Ukrainian energy company. That much, at least, is clear. As is the fact that Trump has an 89 percent approval rating with Republican voters.

That’s why most Republican lawmakers aren’t going to change their minds on the impeachment of President Trump. While some in Congress might privately think that Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukrainian officials to “do him a favor” and investigate former Vice President Joe Biden was a bad idea, they won’t say so in public.

Because, quite simply, Trump is the president. He’s giving them what they want politically, the economy appears strong and, most critically, he is far more popular and powerful than they are.

But House Republicans and many Trump-supportive conservative and right-leaning writers and pundits have largely attempted to avoid saying as much.

Rather, together with constantly shifting responses to specific testimony, they appear to have developed three basic defenses for Trump as House impeachment hearings continued: He was “too inept” to have intended to do what he is being accused of doing; what he did was actually good; and his actions were bad, but not impeachable.

But some congressional Republicans and conservatives have begun saying another, perhaps most accurate, defense of Trump out loud: Whatever he did, it doesn’t matter — not to “normal people” and not to the Republican Party.

1) “Impeachment for incompetence would disqualify most of the government”

The first basic defense of Trump regarding Ukraine is the simplest: Trump lacked the intent and the basic competence to get a quid pro quo deal with Ukraine done. And without intent (legally defined as a conscious decision to commit an illegal act), some argue that what Trump did may have been bad and dumb, but not criminal — and thus, not a “high crime or misdemeanor.”

As elucidated by the Wall Street Journal editorial board in October:

... it may turn out that while Mr. Trump wanted a quid-pro-quo policy ultimatum toward Ukraine, he was too inept to execute it. Impeachment for incompetence would disqualify most of the government, and most Presidents at some point or another in office.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham seemingly agreed, telling CBS News earlier this month that the administration appeared “incapable” of forming a quid pro quo, thus rendering the entire impeachment discussion null and void.

"It was incoherent," Sen @LindseyGrahamSC says of Trump's Ukraine policy. "They seem to be *incapable* of forming a quid pro quo." pic.twitter.com/rdZxyIazNj

— Steven Portnoy (@stevenportnoy) November 6, 2019

Conservative pundit Ben Shapiro made similar arguments on his podcast, saying on October 7 that Trump would make a fantastic client for a defense attorney because “Trump doesn’t have requisite intent for anything. The man has the attention span of a gnat ... if you are his defense lawyer, his best defense to ‘he had a plan in Ukraine to go after Joe Biden’ is ‘dude doesn’t have plans.’” And on November 11, Shapiro argued, “I don’t think he’s had the level of intent necessary to eat a hamburger.” I reached out to Shapiro, but he was unable to comment on Wednesday.

And after all, military aid to Ukraine was eventually restored. So according to this argument, the actions for which Trump is facing impeachment (withholding aid for selfish reasons) never actually happened. Per National Review’s Rich Lowry, “The best defense Republicans can muster is that nothing came of it. An ally was discomfited and yanked around for a couple of months before, ultimately, getting its defense funding.”

And his magazine’s editorial board argued earlier this month, “It has to matter that, at the end of the day, the harm of this episode was minimal or nonexistent. The Ukrainians got their defense aid without making any statement committing themselves to the investigations.”

It’s true that intent matters — in criminal proceedings. I spoke with Ken White, a criminal defense attorney and former US attorney, who told me, “Intent is very important in court, and for many of these crimes, from witness intimidation to bribery, prosecutors must prove corrupt intent. If we were in federal court, litigating criminal charges against the president, I think the “Trump is just Trump” defense would be colorable and tricky to overcome.

“With normal humans, when they act like Trump you can infer corrupt intent; the defense is that you can’t make that inference with Trump because he acts that way all the time, reflexively.”

But White added two caveats. “First, that’s a matter of proof. A jury could still reject it and see corrupt intent. Second, this ain’t federal court.” Impeachment, after all, is a political process, not a legal one.

And as to the argument that funding to Ukraine was indeed restored, the Cato Institute’s Gene Healy pointed out in October that an unsuccessful or “incompetent” attempt to commit an impeachable act doesn’t make it less impeachable:

The Nixon crew botched most of the schemes it undertook, from the Watergate caper to the attempt to audit the president’s political enemies. That didn’t save Richard Nixon from being driven from office via the impeachment process.

2) “Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani deserve praise”

Some of Trump’s defenders are taking an entirely different approach and stating that Donald Trump’s actions were not only defensible, but good. In the words of Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) (who criticized Lt. Col. Vindman for having “opinions counter” to the president), “it’s perfectly within the purview of the president’s authority” to base military aid on the assurance of an investigation into corruption (or more accurately, the announcement of an investigation).

They argue that the government of Ukraine was corrupt and Trump was elected to fight corruption — ergo, of course he would resist sending aid to Ukraine. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) put it this way: “Corruption is not just prevalent in Ukraine. It’s the system. Our president said time out, time out, let’s check out this new guy.”

.@RealDonaldTrump and @RudyGiuliani deserve praise for pushing for accountability because these officials seem to have zero concern about Ukraine's collusion w/Obama admin targeting America's election in 2016 -- and the Biden cover-up...

— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) November 20, 2019

As Washington Examiner writer Byron York wrote in a piece entitled “What if Trump was right about Ukraine?”, supporters of this line of logic argue that while perhaps Trump’s actions weren’t the best, he had real and genuine concerns about Ukraine’s government and its alleged efforts to collude with the Clinton campaign and influence the 2016 election.

Those efforts are based on allegations that Ukrainian officials, concerned about former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s work for a pro-Russian political party, attempted to assist the Clinton campaign and harm the Trump campaign. Right-leaning media outlets have focused serious attention on those allegations since 2017.

For example, the Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway argued on Fox News in October of this year, “You have people who have already admitted that people affiliated with the Ukrainian government worked with the Democratic National Committee’s contractors to help Hillary Clinton in the 2016 campaign,” arguing that Ukraine and the DNC took part in actual collusion, unlike Russia and Trump’s campaign.

York writes that if the allegations were true, Trump’s actions make sense. “If [those concerns] were even mostly legitimate, then Trump defenders could say: “Look, he had a point. Even if one thinks he handled the issue inappropriately, the fact is, what was going on in Ukraine was worrisome enough for a United States president to take notice.” Quoting former US Special Representative to Ukraine Kurt Volker, York concluded, “The president said Ukraine ‘tried to take me down.’ He wasn’t wrong.” (It’s worth noting that other conservatives disagree.)

This was the argument that Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a writer at National Review who published “The Case for Trump” earlier this year, made to me, saying that it made sense for Trump to be suspicious of Ukraine. He asked that I quote him in full.

“Trump is a businessman and he does not want to give much military aid in general, and naturally not to corrupt governments who have in the past, according to Politico, tried to interfere in the 2016 election.”

“Trump naturally takes the past Ukrainian efforts, again according to the 2017 Politico report, to harm his election effort, as a personal affront given they reportedly sought to stop Trump from becoming president and yet wanted him to reverse the Obama policy of no military aid once he was elected (which he did).”

“Once more, we are left with a supposed thought crime of considering delaying aid in exchange for Ukrainian promises of investigating 2016 interference in an American election—which never happened, but was actually reified by earlier suspension of actual Ukrainian investigations in 2016 (and possibly of Hunter Biden) and refusal to arm the Ukrainians.”

But this argument has problems of its own. Fiona Hill and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, both of whom served on Trump’s National Security Council, testified earlier this month that they had seen no evidence that the government of Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election. Hill added in testimony Thursday, “I refuse to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternate narrative that the Ukrainian government is a US adversary, and that Ukraine — not Russia — attacked us in 2016.”

The Politico piece to which Dr. Hanson referred during our conversation notes that while some Ukrainian officials supported Clinton, their efforts were “far less concerted or centrally directed than Russia’s alleged hacking and dissemination of Democratic emails,” which was a “top-down” effort. And according to documents obtained by BuzzFeed News via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, one of the main sources for allegations that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election — including allegations that they, not Russia, hacked the DNC — was Manafort himself.

3) “Impeaching a president is the most extreme and anti-democratic remedy”

But other conservatives have argued that Trump’s actions, even if tied to an “understandable and justifiable” desire to investigate allegations of Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 election, were improper, inappropriate, or just plain bad.

As Townhall.com and Fox News commentator Guy Benson told me, those involved in the alleged quid pro quo “were up to something that stunk.” “They misused and abused their power,” he said. “It’s serious and it should be taken seriously.

But in his view, impeachment is a step too far. “My case against impeachment and removal is that it rises to a thermonuclear option that has never been detonated before. Doing so based on this, so close to an election, in a president’s first term, would do enormous damage.”

Rather, he favors censure, a “very rare tool” last used against President Andrew Jackson in 1834 that would, as he wrote in October, “represent a severe and formal condemnation from the people’s branch, and would constitute a stain on the president’s term in office.”

Daily Caller founders Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel have also argued that impeachment is too harsh a punishment for Trump. In an op-ed in October where they stipulated that “Donald Trump should not have been on the phone with a foreign head of state encouraging another country to investigate his political opponent,” they then wrote, “Impeaching a president is the most extreme and anti-democratic remedy we have in our system of government.”

And they added:

The facts are out there for the American people to weigh as they make their decision. How about we let them sort all this out? There’s no need to come up with thin excuses for a purely partisan impeachment process when we have an election right around the corner.

I spoke to Patel, who told me, “Nancy Pelosi was right for all those months when she repeatedly said that to undo that election without bipartisan support based on clear criminal behavior would tear the country apart. We are on the eve of a new election where the American people can once again vote on Trump and this time they can weigh for themselves Trump’s behavior in this Ukraine affair. That’s a much better solution.”

Thoughts after day one: Trump’s mention of Biden on his 7/25 call was inappropriate. I’ve said that all along. However, nothing I heard today leads me to change my mind : impeachment goes too far. Let the voters settle this. One party, partisan impeachment is not the answer.

— Ari Fleischer (@AriFleischer) November 13, 2019

4) “No one cares”

But an even simpler defense of the president is one being made by Carlson on his Fox News show and by others within the conservative movement, and it actually doesn’t require defending the president at all.

Instead, Republicans are arguing that the entire process is a “distraction.” Moreover, they’re arguing that it doesn’t matter what Trump did or didn’t do because the Senate won’t vote to impeach the president and the average American doesn’t care.

As Townhall.com writer Kurt Schlichter wrote earlier this week, “We’re too busy working, too focused on our 401(k)s going through the roof and on [Trump] flipping circuit courts like a boss, to care about the latest outrage to end all outrages.” I reached out to Schlichter and will update if and when I hear back.

On the November 15 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, Carlson argued, “normal people” — “someone with kids and a job and a marriage you care about” — aren’t thinking about impeachment and would rather “the buffoons on TV would stop yapping about Trump 24/7 and talk about something relevant.”

It’s an argument being made by Republicans both inside and outside of the administration. For example, White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham tweeted that instead of impeachment (which was “boring” and a “waste of time”), “Congress should be working on passing USMCA, funding our govt & military, working on reduced drug pricing & so much more.”

With record low unemployment and record high wage growth, Democrats know they can't beat President Trump in 2020. Democrats need to #StopTheMadness and get back to work for the American people.

— PA GOP (@PAGOP) November 20, 2019

This argument seems somewhat self-refuting — after all, tweeting or writing or saying on national television that no one cares about impeachment would imply that someone, somewhere, decidedly does.

But for the GOP, it is perhaps the most revealing. Not of the sentiment of the average American — 70 percent of whom believe Trump’s actions regarding Ukraine were “wrong” — but of the Republicans. Because they are well aware that within a slimmed-down Republican Party that has largely excised his enemies and detractors through retirements and election losses, Trump is the only available lodestar.

And so for them, it doesn’t actually matter what Trump did with regard to Ukrainian military aid: whether he intended to hurt Joe Biden’s presidential hopes, whether he was genuinely concerned about corruption, or whether he did something that constitutes an impeachable offense. Trump is all they’ve got.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/338QAa3

[corneliusreignallen]

The 4 main conservative defenses for Trump against impeachment, explained

President Trump attends a “Keep America Great” rally in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on October 10, 2019. | Brendan Smialowski /AFP/Getty Images

Only one of them makes sense.

President Donald Trump withheld hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid from the Ukrainian government, seemingly to push lawmakers to announce an investigation into the son of a potential political opponent and his work with a Ukrainian energy company. That much, at least, is clear. As is the fact that Trump has an 89 percent approval rating with Republican voters.

That’s why most Republican lawmakers aren’t going to change their minds on the impeachment of President Trump. While some in Congress might privately think that Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukrainian officials to “do him a favor” and investigate former Vice President Joe Biden was a bad idea, they won’t say so in public.

Because, quite simply, Trump is the president. He’s giving them what they want politically, the economy appears strong and, most critically, he is far more popular and powerful than they are.

But House Republicans and many Trump-supportive conservative and right-leaning writers and pundits have largely attempted to avoid saying as much.

Rather, together with constantly shifting responses to specific testimony, they appear to have developed three basic defenses for Trump as House impeachment hearings continued: He was “too inept” to have intended to do what he is being accused of doing; what he did was actually good; and his actions were bad, but not impeachable.

But some congressional Republicans and conservatives have begun saying another, perhaps most accurate, defense of Trump out loud: Whatever he did, it doesn’t matter — not to “normal people” and not to the Republican Party.

1) “Impeachment for incompetence would disqualify most of the government”

The first basic defense of Trump regarding Ukraine is the simplest: Trump lacked the intent and the basic competence to get a quid pro quo deal with Ukraine done. And without intent (legally defined as a conscious decision to commit an illegal act), some argue that what Trump did may have been bad and dumb, but not criminal — and thus, not a “high crime or misdemeanor.”

As elucidated by the Wall Street Journal editorial board in October:

... it may turn out that while Mr. Trump wanted a quid-pro-quo policy ultimatum toward Ukraine, he was too inept to execute it. Impeachment for incompetence would disqualify most of the government, and most Presidents at some point or another in office.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham seemingly agreed, telling CBS News earlier this month that the administration appeared “incapable” of forming a quid pro quo, thus rendering the entire impeachment discussion null and void.

"It was incoherent," Sen @LindseyGrahamSC says of Trump's Ukraine policy. "They seem to be *incapable* of forming a quid pro quo." pic.twitter.com/rdZxyIazNj

— Steven Portnoy (@stevenportnoy) November 6, 2019

Conservative pundit Ben Shapiro made similar arguments on his podcast, saying on October 7 that Trump would make a fantastic client for a defense attorney because “Trump doesn’t have requisite intent for anything. The man has the attention span of a gnat ... if you are his defense lawyer, his best defense to ‘he had a plan in Ukraine to go after Joe Biden’ is ‘dude doesn’t have plans.’” And on November 11, Shapiro argued, “I don’t think he’s had the level of intent necessary to eat a hamburger.” I reached out to Shapiro, but he was unable to comment on Wednesday.

And after all, military aid to Ukraine was eventually restored. So according to this argument, the actions for which Trump is facing impeachment (withholding aid for selfish reasons) never actually happened. Per National Review’s Rich Lowry, “The best defense Republicans can muster is that nothing came of it. An ally was discomfited and yanked around for a couple of months before, ultimately, getting its defense funding.”

And his magazine’s editorial board argued earlier this month, “It has to matter that, at the end of the day, the harm of this episode was minimal or nonexistent. The Ukrainians got their defense aid without making any statement committing themselves to the investigations.”

It’s true that intent matters — in criminal proceedings. I spoke with Ken White, a criminal defense attorney and former US attorney, who told me, “Intent is very important in court, and for many of these crimes, from witness intimidation to bribery, prosecutors must prove corrupt intent. If we were in federal court, litigating criminal charges against the president, I think the “Trump is just Trump” defense would be colorable and tricky to overcome.

“With normal humans, when they act like Trump you can infer corrupt intent; the defense is that you can’t make that inference with Trump because he acts that way all the time, reflexively.”

But White added two caveats. “First, that’s a matter of proof. A jury could still reject it and see corrupt intent. Second, this ain’t federal court.” Impeachment, after all, is a political process, not a legal one.

And as to the argument that funding to Ukraine was indeed restored, the Cato Institute’s Gene Healy pointed out in October that an unsuccessful or “incompetent” attempt to commit an impeachable act doesn’t make it less impeachable:

The Nixon crew botched most of the schemes it undertook, from the Watergate caper to the attempt to audit the president’s political enemies. That didn’t save Richard Nixon from being driven from office via the impeachment process.

2) “Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani deserve praise”

Some of Trump’s defenders are taking an entirely different approach and stating that Donald Trump’s actions were not only defensible, but good. In the words of Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) (who criticized Lt. Col. Vindman for having “opinions counter” to the president), “it’s perfectly within the purview of the president’s authority” to base military aid on the assurance of an investigation into corruption (or more accurately, the announcement of an investigation).

They argue that the government of Ukraine was corrupt and Trump was elected to fight corruption — ergo, of course he would resist sending aid to Ukraine. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) put it this way: “Corruption is not just prevalent in Ukraine. It’s the system. Our president said time out, time out, let’s check out this new guy.”

.@RealDonaldTrump and @RudyGiuliani deserve praise for pushing for accountability because these officials seem to have zero concern about Ukraine's collusion w/Obama admin targeting America's election in 2016 -- and the Biden cover-up...

— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) November 20, 2019

As Washington Examiner writer Byron York wrote in a piece entitled “What if Trump was right about Ukraine?”, supporters of this line of logic argue that while perhaps Trump’s actions weren’t the best, he had real and genuine concerns about Ukraine’s government and its alleged efforts to collude with the Clinton campaign and influence the 2016 election.

Those efforts are based on allegations that Ukrainian officials, concerned about former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s work for a pro-Russian political party, attempted to assist the Clinton campaign and harm the Trump campaign. Right-leaning media outlets have focused serious attention on those allegations since 2017.

For example, the Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway argued on Fox News in October of this year, “You have people who have already admitted that people affiliated with the Ukrainian government worked with the Democratic National Committee’s contractors to help Hillary Clinton in the 2016 campaign,” arguing that Ukraine and the DNC took part in actual collusion, unlike Russia and Trump’s campaign.

York writes that if the allegations were true, Trump’s actions make sense. “If [those concerns] were even mostly legitimate, then Trump defenders could say: “Look, he had a point. Even if one thinks he handled the issue inappropriately, the fact is, what was going on in Ukraine was worrisome enough for a United States president to take notice.” Quoting former US Special Representative to Ukraine Kurt Volker, York concluded, “The president said Ukraine ‘tried to take me down.’ He wasn’t wrong.” (It’s worth noting that other conservatives disagree.)

This was the argument that Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a writer at National Review who published “The Case for Trump” earlier this year, made to me, saying that it made sense for Trump to be suspicious of Ukraine. He asked that I quote him in full.

“Trump is a businessman and he does not want to give much military aid in general, and naturally not to corrupt governments who have in the past, according to Politico, tried to interfere in the 2016 election.”

“Trump naturally takes the past Ukrainian efforts, again according to the 2017 Politico report, to harm his election effort, as a personal affront given they reportedly sought to stop Trump from becoming president and yet wanted him to reverse the Obama policy of no military aid once he was elected (which he did).”

“Once more, we are left with a supposed thought crime of considering delaying aid in exchange for Ukrainian promises of investigating 2016 interference in an American election—which never happened, but was actually reified by earlier suspension of actual Ukrainian investigations in 2016 (and possibly of Hunter Biden) and refusal to arm the Ukrainians.”

But this argument has problems of its own. Fiona Hill and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, both of whom served on Trump’s National Security Council, testified earlier this month that they had seen no evidence that the government of Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election. Hill added in testimony Thursday, “I refuse to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternate narrative that the Ukrainian government is a US adversary, and that Ukraine — not Russia — attacked us in 2016.”

The Politico piece to which Dr. Hanson referred during our conversation notes that while some Ukrainian officials supported Clinton, their efforts were “far less concerted or centrally directed than Russia’s alleged hacking and dissemination of Democratic emails,” which was a “top-down” effort. And according to documents obtained by BuzzFeed News via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, one of the main sources for allegations that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election — including allegations that they, not Russia, hacked the DNC — was Manafort himself.

3) “Impeaching a president is the most extreme and anti-democratic remedy”

But other conservatives have argued that Trump’s actions, even if tied to an “understandable and justifiable” desire to investigate allegations of Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 election, were improper, inappropriate, or just plain bad.

As Townhall.com and Fox News commentator Guy Benson told me, those involved in the alleged quid pro quo “were up to something that stunk.” “They misused and abused their power,” he said. “It’s serious and it should be taken seriously.

But in his view, impeachment is a step too far. “My case against impeachment and removal is that it rises to a thermonuclear option that has never been detonated before. Doing so based on this, so close to an election, in a president’s first term, would do enormous damage.”

Rather, he favors censure, a “very rare tool” last used against President Andrew Jackson in 1834 that would, as he wrote in October, “represent a severe and formal condemnation from the people’s branch, and would constitute a stain on the president’s term in office.”

Daily Caller founders Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel have also argued that impeachment is too harsh a punishment for Trump. In an op-ed in October where they stipulated that “Donald Trump should not have been on the phone with a foreign head of state encouraging another country to investigate his political opponent,” they then wrote, “Impeaching a president is the most extreme and anti-democratic remedy we have in our system of government.”

And they added:

The facts are out there for the American people to weigh as they make their decision. How about we let them sort all this out? There’s no need to come up with thin excuses for a purely partisan impeachment process when we have an election right around the corner.

I spoke to Patel, who told me, “Nancy Pelosi was right for all those months when she repeatedly said that to undo that election without bipartisan support based on clear criminal behavior would tear the country apart. We are on the eve of a new election where the American people can once again vote on Trump and this time they can weigh for themselves Trump’s behavior in this Ukraine affair. That’s a much better solution.”

Thoughts after day one: Trump’s mention of Biden on his 7/25 call was inappropriate. I’ve said that all along. However, nothing I heard today leads me to change my mind : impeachment goes too far. Let the voters settle this. One party, partisan impeachment is not the answer.

— Ari Fleischer (@AriFleischer) November 13, 2019

4) “No one cares”

But an even simpler defense of the president is one being made by Carlson on his Fox News show and by others within the conservative movement, and it actually doesn’t require defending the president at all.

Instead, Republicans are arguing that the entire process is a “distraction.” Moreover, they’re arguing that it doesn’t matter what Trump did or didn’t do because the Senate won’t vote to impeach the president and the average American doesn’t care.

As Townhall.com writer Kurt Schlichter wrote earlier this week, “We’re too busy working, too focused on our 401(k)s going through the roof and on [Trump] flipping circuit courts like a boss, to care about the latest outrage to end all outrages.” I reached out to Schlichter and will update if and when I hear back.

On the November 15 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, Carlson argued, “normal people” — “someone with kids and a job and a marriage you care about” — aren’t thinking about impeachment and would rather “the buffoons on TV would stop yapping about Trump 24/7 and talk about something relevant.”

It’s an argument being made by Republicans both inside and outside of the administration. For example, White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham tweeted that instead of impeachment (which was “boring” and a “waste of time”), “Congress should be working on passing USMCA, funding our govt & military, working on reduced drug pricing & so much more.”

With record low unemployment and record high wage growth, Democrats know they can't beat President Trump in 2020. Democrats need to #StopTheMadness and get back to work for the American people.

— PA GOP (@PAGOP) November 20, 2019

This argument seems somewhat self-refuting — after all, tweeting or writing or saying on national television that no one cares about impeachment would imply that someone, somewhere, decidedly does.

But for the GOP, it is perhaps the most revealing. Not of the sentiment of the average American — 70 percent of whom believe Trump’s actions regarding Ukraine were “wrong” — but of the Republicans. Because they are well aware that within a slimmed-down Republican Party that has largely excised his enemies and detractors through retirements and election losses, Trump is the only available lodestar.

And so for them, it doesn’t actually matter what Trump did with regard to Ukrainian military aid: whether he intended to hurt Joe Biden’s presidential hopes, whether he was genuinely concerned about corruption, or whether he did something that constitutes an impeachable offense. Trump is all they’ve got.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/338QAa3

[stevedonnellyfaith-blog]

Gettysburg (Post 96) 7-8-15

I have four favorite colonels in life and only one of them makes chicken; the other three fought a desperate fight on a rocky hill in rural Pennsylvania more than a century and a half in our past.  In the town of Gettysburg, on July 2nd, 1863 the outcome of the Civil War hung in the balance, but the Union forces held the high ground and ideally had well-prepared defensive lines organized in a fish-hook shape from Culp’s Hill to Little Round Top.  Except they really didn’t. Dan Sickles, by all accounts an incompetent general, repositioned his forces away from the ordered line without authorization, leaving Little Round Top unmanned and the left flank of the Union line completely exposed. A Brigadier General was sent to investigate Sickle’s mayhem and discovered the empty position on Little Round Top in time to notice the Confederate troops streaming across the heavily wooded Big Round Top headed to the occupy a commanding position on the smaller hill, a leverage point from which they would have first slaughtered Sickle’s troops and then likely rolled up the entire Union line.

But the Brigadier acted quickly enough.  He happened across Col Strong Vincent, who rather than wait for confirming order, moved his brigade into position about five to ten minutes before the rebel yell announced the first onslaught.  Strong Vincent positioned Col Joshua Chamberlain and his 20th Maine Regiment at the extreme left of the Union forces and then returned to overall brigade command where he was shot dead within the hour.  Col Paddy O’Rourke, likewise swiftly answered a call for reinforcements and brought his troops up across Little Round Top to push back the Confederate attack. O’Rourke too was mortally wounded while leading the charge of his soldiers from a frontal position.  Thus two of my favorite colonels died bravely leading their men in an extraordinary situation that required risk and heroism.

Among his brave men the third colonel, Chamberlain, defended his position until there was almost no ammunition left to return fire.  He and his officers knew that they would soon be swept away by their determined adversaries, and that their failure would seriously endanger the entire Army of the Potomac, which had massed for the pivotal standoff.  Rather than retreat, though, they made the decision to fix bayonets and charge, an act that was immortalized in the movie Gettysburg, a film that began my fascination with this particular Civil War campaign.

Anyway, this is not a story about my love of history; it is about my journey over last weekend.  Determined for the last several years that if I ever returned East, I would visit Little Round Top, this holiday I finally made the trip.  I guess you would have to characterize my Gettysburg journey as a line item on a pretty underwhelming bucket list.  I have no desire to scuba, sky dive or ride for even one second on a bull named Fu Manchu, but I am attracted to several places associated with a paradigm shift, a collision of the tectonic plates of American history.  

I find these times and places especially alluring because, to me, they represent our most clear vision of the continuing chess game between Satan and Jesus that spans the centuries.  When there occurs a virtual volcanic crescendo of positive providential happenstance, I feel like I can finally distill God’s will clearly in our most muddied and relativistic times.  I gravitate to those places where spiritual struggle is most concentrated. If I ever visit Europe again, I will certainly stop at Fatima, at Lourdes, and most certainly, at Auschwitz where Maximilian Kolbe’s selfless act rebuked the Nazi killing factory.   In cooperation with Jesus and his vicious captors, the great saint poured out the libation of his life singing hymns to encourage his companions.

So Stephen Jr. and I headed off on an Independence Day pilgrimage to Little Round Top.  I like military history; Stephen likes gift shops at historical sites; my parents like peace and quiet every once in a while.  What is not to like?

We started on Friday morning and I accidentally left a GPS preference enabled that routed me away from all toll roads.  I use this preference to avoid a daily $4.50 shakedown I would otherwise receive by using the Ohio Turnpike to get to Youngstown. I didn’t like bridge tolls in the Bay Area, but here I can avoid the extra cost fairly easily, so I choose to. Unfortunately, if you leave that particular preference in effect on a sojourn from Cleveland to Gettysburg, you will drive through the boondocks of Pennsylvania.  Apparently, you could, in fact, drive on Route 30 from Gettysburg to either Long Island or to the city of San Francisco, but my fascination is with history not with stoplights so I would never do that.

Anyway, I realized my mistake after it no longer made sense to correct the error.  If we were so inclined, Stephen and I could have enjoyed some beautiful scenery of Western Pennsylvania.  Instead we were mostly lost in our own thoughts and tuned out the splendor of God’s creation.  Now that Natalie often rides with me, I have begun to listen to some pop stations again as relentlessly repetitive and sappy pap can pass the time on a long drive.  I must have eventually gotten sick of the audio cotton candy, as I think I was praying a rosary when I noticed the road sign.

Route 30 happens to lead through Shanksville on its meandering circuit towards the location of Abraham Lincoln’s most famous public address. I, like many Americans, vowed long ago never to forget 9-11, but it is not in my nature to remain steadfast in vigilance.  I am easily distracted by the Women’s World Cup, whatever is on the Velocity Channel, and assorted mundanity.  For instance, I missed Nathan’s hot dog eating contest this year because I was traveling.  Still I had intended to visit the Flight 93 Memorial back when I remembered that there was such a thing.

Although 9-11 was a highly significant event, it is probably not as historically important as Gettysburg, after which everything was entirely different, and America continued its ascent to a position of global power, a Godly country that Our Creator put to good use on many occasions until these last couple decades.  As a memorial, Shanksville is a smaller and newer one, but it is and will always remain a place of quiet contemplation.  I took several pictures there and will remember the experience for quite a while, although I now understand that my memory of Todd Beamer’s name etched into a white wall with various mementos lain at wall’s base will eventually fade.

My many pictures of Gettysburg will not serve as fuel for my imagination down the road, as I took very few shots on my July 4th tour.  Because it was a short trip, I decided to not pack my phone charger and instead planned to charge my phone in the car as I drove.  Unfortunately, there is no drive to charge your phone when you stay the night before at the place where you are going in the morning.  Perhaps I should have forwent updating my Facebook page the night before, but the phone would have probably only been a distraction from the documentary, bus tour, museum, cyclorama painting and obligatory visit to gift shop, which Stephen deemed quite satisfactory.  I made it to Little Round Top, the Wheat Field, The Peach Orchard and the Devil’s Den where the strategically challenged Gen Sickles got his leg blown off, which eliminated the need for his superior officers to cashier him.

What I didn’t find in Gettysburg was quiet contemplation. It is hard to engage in meditation in such a popular historical site on such an appropriate day.  In the end, after a good tour, laden with assorted trinkets Stephen and I headed off to Antietam which is down the road a spell, but seemed likely to be less popular.  I don’t know as much about that battle, but I understand that it was pivotal on a smaller scale.  I hoped for a quieter experience there, but Stephen and I were greeted with a crowd overflowing the parking lot and what looked like pumpkin chuckers on the horizon. They were actually amplifiers.  To our great surprise we discovered that the Antietam had closed down as a historical exhibit about an hour before our arrival and was instead being set up for an outdoor night concert by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.  We could have stayed for the fireworks but we arrived at 4 PM, without a blanket or picnic basket, so it seemingly was not the right time for our visit and we headed up the road.

Interestingly, we had spent an hour on the drive at another site we just stumbled across.  Mount Saint Mary’s University, America’s second oldest Catholic University, also a diocesan seminary, is evidently located upon the same Emmitsville Pike along which the Confederate forces traveled towards Gettysburg in search of quality footwear.  We stopped over because there were signs for a Lourdes Grotto on a hill above the campus. The grotto we found was an incredibly beautiful peaceful place.  There is another Lourdes Grotto in Cleveland, but although it is convenient, the Cleveland Lourdes site is largely a deserted and dilapidated relic from the area’s Catholic heritage, although beautiful and peaceful.  I spent time there after Pam’s passing.  While it is also beautiful and peaceful, the grotto at Emmistville, Maryland is wonderfully alive with serene and respectful layman, priests, brothers and sisters of all orders.  Had I not been hurrying towards my disappointment in Antietam, I probably could have sat their quietly all afternoon.  Unencumbered by my unnecessary and doomed holiday syllabus, Stephen enjoyed the stop at the grotto quite a bit.

Already, Stephen has asked me to revisit the grotto on our next trip south, this time a pilgrimage to my wife’s final resting place. Emmitsville was that very memorable stopover for him, although he did like the gift shop at Gettysburg as well. Ironically, the two unplanned stops were more powerful for the both of us, even though I have been planning the ascent of Little Round Top for many years.  I guess that oddity is consistent with all of our pilgrimages, through life. I often assemble and try to execute my own agenda with mixed results.  Sometimes I’ll leave a family member out of an activity if I think that they may be less enthusiastic about my plan than I am.  When instead of over planning, I hand the rudder over at least partially to Jesus, throughout my endeavors, the results are usually much better, more powerful and often more moving that my original idea.  The spiritual wellspring I experienced during the two providential stops on our little weekend trip is continued proof to me that Jesus delights in providing me with more happiness than I expect.

[thestempodcast-blog]

The Stem, Episode 1 (Script)

Howdy! My name is Thomas McPhee, and you're listening to the first episode of The Stem. The Stem is a music podcast where I talk about my thoughts and feelings on whatever happens to make its way into my musical rotation each month. While most episodes will be a review of a single album, I want to celebrate the new year, as well as the beginning of this podcast, by sharing my list for the top ten albums of 2016.

Before we begin, I want to take a moment to share how I built my list. For me, what makes an album one of the most successful albums of any given year is its longevity. Am I still listening to this album weeks or months after I first hear it? There are plenty of albums that I’ve enjoyed on the first listen, but have completely forgotten about after a week. This list then is comprised of albums that I find myself returning to again and again months after I first hear them. There are two important questions this raises that I want to address quickly.

First, what to do about albums released in December, which don’t give me a lot of time to see how they age? My list for 2016 Includes two albums released in mid to late December, which I am choosing to include based purely on the strength of my early impressions. Both of these artists’ previous albums are quite strong, and these new releases have been earning the majority of my attention since I purchased them. For these reasons, I feel safe including them on the list, though I recognize that my early impressions might be wrong and that I am somewhat breaking my own rubric by including them..

Secondly, there are some deliberate omissions that I want to comment on. This year there were several records (Danny Brown’s Atrocity Exhibition and Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds’ Skeleton Tree being the prime examples) that I expect to see top other people’s lists due to their artistic and technical merits. While I appreciate what these albums achieve and how they influence political and musical discourse, if an album doesn’t draw me in and make me listen to it again and again, or if it’s too intense to listen to without significant preparation beforehand, it won’t appear on this list. While I appreciate sharp, incisive lyrics and experimentation in form, I place higher value the ability for an album to be both casually and critically accessible. This list then, like my reviews will be, is very specific to me and my experiences and patterns of listening to music, and I want to be upfront about that so I’m not flooded with questions about why I didn’t include X album or Y artist on this list like everyone else did.

Without any further ado, let’s get to the list! First up, I have four honorable mentions I want to touch on briefly. These are albums that were enjoyable and had longevity, but I couldn’t justify ranking them above the 10 albums that made the cut. They are worth checking out though, so I recommend you given them a listen or two on your preferred streaming service and see what you think. They are

Hell Or High Water: Original Soundtrack - Nick Cave and Warren Ellis

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis are prolific soundtrack composers when they’re not busy working together as Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, and this was a strong addition to their catalogue. This is the soundtrack to yet another western, and its strength lies in how well the original compositions play with the curated songs from other artists. “Sleeping On the Blacktop” by Colter Wall is a standout track here. This record is available through Milan Records.

The Adventure Zone: The Crystal Kingdom Original Soundtrack by Griffin McElroy

The Adventure Zone is a comedy Dungeons and Dragons podcast put out by the podcasting machine McElroy family, and along with his duties as the primary editor of the podcast, as well as the dungeon master for their campaign, Griffin McElroy has begun composing music for the show starting in the show’s third mini-arc. Griffin himself describes these pieces as more musical stingers than actual songs, but the thematic unity between them, as well as the effectiveness they demonstrate in capturing the feelings of the scenarios they underscore, makes this collection well worth a listen. The four part song titled Crystal Kingdom is the strongest song on the album, incorporating haunting melodies together with an almost playful instrumentation. It also features some truly fantastic vocaloid work. You can find this album on Bandcamp, and links will be available on The Stem website.

SremmLife 2 by Rae Sremmurd

SremmLife 2 is the sequel to Rae Sremmurd’s debut full length SremmLife, the 2015 release that was a surprise hit and one of my biggest guilty pleasures of that summer. SremmLife 2 takes the frantic energy and no shame party jams of the first album and pushes them even harder, while also adding a slight dash of love, regret, and reflection. The album is a lot of fun (and often very ridiculous), and even some of the slow jams on it deserve attention. The opener “Start A Party” is a fantastic first track and does its job of hooking you superbly. You can find this album from Interscope.

Now onto the list proper.

Number 10: The Storm – Tech N9ne

Tech N9ne is a Missouri based rapper, and The Storm is the sequel to his 1999 commercial debut, The Calm Before The Storm. Tech is one of the original co-founders of Strange Music, a record label that is an enormous part of Tech’s image and rap persona. The Storm, like his previous albums, features dozens of Strange Music artists, with Krizz Kaliko making a total of 7 appearances across the deluxe edition of album, which equates to a little more than 20% of the entire record. The lyrics here are often typical Tech N9ne fare, which often focusses on the nature of an indie rap life, as well as the darker nature of Tech’s music and his love for his Strange Music crew. I was first introduced to Tech N9ne through his 2015 album Special Effects, which I enjoyed quite a bit, and it prompted me to go into his back catalogue and pick up a few of his previous albums.

While all of them are lengthy, and all of them tread much of the same lyrical and thematic ground as this record, The Storm to me feels like the ultimate realization of Tech’s vision and interests, and as such it stands as one of his longest albums. While there are a few songs on The Storm that I found myself consistently skipping, a number of them come on the album’s second half, which finds itself devoted mostly to featuring songs from his Strange Music label mates that don’t even have Tech on them at all, so I’m willing to overlook them in terms of how I rate the album overall. The fact that, for an almost two hour long album, I would call a solid hour of it fantastic, with the remaining hour split between good, decent, and a few stinkers, seems like a remarkable achievement that deserves being rewarded. There’s something powerful in listening to Tech vault across a myriad of different musical styles provided by his producers, unleashing the full repertoire of his technical rapping ability, and hitting catchy, infectious success at such a high rate. Where the album shines, it shines the brightest of any album he has put out so far, and even where it fails, it feels like it fails more by comparison to the rest of the album than failing wholesale. While this album is a recent release, it has made up the majority of my listening time since I purchased it, and I can easily imagine continuing to listen to it for the months to come.

Number 9: Helter Seltzer – We Are Scientists

My infatuation with We Are Scientists was swift and recent, as I had never heard a song of theirs before summer of 2016, and in the time span of about two to three weeks bought all of their albums and fell in love. Helter Seltzer is the fifth album from this indie pop-rock duo, and in many ways it feels like a return to form for me. Their first album, With Love And Squalor, had a drive and energy to it that kept me hooked and kept the album on rotation in my headphones. It was simple without being sparse, and energetic without being exhausting. Brain Thrust Mastery, their sophomore release, incorporated more electronic elements, and while featuring a few strong songs, generally failed to capture the same feeling and energy that excited me about their debut. Then Barbara, their third album, stripped out a lot of the electronic elements, and while it was a slower paced album than their first, something in the melodies and the lyrics captured my attention again; it felt more intentional with its pacing, and you could almost feel the concentration that went into the album and it payed out in spades. Then TV en Francais came out, and was largely disappointing to me. It kept the slow pacing of Barbara, but lost the focus, feeling too slow and lacking any gripping elements for me.

Now we turn to Helter Seltzer, where it feels like We Are Scientists sat down and re-listened to With Love And Squalor 50 times in a row and regained some of their energy and excitement. Helter Seltzer has possibly one of the most gripping and exciting opening tracks of any album this year with “Buckle”, a hard hitting rock song that sonically and lyrically shows a clear drive and an intensity that hooked me in instantly. The album takes the best parts of all their previous albums and incorporates them seamlessly, navigating the slower ballads of TV en Francais and the electronic experiments of Brain Thrust Mastery, all while continuing to engage me and deliver on the promises of the opening track. Lyrically we cover a powerful range of emotions; we open in “Buckle” with “I want you to buckle when you think of me”, and we end in “Forgiveness” with “What I need’s anybody’s guess, but honestly I don’t expect forgiveness.” While the band are known for their humorous antics, their cat filled music videos, and their generally silly personas, what strikes me most about the album is how how serious they clearly are taking this music. It may not all be serious in tone or subject, but the intention and thought brought to this album is clear, and it helps make this a truly catchy, eclectic rock album that manages to avoid all pretension and still deliver something heartfelt and powerful. This album is available through 100%.

Number 8: Dangerous Woman – Ariana Grande

Dangerous Woman is the third full length album by pop superstar Ariana Grande, and for me it represents the moment that Grande was able to successfully combine all the ingredients in her formula and make a pop album that is so expertly crafted that it engages me critically as well as sonically. While I’ve always enjoyed pop music, I have found much of it to be fluffy enough or thin enough that it tends to only have about a week to a month’s worth of longevity. This album has blown that out of the water, providing new experiences and joys even after seven and a half months of listening. The way Grande weaves her way through the album, from the more classical love ballad “Moonlight”, past the innuendo rife sex ode “Side To Side”, and ending with the more downtempo, electronic, and thoughtful “Thinking About You” is joyful to listen to, really making you want to get up and dance at every moment. The production is infectious, but provides enough layers and development to keep me from getting sick of it after repeated listens.

I’m usually loathe to use a word like “genius” in this context, as it feels like it ties into broken concepts of intellectual superiority in music and “high art/low art” arguments, but it really feels like Grande is a musical genius on this record. It exceeded all my expectations for how much depth, complexity, and earnestness could be on a pop album, and it made fun feel as important as political discourse. Listening to Ariana sing about sex, love, and complicated relationships on this record feels more relatable, important, and in so many ways empowering than it has on any of her previous records, or on similar pop efforts by other artists. It’s also nice to see that the guest list is quite small, so it feels like the mastery of different tones and styles really does come from her musical ability. That said, Ariana uses her guests perfectly; each song is tailored to complement the featured singer, and yet they all fit in and flow naturally within the course of the album. The Lil Wayne feature “Let Me Love You” in particular is one of the standout tracks for me; also of particular note are the showtune-esque “Greedy”, and the longer, more relatively experimental “Knew Better/Forever Boy.” The album is available from Republic.

Number 7 (Tie): Life’s What You Make It - EP & A Place For Us To Dream – Placebo

English alternative rock group Placebo have been making music now for twenty years, and the growth and development they’ve shown over that period is remarkable and part of the reason they’re one of my favorite bands of all time. They’ve released 7 full length studio albums, each with an noticeably different sound and feeling, and yet all their music is held together by the divisive nasal singing of Brian Molko and the band’s music, infused by drugs, sex, and sadness. In a lot of ways I view Placebo as what would have happened had Depeche Mode picked up guitars rather than synthesizers, and both bands have now spanned a similarly epic length of time for a band to remain relevant (though Depeche Mode do beat Placebo out by a good ten years!). So now that they’ve been around for a while, it’s clear Placebo are thinking hard about where to go next. Their last full length release was the 2013 album Loud Like Love, which was my introduction to the band, and stands as possibly their most pop-friendly album to date, featuring bright, crisp production. While the sadness that is innate in Placebo’s very bones is still present, there’s a surprising amount of hope, happiness, and just earnest feeling, rather than the darkness and uncertainty of their previous works. Now, three years later, they’re looking back at their career and planning the next step forward. This consideration has manifested itself as two releases: a short 6 song EP which features four new songs and two live performances of their single “Twenty Years”, and a thirty-six track retrospective/greatest hits collection, which also includes one or two new songs, as well as finally releasing a couple of singles for the first time on the USA iTunes store. Thus while they are old songs they have been previously unavailable to me, so I will consider them as new for the purposes of including these albums on the list.

The new songs across these two albums themselves constitute a short album’s worth of material, and they speak to the band’s ever changing nature. “Life’s What You Make It” takes the pop rock of Loud Like Love and explodes it out into a grandiose atmospheric meditation on happiness and existence, whereas “Jesus’ Son” takes that same starting point and brings it inward, creating a tight, danceable exaltation of happiness and joy. “Autoluminescent” is a more winding and fuzzy electronic track that would feel at home on an electro remix/sequel to Meds, which I consider their best album. The slow version of “Breathe Underwater” takes one of the most fast paced and driving tracks from Battle For The Sun and turns it into a mournful ballad that evokes love and loss simultaneously. These tracks bounce around lots of new ideas, reframing old songs or jumping off from their recent efforts in new directions. It’s worth noting that many of these songs are covers, but I have not ever heard the originals before, and since the band has released an entire album of covers before and incorporates covers into a large part of their identity, I still wanted to call these songs “new”, in that the covers felt very much like they were still Placebo songs at their center. As someone who has been in love with this band since the moment I first heard them, it felt important to me to include these two albums and to mention these songs, as they serve as a neatly wrapped starting point for newcomers to the band, while still challenging all my conceptions of what they are capable of producing. You can find both of these albums on Elevator Lady Ltd.

Number 6: EP1 - FKA Twigs

While the previous entry on this list was a short EP coupled with a few singles from another album, this and the next two entries are all simply short EPs, which I want to quickly unpack here while I have a moment. While it feels a little disingenuous to include several rather short EPs on a best albums list, I tend to think of albums simply as any collection of songs that a musical performer has determined are a complete set by their own self-determined metric. The three EPs included here have such fantastic songs on them, and offer such a satisfying musical experience, that I see them as having a place on this list, and offer something different to many of the quite lengthy full lengths that make up the rest of the list. While I admit there’s something of an apples to oranges conversion going on, I think it’s worth just celebrating fruit and not getting too strung up in the details. I also think it’s important to recognize the role EPs plays nowadays, especially for certain artists.

FKA Twigs, British alternative/electronic/ambient singer, has long utilized EPs and shorter musical works in a way I see few artists with her level of fame and appeal do; of Twigs’ four releases, only one is over five songs long. While this particular EP was the first project she ever released, dating back to 2012, until now it had only been available in the United Kingdom on vinyl. It is thus a new release in the United States and this is the first time I’ve been able to get my hands on it (legally), so I’m considering it new, as there was clearly a choice made to make the product readily available to new audiences, which to me provides it with a context of understanding and reaction to current musical events. The atmosphere generated on this release, while tonally consistent with her other releases, feels simpler and sparser overall, featuring fewer lyrics than her already lyrically minimal other works, as well as less noise and fewer different production layers and instruments. While nothing that FKA Twigs does is “traditional” by any stretch of the imagination, and it all features a somewhat sinister feeling, this album almost feels like a lullaby, something to fall asleep to, not in the sense that the EP is boring or uninteresting, but rather in that there’s a sense of vulnerability and softness throughout, even in the harsher and faster songs, that seems to speak to a direct intimacy and connection with the listener. The song “Ache” is in particular possibly one of the best songs I’ve heard all year, and shows, without any pretension or angst, the ways in which love and longing can tear us down just as much as they can push us forward. This song in particular is a showcase for Twigs’ vocal abilities, which provide the majority of the melody, as well as the majority of the sound on the song, and the song creates an emotional response in me as a listener that was almost overwhelming and was certainly beautiful. You can find this album from The Young Turks.

Number 5: Hypnos/Flame EP – Chelsea Wolfe

Chelsea Wolfe is a alternative/experimental singer songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who started out making albums that were crosses between goth rock and folk music, and has recently began to incorporate elements of hardcore electronica and metal into her sound. If I had to sum up the genre of her most recent works in a single word, it would absolutely be “apocalypse”. Her 2015 album Abyss is sweeping in scope, drenched in ambient atmospheres of darkness and hopelessness, while also still featuring some incredibly hard hitting and crunchy guitar riffs, synth melodies, and unsettling vocal effects. This album was a stand out for me, and really captured something special in the way it mixed so many different elements I loved without feeling bogged down. Jump forward to 2016, and she releases the Hypnos/Flame EP. While only two songs on the album are brand new, the other three being unreleased demos of songs from Abyss, the strength of those two songs alone puts it in the number five spot on this list. The first single, “Hypnos”, is a little closer to a more “traditional” guitar ballad, but it is possibly the most sinister track you’ll hear this year. It starts with a simple but menacing acoustic guitar line, and Wolfe’s vocals seem to be slipping in from some far away location, the way it echoes and softens suggesting maybe the opposite side of a large, empty auditorium. She sings “I licked your hatred, you set me free, In summer in the boiling blood.” Then the melody line shifts, adding a simple extra layer of complication, and turning into a song for a loved one, more intimate and kind. After the chorus we get the subtle addition of a couple of extra guitar notes, which sound almost like a very soft piano, and a synth swirls gently in the background, making it sound like a small chorus of singers is singing from an even further away location in this auditorium of sound. Wolfe sings “Oh baby, I’ll carry your disease, That darkness that lives inside you deep, Oh honey, I’ll put up a fight with death, He’s never coming near my love again.”

The next track, “Flame”, moves a little more swiftly, featuring a more driven guitar line. Wolfe’s voice is front and center, singing right next to you and reverberating all around the sonic space as she sings about running west and chasing the sun, defying everything that has failed her and an unknown other in their relationship thus far.

The demos that are also on the EP are interesting, and vary widely in how much they differ from their counterpart takes that made the cut on the album. “Grey Days” and “Survive” feel quite close to the album versions, but feature subtle shifts in production and pacing, which reveal something interesting about the recording process, providing a window into Chelsea’s mind about what these two tracks needed in order to feel complete to her. “Simple Death”, on the other hand, is starkly different in demo form, featuring an almost entirely different instrumentation, a much slower tempo, and more elaborate supporting vocal work. Like many of the EPs and albums on this list, this collection plays with the idea of “new” and how those kinds of arguments influence what we allow on our end of the year Best Of lists, but based on the strength of the two new songs, as well as the way in which the demos offer something tangible about the perspective and process of the artist, I think this was an incredibly strong offering that deepened and pushed forward Wolfe’s artistry and music. You can pick up this EP from Sargent House.

Number 4: Ritual Spirit EP - Massive Attack

Massive Attack are a DJ duo/trip-hop group from the United Kingdom that’ve been around for almost thirty years, mostly consisting of Robert Del Naja, or “3D”, and Grant Marshall, or “Daddy G”.

Ritual Spirit is the first new release from Massive Attack in a few years, and it feels like a strong departure from their last full length album, Heligoland. Whereas Heligoland was a grander, more cinematic album, with moments of love and hope, Ritual Spirit is a tight, frantic, and desolate collection of songs. The opening track, “Dead Editors”, is a blitzy hip hop track with a haunting, synthetic, and dirty beat. Roots Manuva raps over it with a full, bass tone, unconcerned with exact melody or precision, instead using his voice more like a sledge hammer. The title track, “Ritual Spirit”, is a gorgeous evocation of darkness and uncertainty, featuring relatively sparse and open production and vocals from Azekel, who, while difficult to understand, conveys perfectly an atmosphere of wariness and the unknown simply by the power of his vocal inflection and tone. “Voodoo In My Blood” brings back the franticness, but with the inclusion of the Scottish group Young Fathers, this track feels more like a depraved, reckless party anthem for those already way far gone. The clicking of the drums, and the driving surge of the two note guitar line make the song hard to resist moving to, even when it’s unclear whether you should be dancing or running away. The final track, “Take It There”, features Tricky, another famous English trip-hop musician, and a previous collaborator with Massive Attack. Tricky’s thick, deep vocals as he sings “Treat the girl, like licorice, she's so soft, and ticklish” over the simple, repetitive, but almost hopeless beat is hypnotizing. The thumping of a morose repeated piano note plays as the track seems to almost drag itself forward; this is the song for the end of the night, when all energy has been spent, all hope lost, and the listener must simply lay down and wait for whatever comes next. Together the four tracks provide a compelling and engaging arc over their eighteen minutes, and while it’s undeniable that this is Massive Attack, there’s something in these tracks that feels new, reinvigorated, and makes me hopeful for a new record sometime in 2017. You can find Ritual Spirit on Virgin records.

Number 3: Strange Little Birds – Garbage

Garbage are another older band that have come together to produce new work, the previous release from Garbage being from 2012. In my opinion this is the most interesting work put out by the band, and to me represents the most successful attempt at their self stated goal of “tak[ing] pop music and mak[ing] it as horrible sounding as we can.” Which is not to say that this album doesn’t sound good or plays too much with sonic dissonance; this is by and large a harmonic and easily accessible piece. However, it’s clear that the band is pulling from pop influences and sensibilities, but then twisting them into these eclectic electro, grunge rock songs. Many of the songs, including the album’s opener “Sometimes”, feature heavy synth work and have a kind of otherworldly quality, but other tracks, like “Empty”, feel much more like traditional rock songs, and the balance on the album between all these different ideas and sounds is both successful and energizing. Most of the tracks on the album hit the 5 to 6 minute mark, and there’s something cinematic and luxurious in listening to them, as the space they take allow each of these tracks to grow and evolve as the seconds tick on. While there are a few exceptions, the overall tone of the album is quite dour, telling stories about doomed love, fights to stay alive, and the ways in which we self-sabotage in our own foolishness. From the final track on the album, and my personal favorite, “Amends”, we have the lyrics “It’s what you do to make it right, Matter of fact, it’s called revenge, Cut off your nose to spite your face, It’s pretty cool shutting me out.” The lyrics across the album are unafraid to get down and dirty, lending an almost confrontational tone to the album, and in several places it caused me to stop and think about my own life and relationships, finding moments where I felt like the singer was both describing my own feelings, or calling me out on my mistakes. There’s also something seamless about the album, as it all feels completely natural and effortless, expertly balancing complexity and simplicity not only across songs but within individual tracks as well. You can find this record on Stunvolume.

Number 2: Northern Lights – Allan Kingdom

Allan Kingdom is a Canadian rapper based out of St. Paul, Minnesota, who you may know for his work as part of Thestand4rd with Spooky Black, Bobby Raps, and Psyum, or for his feature on the Kanye West single “All Day”. While the Twin Cities have been known for a while for their indie rap scene, Allan represents the indie indie rap scene of Minnesota, not quite achieving the level of notice and acclaim as groups like Atmosphere and Brother Ali. This album, though, should be the first step in Kingdom receiving that level of attention, as it’s a smart, sharply put together collection of songs exploring love and lies, while expertly capturing a sonic representation of the winter up north. Kingdom is both a successful singer and rapper, effortlessly moving from one to the other. The song “Interruption” is possibly the only track that features almost no singing, and it comes across as an incredibly intimate and honest foray into the real Allan Kingdom, as he gives us scenes from his life, including countless journeys across buses to spend time with a lover. He raps

“I’m vulnerable vulnerable,

so laugh it up laugh it up,

the son of some immigrants ‘bout to sun ‘em like Africa,

you made me some dinner,

I said my debit was actin’ up,

my wallet got lost but we both knew that I ain’t had enough”

His lyrics play around punchy and puny one liners, captivating stories, and a more reserved and cautious version of the braggadocio rap that is all too common place nowadays. The hardest hitting and fiercest songs on the album, “Northern Lights” and “Go Fish” are all about love and relationships, documenting his struggle to communicate his attraction towards and maintain the attentions of those he sees being himself with. Kingdom is able to take the mundane or clichéd aspects of life and culture and transform it into something larger and more complex.

The production across the album is glossy and electronic, adding a brightness to even the darkest of the songs, but it never feels so bright or cheery that it becomes saccharine. Each song deepens our understanding of the person behind the mic, and he has curated his features wisely, allowing each guest singer or rapper to feel perfectly at home in the song they are brought in on. What at first may seem like a foolishly simple album is instead, I think, incredibly earnest; Kingdom is comfortable telling you the truth of how he feels, the struggles of his romantic entanglements, and he’s unashamed to put himself out there on this record, flaws and all. This level of honesty is charming and enticing, and rewards multiple listens. You can pick up this record from his website, allan-kingdom.com, as well as find it on Itunes and other digital music marketplaces.

Number 1: Nocturnal Masquerade – Toothgrinder

Toothgrinder are a New Jersey based metal outfit, and Nocturnal Masquerade is their first full length release, and with it they have firmly cemented themselves as a band to doggedly watch over the coming years. This record is simply, purely brutal, in a way that I’ve rarely rarely seen be so accessible and engrossing. Lead singer Justin Matthews’ ability to growl, scream, and sing, each with equal precision and mastery, on every single song creates the perfect album for those whose interest in metal is limited by your tolerance for harsh vocals. This is not to say the album isn’t heavy; the vast majority of most songs feature harsh shouted vocals, but Matthews lends them a melodic quality that soothes simultaneously as it pummels.

This is also to say nothing of the instrumentation, which utilizes nasty, pummeling drums and urgent guitar and bass riffs that compliment the aggressively musical melodies and harmonies in back. Where other metal bands revel in making their entire sonic palate a fuzzy, discordant, atonal mess of sludge, Toothgrinder cut through that notion with a surgical precision, bringing just enough fuzz and wallop to pack a punch, but never pushing so hard as to lose focus on the trajectory of the songs and the melodies that lie in their center. These songs are incredibly layered; not in the sense that they feature dozens and dozens of different instruments and different musical motifs or lines, but rather that they are similar to a painstakingly plotted novel: each component of the song has a specific purpose and has been matched with the parts around it, creating sub harmonies and sub-rhythms that only reveal themselves after repeated listens.

There are no simple tracks here, but it never feels overwhelming; each song readily provides a through line to follow and grab onto for your first listen, then trusts you to explore around the room each time afterwards until you realize just how much work must have gone into every single one of these songs. With the exception of the fourth song “I Lie In Rain” (which, admittedly, is still pretty heavy and has a strong pace to it, especially in its second half), this album does not stop or slow down ever. It is 42 minutes of constant brutal propulsion that does not let up, but simply changes forms and pushes you from a different angle. Normally I would find something so relentless exhausting or repetitive, but instead, the album makes me just want to go jogging the whole time, constantly feeding me energy and new ideas to keep me going.

“Diamonds for Gold”, which features vocals from Periphery singer Spencer Sotelo, showcases more stripped and bare guitar lines during its verses, removing the fuzz and punch that then comes full force during its chourses; this kind of willingness to mix and interplay with different tonal qualities and instrumentation even within single songs helps keep the album surprising and engaging for every second. My favorite track, “Blue”, is a clear love letter to Meshuggah, but still feels entirely at home within the album, and, more importantly, like a Toothgrinder song. The beat drops on this track are gut wrenching and demand a headbang from even the most staunchly non-metal listeners. “It ain’t nothing but a goddamn monster, harboring, dance a little closer, it ain’t nothing but a goddamn monster, I want to hold your breath right now” Williams screams in the song’s bridge, and he’s right: this album is a goddamn monster, and it makes me catch my breath every time I hear it.

The most moving and almost shocking musical moment on this album is the two song pair “Dejection/Despondency” into “Schizophrenic Jubilee”. “Dejection/Despondency” opens with a sharp guitar line that sounds like an alarm piercing out into the night, and as the song builds up around this sound and shifts, it morphs into something different, allowing for a killer guitar solo which leads into a percussive drop that seamlessly transfers us into “Schizophrenic Jubilee” which picks up the pace as if the two songs were really just one all along, carrying on the momentum and melody for a few seconds before transforming it again. The two songs together are a seven minute powerhouse of precision, technical ability, and pure energy, leaping through a dozen different melodic and sonic ideas while still all showing a direct relation to the starting seconds of ‘Dejection/Despondency.” The compositional work on this album is practically flawless, and I have returned to the album as a whole over and over again since its release in January. It still feels as powerful, fresh, and exciting as when I first heard it, and I don’t expect it to tire out soon. You can find this album on Spinefarm.

Thank you all for listening to this first episode! I hope you found something new you hadn’t heard of before that you might give a listen to. You can find me on Twitter, Tumblr, and Gmail, all at thestempodcast. I plan on having a new episode up within the next month, which will likely be a shorter, more typical review of a single album. If you have any comments, angry, happy, or otherwise, feel free to send those along. The theme music for the show was “Cash Rules” by Ari de Niro, which is available from Needle Drop Co. Happy New Year everyone, and I’ll be back soon. Until then, you’ve been listening to The Stem.

[kansascityhappenings]

Bernie Sanders wins big in Nevada caucuses, increases front-runner status

LAS VEGAS — Bernie Sanders scored a resounding victory in Nevada’s presidential caucuses on Saturday, cementing his status as the Democrats’ national front-runner amid escalating tensions over whether he’s too liberal to defeat President Donald Trump.

While Sanders scored a strong victory, a cluster of candidates fought for a distant second place — and any momentum that may come with it heading into next-up South Carolina and then Super Tuesday on March 3. Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren were trailing far behind Sanders.

The 78-year-old Vermont senator won by rallying his fiercely loyal base and tapping into support from Nevada’s large Latino community as the Democratic contest moved for the first time into a state with a significant minority population.

In a show of confidence, Sanders left Nevada for Texas, which offers one of the biggest delegate troves in just 10 days on Super Tuesday.

“We are bringing our people together,” he declared.“In Nevada we have just brought together a multigenerational, multiracial coalition which is not only going to win in Nevada, it’s going to sweep this country.”

Saturday’s win built on Sanders’ win earlier this month in the New Hampshire primary. He essentially tied for first place in the Iowa caucuses with Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who has sought to position himself as an ideological counter to Sanders’ unabashedly progressive politics.

The victory, while encouraging for Sanders supporters, only deepened concern among establishment-minded Democratic leaders who fear that the self-described democratic socialist is too extreme to defeat Trump. Sanders for decades has been calling for transformative policies to address inequities in politics and the economy, none bigger than his signature “Medicare for All” health care plan that would replace the private insurance system with a government-run universal system.

Trump gloated on social media, continuing his weeks-long push to sow discord between Sanders and his Democratic rivals.

“Looks like Crazy Bernie is doing well in the Great State of Nevada. Biden & the rest look weak,” Trump tweeted. “Congratulations Bernie, & don’t let them take it away from you!”

Buttigieg congratulated Sanders, too, but then launched an aggressive verbal assault on the senator as too divisive.

“Before we rush to nominate Senator Sanders in our one shot to take on this president, let’s take a sober look at what is at stake for our party, for our values and for those with so much to lose,” he said. “Senator Sanders believes in an inflexible, ideological revolution that leaves out most Democrats, not to mention most Americans.”

Biden also took aim at the Vermont senator as he claimed a success — but not a victory — in Nevada that would trigger a comeback.

Without naming names, he took a swipe at Sanders and billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who wasn’t on the Nevada ballot but has emerged as a threat to Biden in contests that begin next month.

“I ain’t a socialist. I’m not a plutocrat. I’m a Democrat,” Biden declared.

Also in the fight: Warren, who desperately needed a spark to revive her stalled bid; billionaire Tom Steyer, who spent more than $12 million on Nevada television and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who hoped to prove her strong New Hampshire finish was no fluke.

Klobuchar, campaigning in her home state of Minnesota Saturday night, claimed Nevada success no matter her poor showing. “As usual I think we have exceeded expectations.”

New York billionaire Mike Bloomberg, who dominated the political conversation this week after a poor debate-stage debut, wasn’t on the ballot. He’s betting everything on a series of delegate-rich states that begin voting next month.

After the chaos of Iowa’s caucuses, there were concerns about Nevada’s similar setup. But no major problems showed up.

At noon, under sunny skies, dozens of uniformed housekeepers and casino workers cast ballots in the Bellagio, one of seven casino-resorts on the Las Vegas Strip among 200 locations statewide that hosted caucuses.

Nevada was the third contest on a 2020 election calendar marked by chaos and uncertainty after the opening votes in Iowa and New Hampshire, overwhelmingly white, rural states.

The first presidential contest in the West tested the candidates’ strength with black and Latino voters for the first time in 2020. Nevada’s population aligns more with the U.S. as a whole, compared with Iowa and New Hampshire: 29% Latino, 10% black and 9% Asian American and Pacific Islander.

The Nevada verdict represented the third in a primary season that will span all 50 states and several U.S. territories, ending only at the party’s national convention in July. But with two more rounds of voting scheduled over the next 10 days — including Super Tuesday’s massive delegate haul — the party may identify a consensus candidate long before the convention.

The stakes were high for Nevada Democrats to avoid a repeat of the chaos in Iowa, and it appeared Saturday’s caucuses were largely successful.

Unlike state primaries and the November election, which are run by government officials, caucuses are overseen by state parties.

Nevada Democrats sought to minimize problems by creating multiple redundancies in their reporting system, relying on results called in by phone, a paper worksheet filled out by caucus organizers, a photo of that worksheet sent in by text message and electronic results captured with a Google form.

In addition, it appeared Nevada Democrats were able to successfully navigate a complicated process for adding early voting to the caucus process. Nearly 75,000 people cast early ballots over a four-day period, and the party was able to process those in time for Saturday so they could be integrated into the in-person vote.

At the Bellagio caucus site, 41-year-old Christian Nielsen, a scuba diver for the Cirque du Soleil show “O,” said he backed Sanders because he believes the country needs a “major change in the White House.”

“We need somebody in the White House who has been on the right side of history for their entire career, somebody who stands with the working class, and will make things more fair for everybody,” Nielsen said.

The Democrats’ 2020 nomination fight shifted beyond Nevada even before the final results were known.

Only Biden, Buttigieg and Steyer were still in the state when news of Sanders’ victory was announced.

Sanders and Klobuchar spent the night in Super Tuesday states, and Buttigieg was headed to a third, Virginia. Warren, who began Saturday in Las Vegas, was to finish the day in Washington state, which hosts its election on March 10 but has already begun offering early voting.

from FOX 4 Kansas City WDAF-TV | News, Weather, Sports https://fox4kc.com/news/bernie-sanders-wins-big-in-nevada-caucuses-increases-front-runner-status/

from Kansas City Happenings https://kansascityhappenings.wordpress.com/2020/02/23/bernie-sanders-wins-big-in-nevada-caucuses-increases-front-runner-status/