About 2 hours actually. From Democracy Now.

Transcript

Transcript

Transcript

It is a huge mistake to rush Impeachment. Limited to just the Ukraine Scandal alone it implicates in Criminal Activity practically everyone in the Administration and many Republican Members of Congress.

All of whom have no even spurious immunity to indictment, prosecution, and conviction.

Enjoy your time in prison.

Explosive new revelations just weakened Trump’s impeachment defenses
By Greg Sargent, Washington Post
Dec. 30, 2019

If Mitch McConnell is going to pull off his scheme to turn President Trump’s impeachment trial into a quick and painless sham with no witnesses, the Senate majority leader needs the story to be covered as a conventional Washington standoff — one that portrays both sides as maneuvering for advantage in an equivalently political manner.

But extraordinary new revelations in the New York Times about Trump’s corrupt freezing of military aid to Ukraine will — or should — make this much harder to get away with.

McConnell badly needs the media’s both-sidesing instincts to hold firm against the brute facts of the situation. If Republicans bear the brunt of media pressure to explain why they don’t want to hear from witnesses, that risks highlighting their true rationale: They adamantly fear new revelations precisely because they know Trump is guilty — and that this corrupt scheme is almost certainly much worse than we can currently surmise.

That possibility is underscored by the Times report, a chronology of Trump’s decision to withhold aid to a vulnerable ally under assault while he and his henchmen extorted Ukraine into carrying out his corrupt designs.

The report demonstrates in striking detail that inside the administration, the consternation over the legality and propriety of the aid freeze — and confusion over Trump’s true motives — ran much deeper than previously known, implicating top Cabinet officials more deeply than we thought.

Among the story’s key points:

• As early as June, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney worked to execute the freeze for Trump, and a top aide to Mulvaney — Robert Blair — worried it would fuel the narrative that Trump was tacitly aiding Russia.
• Internal opposition was more forceful than previously known. The Pentagon pushed for the money for months. Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and then-national security adviser John Bolton privately urged Trump to understand that freezing the aid was not in our national interest.
• Trump was unmoved, citing Ukraine’s “corruption.” We now know Trump actually wanted Ukraine to announce sham investigations absolving Russia of 2016 electoral sabotage and smearing potential 2020 opponent Joe Biden. The Times report reveals that top Trump officials did not think that ostensibly combating Ukrainian “corruption” (which wasn’t even Trump’s real aim) was in our interests.
• Lawyers at the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) worked to develop a far-fetched legal argument that Trump could exercise commander-in-chief authority to override Congress’ appropriation of the aid, to get around the law precluding Trump from freezing it.
• Michael Duffey, a political appointee at OMB, tried to get the Pentagon to assume responsibility for getting the aid released, to deflect blame away from the White House for its own role in blocking it. This led a Pentagon official to pronounce herself “speechless.”
• Duffey froze the aid with highly unusual bureaucratic tactics, refused to tell Pentagon officials why Trump wanted it withheld and instructed them to keep this “closely held.” (Some of this had already been reported, but in narrative context it becomes far more damning.)

It’s impossible to square all this with the lines from Trump’s defenders — that there was no pressure on Ukraine; that the money was withheld for reasonable policy purposes; and that there was no extortion because it was ultimately released. As the Times shows, that only came after the scheme was outed.

Multiple officials worried that the hold violated the law or worked extensively to skirt it. Others saw Trump’s actions as contrary to the national interest and never got a sufficient explanation for his motives. One top official executing the scheme tried to distance the White House from it and keep it quiet.

Multiple officials worried that the hold violated the law or worked extensively to skirt it. Others saw Trump’s actions as contrary to the national interest and never got a sufficient explanation for his motives. One top official executing the scheme tried to distance the White House from it and keep it quiet.

What makes all this new information really damning, however, is that many of these officials who were directly involved with Trump’s freezing of aid are the same ones Trump blocked from appearing before the House impeachment inquiry.

This should make it inescapable that McConnell wants a trial with no testimony from these people — Democrats want to hear from Mulvaney, Bolton, Duffey and Blair — precisely because he, too, wants to prevent us from ever gaining a full accounting.

We now have a much clearer glimpse into the murky depths of just how much more these officials know about the scheme — and just how much McConnell and Trump are determined to make sure we don’t ever learn. That’s so indefensible that it might even breach the levee of the media’s both-sidesing tendencies.

Here’s another possibility. If McConnell does pull off a sham trial leading to a quick acquittal, more might surface later that, in retrospect, will get hung around Republicans’ necks and reverse-reveal just how corrupt their cover-up really was.

As George T. Conway III has noted, in such a scenario, Trump’s defenders will suffer blowback from “the very evidence they sought to suppress.”
…
Do they really want to be on the hook for having suppressed such evidence, even in the face of a whole new round of deeply incriminating revelations?

Apparently they see that outcome as less risky than allowing witnesses to testify. Which again shows how worried they are about allowing the American people to gain a full accounting of Trump’s corruption.

Lew Black’s Annual Roundup on the Daily Show

Ronny Chieng- 2019 Was Stupid

Make perfectly fine, loving companion animals and probably should not be killed, especially with fire.

Right Wing Republican Conspiracy Theories on the other hand…

Graham: Rudy Should Scrub Evidence for Russian Propaganda
by Erin Banco and Asawin Suebsaeng, Daily Beast
Dec. 29, 2019

In the weeks leading up to their impeachment trial, senators on Capitol Hill are actively avoiding meeting with President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani — partly because they fear he might try to pass off Russian conspiracy theories as fact, according to interviews with more than half a dozen Republican and Democratic lawmakers and aides.

On his trip to Kyiv last month, Giuliani met with former general prosecutors and parliamentarians known for peddling Russian conspiracy theories, including supposed plots that involve Ukrainian intervention in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter. When he arrived back in Washington, Giuliani updated Trump, according to two individuals with knowledge of their conversation, and said publicly the president asked him to brief Republican senators about the information he gathered.

“He wants me to do it,” Giuliani told The Washington Post in an interview earlier this month. “I’m working on pulling it together and hope to have it done by the end of the week.”

Since then, though, various lawmakers, as well as administration officials and national security brass, have privately expressed concerns about Giuliani’s latest Ukraine jaunt, given that the Trump lawyer’s efforts are what helped create this Ukraine scandal and get the president impeached in the first place. Both Democrat and Republican senators have steered clear of the president’s personal attorney over concern that the information he is trying to disseminate originated from figures in Ukraine known for spinning the truth or spreading outright lies.

“He has not shared any of that information with me,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) about the information Giuliani obtained overseas. “My advice to Giuliani would be to share what he got from Ukraine with the IC [intelligence community] to make sure it’s not Russia propaganda. I’m very suspicious of what the Russians are up to all over the world.”

Graham earlier this month called on Giuliani to testify in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on allegations that Biden helped his son get a lucrative job at Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company.

While in Kyiv, Giuliani met with Andriy Derkach, a self-described political independent who attended the Dzerzhinsky Higher School of the KGB in Moscow and was for a time a member of the pro-Russia party—the Party of Regions—in the Ukrainian parliament. He also met with Oleksandr Dubinksy, a member of the parliament known for his close ties to controversial Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky. He and Derkach consistently disseminate conspiracy theories on Facebook and elsewhere. The Daily Beast recently obtained a dossier that in part contained the debunked claim that Ukraine intervened in the 2016 presidential election, a claim which had been disseminated by Derkach to Americans, including senior officials, close to President Trump.

That claim and others were aired on One America News shortly after Giuliani’s visit in a documentary-style show. OAN traveled with Giuliani to Ukraine for his meetings with Derkach and Dubinksy and are currently working on a fourth segment to air sometime in the coming weeks.

Oh, you want to see it? Ok.

A pack of lies straight from Putin, the Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye, and the Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsii. Who’s your favorite network now?

To continue-

As senators prep for the impeachment trial they are distancing themselves, now publicly, from Giuliani in an attempt to steer clear of his less-than-reliable associates in Kyiv.
…
“I wouldn’t trust Rudy to represent me in a parking dispute so I’d say avoid,” a senior GOP Senate aide said tersely when asked if it was a good idea for Republican senators to meet with Giuliani to get a Ukraine briefing. Another top aide in a different Republican office said their senator had informed staff that they had “no interest at all” in meeting with Giuliani on this, fearing it would amount to a “waste of time,” if not something worse.

And it’s not just Capitol Hill that’s worried about associating with Giuliani.

“I do not want my name showing up in a [news] story about what Rudy and the president discuss,” said one senior White House official. “I don’t want my text messages with [Giuliani] being all over cable news,” this official continued, referencing the incident when Trump’s personal lawyer went on Fox News and unveiled texts sent between him and Kurt Volker, the former U.S. special envoy to Ukraine. As The Daily Beast reported in early December, senior officials in the State Department and within the national security apparatus began worrying that Giuliani’s ongoing crusade (which has been explicitly blessed and personally encouraged by President Trump) could hurt American foreign policy, and it even got to the point where these officials frantically devoted resources to tracking his foreign movements and figuring out who he was meeting with in Europe.

When asked about Sen. Graham’s recommendation to approach the intelligence community with his materials, and if he agreed that he should do so as due diligence, Giuliani would only reply to The Daily Beast, “It’s not Russian propaganda.”

No, of course it isn’t.

The Secrets of Jewish Genius
By Bret Stephens, The New York Times
Dec. 27, 2019

Now, I’m going to stop right there to point out a few things. This is The New York Times which means it’s base readership includes a number of people with Semitic heritage some of whom are entirely secular. Many of the ‘Geniuses’ cited were notable Atheists. Despite Executive Orders to the contrary ‘Judaism’ is a religion not a race. You can convert if you want to (No lobster? Non-starter.).

Now to be fair to Bret perhaps it’s not his headline. These things happen. The problem is the content is not just Anti-Semitic, it’s Racist.

Jews are, or tend to be, smart. When it comes to Ashkenazi Jews, it’s true. “Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average I.Q. of any ethnic group for which there are reliable data,” noted one 2005 paper. “During the 20th century, they made up about 3 percent of the U.S. population but won 27 percent of the U.S. Nobel science prizes and 25 percent of the ACM Turing awards. They account for more than half of world chess champions.”

Ok, generally speaking, like Islam Judism has 2 branches, Ashkenazi and Sephardic. Sephardic literally means “Spanish Jews” and for nearly a thousand years they lived a relatively unpersecuted existence under the protection of Muslims who regarded them as fellow “people of the Book” (as indeed they did Christians, terribly tolerant folks those Muslims). Spain was the home of many famous and influential Rabbis and one could argue (and Sephardic Jews will until you distract them with something else) that their practices and rituals are more authentic representations of Abraham, Moses, David, and Solomon because they were not repressed.

In Catholic Europe however the Ashkenazi were brutally oppressed and often had to ‘pass’ to avoid harassment.

Territories under the Byzantines and later the Eastern Orthodox Church also allowed more open religious expression for Jews and the Rabbis of Spain developed large followings.

So Sephardic Jews tend to be a bit more Hispanic, more Slavic, and fit the Anti-Semitic stereotypes of sub-human Neanderthals while the “civilized”, assimilated (or beaten into compliance, take your pick) Ashkenazi are good Jews, bright Jews, cultured Jews. The kind you want doing your taxes because they’re good with money, you’d hardly notice they were Jewish at all unless you gang showered with them at the Country Club (for the record I am both circumcised and not Jewish).

You know, the kind that are replacing all us good decent Christian White folks.

The descendants of European immigrants do not govern the United Sates of America today. The foreign and domestic policies of the country are made by Jews and their lackeys. Julius Streicher

We hung him for War Crimes.

Jewish people are overly represented in certain professions because they were excluded from others, same as women and blacks. Why do you think the Irish are stereotyped as Bar Owners, Cops, and Firemen? It’s not an indicator of a vast Irish conspiracy.

Though if I said so do you think I would get as famous as “Q”?