Be Careful, be careful, be careful.
You know, what you wish for.
Cody Johnston on what Atrios calls- Criming.
Nov 21 2019
Cartnoon
Staten Island. Go figure.
Of course only the sentimental hang in the City, Westchester and Tri-State. I’m sure the family living in the gated compound at the bottom of the street are fine upstanding “General Contractors” and “Bonded” just the way their business cards say.
Lock our doors? Why bother?
I’m smart! Not like everybody says! Not Dumb! I’m smart! And I want respect!
Fredo, you’re nothing to me now. You’re not a brother, you’re not a friend. I don’t want to know you or what you do. I don’t want to see you at the hotels, I don’t want you near my house. When you see our mother, I want to know a day in advance, so I won’t be there. You understand?
…
I don’t want anything to happen to him while my Mother is alive.
Though.
Nov 21 2019
Impeachment: Day 5 Testimony
Thank the heavens it’s Thursday and the last day of scheduled hearings. There are none on the calendar for next week but that could change. On Monday, A federal judge intends to rule, no later than the end of the day Monday, November 25, on whether former White House counsel Donald McGahn must testify under subpoena to Congress. The House Judiciary Committee asked her to accelerate a decision because it aims to call him after the current round of public impeachment hearings finish in December. Merry Christmas, Donnie. By now, Trump would be basking in the glow of the Florida sunshine and members of his resort, Mar-a-Lago, instead he’s sulking in the White House and lashing out on Twitter and reporters on the lawn.
I was wrong about yesterday’s hearing being a breeze, they were another marathon lasting into the early evening. NBC’s “Late Night” host Seth Meyer’s had a good summary of US Ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sutherland’s testimony. where he threw, not just Donnie, but everyone under the bus. My guess is he’s trying to avoid being charged with perjury.
Along with Ms. Hill, Ukraine embassy political counselor David Holmes will testify about the phone conversation between Trump and Amb. Sondland in a Kyev restaurant on July 26 the day after Trump spoke with the new Ukrainian president asking for “a favor.” Mr. Holmes was discovered during the testimony of acting US ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor last week. He testified behind closed doors on November 15 and it can be read here.
The hearing is scheduled to start at 9:30 AM ET.
Nov 21 2019
The Breakfast Club (Absurdities)
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Thomas Edison says he’s invented the phonograph; Gap revealed on Nixon White House tape; Final victim dies in America’s anthrax scare; Jonathan Pollard arrested; ‘Anything Goes’ opens on Broadway.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
Nov 21 2019
For the Record: Day 4
Opening Session- Gordon Sondland
Afternoon Session- Laura Cooper and David Hale
Nov 20 2019
So… That Went Well.
It’s a mite hard to walk back when your personal appointment, a man who likes you enough to pay a good chunk of cold hard cash in return for a Title of Nobility, says that you in fact offered a $398 Million bribe of illegally delayed United States assistance duly appropriated and legally allocated by both Houses of Congress and signed into Law (the withholding is the Extortion part, the money is the Bribe) and besides-
The crime is that you asked at all. Investigating Hunter Biden and Crowdstrike is soliciting a foreign contribution to a political campaign.
I mean besides that Bribery part that is actually in the Constitution!
Gordon Sondland just made this scandal a whole lot bigger
By Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman, Washington Post
November 20, 201
Gordon Sondland just made the scandal already consuming Donald Trump’s presidency a whole lot bigger than it was only 12 hours ago.
And that means Democrats are going to have to rethink what comes next.
In his bombshell testimony, Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, implicated numerous members of Trump’s Cabinet in this unfolding story to a far greater degree than before.
In just a few hours, Sondland unleashed a fusillade of revelations that suddenly bring us face to face with much bigger questions about the roles played by acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Vice President Pence.
As a bonus, Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani is now far more deeply implicated as well.
…
“This got a whole lot bigger,” former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner told us. “Sondland just testified that the official channel included everything that Giuliani was insisting on.”First, Sondland — who said unequivocally that the White House meeting the Ukrainian president sought was used as leverage — implicated Mulvaney by stating that Mulvaney could confirm whether Trump also froze the hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to extort Ukraine into doing Trump’s bidding.
Sondland, who conveyed that extortion demand about the military aid directly to Ukrainian officials, repeatedly testified that Trump never directly told him to do this. But Trump and Sondland communicated about it, and it’s likely Trump used mob-boss language to create this plausible deniability for himself. But we may never know for sure.
Mulvaney, though, personally froze the aid at Trump’s direction, a week before his July 25 call with the Ukrainian president. So now that Sondland has directly fingered Mulvaney as the person who can shed light on Trump’s motives, it’s a lot more urgent to hear from him.
Second, Sondland implicated Pence by saying he personally informed Pence of concerns over the frozen military aid, and communicated to Pence that he understood that the money (and the meeting) were conditional on Ukraine announcing the investigations Trump wanted.
“The vice president nodded, like, you know, he heard what I said,” Sondland recounted. Under Democratic questioning, Sondland clarified that Pence didn’t dissent from what Sondland told him. While Pence quickly issued a denial, this, too, underscores the need to learn more.
And Sondland implicated Pompeo by saying Pompeo had direct knowledge of his own view that the frozen military aid’s fate was linked to Ukraine doing Trump’s bidding.
…
Put all this together, and it’s going to be a whole lot harder to do a full reckoning without a much more extensive effort to nail down the new revelations involving those major figures.At the same time, the scale of the new revelations — and the degree to which much of the government is directly implicated in this effort to corrupt the next election on Trump’s behalf — makes doing that full reckoning far more urgent.
“Based on the way this is expanding, I think it’s in our national interest to hold everyone accountable for their involvement,” Kirschner told us. “The case for broadening this is an institutional and a national one.”
“When you have our top government officials involved in extorting a vulnerable nation that’s supposed to be an ally, and weaponizing our relationship with them for the president, if we don’t expand and hold them all accountable, then shame on us,” Kirschner continued.
This would, of course, entail trying to subpoena testimony from all those officials — or at least Mulvaney, Pompeo and Giuliani — and then going to court to force them to testify, since they will continue refusing. Which might take months.
We are sensitive to the fact that the Democratic House is made up of many members with differing political needs, including some who might not want this to drag on. We are also sensitive to the possibility that extending it could cause political support for impeachment to dissipate. It’s not clear to us there’s any evidence this would happen, but we wouldn’t dismiss it as a possibility.
But other things have now been forced upon us by what we’ve seen in the past couple of weeks. House Republicans have shown staggering bad faith and dishonesty in dismissing one stunning revelation after another.
Again and again, they’ve responded by retreating more deeply into the alternative universe they’re concocting, robotically reverting to absurd conspiracy theories that are designed to keep up the corrupt goals Trump has adhered to all along, of absolving Russia of its 2016 attack on our political system and using the levers of government to rig the next election on his behalf.
Given all this, turning the whole affair over to a Senate trial run by Republicans operating in equivalent bad faith should be more worrisome in light of the mind-boggling scale of what we’re now witnessing.
This is a profoundly difficult moment, and we aren’t sure what the answers are. But it does seem clear that the exponential growth of this scandal should call forth a serious rethinking of where this is all going.
Yeah, if facts meant anything it would be game over dude.
What I like about this testimony is the net is wide. These people are Criminals and should rot in Spandau. Nancy, take the time to do this right. At the end the whole Republican Party needs to be tossed on the ash heap of History.
Nov 20 2019
Pondering the Pundits
Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from> around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.
Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt
Paul Krugman: Doing the Health Care Two-Step
Medium-size reform creates the conditions for bigger things.
Recent state elections — the Democratic landslide in Virginia, followed by Democratic gubernatorial victories in Kentucky and Louisiana — have been bad news for Donald Trump.
Among other things, the election results vindicate polls indicating that Trump is historically unpopular. All of these races were in part referendums on Trump, who put a lot of effort into backing his preferred candidates. And in each case voters gave him a clear thumbs down.
Beyond offering a verdict on Trump, however, I’d argue that the state elections offered some guidance on an issue that has divided Democrats, namely health care. What the results suggested to me was the virtue of medium-size reform: incremental enough to have a good chance of being enacted, big enough to provide tangible benefits that voters don’t want taken away.
Remember, there was a third governor’s race, in Mississippi, in which the G.O.P. held on. True, Mississippi is a very red state, which Trump won by 18 points in 2016. But Louisiana and Kentucky are or were, if anything, even redder, with Trump margins of 20 and 30 points respectively. So what made the difference?
Michelle Goldberg: Stephen Miller Is a White Nationalist. Does It Matter?
Leaked emails from a top Trump aide test our capacity for outrage.
We’re about to find out how far the already impossibly low standards to which we hold the Trump administration have fallen since then. Last week, the Southern Poverty Law Center published evidence of the white nationalism of Stephen Miller, President Trump’s senior immigration adviser. The S.P.L.C. obtained more than 900 emails from 2015 and 2016 that Miller, who was then an aide to Senator Jeff Sessions, sent to editors at the far-right website Breitbart to shape its coverage of race and immigration. The group got the emails from Katie McHugh, a former Breitbart editor who, after being fired for anti-Muslim tweets, moved even further right before renouncing racism. The emails show that Miller was steeped in white nationalism before he joined the White House, where he’s had the opportunity to put his racist views into practice. [..]
Though the revelations about Miller aren’t surprising, it’s important that they not be swept away by the torrent of other news, lest we admit that even the degraded standards of 2018 no longer apply. “This is a smoking gun,” said Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has been leading the call for Miller’s resignation in Congress, adding, “We didn’t know this, because if we did, we would have demanded his resignation much earlier, and in a much more forceful way.”
Trump is, of course, unlikely to jettison his xenophobic homunculus. “Stephen is not going anywhere,” a senior White House official told The Daily Beast last week. “The president has his back.” But the pressure on Trump, and, perhaps more important, on his supporters in Congress, is only going to build.
Jamelle Bouie: Republicans Are Following Trump to Nowhere
There’s an impeachment lesson hiding in the president’s failure to produce the political results he wants.
Americans have gone to the polls four times this month to vote in major, statewide races. In Virginia, they voted for control of the state Legislature; in Mississippi, Kentucky and Louisiana, they voted for control of the governor’s mansion. In each case, President Trump tied himself to the outcome. [..]
Trump thought voters would repudiate impeachment and vindicate him. Instead, they did the opposite. Virginia Democrats won a legislative majority for the first time since 1993, flipping historically Republican districts. Kentucky Democrats beat incumbent Gov. Matt Bevin in a state Trump won by 30 points in 2016. And Louisiana Democrats re-elected Governor John Bel Edwards in a state Trump won by the more modest but still substantial margin of 20 points. Democrats in Mississippi made significant gains even as they fell short of victory — their nominee for governor, Jim Hood, lost by five-and-a-half points, a dramatic turnaround from four years ago, when Republican Phil Bryant won in a landslide. [..]
But just because no one ran on impeachment doesn’t mean it wasn’t in the air. Voters could have shown they were tired of Democratic investigations. They could have elevated the president’s allies. Instead, voters handed Trump an unambiguous defeat. And that is much more than just a blow to the president’s immediate political fortunes.
Katrina vanden Heuvel: The furor over Medicare-for-all ignores a key question
In the Democratic presidential debate, Medicare-for-all has been probed and dissected as if it were an extraterrestrial alien rather than a logical extension of Medicare, the most popular U.S. medical program. Debate moderators have drilled down on the cost of Medicare-for-all, ignoring the fact that it would cost less and cover more than our existing system. Pete Buttigieg, the largest recipient of health-care industry donations outside of President Trump, bashes its champions, Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), for wanting to increase taxes on the middle class while booting “150 million Americans off their insurance in four short years.” Former vice president Joe Biden labels Warren as “angry,” “condescending” and “elitist.”
Ignored in the furor is what might be the most incredible assertion in the health-care debate: the claim by the centrists that they can provide health care to everyone for less money than Medicare-for-all by cobbling a public option onto our current system. Americans, they claim, can have their choice between private insurance or a public system like Medicare.
It doesn’t take much reflection to realize that this is a real stretch. Adding a public option on top of our current system would continue the staggering administrative waste of the private insurance system. About 30 percent of every health-care dollar is squandered on administrative overhead — largely the paperwork, the pre-approvals, denials and appeals that are inherent in a system of for-profit private insurance companies. That’s about $1 trillion a year. Medicare-for-all can cut that trillion dollars in half by eliminating that bureaucratic waste. To continue to pay for that waste, a public option system will either end up as Medicare for All Who Can Afford It — rationed by cost, with tens of millions deprived of adequate health care — or it will cost far more than Medicare-for-all.
.
Simon Tisdall: Donald Trump has dragged America’s global reputation to an all-time low
The president’s disdain for democracy, adulation for autocrats and contempt for the global rules-based order poses a unique peril. Ditching Trump in 2020 would be a gift to the world
Europeans, if they can bear to watch, are observing US politics with a mixture of fascination and horror – and it’s all down to Donald Trump. Each week seems to bring another democracy-shattering rumpus, scandalous revelation or shocking tweet. The depth and evident bitterness of America’s public divisions are unsettling for friends and allies who count on dependable US leadership.
It is hard to overstate how badly Trump has hurt America’s worldwide reputation. US presidents have been internationally unpopular before – George W Bush over Iraq, for example, or LBJ over Vietnam. But Trump has sunk to an all-time low. [..]
Trump’s admiration for authoritarian regimes and “strongman” leaders such as Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, when set alongside his electoral shenanigans at home, has strengthened the view that he is no friend to democracy – at a time when democracies everywhere are under sustained attack.
The US under Trump’s baleful tutelage is not only losing influence and respect. It is also, increasingly, a source of and contributor to global woes and instabilities. His unilateral, nationalistic, self-defeating approach threatens deepening trouble across the board next year.
Nov 20 2019
Your Daily Shooting Gallery
Anybody who thinks that ‘it doesn’t matter who’s President’ has never been Drafted and sent off to fight and die in a vicious, stupid war on the other side of the world-or been beaten and gassed by Police for trespassing on public property-or been hounded by the IRS for purely political reasons-or locked up in the Cook County Jail with a broken nose and no phone access and twelve perverts wanting to stomp your ass in the shower. That is when it matters who is President or Governor or Police Chief. That is when you will wish you had voted.
I never leave the house without feeling the target and I’m Ben Franklin. I try to be woke and understand how much worse it could be. I’d bunker up but it might be misunderstood (“He was a good neighbor, always quiet, kept to himself.”) and as we see it’s no help.
Nov 20 2019
Cartnoon
So my great worked the Zone and toughed out some notable hardships including that time when the raisins in his table mate’s Oatmeal started moving. There was kind of like a ‘good luck’ ritual when you arrived. You flung your boater (or ‘Panama’ Hat) into the harbor on your arrival to signal a resolve to stay.
Raisin guy didn’t make it.
What? I surprised you with a Marxist Class piece instead of a hah hah funny piece?
Are you really surprised? Really?
A Lemonade. A nice cold glass a Lemonade. Hey Boss, I’m goin’ a good.
Gentlemen.
Chicolini here may talk like an idiot, and look like an idiot, but don’t let that fool you.
He really is an idiot.
Nov 20 2019
Impeachment: Day 4 Testimony
After yesterday’s marathon of the testimony of four witnesses, today should be a breeze with just three witnesses but the first one is a doozy, US European Union Ambassador Gordon Sondland, and Trump millionaire buddy, who has boxed himself into a perjury corner.
Sondland was assigned by President Trump to coordinate Ukrainian policy outside the normal chain of command with Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Kurt Volker, who was a special envoy to Ukraine. He gave his initial deposition behind closed doors on October 17. Sondland revised his testimony on November 5 and may have to once again after NSC Russia expert Tim Morrison’s testimony yesterday, or take the fifth. His original November 5th deposition can be read here
Pentagon official for Ukraine and Russia Laura Cooper is the next witness who testified former US special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker told her Ukrainian officials were alarmed in August that US security aid was being held up. She said Volker told her in their meeting that he was attempting to lift the hold on the aid by having the Ukrainians deliver a public statement that they would launch the investigations being sought by President Donald Trump. Her deposition is here.
The final witness of the day will be David Hale, under secretary of state for political affairs. His public testimony was requested by House Republicans He testified in a closed hearing on November 6 that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called Fox News host Sean Hannity last spring to ask about the smear campaign launched against former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. Hale noted that Pompeo spoke to Rudolph Giuliani twice in late March regarding the allegations. I have no idea Republicans would want him to appear in public. His deposition can be read here.
The hearing is scheduled to start at 9:30 AM ET.
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