#we were engaged. i was saving up to move back to ukraine. we were.. we were.. too much passion. now rage. i have no respect for this

[jdsmineralwater]

you would think learning all of the words to the pre tsia monologue would be something i remember doing

i do not

[snarksandkisses]

February 11, 2020 (Tuesday)

Heather Cox Richardson 

As predicted, yesterday’s calm was short-lived. There were three major news items today but, put together, they added up to a surprisingly coherent narrative.

The first story was that one that has taken the media by storm: the Department of Justice, under Attorney General William Barr, today stepped into the sentencing of Trump advisor Roger Stone to reverse the recommendation the department had made yesterday.

In November, a jury convicted Stone of seven counts of obstructing and lying to Congress and tampering with witnesses concerning his role connecting the Trump campaign with Wikileaks in 2016. Career prosecutors in the Justice Department yesterday followed federal guidelines to recommend that the judge sentence him to between 7 and 9 years in prison. After they made this recommendation, Trump tweeted that the recommendations for the sentencing of his friend were “very unfair,” a “miscarriage of justice,” and a “ridiculous 9 year sentence recommendation.” Today, the department submitted a revision to its recommendation, telling the judge the previous recommendation was “excessive and unwarranted.”

It appears the Justice Department attorneys on this case learned about the revision by hearing it on the Fox News Channel. As soon as they heard, four of them—Aaron Zelinsky, Adam Jed, and Michael Marando-- filed paperwork to be removed from the case, and one, Jonathan Kravis, resigned his position as an assistant U.S. Attorney in Washington, D.C., going back to his home base as an assistant U.S. attorney in Baltimore.

It is hard to overstate the significance of this event.

The Department of Justice is supposed to defend the rule of law in America. It is not supposed to be swayed by political pressure, and traditionally, communicates with the White House only very generally, and never about specific cases. It is emphatically not the role of the Justice Department to work with the president, but rather its job is to guarantee equality before the law for everyone in America. The Attorney General is the lawyer for the American people, theoretically, while the White House Counsel is the lawyer for the office of the president. In addition, the president can have his or her own personal lawyers. But the idea that the Attorney General is working for the president undermines the whole idea of the impartial justice on which our body of laws rests.

I can’t resist noting here that, while the Constitution established an office of the Attorney General, President Ulysses S. Grant signed the bill creating the Department of Justice in 1870 to try to preserve the rights of African Americans in the South after the Civil War. The department’s first assignment was to stop the Ku Klux Klan in the South, and it did, indicting more than 3000 people and winning more than 600 convictions as it tried to reestablish the rule of law in the former Confederacy. That history reflects that the role of the Department of Justice is really about upholding the rule of law, not about doing any particular president’s bidding.

Even while this is going on, pundits noted that the judge, Amy Berman Jackson, whom Stone attacked online, apparently to try to get her to withdraw from the case, and then apologized when she didn’t, was unlikely to be moved by the revision. Tonight, though, Trump tweeted “Is this the Judge that put Paul Manafort in SOLITARY CONFINEMENT, something that not even mobster Al Capone had to endure? How did she treat Crooked Hillary Clinton? Just asking!” (Jackson did not put Manafort in solitary confinement.) Hillary Clinton retorted: “Do you realize intimidating judges is the behavior of failed-state fascists? Just asking!”

Meanwhile, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi tweeted that Trump had “engaged in political interference in the sentencing of Roger Stone. It is outrageous that DOJ has deeply damaged the rule of law by withdrawing its recommendation. Stepping down of prosecutors should be commended & actions of DOJ should be investigated.” Trump instantly responded “Who are the four prosecutors (Mueller people?) who cut and ran after being exposed for recommending a ridiculous 9 year prison sentence to a man that got caught up in an investigation that was illegal, the Mueller Scam and shouldn’t ever even have started? 13 Angry Democrats?”

(As an aside, can I just say I long, with every fiber of my being, for the days when profound political fights were not conducted by tweet?)

Pundits agree that this is a uniquely terrifying moment. But for all tonight’s outrage, it is not clear that Trump holds all the cards. As former US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara noted, the judge could insist on hearing from the withdrawing prosecutors before she lets them quit. We will know more tomorrow.

The second major story—although it is not being treated as such—is that the Trump administration has withdrawn the nomination of Elaine McCusker for the position of Pentagon Comptroller and Chief Financial Officer. Her confirmation hearing was scheduled for Thursday. Recently released emails show that McCusker pushed back on Trump’s order to withhold money from Ukraine and warned officials that they were likely breaking the law. While the White House is suggesting they are withdrawing the nomination because McCusker is not sufficiently loyal to Trump, the timing makes it likely that they do not want her in a confirmation hearing before the Senate, where she can be asked about the Ukraine Scandal.

And the third major story is the New Hampshire primaries. Before I talk about them, let me note that I am approaching them as a historian looking for patterns, rather than as a modern-day partisan, and I cannot tell you how much I don’t want to be swarmed with supporters of one candidate or another screaming at me that I’m wrong. Yes. I could be wrong. And no, I am neither thrilled by what I see, nor endorsing any candidate. But I will note what I see nonetheless in the hope it will be of interest to some of you. Dismiss it at will.

What has grabbed headlines tonight is that Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, an Independent, has won the New Hampshire Democratic primary. But if you dig a little deeper, the New Hampshire primary showed something very interesting. Progressive candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren won 35% of the vote in New Hampshire, while the moderates—Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Joe Biden-- won 53% of the vote. Now, for all the fact that we pay such deep attention to Iowa and New Hampshire, those states are emphatically not representative of either Democratic voters or of the United States at large. But it is not inappropriate to see groupings at this point, and to note that Democratic votes seem to be resting on candidates perceived to be moderate rather than those perceived to be more progressive. Super Tuesday, March 3 this year, when 14 states vote for presidential candidates, will tell us more about the preferred Democrat, not least because former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg has saved his firepower for that contest.

But my guess is that the headlines trumpeting Sanders at this point are missing the larger story that today revealed so clearly. Americans are just sick of Trump, sick of his attempts to undermine the rule of law, and eager simply for a return to a stable government that does not produce constant drama. That the White House is so eager to keep McCusker from testifying before the Senate that they are withdrawing her nomination suggests that the drama is not yet over, and will not be over, for a long time.

[Original post with sources here]

[Heather Cox Richardson is a political historian who uses facts and history to make observations about contemporary American politics. She is the author, most recently, of To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party. She write these updates DAILY and they are amazing.]

[bountyofbeads]

Trump Accused of Enlisting a Foreign Power to Help Him Politically https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/24/us/politics/democrats-impeachment-trump.html

Nancy Pelosi Announces Formal Impeachment Inquiry of Trump

Faced with new allegations against President Trump and administration stonewalling, Democrats have ended months of caution.

By Nicholas Fandos | Published Sept. 24, 2019 Updated 5:45 PM ET | New York Times | Posted September 24, 2019 6:00 PM ET | VIDEO |

WASHINGTON — Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on Tuesday that the House would begin a formal impeachment inquiry of President Trump, saying that he had betrayed his oath of office and the nation’s security in seeking to enlist a foreign power for his own political gain.

“The actions taken to date by the president have seriously violated the Constitution,” she said after emerging from a meeting of House Democrats in the basement of the Capitol. Mr. Trump, she said, “must be held accountable — no one is above the law.”

The announcement was a stunning development that unfolded after months of caution by House Democrats, who have been divided over using the ultimate remedy to address what they have called flagrant misconduct by the president. It had the potential to reshape Mr. Trump’s presidency and to cleave an already divided nation only a year before he plans to stand for re-election.

In this case, with an avalanche of Democrats — including many who had resisted the move — now demanding it, Ms. Pelosi said that Mr. Trump’s reported actions, and his administration’s refusal to share details about the matter with Congress, have left the House no alternative outside of impeachment.

At issue are allegations that Mr. Trump pressured the president of Ukraine to open a corruption investigation of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, and his son. The conversation is said to be part of a whistle-blower complaint that the Trump administration has withheld from Congress.

Mr. Trump said on Tuesday that he would authorize the release of a transcript of the conversation, practically daring Democrats to try to find an impeachable offense in a conversation that he has called “perfect.” But Democrats, after months of holding back, demanded the full whistle-blower complaint, even as they pushed toward an expansive impeachment inquiry that could encompass unrelated charges.

“The actions of the Trump presidency revealed dishonorable facts of the president’s betrayal of his oath of office, betrayal of our national security and betrayal of the integrity of our elections,” Ms. Pelosi said.

The president, in New York for several days of international diplomacy at the United Nations, issued a defiant response on Twitter, in a series of fuming posts that culminated with a simple phrase: “PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT!”

“Such an important day at the United Nations, so much work and so much success, and the Democrats purposely had to ruin and demean it with more breaking news Witch Hunt garbage,” Mr. Trump wrote. “So bad for our Country!

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

Such an important day at the United Nations, so much work and so much success, and the Democrats purposely had to ruin and demean it with more breaking news Witch Hunt garbage. So bad for our Country!

39.3K

5:08 PM - Sep 24, 2019

Ms. Pelosi said she had directed the chairmen of the six committees that have been investigating Mr. Trump to “proceed under that umbrella of impeachment inquiry.” In a closed-door meeting earlier in the day, she said the panels would put together their best cases on potentially impeachable offenses by the president and send them to the Judiciary Committee, according to two officials familiar with the conversation. That could potentially lay the groundwork for articles of impeachment based on the findings.

The decision to begin a formal impeachment inquiry does not necessarily mean that the House will ultimately vote to charge Mr. Trump with high crimes and misdemeanors — much less that the Republican controlled Senate will vote to remove him. But Ms. Pelosi and her leadership would not initiate the process unless they were prepared to reach that outcome.

Ms. Pelosi met privately on Tuesday with the leaders of the six key committees involved in investigations of Mr. Trump, and later huddled with the full Democratic caucus. Her announcement came amid a groundswell in favor of impeachment among Democrats that has intensified since late last week, with lawmakers from every corner of her caucus lining up in favor of using the House’s unique power to charge Mr. Trump if the allegations are proved true, or if his administration continues to stonewall attempts by Congress to investigate them.

The House Judiciary Committee has been conducting its own impeachment investigation focused on the findings of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, as well as allegations that Mr. Trump may be illegally profiting from spending by state and foreign governments and other matters. But that inquiry has never gotten the imprimatur of a full House vote or the full rhetorical backing of the speaker, as Democrats remained divided about the wisdom and political implications of impeaching a president without broader public support.

Now, after the revelation of a conversations between Mr. Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in which Mr. Trump pressed the foreign leader to investigate the Bidens, a cascading flood of Democrats has come out in favor of a formal impeachment proceeding.

The shift in outlook among Democratic lawmakers has been rapid, and could yet still turn away from impeachment if exculpatory evidence comes to light. The developments that have turned the tide began less that two weeks ago, when Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the Intelligence Committee chairman, first revealed the existence of a secret whistle-blower complaint that the intelligence community’s internal watchdog had deemed “urgent” and credible but that the Trump administration had refused to share with Congress.

Democrats have given Joseph Maguire, the acting director of national intelligence, until Thursday to turn over the whistle-blower complaint or risk reprisal. And they have threatened to subpoena the Trump administration for a copy of the transcript of the president’s call with Mr. Zelensky and other relevant documents after Thursday if they are not shared voluntarily.

There were also indications the whistle-blower might not wait around for the complaint to be disclosed. Democrats said on Tuesday that a lawyer for the whistle-blower had informed the committee his client wanted to speak with the House and Senate intelligence panels, and had requested directions from the office of the director of national intelligence on how to do so.

Though it has attracted much less fanfare, the Senate Intelligence Committee intends to meet privately with the inspector general and Mr. Maguire this week to discuss the whistle-blower complaint.

The House will begin a formal impeachment inquiry of President Trump, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Tuesday. More than two-thirds of the 235 House Democrats had already said they support such an inquiry, according to a New York Times survey and public statements.

At least 45 Democrats announced their support since Monday, as more details have emerged from Mr. Trump’s  attempt this summer to pressure the president of Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son Hunter Biden.

Starting in May, The Times asked every representative for his or her position and has been updating this page with each response. Many House Democrats who do not currently support impeachment proceedings say investigations of Mr. Trump should continue. The White House has stonewalled these inquiries.

Some Democrats called for impeachment after the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, said that he could not clear Mr. Trump of obstruction of justice. Representative Justin Amash of Michigan was the lone House Republican to publicly conclude that Mr. Trump has “engaged in impeachable conduct.” He has since left the party, becoming the lone independent in the House.

SEE FULL LIST OF THOSE FOR AND AGAINST IMPEACHMENT ON NYTIMES WEBSITE

"About time! Finally, maybe the Democratic leadership has realized that spineless half measures and empty threats are perceived as WEAK by not only the monster Trump and his Republican lapdogs, but also by the entire country. It is up to Congress to hold this tyrant accountable." RICK, ROCHESTER NY

"Remember Alexander Butterfield, the White House aide who revealed Nixon’s secret Oval Office taping system, which provided evidence for his impeachment? The whistleblower who revealed this secret conversation will, I hope, someday receive the gratitude of our nation for helping to expose the traitorous behavior of this soon-to-be-impeached occupant of the White House." THERESA, CA

"Clearly the whistle-blower has deeply damaging information on Trump ... this is why he is hiding it, and why the whistle-blower has reached out directly to the House him/her self. This person is the real hero here ... finally, someone with the spine to come forward and speak out against the traitorous trump. Perhaps we will soon be rid of the fool."

GREG, COLORADO

"God bless the whistleblower! That person may have saved our country! God bless the IG. Both these people are very brave! Speaker Pelosi knows what she is doing...she is pretty cool!" SANDRA, CA

"“I think it’s ridiculous,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “It’s a witch hunt. I’m leading in the polls. They have no idea how they stop me. The only way they can try is through impeachment. This has never happened to a president before.” Six sentences: six lies. Is that a record? 1) It's not ridiculous. it's very serious 2)Witches are not involved 3)He's losing in the polls 4) They know how to 'stop' him 4) there are at least two other ways to get rid of him, not counting 2020 election; 25th amednment , forced resignation 5)It happened to three other presidents" DAVID GUNTER, LONGWOOD FLA

"Finally! After the indictments and convictions against many of his associates, thousands of lies, at least 10 instances of obstruction of justice - not to mention incredible damage to the domestic and international community - there is finally going to be a process that puts the whole of Congress on the record for history to show who stood up to the nightmare of Donald Trump. Even if the cowards in the Senate to not vote overwhelmingly to impeach, there will at least be an undeniable accounting of who stood up against Trump’s wrongdoing and the belief that no one is above the law." HONEST TEA, USA

"Move quickly! Trump is becoming increasingly unstable. Time is of the essence. Impeachment will have a small amount of Republican support, but I still believe that it will fall short of the 67 votes needed in the Senate to remove Trump from office. It is important for voters to know who is in favor of removing Trump from office, and who is in favor of keeping him in office. Voters need to know where each and every member of Congress in both houses stand on this issue, so that they can be held accountable in the 2020 election. All of America needs to know who is responsible for retaining Trump in office just in case he does something catastrophic and irreversible. It's not a matter of whether he does something catastrophic and irreversible, only when." S. BUTLER, NM

"Frankly it’s so long past time for Nancy Pelosi to begin impeachment of the most openly corrupt president in the history of the United States. Get on with it Nancy! No half-hearted measures. Treat a bully like a bully! Be strong. Be proactive. Lead! Stop worrying about pill numbers and your incorrect preconceptions. Anyone who has children understands the importance of setting boundaries. My god, why has this been so hard for Nancy Pelosi and her feckless house lieutenants? After all the prior impeachable behaviors? Hopefully now we will *finally* see the Democratic Party spines and stand up to the openly 24/7 lawless behavior of Trump and his band of GOP sycophants. Stop worrying about poll numbers Nancy - let’s start worrying about whether our little democratic experiment can survive after 2020. Enough is enough!" BRETT B, AZ

"It took months, but we finally have the smoking gun that has forced the Democratic leadership into action. Some of Democrat House members are putting the good of this country ahead of their political careers (they come from marginal Democrat districts). Ms. Warren is correct; impeachment must start today. The future of this country is at stake. By the way, impeachment will also ensnare many in the current administration, as well as GOP Senate and House members, before this is all over. Yes, there is risk to Democrats going forward with impeachment. However, it is even a bigger risk, to the future of this country, if they don't."

NICK, CO

"Congress needs to see the full whistle blower's complaint as well as all the other documents Trump has refused to turn over. Calling for an impeachment inquiry will help with that. There's still no guarantee the president will honor the courts' decision -- and this could force a true Constitutional crisis -- but at least there won't be months and months of delays, which Pelosi et al. seem to have been fine with, hoping to run down the clock. It appears that she and her leadership team have finally realized that their inaction has not only hurt the country, which they also seemed to be fine with, but it's now hurting them personally. Better late than never." AVRDS, MONTANA

"I am one of those people who was against impeachment but this latest scandal has changed my mind. If Trump isn't called out now, then we are all implicit in his crimes. We cannot sit back for another year and do nothing and hope that the ballot box will rescue this nation." AK, IOWA CITY

"Ms Pelosi remarked"The first responsibility...." Ms Pelosi surely knows, as the speaker of our "House" that her first responsibility is to honor the US constitution and its laws, a responsibility that transcends her leadership of House Democrats. If she and her Democratic epigones fail to impeach Trump, she and they will fail in their responsibility to assert and uphold the the power of the legislative branch of our government. They and the rest of us will suffer the irremediable consequences. Moral cowardice will likely lead us to a second Trump term and a ticket to terminal decline." DIDEROT, PORTLAND

"I still support moving ahead. It's duty. But there is nothing that actually requires the Senate to hold a trial. Does anyone think McConnell will have Republicans get on record regarding this? My limited legal research indicates he can surely ignore whatever the House does - experience says he would do so without thinking twice. We know because of what happened to Merrick Garland. This is why we have to impeach. Either branches of government take their duties and separation of powers seriously, or they don't. If they don't we wind up with an imperial presidency, game over. A stand is needed against the slide toward that, even if it's not reversible at this point."

SARAH, CHICAGO

" Trump is beyond any and all acceptable / tolerable limits. Cease the never ending 'discussions' and pull the trigger!! Forget the Senate; use the impeachment process to expose the MOUNTAINS of illegality surrounding Trump; set the stage for his criminal indictment. Use the accumulated facts to get him in front of a federal judge for wholesale criminal behavior, be it for next week or next year. Democrats, citizens, anyone and everyone, get up on your feet and JUST DO IT! It's time to hold this con man accountable."

FORGETABOUTIT, OZARK MOUNTAINS

"Just because a majority of Americans might not support an impeachment inquiry does not mean there should not be one. This isn't the Clinton era. This is more like Nixon on steroids - serious malfeasance and abuse of office." JEFF, NY

"Nancy Pelosi stood back patently and waited for Trump to impeach himself."

HECTOR, TX

"A week ago I strongly believed that the window for impeachment has closed. This new information about Ukraine has caused me to completely change my mind. Impeachment is now the only option. If Trump is allowed to get away with this then our democracy isn't merely threatened, it's already long gone. It took a violent revolution to obtain our freedom as a nation - let's not wait until that's our only option to restore it." RS, PMW

If Trump had been a Democrat, the GOP would have impeached him within his first few months in office. OBSERVER, WASHINGTON DC

"The UK stood up to Boris. Right now it looks like Great Britain is great again. We'll see about America." ANONYMOUS, USA

"If I understand it correctly, it's the law that Maguire must turn over the whistleblower information. If it's not possible to make that happen, something is very wrong with our system. But the fact that he won't do that alone speaks to the dubious nature of this administration." KIM, NEW ENGLAND

"Nancy Pelosi announced that impeachment proceedings will go forward in a short but strong statement this afternoon. She is upholding the requirements of our Constitution in so doing, and I hope that most Americans appreciate her prudence in waiting until Trump performed such an odious action--asking a foreign power to get dirt on Joe Biden and his son--that impeachment became imperative." ELIZABETH, AZ

"I live in one of those swing districts that replaced its GOP member with a Democrat. The political differences within my district seem to fall along the lines of tax policy and the amount of business regulation. Differences in economic and government philosophy do not equate to condoning criminality. I see little threat to my newly-elected member for standing up for the rule of law." GREENFISH, NJ

[cantusecho-archive]

(Good lord, episode 7.

Let me just say that it’s pretty crazy that we’re already half-way through the season now? It’s almost overrrrr.

But moving on from that, this episode starts out with Millaarc and Elsa forcing Elfnein to activate what they needed in terms of using Carol’s body.

I’m still really confused on what Millaarc’s ability does and it frustrates me because I feel stupid. Lol. I know it’s clearly mental and dealing with the mind, but it seems like it’s used in so many different ways now that I don’t even know how to explain it.

Regardless, she tries doing this again with Elfnein to destroy her mind. However, Carol literally bursts out of nowhere to stop her.

Now, I originally had a feeling that Carol would make an appearance not only because of where they were, but the summary itself, the top half of it specifically. The portion for the episode I mean is this:

If that which was sworn to be slain is put to words, erase them by plucking the strings from beyond zeros and ones. Discarded as unnecessary and unworthy, echoes of memories once lost linger here.

The “memory” mention is a pretty clear indicator to Carol, as they’re within the Chateau, Elfnein has been trying to reach back out to Carol now that they share the same body, and because Carol’s whole deal was dealing with memories. But what also stood out was the mention of “zeros and ones”.

Carol actually mentions “zeroes and ones” in her battle song (Senkin Dur da Bla) back in GX;

Nothingness is the only peaceful paradise What can I do but believe in that? I’ll expose and extol the providence of all creation With my music enshrined in 0s and 1s

So that just felt like a huge hint there too in that she’d make a reappearance somehow. I just wasn’t expecting it that early in the episode...nor did I expect the end, haha. I love Carol.

But regardless, this stops Millaarc immediately, and seems to end up hurting her briefly in the process.

Also, I was surprised that Miku wasn’t the cocoon thing. I thought she was, since that was what happened to Hibiki, but I guess the divine power didn’t actually go within Miku. Instead, it began to somehow manifest itself instead, thanks to her I suppose?

So, Tsubasa, Hibiki, Kirika and Shirabe go and engage in a fight with the strange deity with Chris and Maria trying to make their way there. But it’s a multi-dimensional being, just like the one in AXZ that I can never fully properly spell the name of.

And what stopped it last time was Hibiki and the so called “god-killer” ability, so that’s what she does. But the odd thing about it is that after Hibiki saves Kirika, she was caught in it. HQ says that it begins focusing energy on her instead, which I assume it was overloading her? But I’m not sure in which way.

Regardless, it’s enough to take Hibiki completely out of the fight, forcing Tsubasa to suggest they all retreat.

This thing looks so gross, haha. It’s like a giant, big headed...baby thing.

But anyway, they say Hibiki’s injuries are far more severe than they seem but no other details than that. Not sure how that is though but suppose we have to wait and see.

Also, Tsubasa’s smile was one of the preview pics for this episode and honestly, it was nice to see her smile...but I was worried about the context.

Something about her smile and comment just feels so off to me. Clearly she’s still not okay, and even Genjurou was surprised by her comment, so this doesn’t mean she’s better. No one knows that Tsubasa is dealing with that whole “seal” thing and we don’t even know how to break it so...I’m just not sure about it haha.

I talked to a friend saying that maybe she’s desperate for some good news or someone telling her she did a good deed? Or she’s trying to think of what Kanade would do? It’s hard for me to explain my feelings on this without making any sense.

After this, everyone on the bridge finally hears the ‘Apple’ song by rearranging the melody that Shem-Ha plays thanks to an idea that Maria had.

Maria makes reference to the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine, as that’s where she and Serena are from, which happened in 1986. It’s been officially stated (or at least shown in the second episode of XV) that the show currently takes place in the year 2044. Maria is currently 22, so that makes her born in the year 2022.

So saying that her ancestors have a similar song can hint to a lot, just like how Tsubasa’s comment leads to. Maria (and Serena) very well may be a descendant of the Annunaki/Custodians, or has a connection with them somehow. Now it’s just speculation but still, it has to mean something. They’ve been alluding to Airgetlam and ‘Apple’ ever since the second episode (at least the song they have) so I mean...it’s slowly but surely getting there. Lol.

Plus it was a massive trigger to bring the world together in song way back in G for them to get enough phonic gain to achieve their X-Drives back then.

After this, Hibiki has a brief dream about the conversation her and Miku had in the first episode. I never did talk about the first episode but this conversation was just throwing a whole bunch of red flags from the get-go. Miku posing the question if she was a burden on someone else, would Hibiki stop her but then turns around and jokes saying that it was a hypothetical question.

Of course I still think she meant this as her fear of being a burden on Hibiki (aka Miku’s guilt) but again, this seems like a re-imagining of that conversation.

It’s different in the fact that Miku says that if she’s ever a burden, that she wants Hibiki to stop her, that she’s the only one who can. Hibiki, throughout this whole exchange, is actually really confused while Miku continues on saying that she’s the only one that she “trusts with all I have”. And it ends there. I can see this being a possible dream of Hibiki where she’s re-imagining the scene but replacing it with the details she knows now, or kind of like her fears slipping in?

But then I saw someone else pose a possible idea of her and Miku actually communicating through the same dream since they’re both knocked tf out right now. Not sure which one is true enough but it very well could be Hibiki having a dream.

Okay, this second half of the episode is just pure gold for Elfnein. It’s a lot of little things that stood out to me too, not even just the big reveal at the end. Here’s one:

Elfnein gaining self-worth in herself ever since the end of GX. Elfnein, in her own way, has gotten so much stronger over the seasons and this whole half showcases that I think. But she’s stuck between Vanessa and co. since they’re trying to kill her. But the second she calls out for help---

THE PREVIOUS AUTOSCORERS COME BACK. I swear, I didn’t see this coming. Like, at all. I actually really enjoyed them back in GX, I found them to be interesting, even with their limited time on screen. The OVAs build on them more but I still felt there was enough there for them to be interesting and for us to get a feel on their dynamics together.

The next thing that’s great for Elfnein:

Elfnein being assertive. She decides trying to fight back and rescue Miku instead. It was strong enough to surprise Genjurou so I mean lmao.

Then another thing for Elfnein as a character. Noble Red catches up to them, so Phara and Leiur stay behind to slow them down while Micha and Garie lead Elfnein away.

Instead of apologizing, she chooses to say thank you instead. It’s something simple like that that shows how much Elfnein has grown too.

The next one is a comment that Micha makes. In the OVAs, Micha makes a comment of how it’s hard for her to hold hands with people due to her claws. She speaks about how she’s the “ultimate autoscorer” but she needs the help of Garie to literally do everything for her; collecting memories, holding hands, and even tying her ribbon.

So she was slightly bummed that she couldn’t help escort Elfnein away like Garie could because her hands were too big. 

But Elfnein tells her that she thinks her hands are “really cool” and she loves them. That gave Micha motivation to keep on fighting and made her happy. It was just something so simple and small that was really really sweet, especially knowing how Micha felt about her hands.

Noble Red catches up though, and defeats all of them easily. Garie was the last one to help Elfnein get away. And now that she’s alone, Elfnein is faced with the fact that everyone has helped her, but she wants to figure out a way to help them too. 

She wants to repay everyone back for their help and kindness but didn’t know how. And so, faced with an incoming attack from Vanessa, she ends up doing this:

She freaking summons the relic Dur da Bla and basically...Carol comes back. AND has a new song. Song is called “Echo of Sforzato”.

I was over the moon when this happened, haha. I couldn’t believe they’d actually have Carol come back in such a way? Again, the beginning is the only think I thought we’d get. But this? Good lord. It’s hard to explain my emotions about this episode because it was sooooo good for Elfnein especially in terms of character, same for the autoscorers. It touched on previous things about them in the OVAs, and added more to it, even if they only had small and limited cameos.

Also, one neat thing about the transformation Carol/Elfnein has is that in her hat, it shows the reflections of Leiur, Phara, Garie and Micha. The colors represented them before but the thing about it is that if you freeze frame the scene, it shows them making poses exactly like their “enemies” GX CD covers. 

Luckily someone made a picture of them all on twitter so I can paste them here haha.

There’s two because Micha is the only one that changes twice for both Shirabe and Kirika. This part isn’t even a second long, it zooms by SUPER fast, but the detail in it is amazing.

It’s just a REALLY nice callback that they probably didn’t even have to add in. Plus there’s some other cool “behind the scene” things they posted on twitter (official staff) that even other stuff they made was meant to reference past CD albums (Like Leiur and her “big sister” version of herself was to reference the GX concert cover with Maria and Tsubasa).

Regardless, yeah this episode was great with the callbacks and references. I enjoyed it and got emotional over it. It turned out to be a great episode for Elfnein as a character honestly, which isn’t what I expected but glad it happened. ♥)

[keremulusoy]

Being one of the most important public spaces, can the streets prevent alienation and form a meeting area? Or a stage for musicians who left their hometowns and came to another country for one reason or another?

When you walk down Istiklal Street, you encounter musicians playing on the street so many times. Some of these musicians are Turkish, while some are travelers on their way to discover the world, and yet others are immigrants who are just passing through or end up in Istanbul due to war in their country. The answer to the question why these people make street music should be studied without strict generalization. At first look, as an external perspective, being a street musician seems pretty fine with its enchanting ways, bringing people who are there together due to different circumstances to a single area with a relatively homogenous status; though, how does it make one feel to do the job?

GO OUT TO DISCOVER!

On the subject of immigrant musicians, I would like to talk about a group of 3 people from Ukraine whom I met while strolling around Istiklal Street. On this hot day with a soft breeze, Alina, grabbed my attention, as she sang beautifully with her great voice and danced with unique moves and stood slightly in front of the two other people.  After that, I realized Svetlana whose body movements were in harmony with her violin, and Denis who calmly played the guitar. After listening to their music for a while, I approached them wondering about their stories. Alina warmheartedly told me about their position in Istanbul. “It is not our first time coming to Turkey; sometimes we even come twice a year. This year, we are in Istanbul for 3 months to spend the summer here. We are also engaged in arts in our own country Ukraine and teach music, but we are here to make save money as well as putting our holidays to good use. Denis and Svetlana are siblings; we met long years ago while making music. We receive positive feedback from people we met here or from those who stop by to listen. We dance together; sing together what else can be more beautiful than this? We haven’t faced any problems; after all, if we had we wouldn’t come here this often. We are doing the job we like; therefore we get more excited each time we go out on the streets. Istanbul is a very big, touristic city; we get the chance to meet people of many different cultures. This both thrills and enriches us, as well as making us gain brand new experiences. We like to be out on the streets to discover. We usually prefer singing Russian classics; however we also have an instrumental composition we particularly made in Istanbul. Leaving Turkey creates a feeling of emptiness in our hearts, and when we go back the first thing we do is always to prepare next year’s plan.” After Alina explained all this, I thought they can earn a living doing this job –at least for their basic and simple needs- all over the world. They do not need to know the language of the country for they have instruments to vocalize their ideas. They do not need to know directions, for music can be performed on the streets and if it saves the day and makes them feel joyous; maybe it is also a tool to earn money up to a satisfactory point. On top of that, they have the chance to return to their countries whenever they want. But, what if they were street musicians as immigrants?

Alina, Svetlana, Denis

Moments of cultural codes unraveling

Immıgratıon and musıc

“SOUNDS BEYOND THE BORDER”

While searching for books to read or movies to watch on immigrant street musicians, I came across a 5-episode video conference series called “Sounds beyond the Border” from Evrim Hikmet Ogut and Umut Sulun. The stories of 5 people from across the border, all five of them had brought different stories to Istanbul, but they had a common point which was their experience as street musicians… First of all, I have to mention a young lady, Sadim, who is younger than the other musicians. Being both an immigrant and a woman, she faces some difficulties making music on the streets; as a matter of fact she could only experience street music once in order to feel this emotion. Having had an education of music in Syria, Sadim left her school due to war and had to come to Turkey. Sadim, who mentions that she would like to continue her education says: “Actually I really wanted to graduate school and continue my education abroad on scholarship. However, the war started and we had to leave the country, so it was not my decision or something I have done to enrich my personality. When I came to Istanbul, I would have liked to continue my education, but I had to work here to earn a living, and earning money takes precedence over education. I want to join courses, but I cannot afford them. Apart from the occasional musical nights we have or singing something at home with my parents who are also musicians just like me, I cannot do anything for the sake of music. I have not come across any Syrian woman singers or instrumentalists in Istanbul. Or maybe they are an unseen minority. Usually, men musicians are able to make music on the streets. We once tried it with my mother, but it was very difficult since you need good quality sound equipment in a crowded metropolitan city. It would be nice to make music on the streets if only we had better opportunities.”

“MY MENTAL STATE KEPT ME FROM MAKING MUSIC”

Alaa Alkateb, who studied music in Syria for over 20 years, is one of those who had to come to Turkey due to war. Leaving the war environment in Syria and coming here with a small bag containing a few clothes, two paintings and his oud, Alaa says: “During the first months I only dusted my oud and tuned it back into its case because of my mental state, I could not enjoy what I played. Afterwards, I got acceptance from a university here, which was a great accomplishment. When we came to Turkey, we tried different options related to music with my sister; our aim was to meet new people. One of them was to make music on the streets in Taksim with some of my friends. It lasted for about a month. I have never had such an experience in Syria. There are many reasons why I stopped making music on the streets, but the main one is exhaustion and playing for long hours. My shoulder hurt from playing for five hours nonstop and the sound of the oud was insufficient on the street. A second reason is that everybody on the street plays with a band, but it is not a stable job since you cannot sign a contract on the street. However, during my time on the streets I met many people. We are still in touch with these people who are researchers, musicologists, and we have several projects together. Among these is a project related to children, I used to join some projects for children when I was in Syria too. We play interactive games with children, sing and organize workshop. I dream and hope to make music in Istanbul. The simplest and most important language is the language of music. The music you play brings together cultures; it will be easier for Syrians to understand Turkish people and Turkish people to understand Syrians. My goal is to sort of synthesize, finding common elements and bring them forward.” While explaining what he has been through, Alaa’s voice makes it clear that he will never lose his faith in music.

THE DEAF STREETS OF METROPOLITAN CITIES

Noise pollution deafens us to a point where we stop noticing it after a while in a city like Istanbul with a population of 15 million or in other metropolitans of the world. Due to this noise pollution, we try to find comfort with our headphones or sometimes with the notes played by street musicians. Why wear headphones when we can travel to other realms via music with the help of the different cultures on the street? Who knows, maybe we should get away from the music industry and hear them out more often. For this to be possible, they need to be able to make music under fair conditions, get the education they need, we need to help accommodate them and most importantly help them earn a living with this job, leaving our deafened sides behind…

NOTES

A research assistant from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University State Conservatory, Evrim Hikmet Ogut, who has been conducting academic and other studies on the musical practices of immigrant groups since 2011, explains immigrant musicians making street music as such: “Making music on the street is a state of obligation, if you ask me. They are usually not really willing when they first start, since there is no street music culture in Syria and it is regarded as kind of begging. The street is like an open market where immigrant musicians can show-off their products; while performing there, they get the chance to meet other musicians and mediators that lead them to cafes, restaurants and other places they can possibly perform at. It is a public place where they meet the Turkish audience as well as tourists from other Arabic speaking countries and Syrians. Street music is subject to permission in Turkey and above all requires being a Turkish citizen. For that reason, the street music practices of Syrian musicians are pretty fragile.”

Beyoglu Street Musicians Festival

Organized by Beyoglu Municipality in 2007, Street Musicians Festival was held for 3 days on a stage built in Tunel. This festival, which was a one tine organization, can help build space for street musicians if it merges with Beyoglu Festival, held at the moment.

IMMIGRATION AND MUSIC

Immigration has been a research topic for various fields of science such as history, geography, archeology, sociology, psychology; and took its place among the important themes of other areas of  art such as literature and music. While even the immigration of the TV at home (moving it to another place) changes the whole atmosphere of the house, the total effects of a collective immigration of living beings would be enormous. This can be regarded as an explanation to how and why immigration affects many different scientific and artistic fields.

THE MUSIC OF THE IMMIGRANT

We cannot regard music as just an artistic production. Music is a product of cultural fault lines and social interactions; it is a sociological event due to the resources it feeds on and feeds in return. From the moment humans discovered their “voices” and “screamed” they also found a solution to their muteness via music. The image of immigration is being portrayed throughout all the geographies of the world as the scream of those who are unwillingly sent on exile “from where they belong”.

A musical reading will both be ‘meaningful’ and comprehensive enough in order to come in contact with especially the sociocultural level/side of mass population movements that are caused by war, natural disasters, chaos, famine, population exchange, political/cyclical changes and deportation.

By: Dilara Özdeş/Photography: Yağız Karahan

*This article was  published in the  July-August issue of Marmara Life. 

THE MELODY OF THE CITY AND STREETS; STREET MUSICIANS Being one of the most important public spaces, can the streets prevent alienation and form a meeting area?

[patriotsnet]

How Many Republicans Need To Vote To Remove Trump

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/how-many-republicans-need-to-vote-to-remove-trump/

How Many Republicans Need To Vote To Remove Trump

Opinionthis Trump Impeachment Defense Falls Apart As Soon As You Read The Constitution

UH-OH: Even REPUBLICANS Want to Remove Trump

Yet 45 Republican senators voted against taking up the impeachment trial Tuesday. Some want to spend as little time thinking and talking about Trump as possible, but many are still in thrall to his base. Twenty Republican-held Senate seats will be contested in two years, and the current occupants no doubt fear primary challengers from the MAGA right if they show any sign of breaking with Trump. What’s less clear is why, given their rhetoric and behavior over the last four years, they think the country would be any worse off with Trump sycophants in their seats.

Thanks to the impeachment process they’ve been gifted by the Democrats, Senate Republicans have one last chance to break with Trump and the conspiracist authoritarianism he represents. Their opening move Tuesday was a weak one, but they still have time for a course correction when the vote on conviction takes place next month. If they won’t do it for the country, they should at least do it to save their place in the party.

Related:

How Many Senators Will Vote To Convict Donald Trump

Reddit

Now that Donald Trump has been impeached for an historic second time, attention turns to the Senate where, according to the Constitution, a trial will begin. The big question isunlike last year when only one Republican Senator voted to convict Trump on charges resulting from his phone call with the President of Ukrainewill there be 17 Republican senators willing to vote to convict Trump?

Lets start with what we know. Senator Ben Sasse is the only senator who has said clearly that he is open to convicting Trump. Senator Mitt Romney voted to convict last year when Trump was impeached over his phone call with the Ukrainian president. The charges in this impeachment are equally if not more serious, so it seems likely that he too may vote to convict. Senator Lisa Murkowski and Senator Patrick Toomey have also made statements signaling that theyve had enough of Trump. Murkowski just wants him out, saying He has caused enough damage, and Toomey thinks he committed impeachable offenses but is unsure whether impeachment makes sense this close to the end of the Trump presidency.

Will Not Support Trumps Re

Former President George W. Bush: Although he has not spoken about whom he will vote for in November, people familiar with Mr. Bushs thinking have said it wont be Mr. Trump. Mr. Bush did not endorse him in 2016.

Senator Mitt Romney of Utah: Mr. Romney has long been critical of Mr. Trump, and was the only Republican senator to vote to convict him during his impeachment trial. Mr. Romney is still mulling over whom he will vote for in November he opted for his wife, Ann, four years ago but he is said to be sure it wont be the president.

John Bolton, the former national security adviser: As he rolled out his recently published book, The Room Where It Happened, Mr. Bolton said in multiple interviews that he would not vote for Mr. Trump in November. He added that he would write in the name of a conservative Republican, but that he was not sure which one.

Gov. Phil Scott of Vermont: Mr. Scott has said multiple times this summer that he will not be voting for the president, a position that he also took in 2016. He says he has not yet decided whether or not he will vote for Mr. Biden.

William H. McRaven, a retired four-star Navy admiral: Several Republican admirals and generals have publicly announced they will not support the president. In an interview with The New York Times, Admiral McRaven, who directed the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, said, This fall, its time for new leadership in this country Republican, Democrat or independent.

Also Check: Republicans Are Stupid Donald Trump Quote

Drafted Articles Of Impeachment

Within hours of the Capitol attack, multiple members of Congress began to call for the impeachment of Donald Trump as president. Several representatives began the process of independently drafting various articles of impeachment. Of these attempts, the first to become public were those of Representative Ilhan Omar ” rel=”nofollow”>DMN-5) who drafted and introduced articles of impeachment against Trump.

Representative David Cicilline ” rel=”nofollow”>DRI-1) separately drafted an article of impeachment. The text was obtained by CNN on January 8. On Twitter, Cicilline acknowledged the coauthorship of Ted Lieu and Jamie Raskin, and said that “more than 110” members had signed on to this article. “Article I: Incitement of Insurrection” accuses Trump of having “willfully made statements that encouragedand foreseeably resulted inimminent lawless action at the Capitol”. As a result of incitement by Trump, “a mob unlawfully breached the Capitol” and “engaged in violent, deadly, destructive, and seditious acts”. On January 10, it was announced that the bill had gathered 210 cosponsors in the House.

So What Brings Down Approval Ratings

President Richard M. Nixon won a landslide reelection in 1972. His approval rating hit 67 percent at his second inauguration in January 1973; by October it had declined to just 27 percent, where it remained until his exit. Unlike Trumps, Nixons popularity gradually declined even among Republicans from almost 90 percent to about 50 percent over the same period. That may be why several Republicans voted to move forward with a Judiciary Committee recommendation to impeach Nixon and did not subsequently suffer at the polls.

Why such a difference between Nixons crimes and the allegations against Trump? One key reason is that partisanship is stronger today, with voters less likely to shift opinions about their party. Thats reinforced by partisan news feeds, with Republicans and Democrats consuming different sources of information. But theres another factor. In 1973-1974, the U.S. was in a recession. Nixons approval rating went down as worries about the economy went up. Republican voters might have continued to back Nixon had the economy been strong.

Would a recession hurt Trumps popularity among Republicans? Given todays partisanship, thats hard to say. But comparative evidence suggests that unless Trumps popularity among Republican voters drops, turning on Trump would probably hurt Republican politicians, both individually and as a party, with those voters. Unless that shifts, Republican leaders are likely to stick with Trump, no matter the evidence against him.

Also Check: What Is The Pin The Republicans Are Wearing

Trump Jr Says He Will Run Against Liz Cheney

The son of Former President Trump told Politico Playbook he would run for Liz Cheney’s Wyoming seat.

“I hear it’s lovely during primary season,” Donald Jr. said, implying his intentions to take the seat from the GOP lawmaker who voted to impeach his father.

The primary won’t be held until August 2022 – but Trump Jr’s message was a clear warning to the congresswoman that the Trump family won’t forget she was one of ten House Republicans to vote to impeach, the;Daily Mail reports.

These Republican Senators Could Vote To Remove Donald Trump From Office

While President Donald Trump’s exoneration in the Senate impeachment trial is almost certain, there are several Republicans who could cross party lines to vote for his conviction and removal.

As opening arguments in the case begin on Wednesday, all eyes are on vulnerable GOP lawmakers like Susan Collins of Maine and Cory Gardner of Colorado. The two are among a handful of conservatives who are viewed as the most likely to break away from the Republican Party and the president.

Overall, 20 Republicans would need to join Democrats in order for Trump to be removed from the White House. A two-thirds majority of 67 senators is needed to convict a sitting president during an impeachment trial.

While it’s a seemingly impossible number for Democrats to reach, it appears some progress is already being made. On Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was forced to make last-minute changes to the proposed rules for the trial after some Republicans, including Collins, reportedly raised concerns about two provisions.

“She and others raised concerns about the 24 hours of opening statements in 2 days and the admission of the House transcript the record. Her position has been that the trial should follow the Clinton model as much as possible,” a spokeswoman for Collins told the press.

Here are the Republican senators who could vote to convict Trump during the trial:

Recommended Reading: How Many States Are Controlled By Republicans

House Republicans Join Democrats In Voting To Impeach Trump

Washington Ten Republican members of the House, including one of its highest-ranking leaders, joined Democrats in voting to impeach President Trump for inciting the deadly attack on the Capitol last week by a violent mob of his supporters.;

The final vote was 232 to 197, as the 10 Republicans joined all 222 Democrats in voting in favor of the impeachment resolution.;

The article of impeachment will next be delivered to the Senate, where Mr. Trump will be placed on trial. However, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said after the House vote that there is “simply no chance that a fair or serious trial could conclude before President-elect Biden is sworn in next week.”

Mr. Trump is the first president to be impeached twice. When he was;impeached;in 2019 over his attempts to pressure Ukraine to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden, no House Republicans voted in favor of impeaching him. But this time, 10 members of his own party determined his actions warranted impeachment.

Here are the Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump:

Liz Cheney of Wyoming

Tom Rice of South Carolina

Fred Upton of Michigan

David Valadao of California

Cheney, the third-ranking Republican in the House, said in a statement on Tuesday that she would vote to impeach Mr. Trump after he whipped up his supporters Wednesday at a rally not far from the Capitol.

Richard Burr North Carolina

Donald Trump Impeached As 10 Republicans Join Democrats To Remove Him Over Capitol Riots

Burr, who has said he will not seek re-election, had previously voted to dismiss the impeachment trial on constitutional grounds. Burr’s term expires in 2022.

“I have listened to the arguments presented by both sides and considered the facts. The facts are clear,” explained Burr in a statement.

“By what he did and by what he did not do, President Trump violated his oath of office to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States,” he explained, adding that he didn’t come to “this decision lightly.”

Read Also: When Is The Last Time Republicans Controlled Congress

Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler

Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington State said that she would vote to impeach because she believed that the president had acted in violation of his oath of office.

I understand the argument that the best course is not to further inflame the country or alienate Republican voters, she said. But I am a Republican voter. I believe in our Constitution, individual liberty, free markets, charity, life, justice, peace and this exceptional country. I see that my own party will be best served when those among us choose truth.

Invoking The 25th Amendment

On the evening of January 6, CBS News reported that Cabinet members were discussing invoking the 25th Amendment. The ten Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, led by U.S. Representative David Cicilline, sent a letter to Pence to “emphatically urge” him to invoke the 25th Amendment and declare Trump “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office”, claiming that he incited and condoned the riots. For invocation, Pence and at least eight Cabinet members, forming a simple majority, would have to consent. Additionally, if challenged by Trump, the second invocation would maintain Pence as acting president, subject to a vote of approval in both houses of Congress, with a two-thirds supermajority necessary in each chamber to sustain. However, Congress would not have needed to act before January 20 for Pence to remain acting president until Biden was inaugurated, per the timeline described in Section 4.

On the same day, the House of Representatives voted to call for Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment. The resolution passed with 223 in favor, 205 against, and 5 not voting; Adam Kinzinger was the only Republican to join a unified Democratic Caucus.

Don’t Miss: What Caused Republicans To Gain Power In Congress In 1938

Opinionwe Want To Hear What You Think Please Submit A Letter To The Editor

Boebert live-tweeted about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s location during the Capitol insurrection Jan. 6 as Pelosi, second in line to the presidency, was being rushed to a secure location. Greene, among other offenses, made in 2018 and 2019 suggesting that she supported executing prominent Democrats.

Some of the senators who endorsed Paul’s motion Tuesday might be tempted to think they can simply move on from Trump and therefore want to avoid an impeachment trial so his entire shameful presidency can be forgotten as quickly as possible.

But they’ve helped to create a disaster much bigger than Trump. By giving in to him at every turn, Republicans helped create the epidemic of conspiracy theories and alternative facts rampant in the Republican Party.

Perhaps most consequentially, they endorsed his Big Lie about the election. It wasn’t just Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri who propagated fantasies about widespread voter fraud, irregularities and a “steal.” Fourteen Senate Republicans announced before the attack on the Capitol that they planned to object to counting at least one state’s electoral votes, even though Trump had won none of his more than 60 lawsuits trying to overturn the results and even though no evidence of widespread voter fraud was found by election officials in any state regardless of party.

How Many House Votes Are Needed To Impeach Trump

In the lower chamber, controlled by the Democrats, a simple majority is required to pass the resolution. Democrats currently hold 222 seats to the Republicans 211, with two vacant. Even without cross-party support, Democrats will have no issue clearing the first hurdle to impeachment proceedings.

As in Trumps first impeachment trial a year ago, accusing the president of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, the eventual outcome will be decided by the Senate. Until 20 January, Republicans hold the same narrow advantage they enjoyed a year ago with 52 seats to the Democrats 48. After the Democratic victory in the Georgia run-off, there will be an even split of 50-50 in the Senate, with Vice-President elect Kamala Harris holding the tie-breaking vote.

Read Also: Did Trump Say He Loves The Poorly Educated

Mcconnell Open To Convicting Trump In Impeachment Trial

WASHINGTON Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pointedly did not rule out Wednesday that he might eventually vote to convict the now twice-impeached President Donald Trump, but he also blocked a quick Senate impeachment trial.

Minutes after the House voted 232-197 to impeach Trump, McConnell said in a letter to his GOP colleagues that hes not determined whether Trump should be convicted in the Senates upcoming proceedings. The House impeachment articles charge that Trump incited insurrection by exhorting supporters who violently attacked the Capitol last week, resulting in five deaths and a disruption of Congress.

I have not made a final decision on how I will vote and I intend to listen to the legal arguments when they are presented to the Senate, McConnell wrote.

McConnells burgeoning alienation from Trump, plus the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach him, underscored how the GOPs long, reflexive support and condoning of Trumps actions was eroding.

McConnells views were first reported by The New York Times.

Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., has said he would definitely consider House impeachment articles.

Theres A Surprisingly Plausible Path To Removing Trump From Office

It would take just three Republican senators to turn the impeachment vote into a secret ballot. Itâs not hard to imagine what would happen then.

A secret impeachment ballot might sound crazy, but itâs actually quite possible. In fact, it would take only three senators to allow for that possibility.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said he will immediately move to hold a trial to adjudicate the articles of impeachment if and when the Senate receives them from the House of Representatives. Article I, Section 3, of the Constitution does not set many parameters for the trial, except to say that âthe Chief Justice shall preside,â and âno Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.â That means the Senate has sole authority to draft its own rules for the impeachment trial, without judicial or executive branch oversight.

During the last impeachment of a president, Bill Clinton, the rules were hammered out by Democrats and Republicans in a collaborative process,as then Senate leaders Trent Lott and Tom Daschle recently pointed out in a Washington Post op-ed. The rules passed unanimously. Thatâs unlikely this time, given the polarization that now defines our politics. McConnell and his fellow Republicans are much more likely to dictate the rules with little input from Democrats.

Read Also: Impeachment Polls In Swing States

How The Televised Hearings Have Moved Public Opinion On Impeachment

In terms of partisan lean,1 Arizona leans red, and West Virginia is super conservative. But I doubt electoral considerations matter that much to either Manchin nor Sinema they arent up for reelection until 2024, when Trumps impeachment will likely be a distant memory.

So I would bet that both Manchin and Sinema vote against Trumps removal, preserving their brands as separate from the broader Democratic Party.

[ramrodd]

''Grave Risk' From Suspected Russian Hacking, Officials Say | Morning Jo...

COMMENTARY:

These are the same people who hacked the 2016 election. And, for my money, it can pretty much all be traced back to Edward Snowden. This is an unaticipated consequence of Snowden’s self-righteousness. This is a case study in Libertarianism being confused with critical thinking.

Trump was tricked into committing treason by these guys to get elected. This does NOT originate with the Kremlin or Putin, no matter who the SVR is, no matter what Thomas P. Bossert says in his NYTimes CYA. This hacking originates with the same people who were astroturfing the Ukraine in 2013 and organizing for the Brexit astroturf. These people are part of a vory crime consortium that is a legacy of Soviet Marxism and they were Trump’s Moscow partners in the 2013 Miss Universe Pageant.

These people, this foreign criminal agency, have been laundering eurodollars through the Trump organization since Yeltsin initiated the de-socialization after he faced down the tanks sent to crush democracy. Like most American voters, Yeltsin mistook democracy as the absence of socialism. Anyway, this is when the Soviet Union was privatized and the Oligarchs moved in and looted the Soviet commonwealth for their personal benefit. Putin did was he had to do to ensure the foundation of domestic tranquility, whether you agree with the methods or not.

I’m not worried about how Putin runs his country: I am worried about how we are running this country and the clear and present danger to America’s domestic tranquity is the Gingrich/Trotsky political strategy that is maintaining the spiritually toxic structural polarization and is the Trojan horse for the SVR hackers, Donald J. Trump* has been the biggest shill for the vory families since 1992. And they are the people who hacked the DNC and provided Trump the metrics he needed to fill the inside-straight of the 2016 Electoral College.

The question is, how are GOPAC and the SVR connected, which is going to come out in the wash, but what we can do at this level is to identify the pool of crypto-Nazis like Tucker Carlson, Stephen Miller, Rick Wilson, Joe in the Morning and other active agents and useful idiots of the Gingrich/Trotsky political strategy as distinct from the Russian bots in the Quora community who generarte disinformation as an AI function. They are sort of the Siri’s of the constant sedition of the Gingrich/Trotsky political strategy. Trumpism is just the leading edge of Newty’s plot to reverse the verdict of Appomattox by political coup arising from violent revolution.

Putin knows about these people and he’s been actively engaged in crippling their infrastructure, but Edward Snowden’s data dump opened up the US security protocols in a way dangerous to Russia’s domestic tranquility: blowing up America will do not fix anything in Russia and just make things worse just at the moment the conquest of Space is a far more profitable economic trajectory than to double down on the Military Industrial Complex in the manner Peter Navarro represents. The Green New Deal is the future, globally, and the people engaged in destabilizing the US Constitution are like William F. Buckley, Jr., standing on the global synergies wave from Apollo 11, shouting “STOP!”

And that pretty well defines the consequences of the structural polarization of generated by the Gingrich/Trotsky political strategy. I don’t believe Edward Snowden will ever connect the dots between his data dump and this hacking, much less his facilitation of the transnational criminal consortium of the Russian vory, but that’s foreign threat that Trump brings into the Oval Office.

Trump is in serious trouble with these people. They are the people who torched the 50th floor of the Trump Tower to remind the Trump organization who their daddy is. My guess is, if he isn’t POTUS on 21 January 2021, they are going to whack him in a Tony Saprano.

There is a way out for him through Process Theology, but he can save himself through Lady Trump’s Be Best Basic Training, which is a MAGA program that employs the performance technology of Task Force Δ to transform the Military-Industrial Complex to the Aerospace-Entrepreneurial Matrix at the of the 100 year trajectory of the Green New Deal which everybody in the world is waiting for American to implement by climbing onto the step of the global synergies wave lingering from Apollo 11.

The Gingrich/Trotsky political strategy doubles down on the Military-Industrial Complex. And that’s part of what this hacking is all about.

https://www.quora.com/q/processtheology

[ibuprofendiplomacy]

Reliable Modern Dip

Playing as Poland

Ukraine: CLRJames

Spain: Syrcellus

(Original) Egypt: Duaner02

England: Jefe

I joined this game in its early stages as Poland in what I found to be a solid position for a chance at survival. An alliance with Ukraine was clearly already underway, and I made sure to showcase my desire to continue this arrangement with them. While I offered Germany the same proposal, as to branch out as many options as possible, I did not receive a response. This, combined with Ukraine’s open suggestion, prompted me to make a swift stab on Germany as my opening move, as well as continuing the campaign into the remainder of Russia with Ukrainian support. 

The war against Germany was quick and efficient. I constructed fleets with the first year’s builds, allowing for an assault on Scandinavia as well as providing some deterrence for the quickly approaching navies of England. It was obvious Germany was to be defeated totally in the next couple of turns, forcing me to choose a new target. England and I had at this point engaged in communication and neither party desired conflict, which began a heavily guarded borderline between the two of us with mutual neutrality. Also here can be seen the beginnings of the annoyance the last remaining Russian unit became, as it took quite some time to kill it off. 

Italy and I had also made a similar neutrality agreement, even though they were currently at war with my two allies- Ukraine by positive communication & support and Egypt by association with Ukraine. Although I did get the impression they were a fine player and good person, I saw it probable that Italy could spell doom for both of my allies. Thinking the time of their reckoning nigh and my defenses solid enough, I made a more or less blind stab at Italian Austria, taking the province, and surprising the hell out of Italy.

Here begins an odd dynamic to this game involving the relationship between Ukraine, Egypt and I. After stabbing Italy, I got this horrible feeling about Egypt, having just saved them from Italian annihilation, they were less than grateful. This caused me to rethink my entire stab on Italy, which I had already been so uncertain about. I saw a vision for the future- Italy, myself, and one other vital player. I messaged them about making peace, which they were enthusiastic about. For this third player, I had England in mind. We had our little line of defenses and they were in my mind now without a direction to attack- I suggested they go after Spain, which would be perfect for the alliance, as it was becoming clear Spain had Italy in its sights. England game me no answer whatsoever. It didn’t do wonders for my opinion and intentions with England in the long term, and in the short term, this threw a nice wrench in my “repairing the Italian alliance” plan. I proceeded with the agreed upon move of moving of moving Venice back towards my territory through Austria, with Italy meant to move back into Venice after me. Still no word from England, and on top of that Italy didn’t take back Venice as planned. Ukraine, who I had luckily not yet stabbed, had also begun to seemingly reverse Italy’s advance on their Balkan territory. Sensing I had made an obvious mistake, I decided to take immediate action to return to the previous plan of an alliance with Ukraine. Italy had sealed their fate...Munich was taken and I built an army in Venice. 

I had certainly made the right choice, as Italy put up little defense. The other large player that was now becoming obvious as the best choice for a third member of a draw was Spain. Our alliance started more as an assumed one as they and Ukraine had started friendly communications. Simply out of there not being a need, we had not spoken, but eventually I did ask for their assistance in killing off Egypt. As previously mentioned, I felt Egypt was being particularly dickish. As I had no route to take to attack them, I asked permission from my now good close ally Ukraine to move a single unit through Volga to Kazakhstan for an “attack” on Egypt- if not for any tactical reason then to simply pester them. Ukraine allowed me this privilege, and I did so. I had been for some time now encouraging Ukraine to backstab Egypt, as I thought it likely they could win the conflict (although not as likely as I told them I thought it was), and with Italy under control, they finally agreed. This allowance of my unit to enter Kazakhstan was rightfully considered a sign of war between Ukraine and Egypt also, so even with Ukraine’s insistence that I was acting without their previous knowledge and that they were still united together, Egypt sensed the backstab and countered as best they could. 

With my problem with Egypt now in the process of being settled and Italy in their final days, I had but one other area to take care of before a draw would be acceptable in my eyes. England had for three years now sent in the exact same moves for their 8 units. While a good strategy per say, as it was a relatively sturdy connection of supports against any attack I could envision, I saw it as nothing but cowardice and boring- definitely not something I would reward with a draw. As I had done with Ukraine and Egypt, I had now asked Spain a number of times to join me in an attack on England as they had access to the soft rear, but they were cautious to start a new front before taking remaining Italian centers I had promised them. Although England’s defenses were formidable, they were not without error, and as they had been sending the same moves each turn, I saw the chink in the armor to be Denmark. In the same Fall turn Ukraine generously supported me into Iran, I made a backstab on England, slamming into Denmark and building many a new Polish fleet. Spain saw the direction the war was headed right after the stab, and built the beginnings of their own anti-english force to come in from the south. 

Egypt quickly found a relative stalemate line against Ukraine and I that would only be broken with an extended fleet conflict in the Aegean. After many an option was considered, I saw the solution- a cheeky move out of Iran for a turn, and building a fleet- beautiful! The war with England was surprisingly quick, with good progress being made each turn. After just two years I already had three armies on mainland Britain. With the low countries taken by Spain and I, Italy dying off and Egypt appearing to crack, the game appeared to finally be wrapping up. 

Appearances can be deceiving though. On the last turn of Britain’s life, they messaged me, hoping that my intentions were to go for a solo. On the previous turn I had already taken Liverpool and Saudi Arabia as well as a saved build from previous year. I told Britain of course I had considered it but I gave my reasons why I didn’t think I could pull it off and didn’t want to- I truly did enjoy playing with both of my allies. That being said, in the depths of my mind, trying for the solo was the only thing that I wanted. Britain agreed to do the exact same turn as the last, which if I played it right would bring my total yearly gains to +5. My allies suspected nothing, with the assumed ending support chains already in place between us. The areas of automatic concern were Gorky and getting to Volga, holding Venice for as long as possible, and quickly beating Spain out of the Channel and France. In the Fall of 2004, with the correct lies of support given to Spain and with Britain graciously on my side, I advanced units to key spaces that would prove pivotal to the future war, and built the five new units in the previously occupied centers. Cheating Spain out of their British territory and Belgium, as well as a nice convoy to Lapland made it a very effective stab. While a gorgeous turn, for certain, here I also made perhaps my biggest mistake. In supporting Iran to Iraq, I effectively sealed that army off from any return to Kazakhstan, where it was so badly needed....still a beautiful turn though. 

The going was slow and steady. As Ukraine didn’t build in Gorky as was expected, the armies in the north were able to take control relatively easily, luckily taking Volga early, and attempting to seal off Kazakhstan (wishing that Iran unit was still there). I saw Podolia as key, and with my first try at it thwarted, I employed a strategy I used several times on a different large Europe map with some friends- to take a tile you know you want hold, Croatia in this case, and and turn by turn, slide it through its adjacent enemy spaces like a battering ram, in this case Hungary, until it reaches its desired location- Podolia. In the Steppe, I felt I had now accumulated enough armies to make Kazakhstan less of a priority, so I cut Kharkov support with Volga and took Kiev. In the turn I took Podolia, I decided to instead take the more defendable Kharkov with Kiev, and with Ukraine forcing Volga to retreat to Donetsk, I found I had enough units around Kiev to take it in the coming year. In the other theater of war, I was doing unexpectedly well. I had predicted Spain to move more fleets towards the Atlantic, but I found my only naval competition to be the three original anit-british fleets. This naval superiority secured the win in the fact that my allowance into the South Atlantic Ocean opened up the necessary few additional centers I needed. I had also predicted the fall of Venice to happen very quickly, as Ukraine and Spain now had units in the Adriatic and Apulia, and although they attempted, they never cut the Austrian support. In France, it was more of a guessing game trying to poke at Spain’s few, yet well positioned armies. Eventually, a crack made in Lyon showed the beginnings of progress there as well. 

With Kharkov and Podolia taken, I saw a chance to take Kiev once and for all, as there was a nice stalemate line I had seen if you had Kharkov, Kiev and Volga all captured. With many units circling Volga, I made sure this was the case in the Spring. Ukraine didn’t submit orders this turn unfortunately, so these things went appropriately smoothly. I still held Venice, and exchanged Lyon for Marseilles. More importantly, I had an uncontested convoy into Gibraltar, allowing for the final centers I needed. In the Fall, the final turn of the game, I finally lost Venice, exchanging it in the best way for Hungary as I used it to cut Croatian support. With Marseilles and the newly captured Picardy, I snagged both Paris and Lyon, as well as grabbing Seville with support from the Gibraltar convoy. With Kiev and Kharkov solidly in my control, I ended the year with a total of 33 centers, winning the game. 250 points, finally boosting my total to over 1000!

[indochine-moto]

Indochine Moto Blog

June 21, 2017

Today marks the eighth day since my girlfriend Shalma and I arrived in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. This entire endeavor was in many ways committed to on a lark. I am not sure where the story really starts. Maybe it began with my longing for my carefree years of traveling skint around Europe and the Middle East in my late teens and early twenties. For the sake of this story, it begins on the 11 September 2015, the day I was hit by a car on my motorcycle, a 2014 Triumph Tiger XC. After spending the last year and a half recovering, it was time to move onto newer things.

My old friend Dimitri, a Greek national who I have known for at least two decades, had already been here for a year and a half. He suggested I come around. Longing for the tropical weather because it seems to help with the residual pain of breaking seven vertebrae, I had considered spending more time in Central America. However, I have always longed to go experience life in Southeast Asia. I have wanted to go to Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia for years. My biggest dream was to check these places out by motorcycle.

Shalma (my girlfriend) has been in the freight forwarding business for the last couple years, so we looked at shipping my bike here. Dimitri, however, warned me that the traffic in Cambodia was way too complicated–and the streets too small–for such a large motorcycle. I decided to mothball my bike and get another after we arrived. I have since gone on the search for a little Honda XR250 or CRF 250, the details of which I will get into below. First, we needed to get situated for the long haul.

Our intentions are to get a feel for Phnom Penh, and Cambodia in general, for a month or so before looking for work. Dimitri had invited us to stay at his place for the first couple of weeks. Centrally located, he lives kitty-corner to the infamous Tuol Sleng S21 prison turned genocide museum. Dimitri was a very gracious host, and we decided to look around for apartments while he was at work just to get a feel for what is out there. Within a couple days of looking, we found a great place: a brand new apartment in the Riverside area of Phnom Penh. Here we are surrounded by some of the most beautiful architecture and raucous nightlife.

One of the amazing views from the vantage point of our seventh floor walkup

The next piece on my agenda was to find a motorbike for regular transportation. The tuk tuks in Phnom Penh are cheap, but two dollars here and three dollars there adds up pretty quickly. We have walked between four and six miles every day over the last week, which is tricky in a city that is mostly void of pedestrians. Sure, there are sidewalks, but they have all been relegated as motorbike parking by this point. Its a treacherous game of Frogger out there, and you’re the frog in this city.

Shalma and I walked around to a couple motorbike shops. I saw a three-year-old CRF 250 for 3600 dollars, a new one for 5600, and a couple of XRs in the same price range. The Khmer salesman at the shop told me that bike was too big for me. If only he saw what I rode back home!! After some looking, we came across a highly recommended mechanic called Lyda who has a couple bikes for sale for considerably less money. I found an XR250 that will suit me, and I have been making payments for the couple days. I am, like many expats, limited by the amount of money I can take out of the bank in a day. I will be able to pick up the bike the day after tomorrow, right on time for the weekend.

In the meantime, Shalma and I have been busy setting up our place. We sort of embrace a minimalist lifestyle and are excited that we do not own too many things. In fact, we have been talking about the few things we stored back home and I think we both wish we got rid of it all, especially since we are already enjoying the lack of things. But I digress. The main thing that we have been trying to do is stay as cheap as possible. Most of the things that can be found in the US or Europe can be found here. While it is rather easy to live here cheaply, if you want to completely maintain your western lifestyle, things come at a premium. You can shop at the Aeon mall and pay twenty dollars for a cutting board or get a better one made of solid wood for less than four dollars at Central Market.

Yesterday Shalma and I made a payment on the motorbike and decided to do our first truly touristy bit since our arrival; we went to the killing fields of Choeung Ek. There are actually many killing fields around Cambodia from the murderous Khmer Rouge regime.  Between 1975 and 1979 the regime led by a former teacher called Pol Pot exterminated roughly one in four people in this country. The Khmer Rouge, having clearly not read The Wealth of Nations (or not believed in Adam Smith’s hypothesis), believed that the way forward for Cambodia was to go to a completely agrarian society.

The Khmer Rouge emptied all the cities of its inhabitants and engaged in a brutal ethnic cleansing spree that was largely inspired by China’s Great Leap Forward. Seeing educated people–including intellectuals, doctors, lawyers, bankers, teachers, people living in cities–as a threat to an agricultural utopia, the Khmer Rouge began rounding people up, torturing them, and then using various methods to dispatch them. They also sought to wipe out other ethnicities from Cambodia, including countless ethnic Chinese people who had long been part of the fabric of Cambodian society. For the most part they avoided using firearms for executions as to save bullets, which were supposedly costly.  Choeung Ek is one of the places where people were murdered and varied en mass. Below is a picture gallery with captions.

This is the memorial building at the killing fields. Within this tall structure are racks of human skulls that go countless meters up to the very top.

This is the entrance to the genocide memorial building. Shalma and I purchased incense and flowers to place here before entering this sacred space.

Although this is not the clearest picture due to the reflection, you can see racks of human skulls going up for many meters.

Most of the skulls inside this memorial exhibit extreme trauma. This one has a clearly visible bullet hole.

The killing fields were filled with murder victims between 1975 and 1979. In spite of being excavated in 1975, erosion still reveals bones and clothing. In this picture is a pair of men’s trousers and a long leg bone.

Beneath this picturesque and quiet pond surrounded by songbirds lay countless bodies of victims murdered by the Khmer Rouge.

This is the killing tree where the Khmer Rouge murdered women and children by bashing there heads into the tree.

A jaw bone recently rendered by the earth. As the ground erodes and the earth settles and moves, bones are constantly becoming exposed and are then collected by museum staff.

The only thing to offer respite or levity during such an emotionally draining and heavy experience is the antics of baby chickens.

Another picture of the genocide memorial building. Inside is held racks of skulls going all the way up to the top.

Overall, visiting the killing fields was by far more emotionally draining than I had ever imagined it would be. After two hours there, Shalma and I hardly spoke to each other. While I realize the macabre nature of genocide tourism, I believe it is important to see what humans are capable of; all they need is an excuse, be it nationalism, utopianism, or the  myth of an existential threat. We have seen ethnic cleansing and genocide all over the word, from the extermination of Europe’s Jewish population to the eradication of millions of Native Americans in the US. The nationalist impulses that can spark such events are often grandly accepted, be it by those who voted for President Trump, American arming of anti-semitic nationalists in Ukraine, or international support for the continued ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.

On a lighter note, from here on out I hope to post not only more pictures and commentary on life here in Cambodia, but I am very excited to share our upcoming motorcycle explorations. We are currently trying to decide whether to go to Angkor Wat or down to somewhere south by the sea.

[realtalkingpoints]

Tough on Russia

Could we please get the Democrats and liberal media to tell us one more time what they want the President to do with Russia… You want him to be tough on Russia?  Yes?  Yes? You want the President to be tough on Russia, and the answer to that question is yes...  Right?

Could you please write that down, so you will remember it the next time we ask you…?

I believe the President has every intention of showing Putin who’s boss, and that is probably not going to be easy.  Vladimir Putin has a tight game, and that’s why he is treated with kid gloves around the world.  For anyone who may have missed it, his recent successes include making arms deals with Iran and gaining strategic air base and seaport access in Syria.   Putin likely had reservations about such moves, but calculated it would strengthen his position against Russia’s biggest foes, the US and NATO.  

Add to that huge oil deals with China and much of eastern Europe, and Russia has done well for itself in recent years.  Putin’s biggest move was the annexation of Crimea and the Crimean-peninsula.  A covert operation, with unmarked, blank uniformed, masked soldiers appearing in Russian tanks to take control of Crimea, which included a strategic submarine base still located there from the former Soviet Union days.   Crimea was designated part of Ukraine when the United Soviet Socialist Republic fell apart in the early 90’s.   But in 2014, the strategically minded Putin wanted it back, and thought he could do it quickly, overshadowed by other world conflicts, and spoof the media so maybe no one would notice until it was too late.

It was a calculated move, based on a pattern of inaction, by the US, in other conflicts in the region. Pulling armies home from the Middle East, and little response amid provocations from China and N. Korea towards US allies, were clear signs to Putin, that the US wanted no involvement in foreign conflict, and likely wouldn’t do much to stop him if he went after Crimea.  And he was right.  Obama did very little to save Crimea from falling into the hands of the ambitious Vladimir Putin.

More might have been done, if the President’s own constituents, the Democrats, had been protesting in the streets to get tough on Russia.   But the Democrats took little interest in the Russian annexation of Crimea. A military take-over, of a sovereign piece of territory, in a civilized nation that’s geographically connected to Europe, and the Democrats didn’t see how it would affect them… and didn’t care.   And no one organized any protests (not that it would have mattered) and President Obama limited his aid to ‘non-lethal’ equipment for the Ukrainian people, in their own frail attempt to defend their nation against an invading Putin war machine.

President Putin basically had his way with President Obama.  Obama era sanctions, for the Crimea annexation and other egregious actions, have badly hurt Russia’s economy, yet Putin’s military gains have remained in place.   Possibly worse, is that he has built stronger ties with Iran, Syria, and China, as US relations with all 3 are in decline.  Russia has also spent recent years widening surveillance and patrol routes in norther Baltic regions and around the globe, pushing tensions higher amid more frequent encounters with US and European patrols.  And don’t forget Edward Snowden, having been granted asylum in Russia, carrying several hard drives packed with NSA intelligence documents. Let’s rest assured that Russia now has one of the most sophisticated cyber intelligence agencies in the world, thanks in part to US intelligence from Snowden.  

Enter President Donald Trump, handing the Democrats their worst upset anyone can remember.   America watched in disbelief, as even the News Anchors couldn’t hide their amazement while the numbers came in on election night. They had planned for a Hillary landslide, and got a Trump upset instead. A hurtful blame game began almost immediately.  Blame the media, blame the DNC, blame the Hillary campaign, blame Wikileaks, blame Russia…  Ruling out itself, and its support network which includes the DNC and Hillary campaign, the media cleverly blamed Russian hacking, a narrative quickly adopted by all Trump opposition and a conspiracy was born.  The intelligence community had already concluded that the Russians attempted to hack into computer systems at the DNC and the RNC.  While hacking successes at the RNC were limited to some older, less protected servers, the DNC hacks were quite successful, and resulted in many private DNC emails being made public.  The intelligence community, then still under the control President Obama, concluded there was no evidence that the hacking had influenced the outcome of the election.  

But the Dems and the media had found their scapegoat.  If they are going to blame their embarrassing loss on someone else, it’s gotta be Russia. Suddenly, anything less than pure savagery towards Russia and Vladimir Putin is unacceptable.  Any pleasant posturing toward Russia by President Trump, to open a civil dialogue with Putin perhaps, is seen as Team Trump in cahoots with Russia. And even though the Obama intelligence community had seen phone transcripts of Trump team officials speaking with Russians before leaving office, and determined no crimes had been committed, the speculative news stories continue to break about ‘new possible evidence’.  Because once the Russia effect is disproven as the cause for Hillary’s loss, the Dems, the Hillary campaign, and the liberal media are back to facing the harsh facts, that their own attempts to cheat and manipulate the election were the real cause of their loss.  

In all this, the Republicans in congress watch optimistically, in hopes that the President will in fact, get tough on Russia.  They watched in dismay for many years, as Putin ran amuck unchallenged by President Obama, re-establishing his military super power status in conflicts throughout Europe and the Middle East.  Many times, they would have welcomed a cry from the left to toughen up on Putin, and provide US leadership in those very conflicts.  Times when filling voids and power vacuums before they were filled by Russia was still possible.    

And still, cooperation and de-escalation with Russia, seem the ultimate end goal.  President Trump finds himself faced with a complicated task.   Send a clear message to Putin, and the rest of the world that cooperating with state sponsors of terrorism, unprovoked military takeovers of sovereign neighbors, and cyber espionage in US elections is unacceptable… But also convincing Putin that he should respect American strength at the negotiating table, and not pursue a military conflict, even though Putin is in much better strategic position to engage in one, than he was, say…, eight years ago.

And I bet, Trump will get tough on Putin.  Which, again, is what we all agree we want, right?   And I think he can do it.  We saw what a stoner Harvard Professor from Hawaii got out of Putin… (not much!)   Let’s see what a bully business man from New York can do.  He might be just the man for the job.  He’s going to need some cooperation from the media, and the Dems of course.  When he takes his first position, he’s gonna take an obnoxiously one-sided, impossible position, and say it very loudly.  He then needs the media to resist their yearning desire to painfully dissect his offer, and instead let Putin and the Russians do that.  He needs to negotiate with Putin, not the liberal media.

All part of the art of the deal…

[bountyofbeads]

The Mystery of Rudy Giuliani’s Vienna Trip

President Trump’s personal lawyer told me he was planning to fly to Vienna roughly 24 hours after his business associates were arrested as they prepared to do the same.

By Elaina Plott Published Oct 10, 2019 | The Atlantic | Posted October 13, 2019 |

Last night, when Rudy Giuliani told me he couldn’t get together for an interview, his reason made sense: As with many nights of late, he was due to appear on Hannity. When I suggested this evening instead, his response was a bit more curious. We would have to aim for lunch, Giuliani told me, because he was planning to fly to Vienna, Austria, at night. He didn’t offer any details beyond that.

Giuliani called me at 6:22 p.m. last night—around the same time that two of his associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, were arrested at Dulles Airport while waiting to board an international flight with one-way tickets. As The Wall Street Journal reported this afternoon, the two men were bound for Vienna. The Florida businessmen, who are reported to have assisted Giuliani in his alleged efforts to investigate Joe Biden and his family ahead of the 2020 election, were charged with campaign-finance violations, with prosecutors alleging that they had conspired to funnel money from a Russian donor into Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

But Giuliani, when confirming today that Parnas and Fruman were heading to Vienna on matters “related to their business,” told the Journal that he himself only had plans to meet with them when they returned to Washington. By this logic, Giuliani was also planning to fly to Vienna within roughly 24 hours of his business associates, but do no business with them while all three were there.

This morning, Giuliani told me he’d have to reschedule our lunch. I’ve tried to reach him since then, to discuss Parnas’s and Fruman’s arrests, among other things, to no avail. When I called at 3 p.m. ET to ask about his Vienna trip, a woman claiming to be his communications director answered the phone. I have called him more than 100 times over the past year, and this is the first time that has ever happened. She said she’d have to get back to me. As we spoke, I could hear a voice that resembled Giuliani’s shout “asshole” in the background. “Oh, sorry,” the woman told me. “He was talking to the TV.”

Why were Parnas and Fruman bound for Vienna? Why was Giuliani—if what he told me was true—planning to be in the same city a day later?

Giuliani finally sent me a text message at 4:18 p.m. ET: “I can’t comment on it at this time.”

Read: Rudy Giuliani: ‘You should be happy for your country that I uncovered this’

Parnas and Fruman, both Soviet-born, have been instrumental in helping Giuliani develop Ukrainian contacts in his quest to prove that Biden, while vice president, tried to curtail an investigation into a Ukrainian gas company for which his son Hunter Biden served on the board. Parnas told NPR, for example, that he was the one who had arranged a Skype call between Giuliani and former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin to discuss their corruption theory. Parnas was also present at meetings in New York and Warsaw earlier this year with Giuliani and Yuriy Lutsenko, another former prosecutor general for Ukraine.

I met Parnas and Fruman in March, when I joined Giuliani at Shelly’s Back Room, a cigar bar in D.C., to discuss Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s soon-to-be-released report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. Sipping back-to-back glasses of Macallan—double, one large ice cube—and smoking a Nicaraguan cigar, Giuliani told me he’d known Parnas for two years. Parnas laughed and said he’d grown up “idolizing” Giuliani. They bantered about how the Mueller probe would likely amount to nothing, with Parnas adding that it was Trump’s “constitutional right” to fire former FBI Director James Comey. Save for introducing himself when I arrived, Fruman was quiet. Parnas told me they were all “great friends” and all “work together.”

Along with allegedly using a shell company to donate hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican candidates and a pro-Trump super PAC, Parnas and Fruman were also accused by federal prosectors of meddling in American political activities on behalf of one or more Ukrainian officials. In the 21-page indictment, prosecutors allege that Parnas and Fruman lobbied for the removal of the U.S. ambassador in Kiev, Marie Yovanovitch—something Giuliani sought as well, arguing that she was biased against the president. In May, Trump ordered Yovanovitch’s removal.

The White House has kept mum about the arrests. Jay Sekulow, Trump’s personal lawyer alongside Giuliani, told reporters that neither Trump nor his campaign has “anything to do with the scheme these guys were involved in.”

It’s difficult to know, however, precisely what Trump may or may not know about Parnas and Fruman, given that Giuliani and Trump are in constant contact and that Giuliani, at least broadly, has frequently kept Trump updated on his maneuverings in Ukraine. Presumably these are the kinds of questions that House Democrats had in mind when they subpoenaed Giuliani last month, and Parnas and Fruman today. Giuliani has said he refuses to testify or provide documents to the House Intelligence Committee. Parnas and Fruman, for their part, are being held in a Virginia jail on a $1 million bond each.

Trump is already seeking to distance himself from the controversy. “I don’t know those gentlemen,” the president told reporters before departing for a rally in Minnesota. “Now, it’s possible I have a picture with them, because I have a picture with everybody.” (He does, in fact, have a picture with Parnas.)

“Maybe they were clients of Rudy,” Trump added. “You’d have to ask Rudy.”

The Story Keeps Getting Worse for the White House

A pair of men helping the president’s supposed anti-corruption campaign were apprehended as they tried to leave the United States.

David A. Graham | Updated at 3:48 p.m. on October 10, 2019, Published October 10, 2019 | The Atlantic | Posted October 13, 2019 |

If the president’s fundamental defense against impeachment is that there’s nothing to see here and people should move along, Thursday morning was not a good day for the president.

As The Wall Street Journal first reported, two men who assisted in Rudy Giuliani’s investigations in Ukraine on behalf of Donald Trump were arrested Wednesday night. Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, both Soviet-born, naturalized American citizens, had been asked to testify to Congress today and Friday in connection with the impeachment inquiry into Trump; they were apprehended at Dulles Airport, outside of Washington, D.C., trying to leave the country on one-way tickets. Congress has now issued subpoenas to them as well.

The details of the allegations against Parnas and Fruman are arcane, but the big picture is not: Two men who were helping the president’s supposed anti-corruption scheme in Ukraine have now been arrested and charged with federal crimes.

David A. Graham: Trump is panicking

In a letter to House Democrats last week, attorney John Dowd—last seen representing Trump in connection with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation—wrote, “Please be advised that Messrs. Parnas and Fruman assisted Mr. Giuliani in connection with his representation of President Trump.” This was apparently intended to shield Parnas and Fruman: Dowd argued that some of what Democrats sought from them was protected by attorney-client privilege. But with the arrests today, that argument adds to Trump’s problems. Attorney-client privilege does not cover the commission of crimes, and now the connection to the president has been established.

Parnas and Fruman’s schemes are a little hard to follow. Prosecutors charged them, as well as two other men, with conspiracy, false statements to the Federal Election Commission, and falsifying records. An indictment charges that the men engaged in a straw-donor scheme to illegally donate money to a congressman—former Representative Pete Sessions, a Texas Republican—at the behest of a Ukrainian official, to get help in trying to have the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine fired. (Sessions wrote a letter calling for the diplomat’s firing, and she was eventually removed.) In another scheme, they funneled money from a Russian foreign national, again in violation of the law, into donations, using a legal recreational-marijuana enterprise as a front.

“Protecting the integrity of elections, and protecting our elections from unlawful foreign influence, are core functions of our campaign-finance laws,” Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said at a press conference on Thursday.

This is not the first time attention has turned to Parnas and Fruman. The men were already reported to have been assisting Giuliani in his quest to dig up dirt on dealings in Ukraine by former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden. (No evidence of wrongdoing has yet turned up.) BuzzFeed reported on the men’s lavish spending during that investigation. Parnas told BuzzFeed he’d met with the president “many times” but wouldn’t say what they discussed. The men seem to have been small-time businessmen with little political experience until recently, and how they got involved or what they were seeking is still not clear.

Read: Trump’s game of chicken

The fact that Trump’s corruption-seekers were, themselves, allegedly corrupt begs a comparison to Richard Nixon’s crew of Plumbers, who were convened to investigate leaks of classified information but were eventually arrested for crimes of their own. The White House has argued that the Democratic impeachment inquiry is illegitimate because Trump did nothing wrong and there’s nothing to investigate, but each new piece of information—much less federal indictments—makes that argument harder to sustain.

Even before the arrests, there was evidence that the public wasn’t buying it. A Fox News poll released Wednesday found that an eye-popping 51 percent of Americans want Trump impeached and removed from office. Another 4 percent want him impeached but not removed. The poll shows growing support in practically every group, across ideological and demographic categories. Some are especially worrisome for Trump: Suburban women favor impeachment and removal, 57 to 33. More than half of the respondents think the Trump administration is more corrupt than previous presidencies. Among those who oppose impeachment, only one in five say Trump did nothing wrong.

David A. Graham: The cover-up betrays Trump’s guilt

The Fox News poll has not escaped Trump’s agitated notice. It is a mild outlier, showing stronger support than most polls—but not by a lot. Support has grown steadily over the past two weeks; FiveThirtyEight’s tracker of impeachment polls shows an average 49.2 percent support as of this writing.

The president likes to point out that some polls underestimated his support in the 2016 election and failed to predict his victory. But these impeachment polls aren’t interesting as a predictor of electoral success. Instead, they’re a snapshot of public opinion. Trump’s firewall against removal from office is Republicans in the Senate. Many of them have never had a great deal of personal affection for Trump, but they fear the power of his supporters to punish them politically. If voters, especially Republicans, turn against Trump, GOP senators will have less reason to stick with him.

Souring public opinion is also a problem for Trump because his entire defense strategy against impeachment is currently premised on public opinion. An eight-page letter sent to House Democrats on Tuesday was signed by White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, but as I wrote, its arguments are almost entirely political rather than legal, attempting to dismiss the impeachment inquiry as illegitimate because it is politically motivated. Meanwhile, White House efforts to turn the focus back to the Bidens have struggled; even Peter Schweizer, a progenitor of the case against Hunter Biden, wrote in a New York Times column Wednesday that what Biden did was legal, though he says it should not be.

There’s a hoary legal adage, “If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell.” Neither fact nor the law is especially helpful to Trump right now, so the White House is pounding the table ferociously. At the moment, though, few people are heeding the racket.

[45news]

LOS ANGELES -- The crowd was buzzing with Hollywood types -- actress Patricia Arquette, producer Norman Lear -- at a private film screening on Sunset Boulevard one recent Sunday afternoon. But here in liberal America, the biggest celebrity in the room was not someone who makes a living in what people call "the industry."It was Rep. Adam Schiff, the straight-laced former federal prosecutor who was on the brink of prosecuting his biggest defendant yet: President Donald Trump.These are heady but perilous days for Schiff, the inscrutable and slightly nerdy chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who is leading the impeachment inquiry into Trump. Adored by the left, reviled by the right, he has become a Rorschach test for U.S. politics. Depending on one's point of view, he is either going to save the republic or destroy it.Here in his home district, at the screening of "The Great Hack," a film about misinformation in the 2016 election, Lear introduced Schiff as a "current American hero." As the audience leapt to its feet in a standing ovation, the congressman emerged from backstage in standard Washington uniform -- navy blazer, white shirt, light blue tie -- his manner as inoffensive as his attire."We thank them for their patriotism," Schiff said somberly, praising whistleblowers, including the anonymous one whose complaint against Trump prompted the impeachment inquiry, "and we hope others will follow their courageous example."Now Schiff, 59, is poised to take a much bigger stage as his inquiry moves from a secure office suite in a Capitol Hill basement into nationally televised public hearings. He will make the case against Trump to a divided nation, in what amounts to an epic courtroom drama meant to unveil evidence of the president's pressure campaign to enlist Ukraine to smear his political rivals -- a moment that is bound to be must-watch TV.At home in his district, which stretches from West Hollywood to Pasadena and north to the San Gabriel Mountains, Schiff is well acquainted with the celebrity lifestyle.He lives with his wife, Eve (yes, Adam and Eve), and their two children in suburban Maryland, but they also have an apartment in Burbank, home to Walt Disney Studios. He favors vegan Chinese food and drives an Audi whose license plate frame bears a line from the movie "The Big Lebowski" ("I don't roll on Shabbos"), from which he can quote at length. He has dabbled at screenwriting, once drafting a script that featured a prosecutor as the hero. He tried stand-up comedy, too, during a fundraiser at the Improv in Hollywood."He did a whole riff on being a nihilist," said one of his best friends, former congressman Steve Israel, who joined him onstage. "Basically, we got told to stick to our day jobs."But if Schiff has a sense of humor (his friends insist he does have a dry one), he rarely shows it in Washington, where he has carefully cultivated his image as the stylistic and substantive opposite of Trump: calm, measured, reserved and brainy.He makes no secret of his disdain for the president, who refers to him as "Little Pencil Neck" or "Shifty Schiff" when he is not replacing the congressman's surname with a similar-sounding expletive. In an interview, Schiff called Trump a "grave risk to our democracy" who is conducting an "amoral presidency" and has debased his office with "infantile" insults."What comes through in the president's comments and his tweets and his outrage and his anger toward me in particular is, this president feels he has a God-given right to abuse his office in any way he sees fit," Schiff said.Trump and his allies, sensing the threat posed by Schiff's inquiry and divided over how to defend the president against damning testimony, have united in trying to undermine the congressman's credibility. They sought unsuccessfully to have the House censure him and have accused him of running a "Soviet-style impeachment inquiry."On Saturday, Trump proclaimed him "a corrupt politician" on Twitter and claimed that if Schiff "is allowed to release transcripts of the Never Trumpers & others that are & were interviewed, he will change the words that were said to suit the Dems purposes."Republicans who work side by side with him on the Intelligence Committee contend that he has changed as his star has risen alongside Trump's. A figure they once saw as a serious and studious policy wonk they now describe in viscerally negative terms, as a liar and a hypocrite who will stop at nothing to oust a duly elected president.Schiff has an "absolute maniacal focus on Donald Trump" said one committee Republican, Rep. Michael Turner of Ohio, who accused Schiff of routinely lying to the press and the public about what happened in private interviews and conducting the inquiry's initial hearings out of public view so he and other Democrats could distort the findings.And Schiff has let the publicity go to his head, Turner said: "Schiff finds the media intoxicating. And he is pretty much willing to do whatever it takes to get to the top of the media cycle."Schiff has made some missteps. His dramatized description of the president's phone call with the leader of Ukraine drew attacks from the president and Republican lawmakers, who said he was fabricating evidence -- and surprised even a close friend, Alice Hill, who knows the congressman from their days as young prosecutors in Los Angeles."I was a bit surprised because he is reserved and not prone to overstatement, very careful with his words, very careful with the facts and keeping to the facts," she said, adding, "It felt out of character."And Schiff's assertion that he had not had any contact with the whistleblower who incited the inquiry drew a "false" rating from The Washington Post; the whistleblower had approached his panel for guidance before filing his complaint. Schiff conceded he "should have been much more clear" about that.Democrats, who are united behind Schiff, counter that the attacks are opportunistic; Republicans, they said, are attacking Schiff over process because they cannot defend the president on the merits of his behavior.There is little room for error as Schiff pushes the inquiry forward in the coming months. His performance could determine not only Trump's future but also his own. Schiff is a close ally of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and viewed by some as her possible successor. At a recent news conference, Pelosi -- not ordinarily one to cede control -- took the rare step of sitting with reporters to watch admiringly as the congressman spoke."He's a full package," Pelosi said in an interview, praising Schiff as "always gracious, always lovely." She added, "He knows his purpose, and his purpose is not to engage in that silliness that the president is engaged in."A lawyer educated at Stanford University and Harvard Law School, Schiff tried his first big case three decades ago when, as a young federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, he secured the conviction of an FBI agent who was seduced by a Soviet spy and traded secrets for gold and cash. In 1996, he won a seat in the California Senate; in 2000, he was elected to the House by beating a Republican who had been a manager in the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.In Washington, Schiff joined the Blue Dogs, a group of conservative Democrats, and made a name for himself as a national security expert. He joined the Intelligence Committee in 2008 -- drawn to it, Israel said, because he viewed it as "a quiet place for bipartisanship."His breakout moment came in 2014, when the Republican-led House established a committee to investigate attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. Schiff had argued that Democrats should not participate in what he viewed as a partisan exercise, but Pelosi put him on the committee.But it was the election of Trump that elevated Schiff's profile and made him a sought-after speaker and fundraiser in Democratic circles. As the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee last term, when Republicans still had the majority, he vigorously investigated Russian election interference and questions around whether the Trump campaign had conspired with hostile foreign actors, becoming the most recognizable public face explaining the biggest story in Washington on national TV. When Democrats won the majority in the House, he helped Pelosi draft an investigative strategy.Schiff was a late convert to the impeachment push; like Pelosi, he held back until revelations about Ukraine emerged. For the last five weeks, he has spent much of his time in a secure room four floors below the Capitol, overseeing the closed-door questioning of witnesses. He opens each witness interview and sometimes steps in to conduct questioning himself."The American people have a right to know -- they have a need to know -- how deep this misconduct goes," he said, adding, "There's no hiding the president's hand in any of this."These days, Schiff has tried to tightly control his public profile. He goes on television less than he used to and zips wordlessly through the Capitol, trailed by a phalanx of aides and a scrum of journalists, smiling wanly as they pepper him with questions.It has all given him "a new appreciation" of the struggles his celebrity constituents face in maintaining their privacy, he said. And he is well aware that, out there in the rest of the U.S., he has become a polarizing figure."I feel I've become kind of a human focus group," he said during a panel discussion after the screening here. "People will stop me in the airport in close succession. One will come up to me and say, 'Are you Adam Schiff? I just want to shake your hand -- you're my hero,' immediately to be followed by someone else who says, 'Why are you destroying our democracy?' "The congressman paused and concluded that both couldn't be right "because last time I checked, I'm the same person."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/34zFMD4

[ramrodd]

COMMENTARY:

These are the same people who hacked the 2016 election. And, for my money, it can pretty much all be traced back to Edward Snowden. This is an unaticipated consequence of Snowden’s self-righteousness. This is a case study in Libertarianism being confused with critical thinking.

Trump was tricked into committing treason by these guys to get elected. This does NOT originate with the Kremlin or Putin, no matter who the SVR is, no matter what Thomas P. Bossert says in his NYTimes CYA. This hacking originates with the same people who were astroturfing the Ukraine in 2013 and organizing for the Brexit astroturf. These people are part of a vory crime consortium that is a legacy of Soviet Marxism and they were Trump’s Moscow partners in the 2013 Miss Universe Pageant.

These people, this foreign criminal agency, have been laundering eurodollars through the Trump organization since Yeltsin initiated the de-socialization after he faced down the tanks sent to crush democracy. Like most American voters, Yeltsin mistook democracy as the absence of socialism. Anyway, this is when the Soviet Union was privatized and the Oligarchs moved in and looted the Soviet commonwealth for their personal benefit. Putin did was he had to do to ensure the foundation of domestic tranquility, whether you agree with the methods or not.

I’m not worried about how Putin runs his country: I am worried about how we are running this country and the clear and present danger to America’s domestic tranquity is the Gingrich/Trotsky political strategy that is maintaining the spiritually toxic structural polarization and is the Trojan horse for the SVR hackers, Donald J. Trump* has been the biggest shill for the vory families since 1992. And they are the people who hacked the DNC and provided Trump the metrics he needed to fill the inside-straight of the 2016 Electoral College.

The question is, how are GOPAC and the SVR connected, which is going to come out in the wash, but what we can do at this level is to identify the pool of crypto-Nazis like Tucker Carlson, Stephen Miller, Rick Wilson, Joe in the Morning and other active agents and useful idiots of the Gingrich/Trotsky political strategy as distinct from the Russian bots in the Quora community who generarte disinformation as an AI function. They are sort of the Siri’s of the constant sedition of the Gingrich/Trotsky political strategy. Trumpism is just the leading edge of Newty’s plot to reverse the verdict of Appomattox by political coup arising from violent revolution.

Putin knows about these people and he’s been actively engaged in crippling their infrastructure, but Edward Snowden’s data dump opened up the US security protocols in a way dangerous to Russia’s domestic tranquility: blowing up America will do not fix anything in Russia and just make things worse just at the moment the conquest of Space is a far more profitable economic trajectory than to double down on the Military Industrial Complex in the manner Peter Navarro represents. The Green New Deal is the future, globally, and the people engaged in destabilizing the US Constitution are like William F. Buckley, Jr., standing on the global synergies wave from Apollo 11, shouting “STOP!”

And that pretty well defines the consequences of the structural polarization of generated by the Gingrich/Trotsky political strategy. I don’t believe Edward Snowden will ever connect the dots between his data dump and this hacking, much less his facilitation of the transnational criminal consortium of the Russian vory, but that’s foreign threat that Trump brings into the Oval Office.

Trump is in serious trouble with these people. They are the people who torched the 50th floor of the Trump Tower to remind the Trump organization who their daddy is. My guess is, if he isn’t POTUS on 21 January 2021, they are going to whack him in a Tony Saprano.

There is a way out for him through Process Theology, but he can save himself through Lady Trump’s Be Best Basic Training, which is a MAGA program that employs the performance technology of Task Force Δ to transform the Military-Industrial Complex to the Aerospace-Entrepreneurial Matrix at the of the 100 year trajectory of the Green New Deal which everybody in the world is waiting for American to implement by climbing onto the step of the global synergies wave lingering from Apollo 11.

The Gingrich/Trotsky political strategy doubles down on the Military-Industrial Complex. And that’s part of what this hacking is all about.

[usuallyleftnight]

LOS ANGELES -- The crowd was buzzing with Hollywood types -- actress Patricia Arquette, producer Norman Lear -- at a private film screening on Sunset Boulevard one recent Sunday afternoon. But here in liberal America, the biggest celebrity in the room was not someone who makes a living in what people call "the industry."It was Rep. Adam Schiff, the straight-laced former federal prosecutor who was on the brink of prosecuting his biggest defendant yet: President Donald Trump.These are heady but perilous days for Schiff, the inscrutable and slightly nerdy chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who is leading the impeachment inquiry into Trump. Adored by the left, reviled by the right, he has become a Rorschach test for U.S. politics. Depending on one's point of view, he is either going to save the republic or destroy it.Here in his home district, at the screening of "The Great Hack," a film about misinformation in the 2016 election, Lear introduced Schiff as a "current American hero." As the audience leapt to its feet in a standing ovation, the congressman emerged from backstage in standard Washington uniform -- navy blazer, white shirt, light blue tie -- his manner as inoffensive as his attire."We thank them for their patriotism," Schiff said somberly, praising whistleblowers, including the anonymous one whose complaint against Trump prompted the impeachment inquiry, "and we hope others will follow their courageous example."Now Schiff, 59, is poised to take a much bigger stage as his inquiry moves from a secure office suite in a Capitol Hill basement into nationally televised public hearings. He will make the case against Trump to a divided nation, in what amounts to an epic courtroom drama meant to unveil evidence of the president's pressure campaign to enlist Ukraine to smear his political rivals -- a moment that is bound to be must-watch TV.At home in his district, which stretches from West Hollywood to Pasadena and north to the San Gabriel Mountains, Schiff is well acquainted with the celebrity lifestyle.He lives with his wife, Eve (yes, Adam and Eve), and their two children in suburban Maryland, but they also have an apartment in Burbank, home to Walt Disney Studios. He favors vegan Chinese food and drives an Audi whose license plate frame bears a line from the movie "The Big Lebowski" ("I don't roll on Shabbos"), from which he can quote at length. He has dabbled at screenwriting, once drafting a script that featured a prosecutor as the hero. He tried stand-up comedy, too, during a fundraiser at the Improv in Hollywood."He did a whole riff on being a nihilist," said one of his best friends, former congressman Steve Israel, who joined him onstage. "Basically, we got told to stick to our day jobs."But if Schiff has a sense of humor (his friends insist he does have a dry one), he rarely shows it in Washington, where he has carefully cultivated his image as the stylistic and substantive opposite of Trump: calm, measured, reserved and brainy.He makes no secret of his disdain for the president, who refers to him as "Little Pencil Neck" or "Shifty Schiff" when he is not replacing the congressman's surname with a similar-sounding expletive. In an interview, Schiff called Trump a "grave risk to our democracy" who is conducting an "amoral presidency" and has debased his office with "infantile" insults."What comes through in the president's comments and his tweets and his outrage and his anger toward me in particular is, this president feels he has a God-given right to abuse his office in any way he sees fit," Schiff said.Trump and his allies, sensing the threat posed by Schiff's inquiry and divided over how to defend the president against damning testimony, have united in trying to undermine the congressman's credibility. They sought unsuccessfully to have the House censure him and have accused him of running a "Soviet-style impeachment inquiry."On Saturday, Trump proclaimed him "a corrupt politician" on Twitter and claimed that if Schiff "is allowed to release transcripts of the Never Trumpers & others that are & were interviewed, he will change the words that were said to suit the Dems purposes."Republicans who work side by side with him on the Intelligence Committee contend that he has changed as his star has risen alongside Trump's. A figure they once saw as a serious and studious policy wonk they now describe in viscerally negative terms, as a liar and a hypocrite who will stop at nothing to oust a duly elected president.Schiff has an "absolute maniacal focus on Donald Trump" said one committee Republican, Rep. Michael Turner of Ohio, who accused Schiff of routinely lying to the press and the public about what happened in private interviews and conducting the inquiry's initial hearings out of public view so he and other Democrats could distort the findings.And Schiff has let the publicity go to his head, Turner said: "Schiff finds the media intoxicating. And he is pretty much willing to do whatever it takes to get to the top of the media cycle."Schiff has made some missteps. His dramatized description of the president's phone call with the leader of Ukraine drew attacks from the president and Republican lawmakers, who said he was fabricating evidence -- and surprised even a close friend, Alice Hill, who knows the congressman from their days as young prosecutors in Los Angeles."I was a bit surprised because he is reserved and not prone to overstatement, very careful with his words, very careful with the facts and keeping to the facts," she said, adding, "It felt out of character."And Schiff's assertion that he had not had any contact with the whistleblower who incited the inquiry drew a "false" rating from The Washington Post; the whistleblower had approached his panel for guidance before filing his complaint. Schiff conceded he "should have been much more clear" about that.Democrats, who are united behind Schiff, counter that the attacks are opportunistic; Republicans, they said, are attacking Schiff over process because they cannot defend the president on the merits of his behavior.There is little room for error as Schiff pushes the inquiry forward in the coming months. His performance could determine not only Trump's future but also his own. Schiff is a close ally of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and viewed by some as her possible successor. At a recent news conference, Pelosi -- not ordinarily one to cede control -- took the rare step of sitting with reporters to watch admiringly as the congressman spoke."He's a full package," Pelosi said in an interview, praising Schiff as "always gracious, always lovely." She added, "He knows his purpose, and his purpose is not to engage in that silliness that the president is engaged in."A lawyer educated at Stanford University and Harvard Law School, Schiff tried his first big case three decades ago when, as a young federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, he secured the conviction of an FBI agent who was seduced by a Soviet spy and traded secrets for gold and cash. In 1996, he won a seat in the California Senate; in 2000, he was elected to the House by beating a Republican who had been a manager in the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.In Washington, Schiff joined the Blue Dogs, a group of conservative Democrats, and made a name for himself as a national security expert. He joined the Intelligence Committee in 2008 -- drawn to it, Israel said, because he viewed it as "a quiet place for bipartisanship."His breakout moment came in 2014, when the Republican-led House established a committee to investigate attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. Schiff had argued that Democrats should not participate in what he viewed as a partisan exercise, but Pelosi put him on the committee.But it was the election of Trump that elevated Schiff's profile and made him a sought-after speaker and fundraiser in Democratic circles. As the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee last term, when Republicans still had the majority, he vigorously investigated Russian election interference and questions around whether the Trump campaign had conspired with hostile foreign actors, becoming the most recognizable public face explaining the biggest story in Washington on national TV. When Democrats won the majority in the House, he helped Pelosi draft an investigative strategy.Schiff was a late convert to the impeachment push; like Pelosi, he held back until revelations about Ukraine emerged. For the last five weeks, he has spent much of his time in a secure room four floors below the Capitol, overseeing the closed-door questioning of witnesses. He opens each witness interview and sometimes steps in to conduct questioning himself."The American people have a right to know -- they have a need to know -- how deep this misconduct goes," he said, adding, "There's no hiding the president's hand in any of this."These days, Schiff has tried to tightly control his public profile. He goes on television less than he used to and zips wordlessly through the Capitol, trailed by a phalanx of aides and a scrum of journalists, smiling wanly as they pepper him with questions.It has all given him "a new appreciation" of the struggles his celebrity constituents face in maintaining their privacy, he said. And he is well aware that, out there in the rest of the U.S., he has become a polarizing figure."I feel I've become kind of a human focus group," he said during a panel discussion after the screening here. "People will stop me in the airport in close succession. One will come up to me and say, 'Are you Adam Schiff? I just want to shake your hand -- you're my hero,' immediately to be followed by someone else who says, 'Why are you destroying our democracy?' "The congressman paused and concluded that both couldn't be right "because last time I checked, I'm the same person."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/34zFMD4

[bersiuniverse]

LOS ANGELES -- The crowd was buzzing with Hollywood types -- actress Patricia Arquette, producer Norman Lear -- at a private film screening on Sunset Boulevard one recent Sunday afternoon. But here in liberal America, the biggest celebrity in the room was not someone who makes a living in what people call "the industry."It was Rep. Adam Schiff, the straight-laced former federal prosecutor who was on the brink of prosecuting his biggest defendant yet: President Donald Trump.These are heady but perilous days for Schiff, the inscrutable and slightly nerdy chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who is leading the impeachment inquiry into Trump. Adored by the left, reviled by the right, he has become a Rorschach test for U.S. politics. Depending on one's point of view, he is either going to save the republic or destroy it.Here in his home district, at the screening of "The Great Hack," a film about misinformation in the 2016 election, Lear introduced Schiff as a "current American hero." As the audience leapt to its feet in a standing ovation, the congressman emerged from backstage in standard Washington uniform -- navy blazer, white shirt, light blue tie -- his manner as inoffensive as his attire."We thank them for their patriotism," Schiff said somberly, praising whistleblowers, including the anonymous one whose complaint against Trump prompted the impeachment inquiry, "and we hope others will follow their courageous example."Now Schiff, 59, is poised to take a much bigger stage as his inquiry moves from a secure office suite in a Capitol Hill basement into nationally televised public hearings. He will make the case against Trump to a divided nation, in what amounts to an epic courtroom drama meant to unveil evidence of the president's pressure campaign to enlist Ukraine to smear his political rivals -- a moment that is bound to be must-watch TV.At home in his district, which stretches from West Hollywood to Pasadena and north to the San Gabriel Mountains, Schiff is well acquainted with the celebrity lifestyle.He lives with his wife, Eve (yes, Adam and Eve), and their two children in suburban Maryland, but they also have an apartment in Burbank, home to Walt Disney Studios. He favors vegan Chinese food and drives an Audi whose license plate frame bears a line from the movie "The Big Lebowski" ("I don't roll on Shabbos"), from which he can quote at length. He has dabbled at screenwriting, once drafting a script that featured a prosecutor as the hero. He tried stand-up comedy, too, during a fundraiser at the Improv in Hollywood."He did a whole riff on being a nihilist," said one of his best friends, former congressman Steve Israel, who joined him onstage. "Basically, we got told to stick to our day jobs."But if Schiff has a sense of humor (his friends insist he does have a dry one), he rarely shows it in Washington, where he has carefully cultivated his image as the stylistic and substantive opposite of Trump: calm, measured, reserved and brainy.He makes no secret of his disdain for the president, who refers to him as "Little Pencil Neck" or "Shifty Schiff" when he is not replacing the congressman's surname with a similar-sounding expletive. In an interview, Schiff called Trump a "grave risk to our democracy" who is conducting an "amoral presidency" and has debased his office with "infantile" insults."What comes through in the president's comments and his tweets and his outrage and his anger toward me in particular is, this president feels he has a God-given right to abuse his office in any way he sees fit," Schiff said.Trump and his allies, sensing the threat posed by Schiff's inquiry and divided over how to defend the president against damning testimony, have united in trying to undermine the congressman's credibility. They sought unsuccessfully to have the House censure him and have accused him of running a "Soviet-style impeachment inquiry."On Saturday, Trump proclaimed him "a corrupt politician" on Twitter and claimed that if Schiff "is allowed to release transcripts of the Never Trumpers & others that are & were interviewed, he will change the words that were said to suit the Dems purposes."Republicans who work side by side with him on the Intelligence Committee contend that he has changed as his star has risen alongside Trump's. A figure they once saw as a serious and studious policy wonk they now describe in viscerally negative terms, as a liar and a hypocrite who will stop at nothing to oust a duly elected president.Schiff has an "absolute maniacal focus on Donald Trump" said one committee Republican, Rep. Michael Turner of Ohio, who accused Schiff of routinely lying to the press and the public about what happened in private interviews and conducting the inquiry's initial hearings out of public view so he and other Democrats could distort the findings.And Schiff has let the publicity go to his head, Turner said: "Schiff finds the media intoxicating. And he is pretty much willing to do whatever it takes to get to the top of the media cycle."Schiff has made some missteps. His dramatized description of the president's phone call with the leader of Ukraine drew attacks from the president and Republican lawmakers, who said he was fabricating evidence -- and surprised even a close friend, Alice Hill, who knows the congressman from their days as young prosecutors in Los Angeles."I was a bit surprised because he is reserved and not prone to overstatement, very careful with his words, very careful with the facts and keeping to the facts," she said, adding, "It felt out of character."And Schiff's assertion that he had not had any contact with the whistleblower who incited the inquiry drew a "false" rating from The Washington Post; the whistleblower had approached his panel for guidance before filing his complaint. Schiff conceded he "should have been much more clear" about that.Democrats, who are united behind Schiff, counter that the attacks are opportunistic; Republicans, they said, are attacking Schiff over process because they cannot defend the president on the merits of his behavior.There is little room for error as Schiff pushes the inquiry forward in the coming months. His performance could determine not only Trump's future but also his own. Schiff is a close ally of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and viewed by some as her possible successor. At a recent news conference, Pelosi -- not ordinarily one to cede control -- took the rare step of sitting with reporters to watch admiringly as the congressman spoke."He's a full package," Pelosi said in an interview, praising Schiff as "always gracious, always lovely." She added, "He knows his purpose, and his purpose is not to engage in that silliness that the president is engaged in."A lawyer educated at Stanford University and Harvard Law School, Schiff tried his first big case three decades ago when, as a young federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, he secured the conviction of an FBI agent who was seduced by a Soviet spy and traded secrets for gold and cash. In 1996, he won a seat in the California Senate; in 2000, he was elected to the House by beating a Republican who had been a manager in the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.In Washington, Schiff joined the Blue Dogs, a group of conservative Democrats, and made a name for himself as a national security expert. He joined the Intelligence Committee in 2008 -- drawn to it, Israel said, because he viewed it as "a quiet place for bipartisanship."His breakout moment came in 2014, when the Republican-led House established a committee to investigate attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. Schiff had argued that Democrats should not participate in what he viewed as a partisan exercise, but Pelosi put him on the committee.But it was the election of Trump that elevated Schiff's profile and made him a sought-after speaker and fundraiser in Democratic circles. As the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee last term, when Republicans still had the majority, he vigorously investigated Russian election interference and questions around whether the Trump campaign had conspired with hostile foreign actors, becoming the most recognizable public face explaining the biggest story in Washington on national TV. When Democrats won the majority in the House, he helped Pelosi draft an investigative strategy.Schiff was a late convert to the impeachment push; like Pelosi, he held back until revelations about Ukraine emerged. For the last five weeks, he has spent much of his time in a secure room four floors below the Capitol, overseeing the closed-door questioning of witnesses. He opens each witness interview and sometimes steps in to conduct questioning himself."The American people have a right to know -- they have a need to know -- how deep this misconduct goes," he said, adding, "There's no hiding the president's hand in any of this."These days, Schiff has tried to tightly control his public profile. He goes on television less than he used to and zips wordlessly through the Capitol, trailed by a phalanx of aides and a scrum of journalists, smiling wanly as they pepper him with questions.It has all given him "a new appreciation" of the struggles his celebrity constituents face in maintaining their privacy, he said. And he is well aware that, out there in the rest of the U.S., he has become a polarizing figure."I feel I've become kind of a human focus group," he said during a panel discussion after the screening here. "People will stop me in the airport in close succession. One will come up to me and say, 'Are you Adam Schiff? I just want to shake your hand -- you're my hero,' immediately to be followed by someone else who says, 'Why are you destroying our democracy?' "The congressman paused and concluded that both couldn't be right "because last time I checked, I'm the same person."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company

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[lovehardenemycollector]

LOS ANGELES -- The crowd was buzzing with Hollywood types -- actress Patricia Arquette, producer Norman Lear -- at a private film screening on Sunset Boulevard one recent Sunday afternoon. But here in liberal America, the biggest celebrity in the room was not someone who makes a living in what people call "the industry."It was Rep. Adam Schiff, the straight-laced former federal prosecutor who was on the brink of prosecuting his biggest defendant yet: President Donald Trump.These are heady but perilous days for Schiff, the inscrutable and slightly nerdy chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who is leading the impeachment inquiry into Trump. Adored by the left, reviled by the right, he has become a Rorschach test for U.S. politics. Depending on one's point of view, he is either going to save the republic or destroy it.Here in his home district, at the screening of "The Great Hack," a film about misinformation in the 2016 election, Lear introduced Schiff as a "current American hero." As the audience leapt to its feet in a standing ovation, the congressman emerged from backstage in standard Washington uniform -- navy blazer, white shirt, light blue tie -- his manner as inoffensive as his attire."We thank them for their patriotism," Schiff said somberly, praising whistleblowers, including the anonymous one whose complaint against Trump prompted the impeachment inquiry, "and we hope others will follow their courageous example."Now Schiff, 59, is poised to take a much bigger stage as his inquiry moves from a secure office suite in a Capitol Hill basement into nationally televised public hearings. He will make the case against Trump to a divided nation, in what amounts to an epic courtroom drama meant to unveil evidence of the president's pressure campaign to enlist Ukraine to smear his political rivals -- a moment that is bound to be must-watch TV.At home in his district, which stretches from West Hollywood to Pasadena and north to the San Gabriel Mountains, Schiff is well acquainted with the celebrity lifestyle.He lives with his wife, Eve (yes, Adam and Eve), and their two children in suburban Maryland, but they also have an apartment in Burbank, home to Walt Disney Studios. He favors vegan Chinese food and drives an Audi whose license plate frame bears a line from the movie "The Big Lebowski" ("I don't roll on Shabbos"), from which he can quote at length. He has dabbled at screenwriting, once drafting a script that featured a prosecutor as the hero. He tried stand-up comedy, too, during a fundraiser at the Improv in Hollywood."He did a whole riff on being a nihilist," said one of his best friends, former congressman Steve Israel, who joined him onstage. "Basically, we got told to stick to our day jobs."But if Schiff has a sense of humor (his friends insist he does have a dry one), he rarely shows it in Washington, where he has carefully cultivated his image as the stylistic and substantive opposite of Trump: calm, measured, reserved and brainy.He makes no secret of his disdain for the president, who refers to him as "Little Pencil Neck" or "Shifty Schiff" when he is not replacing the congressman's surname with a similar-sounding expletive. In an interview, Schiff called Trump a "grave risk to our democracy" who is conducting an "amoral presidency" and has debased his office with "infantile" insults."What comes through in the president's comments and his tweets and his outrage and his anger toward me in particular is, this president feels he has a God-given right to abuse his office in any way he sees fit," Schiff said.Trump and his allies, sensing the threat posed by Schiff's inquiry and divided over how to defend the president against damning testimony, have united in trying to undermine the congressman's credibility. They sought unsuccessfully to have the House censure him and have accused him of running a "Soviet-style impeachment inquiry."On Saturday, Trump proclaimed him "a corrupt politician" on Twitter and claimed that if Schiff "is allowed to release transcripts of the Never Trumpers & others that are & were interviewed, he will change the words that were said to suit the Dems purposes."Republicans who work side by side with him on the Intelligence Committee contend that he has changed as his star has risen alongside Trump's. A figure they once saw as a serious and studious policy wonk they now describe in viscerally negative terms, as a liar and a hypocrite who will stop at nothing to oust a duly elected president.Schiff has an "absolute maniacal focus on Donald Trump" said one committee Republican, Rep. Michael Turner of Ohio, who accused Schiff of routinely lying to the press and the public about what happened in private interviews and conducting the inquiry's initial hearings out of public view so he and other Democrats could distort the findings.And Schiff has let the publicity go to his head, Turner said: "Schiff finds the media intoxicating. And he is pretty much willing to do whatever it takes to get to the top of the media cycle."Schiff has made some missteps. His dramatized description of the president's phone call with the leader of Ukraine drew attacks from the president and Republican lawmakers, who said he was fabricating evidence -- and surprised even a close friend, Alice Hill, who knows the congressman from their days as young prosecutors in Los Angeles."I was a bit surprised because he is reserved and not prone to overstatement, very careful with his words, very careful with the facts and keeping to the facts," she said, adding, "It felt out of character."And Schiff's assertion that he had not had any contact with the whistleblower who incited the inquiry drew a "false" rating from The Washington Post; the whistleblower had approached his panel for guidance before filing his complaint. Schiff conceded he "should have been much more clear" about that.Democrats, who are united behind Schiff, counter that the attacks are opportunistic; Republicans, they said, are attacking Schiff over process because they cannot defend the president on the merits of his behavior.There is little room for error as Schiff pushes the inquiry forward in the coming months. His performance could determine not only Trump's future but also his own. Schiff is a close ally of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and viewed by some as her possible successor. At a recent news conference, Pelosi -- not ordinarily one to cede control -- took the rare step of sitting with reporters to watch admiringly as the congressman spoke."He's a full package," Pelosi said in an interview, praising Schiff as "always gracious, always lovely." She added, "He knows his purpose, and his purpose is not to engage in that silliness that the president is engaged in."A lawyer educated at Stanford University and Harvard Law School, Schiff tried his first big case three decades ago when, as a young federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, he secured the conviction of an FBI agent who was seduced by a Soviet spy and traded secrets for gold and cash. In 1996, he won a seat in the California Senate; in 2000, he was elected to the House by beating a Republican who had been a manager in the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.In Washington, Schiff joined the Blue Dogs, a group of conservative Democrats, and made a name for himself as a national security expert. He joined the Intelligence Committee in 2008 -- drawn to it, Israel said, because he viewed it as "a quiet place for bipartisanship."His breakout moment came in 2014, when the Republican-led House established a committee to investigate attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. Schiff had argued that Democrats should not participate in what he viewed as a partisan exercise, but Pelosi put him on the committee.But it was the election of Trump that elevated Schiff's profile and made him a sought-after speaker and fundraiser in Democratic circles. As the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee last term, when Republicans still had the majority, he vigorously investigated Russian election interference and questions around whether the Trump campaign had conspired with hostile foreign actors, becoming the most recognizable public face explaining the biggest story in Washington on national TV. When Democrats won the majority in the House, he helped Pelosi draft an investigative strategy.Schiff was a late convert to the impeachment push; like Pelosi, he held back until revelations about Ukraine emerged. For the last five weeks, he has spent much of his time in a secure room four floors below the Capitol, overseeing the closed-door questioning of witnesses. He opens each witness interview and sometimes steps in to conduct questioning himself."The American people have a right to know -- they have a need to know -- how deep this misconduct goes," he said, adding, "There's no hiding the president's hand in any of this."These days, Schiff has tried to tightly control his public profile. He goes on television less than he used to and zips wordlessly through the Capitol, trailed by a phalanx of aides and a scrum of journalists, smiling wanly as they pepper him with questions.It has all given him "a new appreciation" of the struggles his celebrity constituents face in maintaining their privacy, he said. And he is well aware that, out there in the rest of the U.S., he has become a polarizing figure."I feel I've become kind of a human focus group," he said during a panel discussion after the screening here. "People will stop me in the airport in close succession. One will come up to me and say, 'Are you Adam Schiff? I just want to shake your hand -- you're my hero,' immediately to be followed by someone else who says, 'Why are you destroying our democracy?' "The congressman paused and concluded that both couldn't be right "because last time I checked, I'm the same person."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company

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