The point is the origin story has been told so many times in so many contradictory ways that is hard to tell who the Dark Knight’s nemesis really is.

I suspect the Clown Primce of Crime appreciates that. Probably thinks it’s a hoot.

High in the Middle and Round at Both Ends

Lebensborn

Amber

Seth

Basketball Again?

Stephen

It appears that one of the main lines of Republican defense of Unindicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio is endless parroting of “No Quid Pro Quo” which I find annoying because “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” and of course whether there is or isn’t any “Quid Pro Quo” is utterly irrelevant to the case for Impeachment.

This is in keeping with the primary Republican strategy right along- Lie, Stonewall, Obfuscate, and Distract.

As I recently mentioned–

Unindicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio solicited a Campaign contribution from a Foreign Government. That is illegal because it breaks Campaign Finance Law. It’s also Unconstitutional because it violates the Emoluments Clause. Unindicted Co-Conspirator withheld the property of the Government who’s favor he was soliciting. This is highly Illegal, it’s called Extortion. He did so with money duly authorized by the Congress, both Houses, in a lawful appropriation authorized by his signature scrawl. This is Contempt of Congress. This is failure to uphold your Oath of Office to ensure the laws of the United States are faithfully executed.

And this is all indisputable. He has admitted it, sometimes on Video Tape. Sometimes he’s been Taped in the commission of the crime itself.

So I come up with 4 Articles of Impeachment based just on this (though I think limiting yourself is misguided).

I. Criminal Acts– Campaign Finance Violation, Extortion (Quid Pro Quo unnecessary), Lying to Congresss (yep, illegal), Failure to disburse appropriated funds in a timely manner without cause (also).

II. Constitutional Violations– Failure to see tha Laws are faithfully executed (Oath Violation, Appropriations are Laws), Seeking an item of value from Foreign Governments or Nationals (Emoluments Clause, does not require actual receipt of item- simply soliciting it is the violation).

III. Contempt of Congress– Subpoenas mean something.

IV. Abuse of Power– It might not be technically illegal, but it is certainly an indicator of unfitness for Office to use the Full Authority, Power, and Majesty of the United States to bully a Sovereign Foreign Government into performing a petty personal errand for you.

Why is Quid Pro Quo not relevant?

Well, first why it does not mean what they think it means. Quid Pro Quo means “This For That” and is of course the essence of any enforcable contract. It carries the implication, however, that the deal is corrupt and the exact nature of the terms must be hidden because of… consequences, there are all types.

Quid Pro Quo is not a necessary element of every crime. In Extortion for instance, it is sufficient to prove that the person performing the act of the Extortion had the intention of receiving something, whether the victim was aware of it or not. Likewise the item sought doesn’t have to have any actual value, that the Extortionist wanted it is enough.

Bribery would seem to be based on exchange, but it’s not. For one thing, there’s “Attempted” Bribery which carries about the same penalties. Nope, it’s based on who is actively seeking the item of value and who makes the first offer of an exchange. I want a Building Permit. If I offer you money to “expedite” it I’m guilty of Bribery if you accept and Attempted Bribery if you don’t.

And Impeachment is not about criminality anyway, being a criminal is just a really, really good reason to do it. It is Political and simply a way to stop the damage being caused by removing the one causing it from the Office that is enabling them to do it.

You can send them to prison later.

Here’s the quid pro quo proof, Lindsey Graham
The Washington Post
October 22, 2019

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham, one of President Trump’s most ardent defenders in the Ukraine affair, has said he sees no evidence of wrongdoing in the president’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, during which Mr. Trump pressed for investigations of former vice president Joe Biden and his son and the 2016 hack of the Democratic National Committee, while dangling a White House meeting that Mr. Zelensky wanted. But Mr. Graham did say the other day that “if you could show me that, you know, Trump was actually engaging in a quid pro quo, outside the phone call, that would be very disturbing.”

We think we can help the South Carolina Republican. Evidently he has not followed closely the depositions and documents collected by three House committees from present and former senior administration officials. If he had, he would see they contain clear proof that Mr. Trump, acting directly and through his lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, repeatedly demanded a pledge from Mr. Zelensky to open those political investigations to obtain an Oval Office invitation. There is evidence that U.S. military aid was dependent on the probes, as well.

We think we can help the South Carolina Republican. Evidently he has not followed closely the depositions and documents collected by three House committees from present and former senior administration officials. If he had, he would see they contain clear proof that Mr. Trump, acting directly and through his lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, repeatedly demanded a pledge from Mr. Zelensky to open those political investigations to obtain an Oval Office invitation. There is evidence that U.S. military aid was dependent on the probes, as well.

The chain of evidence begins with the testimony of two State Department officials about a May 23 meeting they had with Mr. Trump to discuss the newly formed government of Mr. Zelensky. Kurt Volker, the administration’s special envoy to Ukraine, and Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, said that the president rejected their appeal to invite Mr. Zelensky to the White House. Instead, said Mr. Volker, Mr. Trump complained that Ukraine was a “corrupt country” that “tried to take me down.”

According to Mr. Sondland, he “directed those of us present . . . to talk to Mr. Giuliani . . . about his concerns.” Added the ambassador: “It was apparent to all of us that the key to changing the president’s mind on Ukraine was Mr. Giuliani.”

On July 19, Mr. Volker had breakfast with Mr. Giuliani. “He mentioned both the accusations about Vice President Biden and about interference in the 2016 election,” Mr. Volker told Congress, adding that Mr. Giuliani “stressed that all he wanted to see was for Ukraine to investigate what happened in the past.”

Mr. Volker then worked with a top aide to Mr. Zelensky, Andrey Yermak, to set up the July 25 phone call. The morning it took place, Mr. Volker texted Mr. Yermak to clearly lay out the quid pro quo: “Heard from White House-assuming President Z convinces trump he will investigate/‘get to the bottom of what happened’ in 2016, we will nail down date for visit to Washington. Good luck!” During the call, Mr. Trump requested investigations both of the DNC hack and of Mr. Biden; Mr. Zelensky promised to comply; and Mr. Trump seemed to offer a visit to Washington.

Only it turned out the president and his lawyer were not yet satisfied. Around Aug. 7, according to Mr. Volker, Mr. Giuliani called him and Mr. Sondland. When the two ambassadors raised Mr. Zelensky’s pending White House visit, “Mayor Giuliani then said he believed the Ukrainian president needed to make a statement about fighting corruption, and that he had discussed it with Mr. Yermak,” Mr. Volker testified. The Ukrainians duly produced a draft statement that was “generic” about corruption, Mr. Volker said — only to have it rejected by Mr. Giuliani, who said that “the statement should include specific reference to ‘Burisma’ and ‘2016.’ ” Burisma was the gas company that Mr. Biden’s son Hunter was associated with.

Mr. Volker said he “edited the draft statement by Mr. Yermak to include these points.” On Aug. 10, he received a text from Mr. Yermak saying: “I think it’s possible to make this declaration and mention all these things. . . . But it will be logic to do after we receive a confirmation of date.” Again, the trade-off of a White House meeting for a promise to investigate the Bidens and the DNC was explicit.

William B. Taylor Jr., the U.S. chargé d’affaires in Kyiv, also knew about the demand for a public statement. On Tuesday, he testified that Mr. Sondland had told him he had heard about the requirement directly from Mr. Trump. Mr. Taylor also said Mr. Sondland had told him he had been wrong to tell the Ukrainians that only a White House meeting was linked to the statement; in fact, “ ‘everything’ was dependent on such an announcement, including security assistance,” Mr. Taylor said. That’s consistent with the news conference last week by White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, who confirmed that the military aid was held up to leverage a Ukrainian investigation — before issuing an unconvincing retraction.

The pressure campaign continued into September. On Sept. 8, Mr. Taylor said, Mr. Sondland informed him that after talking to Mr. Trump, he had told Mr. Zelensky that if he “did not ‘clear things up’ in public, we would be at a ‘stalemate.’ ” Added Mr. Taylor: “I understood a ‘stalemate’ to mean that Ukraine would not receive the much-needed military assistance.”

The Ukrainians eventually told Mr. Volker that they did not want to promise investigations of Mr. Biden and the Democrats. The statement, Mr. Volker said, “was shelved.” And Mr. Zelensky never got his White House meeting. U.S. military aid, which Mr. Trump had ordered held up on July 18, was released on Sept. 11 — only after the corrupt quid pro quo was becoming public. By that date, House Democrats had announced that they would investigate whether the aid had been blocked to force Ukraine to assist Mr. Trump’s reelection campaign.

Mr. Graham and some other Republicans would portray the July 25 phone call as an isolated event in which Mr. Trump did not clearly conclude a quid pro quo with Mr. Zelensky. But the evidence presented to Congress shows that the call was part of a process that extended over three months and included repeated and specific demands for Ukraine to undertake political investigations, including of Mr. Trump’s possible 2020 opponent, lodged by Mr. Trump and by the lawyer he told top aides to work with on the deal.

Mr. Graham is himself a lawyer and former military prosecutor. He surely can recognize this corrupt campaign for what it is. The question is whether he, and other Republicans, have the moral courage to do so.

Uh, what’s wacky about this is that nobody else is committing (at this moment) in detail this specific what his testimony was today, likely because it’s embargoed. So I’m not going to vouch for it’s entire accuracy, but since not much of it is new in the sense of stuff we didn’t already know I’ll recommend it as a well organized recap of what happened when.

William Taylor testifies about deep-seated push for Ukraine quid pro quo
By ANDREW DESIDERIO and KYLE CHENEY, Politico
10/22/2019 10:03 AM EDT
Updated: 10/22/2019 01:37 PM EDT

Weeks before Taylor testified, it emerged that he had deep concerns that Trump was possibly withholding military aid to the eastern European nation to pressure Ukrainian leaders to launch the investigations — one of which centers on an unsubstantiated claim about the origins of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

Taylor, who replaced U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch after her unceremonious ouster by Trump in May, raised alarms with colleagues on Sept. 1 in a text message exchange released earlier this month by the three committees spearheading the inquiry.

“Are we now saying that security assistance and [White House] meeting are conditioned on investigations?” he wondered, referring to a potential meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Eight days later, Taylor’s concerns grew more urgent. In texts with two other diplomats, Taylor said it was “crazy” that military aid to Kiev was being blocked in order to force “help with a political campaign.” Nearly $400 million in military assistance to Ukraine was put on hold in late July by the White House but was released in September two weeks after POLITICO revealedbegun to slip.
…
Taylor had left government service for a senior position at the U.S. Institute of Peace but returned to the diplomatic corps in June after Yovanovitch’s ouster. She testified to lawmakers earlier this month that her removal was the result of a smear campaign engineered by Trump allies who portrayed her as disloyal for rebuffing Giuliani’s mission in Ukraine.

Taylor’s two correspondents in the text exchanges — former ambassador Kurt Volker and Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union — have already testified to impeachment investigators. They painted a portrait of a foreign policy that had been outsourced by Trump to his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. Both described deep discomfort with the arrangement and worried that Giuliani’s freelancing — especially in a country fending off Russian aggression and battling systemic internal corruption — could undermine America’s years-long diplomatic efforts.

Taylor voiced those concerns in a July text exchange days before Trump called Zelensky, who was elected in the spring on a platform of fighting corruption.

“Gordon, one thing Kurt and I talked about yesterday was Sasha Danyliuk’s point that President Zelenskyy is sensitive about Ukraine being taken seriously, not merely as an instrument in Washington domestic, reelection politics,” he said. Danyliuk is likely a reference to Oleksandr Danyliuk, Ukraine’s former finance minister.

Sondland replied, “Absolutely, but we need to get the conversation started and the relationship built, irrespective of the pretext. I am worried about the alternative.”

After Trump canceled a late August trip to Poland, where he was to meet Zelensky, the ambassadors again fretted about building a relationship between Trump and Zelensky. Volker said he hoped Vice President Mike Pence would attend in Trump’s place and set up a White House visit for Zelensky. He also said he hoped Energy Secretary Rick Perry would join.

But Taylor, on Sept. 1, worried that the White House visit itself would be conditioned on Trump’s demand for Ukraine to investigate Biden as well as an unfounded conspiracy theory that Ukraine — not Russia — interfered in the 2016 election.

As Taylor’s concerns about a quid pro quo grew more explicit, Sondland sought to put him at ease.

“Bill, I believe you are incorrect about President Trump’s intentions. The President has been crystal clear no quid pro quo’s of any kind,” Sondland texted on Sept. 9, urging his colleagues to stop the text message exchanges.

Last week, Sondland told House investigators that he sent this message after speaking directly to Trump and that he could not speak to whether it was true.

So there you have. Pretty cut and dried. Unidicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio solicited a Campaign contribution from a Foreign Government. That is illegal because it breaks Campaign Finance Law. It’s also Unconstitutional because it violates the Emoluments Clause. Unidicted Co-Conspirator withheld the property of the Government who’s favor he was soliciting. This is highly Illegal, it’s called Extortion. He did so with money duly authorized by the Congress, both Houses, in a lawfull appropriation authorized by his signature scrawl. This is Contempt of Congress. This is failure to uphold your Oath of Office to ensure the laws of the United States are faithfully executed.

Now- that’s enough really, but like everything else in this organization it’s corrupt to the bone and it’s hard to pull on a single thread without the whole damn thing starting to unravel. The main point is these are all incontrovertable facts, uncontested by Unindicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio because he did them on the Public Record, often on Video Tape.

À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu is a Septology by Marcel Proust with the first part being Du Côté De Chez Swann which itself has 4 parts- Combray I, Combray II, and Noms De Pays: Le Nom which features both the famous Madeline incident and a self contained novella, Un Amour De Swann that features the romance of Charles Swann and Odette de Crécy.

If you read it in order it can easily seem an “endless collection of memories and philosophizing or melancholic episodes” and can be quite a chore, especially in the original French (didn’t really like The Forsyte Saga either) but the Madeline incident is one of the cultural touchstones that you need to know to appear educated. It turns out this nostalgic rambling is precipitated by the sight of a Madeline, basically a small sponge cake in the shape of a scallop. What makes it a work of art is the attention to detail and the philosophizing which is considered profound.

But Wait! There’s More!

It is certainly long. The initial part is generally considered 4 novels worth of content so- 4. The next part was À L’ombre Des Jeunes Filles En Fleurs, that’s 5. The 3rd part overall but the 6th and 7th in our count is Le Côté De Guermantes I and Le Côté De Guermantes I. Likewise Sodome et Gomorrhe, Part 4, is 2 books- Sodome Et Gomorrhe I and Sodome Et Gomorrhe II, Books 8 and 9. Parts 5 and 6 are collectively known as Le Roman d’Albertine but are universally counted separately, Part 5 (Book 10) is La Prisonnière and Part 6 (Book 11) is La Fugitive. The final volume (Part 7, Book 11), <(Le Temps Retrouvé, was written at the same time as Du Côté De Chez Swann but updated as additional material was added.

What? This isn’t the All England Summarizing Proust Competition?

My bad.

Our boys are back in town having been away during a week when much happened. They certainly had plenty of time to do something special. Let’s see what made the cut shall we?

Stephen

Seth

Was that memorable? I’m hungry. Think I’ll find me a cookie.