Trump enters the stage

The impeachment so far verifies intelligence differences, as prescribed by the Budapest conference and the Trump -Orban meetings drawing down the line, of international barriers…

Basically the bottom line is intelligence variance surrounding the same type of agreements that were pre-scribes by the Malta Agreements, drawing lines of influence between the east and west.

That an agreement like that would utilize mob-collaboration, is no different from the Mafia’s participation in WW2 .
What else is new?

This was a time when Democratic ‘principles’ meant something else then oligarchian collusion. It was affordable.

2 nd hearing:

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OPINION | LAW AND ORDER

Trump Is Writing His Own Articles of Impeachment
Disparaging a witness in the middle of her testimony, the president made the Democrats’ job a lot easier.

By RENATO MARIOTTI

11/15/2019 11:28 PM EST

The second public impeachment hearing should have made less of an impact than the blockbuster first hearing. After all, the witness—former ambassador Marie Yovanovitch—had little testimony to offer about the aid-for-dirt scheme at the core of the inquiry.

President Trump changed that with a single tweet.

Trump often blasts his perceived enemies on Twitter, and the result is usually little more than handwringing on cable news. Thursday’s blast was altogether different and may end up changing the actual charges the House ultimately files against Trump.

The timing could not have been more dramatic, coming about an hour into the hearing and only moments after Yovanovitch testified about how mortified she felt reading what Trump had said about her to the Ukrainian president in July. And then he did it again: “Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad,” he wrote. Chairman Adam Schiff deftly turned the disparaging tweet against Trump by reading it to a stunned Yovanovitch.

Her response to the tweet—“It’s very intimidating”—spoke volumes and drowned out any other narrative that could have come out of her testimony.

Trump has been a master at distraction, and today he tried to do so by releasing the transcript of his first call with newly elected Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee, dutifully read the entirety of the call into the record.

But that move landed with a thud, given how irrelevant the transcript was. His second attempt to distract—the tweet—succeeded only in making Yovanovitch’s testimony far more weighty and relevant than it might have been otherwise.

It’s not hard to see why commentators rushed to call it witness tampering. After all, Yovanovitch called it “very intimidating” herself, and knowingly using intimidation with the intent to influence testimony is the very definition of witness tampering.

It doesn’t matter that Yovanovitch would not be intimidated by a mere tweet, given how formidable she appeared during her testimony. As Schiff pointed out, the fear of a Trump tweet could influence other witnesses, such as Ambassador Gordon Sondland, who is scheduled to appear next week. Indeed, the picture painted by testimony during the inquiry thus far is of Trump officials working under the specter that a Trump tweet could turn their world upside down.

That doesn’t mean a federal prosecutor would actually charge Trump with witness tampering if he was not in office. It would be hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump intended to intimidate witnesses. Trump’s state of mind is a difficult thing to pin down in any context. In fact, he later denied he was trying to intimidate her, insisting he was exercising his “free speech” right.

But it really doesn’t matter. Impeachment is a political process, and you can expect House Democrats to add another article of impeachment charging Trump with witness tampering, which was also part of the articles of impeachment against former president Richard Nixon.

More importantly, Trump handed the narrative to Democrats on a day when his supporters could have otherwise argued that Yovanovitch didn’t really provide testimony of truly impeachable acts by Trump.

For her own part, Yovanovitch provided something important to Democrats. Her testimony not only set the stage for the core story to be told by subsequent witnesses, but she provided an emotional heft and counterpoint to Trump that had power beyond the substance of her words.

Yovanovitch reminded me of a type of witness who often testifies at a criminal trial—a victim of wrongdoing who possesses a quiet strength while detailing how a wrongdoer has impacted her life.

One weakness of the Democrats’ otherwise strong case against Trump is that the victim of Trump’s scheme was Ukraine—or our system of government as a whole. There was no tangible American who was the target of Trump’s scheme other than former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, who are too politicized to be portrayed as victims by House Democrats.

Although Yovanovitch was not the intended victim of Trump’s scheme, she paid a price for his wrongdoing. Her strength and dignity in the face of poor treatment by Trump drew a contrast to him and created an emotional weight to the Democrats’ case that it did not have before.

Trump may very well escape removal from office, given that the Senate Republicans appear to be all but impervious to any evidence that might emerge from the hearings. But he is his own worst enemy. His ham-handed mistreatment of Yovanovitch and impulsive desire to belittle her during her testimony made it even more difficult for House Republicans to distract viewers from his indefensible conduct. If he keeps this up, he might well be the author of his own political end.

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Weak ego?

Opinion, Analysis, Essays

HOT TAKE

Trump’s impeachment tantrums reveal a fragile ego obsessed with saving his legacy
Fear is dominating Trump’s decision-making right now. It’s a sense of panic, masquerading as strength.

Impeachment is Trump’s scarlet letter.Tom Brenner / Reuters
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Nov. 16, 2019, 4:30 AM EST
By Kurt Bardella, NBC News THINK contributor
As the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, gave public testimony during the House Intelligence Committee’s second public impeachment hearing Friday, President Donald J. Trump unleashed a bizarre tweet attack, claiming, “Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad. She started off in Somalia, how did that go? Then fast forward to Ukraine, where the new Ukrainian President spoke unfavorably about her in my second phone call with him.”

Aside from the absurdity of blaming the ambassador for decades of turmoil in Somalia, Trump’s clear intent, as committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., noted, was to intimidate future witnesses and maybe even convince them not to testify.

While Trump may have deluded himself into believing that this kind of bullying projects strength, I think it reveals the exact opposite. Donald Trump is afraid. This is a man who has spent the entirety of his adult life plastering his name on skyscrapers and casinos; this is a man who is obsessed with his own legacy. And that’s why impeachment is the permanent stain that Trump deserves — and one he clearly fears.

While Trump may have deluded himself into believing that this kind of bullying projects strength, I think it reveals the exact opposite.

Axios reported recently that Trump has said privately impeachment is a “bad thing to have on your resume.” He doesn’t want impeachment to be the first thing written about him in the world’s history books.

Conventional wisdom suggests that there are enough votes in the Democrat-controlled House to successfully impeach Trump, while the Senate will vote against it. But when it comes to Trump and how he is wired, it may not matter if he is thrown out of office. The fact that he would go down in history as only the third president ever to be impeached would psychologically cripple him.

Think about how Trump’s self-obsession manifests itself. In August, in the wake of yet another mass shooting, Trump visited a hospital in El Paso, Texas, and proceeded to brag about the crowd size at an earlier campaign rally, saying, “the place was packed … that was some crowd and we had twice the number outside.” During a rally last summer in Minnesota, the supposedly populist president riffed on “the elite” declaring, “I have a much better apartment than they do. I’m smarter than they are, I’m richer than they are.” Even his infamous “grab ‘em by the pussy” comment during the 2016 campaign was also a brag. Before going on to make what sure sounded like an endorsement of sexual assault, Trump noted “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”

Trump revels in his own celebrity, fame and wealth. But what we’re talking about right now is infamy on a historic scale. Impeachment is his scarlet letter, a public rebuke that will be very hard to dismiss or minimize (although we can be sure that he’ll try).

And the increasing public meltdowns we have seen from the president suggest the fear of impeachment is getting to him.

Related
OPINION
Trump rages about the impeachment process. But the GOP created those rules.
It wasn’t long ago that the president of the United States tweeted about the possibility of “a Civil War like fracture” if he was impeached. Trump has begun to recycle his Mueller mantra describing this as “The Greatest Witch Hunt in American history!” He tweeted a fake conspiracy theory about changes to a whistleblower report that never happened. He even called for the resignation of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, suggesting he “should be looked at for treason.”

Trump’s tantrums reveal a fragility that is dominating his decision-making. It’s panic, masquerading as strength. He’s not even trying to hide his self-pity, tweeting, “there has been no President in the history of our Country who has been treated so badly as I have.”

Trump’s unhinged tweets and press outbursts are a manifestation of what feels a lot like desperation. And the more desperate Trump becomes, the more outrageous his rhetoric will become and the more his paranoia will grow. He will continue to howl and bark in the hopes that he can both scare anyone willing to cooperate with impeachment and maintain his GOP-firewall of protection. But just remember, like any bully, the louder he yells, the more scared he is.

Kurt Bardella
Kurt Bardella is an NBC News THINK contributor and served as the spokesperson and senior advisor for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee from 2009-2013.

Live TV
A day that underscored the corruption swamping the Trump presidency
Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN
Updated 5:33 AM EST, Sat November 16, 2019

(CNN) A fateful convergence of events Friday reflected a culture of corruption and intimidation endemic to the circle of a President who vowed to drain the swamp but instead became its incarnation.

First, a US ambassador told how her reputation was shredded and she was hounded out of her job by President Donald Trump’s rogue associates after a faultless 30-year career advancing America’s interests.

“Ukrainians who prefer to play by the old corrupt rules sought to remove me,” former US envoy to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch said at the House impeachment hearings. “What continues to amaze me is that they found Americans willing to partner with them.”

Incredibly, her testimony was interrupted by a Trump attack tweet that visibly exacerbated her anguish over his bullying tactics, lent credibility to her testimony and could now be folded into articles of impeachment.

As she spoke, and less than a mile away across Washington’s mall, Roger Stone became the latest associate who will pay for his loyalty to the President.

Trump associate Roger Stone found guilty of lies that protected Trump
Trump associate Roger Stone found guilty of lies that protected Trump
The Nixon-era political trickster was found guilty of lying to Congress and witness tampering, apparently motivated by a desire to protect Trump from embarrassment over the Russia scandal.

“Truth matters. Truth still matters, OK?” prosecutor Michael Marando had told the jury on Wednesday. “In our institutions of self-governance, committee hearings, courts of law … truth still matters.”

All this came during a week in which the President made a new last-ditch appeal to the Supreme Court to shield his tax returns from public scrutiny.

And on Friday evening, things took another turn for the worse for Trump.

Diplomatic aide David Holmes testified that he had heard Trump on a telephone call ask US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland whether the Ukrainians were going to open investigations he had asked for into former Vice President Joe Biden and a conspiracy theory surrounding the 2016 election.

Sondland told Trump on the call in July that Ukranian President Vlodymyr Zelensky was ready to do “anything you ask him to,” according to a transcript of an opening statement delivered by Holmes to a closed-door session of the impeachment investigation.

The revelation significantly raised the stakes for Sondland’s testimony in a televised hearing next week and suggests that Trump was intimately involved in his lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s scheme to pressure the Ukrainians.

Whether Americans ultimately come to believe that the President’s alleged misconduct merits the terrible sanction of removal or come to believe the Democratic impeachment attempt is narrowly political and unjustified, this was a clarifying day.

At a time of swirling misinformation, propagandistic pro-Trump news coverage and conspiracy theories, it showed that while facts may be under assault, they can ultimately still emerge in a way that will allow history to render a judgment even if the fractured political climate makes that it impossible in the moment.

Friday piled more testimony on the mountain of evidence suggesting that the US is in the grip of not just the most unorthodox, but the most corrupt presidency of the modern era.

The Stone and Yovanovitch dramas did not take place in isolation. They fit into a pattern of questionable behavior clouding Trump’s entire political career. The sheer weight of such evidence confounds his supporters’ claims that the real problem is that Democrats and the media are caught up in some kind of “Never Trump” mania that amounts to a coup.

This, after all, is a President who demanded misplaced personal loyalty from FBI chief James Comey, then fired him and said he did it because of the Russia investigation. Trump also repeatedly berated his first Attorney General Jeff Sessions for honoring an obligation to recuse himself from the Russia probe.

While special counsel Robert Mueller did not establish cooperation between Trump’s campaign and Russia, he said the President’s team expected to benefit from his election meddling.

And he pointedly did not exonerate Trump of obstruction.

This is a President who tried to get the US government to cut him a check to host next year’s G7 summit before backing off because of the political outrage. As if to underscore conflicts of interests posed by his financial entanglements, Trump filed suit with the Supreme Court Friday to stop prosecutors pulling his tax returns, setting up a landmark separation of powers showdown.

For sure, there are legal questions about immunity and the extent to which individual in that job should expect financial privacy at play here.

But Trump’s move still raised the question about what he has to hide from the people for whom he holds a public trust.

The human toll of the Ukraine scandal
Yovanovitch’s only offense may have been that she got in the way of a plan by Giuliani, working at Trump’s direction, to get the Ukrainian government to investigate one of the President’s domestic political opponents – Biden.

It was notable that while Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee protested the process and highlighted that Yovanovitch was gone before Trump’s alleged scheme to get dirt on Biden came to fruition, they did little to counter her story of a back door diplomatic scheme led by Giuliani.

Democrats scheduled the former ambassador in their second televised impeachment hearing to suggest the human cost of the President’s Ukraine scheme.

She also helped them flesh out an argument that Giuliani, acting at the direction of the President, and with associates in Ukraine like now indicted Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, had trampled over America’s foreign policy interests in pursuit of their own personal and political enrichment.

Yovanovitch also found herself the target of a fierce campaign by conservative pundits that including the President’s son, Donald Trump Jr.

Far from working to drain corruption as Yovanovitch was in Ukraine, she testified that Giuliani’s team was working with corrupt figures in Kiev and importing their methods to the US.

Like her colleagues, George Kent and Bill Taylor who testified Wednesday, she seemed like an envoy to a country she no longer understood – her own – where governance is beginning to share characteristics of corruption-laced nations where they served.

“How could our system fail like this?” Yovanovitch asked.

“How is it that foreign corrupt interests could manipulate our government? Which country’s interests are served when the very corrupt behavior we have been criticizing is allowed to prevail?” Yovanovitch said.

Like other witnesses from the foreign service bureaucracy, Yovanovitch also warned that current turmoil will damage America’s reputation.

“Such conduct undermines the US, exposes our friends and widens the playing failed for autocrats like President Putin,” she said. “Our leadership depends on the power of our example.”

Trump’s tweet in which he accused Yovanovitch of making each country that she served in – for instance Somalia – worse, only lent credibility to her account of feeling intimidated by the commander-in-chief’s smears and threats.

Several Republicans decried Trump’s attack as counterproductive.

“It was idiotic to tweet today about her,” one Trump campaign source told CNN’s Jim Acosta. “She seems legitimately worried.”

The President’s intervention could be a sign that he understood the damage the ambassador’s testimony was doing. But he insisted later that he had every right to go after her.

“You know what? I have the right to speak. I have freedom of speech just as other people do, but they’ve taken away the Republicans rights,” the President said.

It’s unclear whether the tweets reach a standard of witness tampering that might stand up in court. Democrats suggested they could become part of eventual articles of the political process of impeachment in any case.

But the attack couldn’t have been a clearer sign of the intimidation that characterizes Trump orbit.

And the assault by the most powerful man in the world will surely be on the mind of witnesses called to testify in next week’s frenetic week of impeachment theater.

Trump rails at ‘double standard’
6 Trump associates have been convicted in Mueller-related investigations
Stone’s conviction stems directly from the Mueller investigation. He was accused of lying about his efforts to contact Wikileaks to get information that could helped Trump during his 2016 election campaign against Hillary Clinton.

Prosecutors argued that his crimes were partly motivated by a desire to save the President from political embarrassment.

Stone became the sixth Trump associate to be convicted – a list that includes former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, the campaign’s ex-deputy chairman Rick Gates, short-lived national security adviser Michael Flynn and former campaign foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos.

So far, the President has largely avoid such legal consequences. But each of these men now has cause to regret their decision to jump aboard the Trump train. If a man is judged by the company he keeps, their convictions reflect poorly on the President.

Trump reacted furiously to Stone’s conviction, claiming his fate at the hand of a jury of his peers was another example of an establishment plot against him.

“So they now convict Roger Stone of lying and want to jail him for many years to come,” Trump tweeted, before raging at his usual punching bags including Clinton, Comey and Obama administration intelligence community officials.

“A double standard like never seen before in the history of our Country?” the President wrote.

Speculation is already running high that the President could use his power to pardon Stone – a move – at the time of an impeachment drama that would be politically radioactive.

The President has exceedingly broad power to pardon offenders, but saving Stone would suggest that people around him are above the law. And it would further color in a portrait of rampant corruption already threatening to dominate his legacy.

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© 2019 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Trump tweets Saturday , Nov 16 2019

If her were impeached, there will be the biggest depression , wiping out all 401 K’s …

Could this really happen ? You bet! From what we have seen so far, nothing is impossible.

In spite of everything can the Dems win the 2020 general election?

2020 ELECTION

High anxiety: Jittery Democrats fear their candidate won’t beat Trump

Acknowledging the concern, former President Barack Obama told his party’s moderates to chill and the left to get more realistic.

Nov. 16, 2019, 9:48 AM EST / Updated Nov. 16, 2019, 10:15 AM EST

By Alex Seitz-Wald

WASHINGTON — The offer: A $1 million check from a major Democratic donor to a major Democratic group. The one condition: The money would be refunded if Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warrenbecomes the party’s nominee.

That offer was rejected, according to an official familiar with it, but it was indicative of the larger anxiety felt by many in the Democratic Party’s elite circles about the state of the 2020 Democratic presidential field. “Ninety to 95 percent of our donor base is terrified about Warren,” said a prominent Democratic official.

Democrats, often prone to fretting about elections, have been increasingly worried that their large and divided presidential field, currently led by four imperfect front-runners, doesn’t have what it takes to beat President Donald Trump next year.

They worry that Biden is too old and stumbling; that Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, is too young and too inexperienced; and that Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are too far left and can’t win. And they tend to write off the rest of the field, assuming that if those contenders haven’t caught on yet, they never will.

That angst reached a fever pitch this week and helped push one new candidate and another potential challenger from the party’s more moderate wing into the race — former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, who announced he’s running, and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who’s thinking about it — just ahead of a New Hampshire filing deadline, which essentially barred the door to new candidates when it expired at 5 p.m. on Friday.

Former President Barack Obama, who is loath to speak publicly about internal party politics, felt the need to tell an influential group of donors on Friday night to essentially calm down,while also warning progressives that the country is “less revolutionary than it is interested in improvement.”

“Democratic voters and certainly persuadable independents or even moderate Republicans are not driven by the same views that are reflected on certain, you know, left-leaning Twitter feeds or the activist wing of our party,” Obama said at the private meeting of the Democracy Alliance donor group at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington.

“That’s not a criticism to the activist wing. Their job is to poke and prod and test and inspire and motivate,” he continued. “But the candidate’s job, whoever it ends up being, is to get elected.”

And Obama reminded them that he faced his own messy primary and won.

“Not only did I win ultimately a remarkably tough and lengthy primary process with Hillary Clinton, but people forget that even before that we had a big field of really serious, accomplished people,” he said.

Not everyone is so sure, though, even though polls show all of the party’s front-runners beating Trump at the moment in head-to-head tests.

"With stakes this high in the election, Democrats from coast to coast are in search of the perfect candidate,” said Rufus Gifford, the former national finance director for Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign and ambassador to Denmark. “That person doesn’t exist. He or she never has.”

Democratic voters have expressed little interest in expanding the field. Eighty-fight percent said they are “very” or “somewhat” satisfied with their present options in a September NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, while other surveys have found a sizable number of Democrats wanting to winnow their options.

But many party insiders, who have watched the field take shape and studied the candidates closely, feel none of them measure up to Obama, who remains the model presidential candidate for many in the party.

“Donors are casting around for someone who can fill those shoes because they feel that Joe Biden hasn’t closed the deal yet,” said David Brock, a Democratic fundraiser who runs a constellation of progressive groups, including Media Matters and American Bridge. “Donors are always kind of anxious, it’s in their DNA. They’re nervous that Biden has proven to be a shaky front-runner and they’re nervous about the rise of Elizabeth Warren and/or Bernie Sanders.”

President Barack Obama waves as he is followed by Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, right, upon his arrival on Air Force One at Logan Airport in Boston on March 5, 2014.Charles Krupa / AP file

And they looked around for other potential white knights:

Hillary Clinton? “I’m under enormous pressure from many, many, many people to think about it,” the 2016 presidential nominee told the BBC.

Stacey Abrams? “I’ve been urged to reconsider. I have said no,” the former nominee for governor in Georgia said at lunch at the National Press Club.

Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown? “How many times do I have to answer this question? No. No, no, no,” Brown, who had considered running this year before deciding against it, told reporters in the Capitol.

In some circles, the search is driven largely driven by deep concerns that Warren or Sanders would fall to Trump and would be an albatross around the neck of Democratic candidates running for the Senate and House in 2020.

A new analysis by political scientist Alan Abromivitz found that support for “Medicare for All,” the single-payer health care plan Warren and Sanders favor, could have cost Democratic congressional candidates as much as 5 percentage points in the 2018 midterms.

Some on the left wonder which is scarier to donors: Warren or Sanders losing to Trump or winning against him and raising their taxes.

“Makes you wonder if they’re trying to save us from Trump or are they really just trying to save themselves from Bernie and Warren,” said Rebecca Katz, a former aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid who now advises insurgent progressive candidates.

Warren’s campaign has begun selling mugs to drink “billionaire tears” and engaged in public fights with wealthy financiers who feel, as many of them did under Obama as well, that they’re being unfairly targeted.

Former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, one of the more prominent Democrats on Wall Street, condemned Warren’s incivility against the wealthy while taking a not-so-subtle shot at the controversy over her Native American ancestry and DNA test.

Patrick Murray, the pollster who runs the well-regarded Monmouth University poll, said the unsettled state of the field is not uncommon, historically, and more a product of voters waiting to chose a candidate than not liking any of them.

“It’s not a sign of weakness,” he said.

Needless to say, the new entries are frustrating to candidates who have been pitching themselves for months, as alternatives to Biden on one hand and Warren and Sanders on the other, just as Patrick is now.

Obama himself praised the current field and said he was sure that in the end, “we will have a candidate who has been tested and will be able to proudly carry the Democratic banner.”

Alex Seitz-Wald is a political reporter for NBC News.

Republican congressman calls new details about Trump revealed in impeachment testimony ‘alarming’

By Devan Cole, CNN

Updated 4:05 PM EST, Sun November 17, 2019

Washington (CNN)A Republican member of one of the House committees involved in the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump said Sunday that information provided about Trump during a closed-door deposition of a former National Security Council official"is alarming" and “not OK.”

“Well, of course, all of that is alarming. As I’ve said from the beginning, I think this is not okay. The President of the United States shouldn’t even in the original phone call be on the phone with the president of another country and raise his political opponent,” Rep. Mike Turner, an Ohio Republican, told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”

“So, no, this is not OK,” he added on Sunday.

On Saturday, Morrison testified that US ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland was acting at Trump’s instruction in his dealings with Ukraine. According to Morrison’s deposition, Sondland said the President told him that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “must announce the opening of the investigations” into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. Morrison also testified that US aid to Ukraine was conditioned on the country announcing an investigation into the Bidens. There is no evidence of wrongdoing by either Biden in Ukraine.

Ex-NSC official corroborates Sondland said he was directed by Trump on Ukraine

Morrison’s testimony, which was released by House impeachment investigators on Saturday, adds additional corroboration to the testimony of others, like US diplomat Bill Taylor, that Sondland said he was acting at Trump’s direction when he was urging Ukraine to announce political investigations.

In his CNN interview on Sunday, Turner also addressed tweets Trump posted last week during former Ukrainian Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch’s public testimony before the panel. Responding in real-time to the President’s tweets, which claimed that “everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad,” the former official said they were “very intimidating.”

“It’s certainly not impeachable, and it’s certainly not criminal and it’s certainly not witness intimidation. It certainly wasn’t trying to prevent her or wouldn’t have prevented her from testifying, she was actually in the process of testifying. But nonetheless, I find the President’s tweets unfortunate,” the congressman said.

“I think along with most people, I find the President’s tweets, generally, unfortunate,” Turner said.

CNN’s Jeremy Herb, Jennifer Hansler, Kevin Liptak and Marshall Cohen contributed to this report.

© 2019 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Trump is finally facing impeachment, but another, bigger cover-up is continuing in broad daylight

Andrew J. Bacevich,

Oct 21, 2019, 10:49 AM

President Donald Trump mocks US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at a rally with supporters in Dallas, October 17, 2019. Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

Democrats in Congress have started impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump.

But many of the policies and policymakers who laid the groundwork for Trump, and enabled his misdeeds, are going unquestioned, writes Quincy Institute cofounder and president Andrew Bacevich.

There is blood in the water and frenzied sharks are closing in for the kill. Or so they think.

From the time of Donald Trump’s election, American elites have hungered for this moment. At long last, they have the 45th president of the United States cornered. In typically ham-handed fashion, Trump has given his adversaries the very means to destroy him politically. They will not waste the opportunity. Impeachment now — finally, some will say — qualifies as a virtual certainty.

No doubt many surprises lie ahead. Yet the Democrats controlling the House of Representatives have passed the point of no return. The time for prudential judgments — the Republican-controlled Senate will never convict, so why bother? — is gone for good. To back down now would expose the president’s pursuers as spineless cowards. The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC would not soon forgive such craven behavior.

So, as President Woodrow Wilson speaking in 1919 put it, “The stage is set, the destiny disclosed. It has come about by no plan of our conceiving, but by the hand of God.” Of course, the issue back then was a notably weighty one: whether to ratify the Versailles Treaty.

That it now concerns a “Mafia-like shakedown” orchestrated by one of Wilson’s successors tells us something about the trajectory of American politics over the course of the last century and it has not been a story of ascent.

Trump with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy at the UN General Assembly in New York, September 25, 2019.Associated Press

The effort to boot the president from office is certain to yield a memorable spectacle. The rancor and contempt that have clogged American politics like a backed-up sewer since the day of Donald Trump’s election will now find release. Watergate will pale by comparison. The uproar triggered by Bill Clinton’s “sexual relations” will be nothing by comparison.

A de facto collaboration between Trump, those who despise him, and those who despise his critics all but guarantees that this story will dominate the news, undoubtedly for months to come.

As this process unspools, what politicians like to call “the people’s business” will go essentially unattended.

So while Congress considers whether or not to remove Trump from office, gun-control legislation will languish, the deterioration of the nation’s infrastructure will proceed apace, needed healthcare reforms will be tabled, the military-industrial complex will waste yet more billions, and the national debt, already at $22 trillion — larger, that is, than the entire economy — will continue to surge. The looming threat posed by climate change, much talked about of late, will proceed all but unchecked. For those of us preoccupied with America’s role in the world, the obsolete assumptions and habits undergirding what’s still called “national security” will continue to evade examination. Our endless wars will remain endless and pointless.

By way of compensation, we might wonder what benefits impeachment is likely to yield. Answering that question requires examining four scenarios that describe the range of possibilities awaiting the nation.

Trump meets with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, standing left, Congressional leaders, and others at the White House, October 16, 2019.Associated Press

The first and most to be desired (but least likely) is that Trump will tire of being a public piñata and just quit. With the thrill of flying in Air Force One having worn off, being president can’t be as much fun these days. Why put up with further grief? How much more entertaining for Trump to retire to the political sidelines where he can tweet up a storm and indulge his penchant for name-calling.

And think of the “deals” an ex-president could make in countries like Israel, North Korea, Poland, and Saudi Arabia on which he’s bestowed favors. Cha-ching! As of yet, however, the president shows no signs of taking the easy (and lucrative) way out.

The second possible outcome sounds almost as good but is no less implausible: A sufficient number of Republican senators rediscover their moral compass and “do the right thing,” joining with Democrats to create the two-thirds majority needed to convict Trump and send him packing.

In the Washington of that classic 20th-century film director Frank Capra, with Jimmy Stewart holding forth on the Senate floor and a moist-eyed Jean Arthur cheering him on from the gallery, this might have happened. In the real Washington of “Moscow Mitch” McConnell, think again.

The third somewhat seamier outcome might seem a tad more likely. It postulates that McConnell and various GOP senators facing reelection in 2020 or 2022 will calculate that turning on Trump just might offer the best way of saving their own skins. The president’s loyalty to just about anyone, wives included, has always been highly contingent, the people streaming out of his administration routinely making the point. So why should senatorial loyalty to the president be any different?

At the moment, however, indications that Trump loyalists out in the hinterlands will reward such turncoats are just about nonexistent. Unless that base were to flip, don’t expect Republican senators to do anything but flop.

That leaves outcome number four, easily the most probable: While the House will impeach, the Senate will decline to convict. Trump will therefore stay right where he is, with the matter of his fitness for office effectively deferred to the November 2020 elections. Except as a source of sadomasochistic diversion, the entire agonizing experience will, therefore, prove to be a colossal waste of time and blather.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gestures to fellow Democrats as President Donald Trump acknowledges women in Congress during his State of the Union address. AP Photo/Andrew Harnik

Furthermore, Donald Trump might well emerge from this national ordeal with his reelection chances enhanced. Such a prospect is belatedly insinuating itself into public discourse.

For that reason, certain anti-Trump pundits are already showing signs of going wobbly, suggesting, for instance, that censure rather than outright impeachment might suffice as punishment for the president’s various offenses. Yet censuring Trump while allowing him to stay in office would be the equivalent of letting Harvey Weinstein off with a good tongue-lashing so that he can get back to making movies. Censure is for wimps.

Besides, as Trump campaigns for a second term, he would almost surely wear censure like a badge of honor. Keep in mind that Congress’s approval ratings are considerably worse than his. To more than a few members of the public, a black mark awarded by Congress might look like a gold star.

Not removal but restoration

So if Trump finds himself backed into a corner, Democrats aren’t necessarily in a more favorable position. And that ain’t the half of it.

Let me suggest that, while Trump is being pursued, it’s you, my fellow Americans, who are really being played. The unspoken purpose of impeachment is not removal, but restoration.

The overarching aim is not to replace Trump with Mike Pence — the equivalent of exchanging Groucho for Harpo. No, the object of the exercise is to return power to those who created the conditions that enabled Trump to win the White House i

Just recently, for instance, Hillary Clinton declaredTrump to be an “illegitimate president.” Implicit in her charge is the conviction — no doubt sincere — that people like Donald Trump are not supposed to bepresident. People like Hillary Clinton — people possessing credentials like hersand sharing her values — should be the chosen ones.

Here we glimpse the true meaning of legitimacy in this context. Whatever the vote in the Electoral College, Trump doesn’t deserve to be president and never did.

For many of the main participants in this melodrama, the actual but unstated purpose of impeachment is to correct this great wrong and thereby restore history to its anointed path.

In a recent column in the Guardian, professor Samuel Moyn makes the essential point: Removing from office a vulgar, dishonest, and utterly incompetent president comes nowhere close to capturing what’s going on here.

To the elites most intent on ousting Trump, far more important than anything he may say or do is what he signifies. He is a walking, talking repudiation of everything they believe and, by extension, of a future they had come to see as foreordained.

Moyn styles these anti-Trump elites as “centrists,” members of the post-Cold War political mainstream that allowed ample room for nominally conservative Bushes and nominally liberal Clintons, while leaving just enough space for Barack Obama’s promise of hope-and-(not-too-much) change.

These centrists share a common worldview. They believe in the universality of freedom as defined and practiced within the United States. They believe in corporate capitalism operating on a planetary scale. They believe in American primacy, with the United States presiding over a global order as the sole superpower. They believe in “American global leadership,” which they define as primarily a military enterprise.

And perhaps most of all, while collecting degrees from Georgetown, Harvard, Oxford, Wellesley, the University of Chicago, and Yale, they came to believe in a so-called meritocracy as the preferred mechanism for allocating wealth, power, and privilege.

All of these together comprise the sacred scripture of contemporary American political elites. And if Donald Trump’s antagonists have their way, his removal will restore that sacred scripture to its proper place as the basis of policy.

“For all their appeals to enduring moral values,” Moyn writes, “the centrists are deploying a transparent strategy to return to power.” Destruction of the Trump presidency is a necessary precondition for achieving that goal.

“Centrists simply want to return to the status quo interrupted by Trump, their reputations laundered by their courageous opposition to his mercurial reign, and their policies restored to credibility.” Precisely.

High crimes and misdemeanors

For such a scheme to succeed, however, laundering reputations alone will not suffice. Equally important will be to bury any recollection of the catastrophes that paved the way for an über-qualified centrist to lose to an indisputably unqualified and unprincipled political novice in 2016.

Former President George W. Bush hugs his wife, Laura Bush, during the George W. Bush Presidential Center Topping Out Ceremony on October 3, 2011 in Dallas, Texas. Tom Pennington/Getty Images

Holding promised security assistance hostage unless a foreign leader agrees to do you political favors is obviously and indisputably wrong. Trump’s antics regarding Ukraine may even meet some definition of criminal. Still, how does such misconduct compare to the calamities engineered by the “centrists” who preceded him?

Consider, in particular, the George W. Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 (along with the spin-off wars that followed). Consider, too, the reckless economic policies that produced the Great Recession of 2007-2008. As measured by the harm inflicted on the American people (and others), the offenses for which Trump is being impeached qualify as mere misdemeanors.

Honest people may differ on whether to attribute the Iraq War to outright lies or monumental hubris. When it comes to tallying up the consequences, however, the intentions of those who sold the war don’t particularly matter. The results include thousands of Americans killed; tens of thousands wounded, many grievously, or left to struggle with the effects of PTSD; hundreds of thousands of non-Americans killed or injured; millions displaced; trillions of dollars expended; radical groups like ISIS empowered (and in its case even formedinside a US prison in Iraq); and the Persian Gulf region plunged into turmoil from which it has yet to recover.

How do Trump’s crimes stack up against these?

The Great Recession stemmed directly from economic policies implemented during the administration of President Bill Clinton and continued by his successor. Deregulating the banking sector was projected to produce a bonanza in which all would share. Yet, as a direct result of the ensuing chicanery, nearly 9 million Americans lost their jobs, while overall unemployment shot up to 10%. Roughly 4 million Americans lost their homes to foreclosure. The stock market cratered and millions saw their life savings evaporate.

Again, the question must be asked: How do these results compare to Trump’s dubious dealings with Ukraine?

Trump’s critics speak with one voice in demanding accountability. Yet virtually no one has been held accountable for the pain, suffering, and loss inflicted by the architects of the Iraq War and the Great Recession. Why is that? As another presidential election approaches, the question not only goes unanswered, but unasked.

To win reelection, Trump, a corrupt con man (who jumped shipon his own bankrupt casinos, money in hand, leaving others holding the bag) will cheat and lie. Yet, in the politics of the last half-century, these do not qualify as novelties. (Indeed, apart from being the son of a sitting US vice president, what made Hunter Biden worth $50Gs per month to a gas company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch? I’m curious.)

That the president and his associates are engaging in a cover-up is doubtless the case. Yet another cover-up proceeds in broad daylight on a vastly larger scale.

“Trump’s shambolic presidency somehow seems less unsavory,” Moyn writes, when considering the fact that his critics refuse “to admit how massively his election signified the failure of their policies, from endless war to economic inequality.” Just so.

What are the real crimes? Who are the real criminals? No matter what happens in the coming months, don’t expect the Trump impeachment proceedings to come within a country mile of addressing such questions.

• Copyright © 2019 Insider Inc. All rights reserved.

{The almost occult. Pan psychic instigator? Carrying a modicum of responsibility for the two key basis of evidenciarily collusive medium?:

1. The evidence for Iraqis possession of weapons of mass destruction and

2. The deregularion

Great minds are destroyed by mad gods. Whooooooooe!

Final arbiter: it is most probable, that it is the variant displacement of the levels of intelligence between the various agencies of procurement of it( intelligence), whether they be private, public, representative, legal, illegal, secure or not.

The issue is indeed entering the stage of irreducibility between real and artificial simulation.

The rate of ready access determines the success of pertinent policy decision making, reducing the number of availabilable probable scenarios.}

{…} bracketed are pure singular opinions.

Day 3 impeachment hearings:

Impeachment may pass but Senate will not convict, yet how with this effect the general election?

Watch live: Volker, Morrison testify at Trump impeachment hearing
Updated Nov. 19, 2019, 5:41 PM PST
The second week of public hearings in the House’s impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump kicked off on Tuesday with testimony from four current and former administration officials.

Former U.S. envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker and former National Security Council staffer Tim Morrison began testifying starting around 3:30 p.m. ET. Earlier Tuesday, NSC staffer Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and Jennifer Williams, an aide to Vice President Mike Pence, testified for around 4.5 hours starting at 9 a.m ET.

Alex Moe

3h ago /

And that’s a wrap on Tuesday’s hearings
The Volker and Morrison hearing has concluded. It lasted roughly 5 hours. That’s roughly 9.5 hours total today between the two impeachment inquiry hearings.

As the hearing ended, Volker approached the dais to shake hands with several members. He specifically called to Rep. Heck to thank him for giving him time to answer.

Dartunorro Clark

3h ago / 5:48 PM PST
Schiff scorches GOP: They only care that Trump got caught
Schiff delivered a fiery closing statement, reminding everyone of the facts gathered from witnesses so far and arguing that it points to an abuse of power.

In one of his most animated moments so far, Schiff cast the pressure campaign on Ukraine as Trump using corruption as a pretense to open an investigation into the Bidens, saying that Republicans are more upset that “somebody blew the whistle” and not potential abuse of power by the president.

Very believable
The case is resolving.It amounts to a Democratic versus a Republican approach to foreign relations, the prize Crimea, and prior affiliation away or toward the issue of Russian or Ukranian title to Crimea.

The value? Is it in the interest of oligarcic international dominance to .subjugate nationalism to a prior existing union? (Szoviet).
The effect is reversible applicable to the personal fortunes of those elected by non Democratic means(electoral college)

Nunez and Castro are good examples of. disaffiliation especially Castro being from California. He is fighting for his life , alongside T.

I wonder of Arminius &/or Saint James was here , who saw a vision of a mushroom clouded sky as a result of disallowing the contrary possibility of the contingency presented, how it would sustain their initial opinion?

Within the borderline question , left unresolved, within the bounds of synthetic unity, by the simulated objectively valid , reconstructed rationale, - (within again the reams of deconstructed intelligence) , ?

Arminius , if You are still a member, or anyone speaking for You, & if You followed today’s procedure, especially regarding the charge that Germany is not paying it’s share of upkeeping Nato costs , and other international agencies?

That would be great

Optiçs:

Stunning testimony links Trump to abuse of power

Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN

Updated 5:27 AM EST, Thu November 21, 2019

Washington(CNN)Gordon Sondland wrote his name in history and triggered a turning point in the House impeachment inquiry with stunning testimony implicating the Presidentin an abuse of power.

In effect, one of President Donald Trump’s political appointees confirmed the core allegation of the entire scandal: that he conditioned aid and recognition for Ukraine on personal favors that could help him in his 2020 reelection campaign.

This was no “Never Trumper” bureaucrat perpetrating what some of the President’s conservative backers have called a coup. He was a glad-handing businessman who paid $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee and ended up with a plum job.

Sondland destroyed once and for all the earliest presidential talking point that there was no quid pro quo with Ukraine. He explicitly said the prospect of a White House visit for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was conditional on Ukraine announcing an investigation against Trump’s possible 2020 rival Joe Biden.

‘It was no secret’: Ambassador says quid pro quo came at ‘express direction of the President’

“I know that members of this committee frequently frame these complicated issues in the form of a simple question: was there a quid pro quo?” Sondland said.

“As I testified previously … the answer is yes.”

And Sondland broadened the scope of the conspiracy – testifying that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Vice President Mike Pence and acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney all knew what was going on.

“Everyone was in the loop,” said Sondland.

Testimony by Sondland – the most anticipated impeachment witness so far – came on the penultimate day of the currently scheduled televised hearings that built a new wall of facts against the President and will wrap up on Thursday with testimony from witnesses including former White House adviser on Russia, Fiona Hill.

Disastrous day for Trump

Gordon Sondland just saved himself – and jeopardized Donald Trump’s presidency

On the face of it, this was a disastrous day for Trump.

Yet the President declared total victory in the face of a factual defeat. Conservative media and Trump’s Republican allies seized on the inconsistencies in Sondland’s testimony. Their reactions made Wednesday’s revelations seem unlikely to shatter Trump’s political base, which is almost certain to prevent GOP senators deserting him.

The President seized on a comment by Sondland in which he said Trump told him he didn’t want a quid pro quo with Ukraine, despite a pattern of backdoor diplomacy that appeared to be demanding just such a concession.

“I want nothing, I want nothing, I want no quid pro quo. Tell Zelensky to do the right thing,” Sondland quoted Trump as saying in the conversation.

For the President, despite hour upon hour after devastating testimony, that was enough.

“If this were a prize fight, they’d stop it!” he declared in a tweet.

But in any version of reality outside of the Trump bubble, Wednesday’s dramatic events took the impeachment saga into a more foreboding phase and leaves critical players including Trump, his Republican defenders and Democratic investigators faced with important strategic decisions.

The US envoy to Europe, a forgetful witness at times, still dismantled the foundations of Trump’s impeachment defense.

He erased any idea that the scheme to go around traditional US diplomats and pressure Ukraine’s rookie president, Zelensky, was a black diplomatic operation dreamed up and largely run by Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

Sondland said he and other senior officials worked with “Mr. Rudy Giuliani on Ukraine matters at the express direction of the President of the United States.”

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff told reporters midway through the hearing that Sondland’s testimony “is among the most significant to date.”

“It was the conditioning of official acts or something of great value to the President these political investigations it goes right to the heart of the issue of bribery as well as other potential high crimes or misdemeanors,” Schiff said – apparently all but guaranteeing House Democrats will go ahead and make Trump the third President to be impeached.

Democrats face strategic questions

As the dust settles from Sondland’s testimony, the Democrats, given their House majority, are in the driving seat.

They now have testimony from inside the heart of the plot that sheds damning new light on the transcript of the July 25 call between Trump and Zelensky.

The question will be whether they can distill a concise, effective indictment of the President that will move Americans comprehensively against him. While their hopes of getting Senate Republicans to ditch Trump may be hopeless, they are also playing for the 2020 presidential election and are trying to grab back the Senate itself.

Each Washington scandal unfolds against the backdrop of every previous one. The scale of Trump’s impeachment saga is drawing increasing parallels to Watergate, that doomed Richard Nixon.

Sondland was in no sense one of the President’s Men ready to sacrifice himself in a bid to shield his boss. He was reasonably open and blew the lid off the back-door scheme to pressure Kiev. He clearly had no appetite to follow the fate of Trump acolyte Roger Stone who was recently convicted of lying to Congress.

His testimony essentially offers Democrats validation for moving ahead with impeachment – a significant political risk in itself.

And it was a reward for a process that has laid building blocks of a case started with a black diplomatic initiative before moving closer and closer to the President himself.

“This is a seminal moment in our investigation,” Schiff declared after Sondland left to go back to Europe.

Democratic leaders now face new questions raised by his testimony. Given his evidence implicating Giuliani, Pence, Pompeo and outgoing Energy Secretary Rick Perry, is it incumbent for the legitimacy of the probe to make a new effort to secure testimony from officials who are refusing to appear.

Democrats have wanted to avoid a long court showdown that would stretch the impeachment drive for months, could test the public’s patience and could bleed into 2020 primary season.

An attempt to at least give the impression of pursuing other officials could take the unofficial timetable that seeks a full House impeachment vote before Christmas into next year.

Testimony reinforces call transcript

Trump quickly reacted to Sondland’s testimony by characteristically denying he knew his Europe envoy well – despite the fact that the star witness boasted about their expletive-laden phone calls.

Republicans in the House Intelligence Committee did manage to pick up a few crumbs on Wednesday despite the core of Trump’s defense being dismantled

They seized on Sondland’s statements that the President did not direct him personally to withhold military aid to Ukraine in return for an announcement of a probe against Biden.

And while he admitted that there was a clear scheme to demand a quid pro quo for an Oval Office meeting for Zelensky, Sondland did not quite as far on the $400 million in military aid that was mysteriously held up by the President.

He said he presumed that the aid was held up for the same reason as the meeting – and expressed the concern about the possibility to Pence on September 1.

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham provided the updated White House version of the President’s relationship with Ukraine.

“Ambassador Sondland’s testimony made clear that in one of the few brief phone calls he had with President Trump, the President clearly stated that he ‘wanted nothing’ from Ukraine and repeated ‘no quid pro quo over and over again.’ In fact, no quid pro quo ever occurred. The U.S. aid to Ukraine flowed, no investigation was launched, and President Trump has met and spoken with President Zelensky. Democrats keep chasing ghosts,” Grisham said.

Her statement was a blueprint for Trump’s Republican and media friends.

But it contained inconsistencies in itself.

Evidence suggests that while Trump told Sondland that he didn’t want a quid pro quo, such a statement is not the same as not demanding one. Threatening to withhold aid for political favors can be an abuse of power in itself. And the military aid only started flowing on September 11 when it was clear that Democrats were investigating why it had been held up following a whistleblower’s report.

Trump’s own call with Zelensky on July 25 actually shows him asking his counterpart in Kiev for a “favor” immediately following a discussion of US military hardware that Ukraine hopes to acquire.

Sondland’s testimony caused an immediate headache for officials such as Pence and Pompeo – who are getting more and more dragged into the Ukraine mess.

The vice president on Wednesday tried to put out the fire in an interview with a local television station in Wisconsin saying he didn’t “recall” a conversation with Sondland in Poland on September 1.

© 2019 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Note:

{It is almost an era now when partisan politics are playing into a ditch of non recovery, where amazingly the fears of the seeds of distrust are morphing into actual hateful paranoia of distrust, sarising out of the hunger for absolute power.

It was inconceivable back in the day for Nixon to survive such a scenario , which now overwhelmingly is snowballing into a much larger set of wrongdoings, but as most paranoid operate, the more fissures the while system reveals, the more a new conflation of them into new and larger objects of concern loom below awareness.

This sandwitching the known with it’s negative seems to offer no relief in sight, and the moderates are slowly looking their cautionary margins. The borderline is melting into the inescapable birth of a tragic state if affairs , where reality is turning into tactics resembling delusions if invincibility.
Let’s see if these really are, as some suggested, the myopic last days if a grand experiment of social justice.}

After her testimony, the objectives become clear that the Ukraine problem was manufactured by Putin,who is using his Szoviet day operational techniques to undermine US political structural integrity

The fact is, that Russia has a lien on Trump. For what?

For the ‘help received from RUSSIA?, the help to build a Trump tower in Moscow, for Deutche Bank financing irregularities, for perhaps a hidden threat, to underlying ’ peace processes-such as those nuclear treaties which have been abrogated & other unmentionables’

Trump and His Corrupt Old Party
For Republicans, there is no bottom.

By Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist

Nov. 21, 2019
Image
House Republicans before testimony at an impeachment hearing.
House Republicans before testimony at an impeachment hearing.Credit…Damon Winter/The New York Times
Formally, the House of Representatives is holding an inquiry into the question of whether Donald J. Trump should be impeached. In reality, we’ve known the answer to that question for a long time. In a different era, when both parties believed in the Constitution, Trump’s abuse of his position for personal gain would have led to his removal from office long ago.

No, what we’re actually witnessing is a test of the depths to which the Republican Party will sink. How much corruption, how much collusion with foreign powers and betrayal of the national interest will that party’s elected representatives stand for?

And the result of that test seems increasingly clear: There is no bottom. The inquiry hasn’t found a smoking gun; it has found what amounts to a smoking battery of artillery. Yet almost no partisan Republicans have turned on Trump and his high-crimes-and-misdemeanors collaborators. Why not?

The answer gets to the heart of what’s wrong with modern American politics: The G.O.P. is now a thoroughly corrupt party. Trump is a symptom, not the disease, and our democracy will remain under dire threat even if and when he’s gone.

The usual explanation you hear for G.O.P. acquiescence in Trumpian malfeasance is that elected Republicans fear being defeated in a primary if they show any hint of wavering. And that’s certainly an important part of the story.

Republicans haven’t forgotten what happened in 2014, when David Brat, a Tea Party insurgent, ousted Eric Cantor, at the time the House majority leader. Cantor was a hard-line conservative, but mild-mannered in affect, and perceived as soft on immigration. The lesson was that the G.O.P. base demands red meat, and these days that means supporting Trump no matter what.

But electoral fears aren’t the only thing keeping Republicans in line.

On one side, I don’t think most observers realize, even now, the extent to which many Republicans view their domestic opponents not as fellow citizens but as enemies with no legitimate right to govern.

William Barr, the attorney general, says that progressives are “militant secularists” out to “destroy the traditional moral order.” If that’s how you see the world, you’ll support anything — up to and including soliciting and/or extorting intervention by foreign powers in U.S. elections — that helps defeat those progressives.

On the other side, it’s notable that with few exceptions even Republicans who are leaving or have left office still refuse to criticize Trump. There has been a wave of Republicans announcing retirements from the House, and there’s little question that some of these politicians are leaving because they’re disgusted with serving this administration. Yet almost none have said so explicitly, even though they won’t be facing any more primaries. What keeps them in line?

The answer is, follow the money.

What, after all, do retired officials do for a living? Many become lobbyists, and in an era of extreme polarization that means lobbying their own party. Being honest about why you quit would be bad for future business.

Beyond that, the modern U.S. right contains many institutions — Fox News and other media, right-wing think tanks, and others — that offer sinecures to former officials. However, this “wing-nut welfare” — which has no counterpart on the left — is available only to those who continue to toe the line.

Earlier I mentioned David Brat, who ousted Eric Cantor. As it happens, Brat himself was defeated in last year’s Democratic landslide. So what’s he doing now? He’s dean of the business school at Jerry Falwell Jr.’s Liberty University.

So financial incentives keep even retiring Republicans in line. And the exceptions prove the rule.

As far as I can tell, Gordon Sondland, who is ambassador to the European Union — but surely not for long — was the first political appointee, as opposed to professional civil servant, to attest to the Trump administration’s abuse of power in Ukraine. A key point about Sondland, however, is that he’s a rich man who doesn’t need wing-nut welfare.

He’ll live comfortably in retirement as long as he doesn’t go to jail. So his incentives were very different from those facing most G.O.P. figures.

So are all Republicans corruptly subservient to Trump? No, there are some honorable Never Trumpers, including many of the foreign-policy neocons like William Kristol. Some of us will never forgive this group for misleading us into war, but it turns out that they really do have principles, and deserve recognition for their current political courage.

But the modern G.O.P. as a whole is overwhelmingly fanatical, corrupt, or both. Anyone imagining that the mountainous evidence of Trump’s malfeasance will lead to a moral awakening, or that Republicans will return to democratic political norms once Trump is gone, is living in a fantasy world. Even catastrophic electoral defeat next year probably wouldn’t do much to change Republican behavior.

The big question is whether America as we know it can long endure when one of its two major parties has effectively rejected the principles on which our nation was built.

Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade and economic geography. @PaulKrugman

© 2019 The New York Times Company

The above indicated a systemic political failure to conform the principles of Democracy as laid down by the founding fathers , framed within the boundaries of political rules , to the substantiality of what it means to be free in accordance to the meaning of freedom, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Those words have derived their meaning from processes of anti-authoritarianism , which the economy of the United States can no longer afford.
The devalued conditions by which the depreciation of values came about, through the inflation of the qualified aspects of life, in inverse proportion of it’s quantified, value searching middle, has created a scene of diminishing returned abstraction of the very means of assurance through which a stable governance can guarantee such a vision.
No one in particular, no person, party , rule or procedure , only this erosion of.trust in an expanding economy of wasteful procurememt of sustaining the welfare of US society.
The diminishing returns of happiness is certainly due to similar to the Roman Empire’s disintegration, where more and more satiations resulted in more and more orgies of expressions of inadequacy.
Is it human nature that acts in accordance with Marx’s famous tenet that really is nothing else but a return to primal aesthetic values of pre Marxian pure dialectics? Perhaps the effort would be inauthentic if it was not be compared with the process that paralleled the prehistorical pre-Socratic efforts of human intelligence to overcome the primal authorities by means that transcend the religious by the aesthetic , natural yearnings , in the manner in which, rough alabaster , marble and diamond cutting along pre-formed natural fissures are recognized.

The rules and institutions are under attack by demands for processes which even if wrong and immoral, are temporalized through inadequate reasons, inadequate because the forms of projection can not ever be simulated backward.
Computer learning will always miss this process by the faulty application of this backward look, until the science unlocks these missing links
This is why democracy can not be learned from people who have been repressed within loops of colonialism for extended times, and short cutting such learning is reminiscent of the methods by which and the reasons put forward by Augustus toward a Christian Roman Empire,
which lasted a millennium and a half, and now for about a hundred fifty years, we are victims to a sudden reversal, with no quick quid quo pro in sight that can trade in the old model.

POLITICO

WHITE HOUSE

‘Combustible’: Trump’s pivotal moment with Iran

Popular protests across the Middle East — in Iran, Iraq and Lebanon — are intensifying as Washington appears consumed with the impeachment of President Donald Trump. | Susan Walsh/AP Photo

A cauldron of violence and tension overseas is threatening to boil over and grab attention just as President Donald Trump is fighting for his political survival back home.

It may seem like a “Wag the Dog” scenario — but this one’s actually dangerous and not manufactured as a distraction. Protests are rippling across the Middle East, potentially bringing long-simmering friction between the U.S. and Iran to a head in the coming months, exactly when Trump is expected to face a Senate impeachment trial.

In recent weeks, Iraq, Lebanon and Iran have been beset by demonstrations that are, at least in part, opposing Tehran. At home, Iranians are frustrated with an economy that’s sputtering under U.S. sanctions, while protesters in Iraq and Lebanon are objecting, among other things, to Tehran’s sway over their own governments. Iran is known to react violently in such situations — the country’s regime was accused over the summer of sabotaging oil tankers and downing an American drone, and it has more recently been blamed for killing Iranian protesters. If Tehran takes similar steps in Iraq, Lebanon or elsewhere in the Middle East, it could put pressure on Trump to respond militarily, as he almost did after the U.S. drone was taken out in June.

It’s all creating a pivotal moment for U.S. policy towards Iran. But thus far it’s gotten little attention back in the U.S., where foreign policy specialists of all political stripes fear the Trump administration and Congress are too consumed by an impeachment inquiry and the 2020 election.

“There’s a real risk that over the coming months, Iran does something in the Gulf or elsewhere, and you’ve had no routine deliberative process of which the president’s been a part to assess courses of action,” said Brett McGurk, who served until late 2018 as the Trump administration’s special envoy overseeing the coalition to fight ISIS. “That means a unilateral reaction, not considered policy, in moment of crisis.”

The unrest is occurring against an already unsettling backdrop. Turkey is starting to deport Islamic State fighters back to Europe and the U.S. as military experts warn of a possible ISIS resurgence. Russia is eyeing an increased role in Syria after the recent partial U.S. troop withdrawal and is selling warplanes to American allies in the region. And Iran continues to take incremental steps to test the boundaries of an international deal it struck to restrict its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.

A bank closed down after being attacked and burned during protests in Tehran. | Ebrahim Noroozi/AP Photo

“People are clamoring in the streets for democracy and prosperity, but we have a president who seems more interested in cozying up to authoritarian leaders and a Congress that is more interested in political bickering rather than uniting beyond the water’s edge,” said Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think tank that has pushed for the Trump administration’s sanctions against Iran.

It’s not an opinion unanimously shared in foreign policy circles. James Carafano, a national security and foreign policy expert at The Heritage Foundation, called the Trump administration’s Middle East policy “pretty resilient” and said the president is in a good position to handle future conflicts.

“The U.S. position in the Middle East is better than it was three years ago,” he said. “There’s still a ton to be done, but nothing to suggest the president needs to majorly overhaul his strategy.”

In recent days, the Trump administration has started to draw more attention to the situation in Iran. Trump on Thursday tweeted about Tehran’s move to shut down the internet amid the ongoing protests. “They want ZERO transparency, thinking the world will not find out the death and tragedy that the Iranian Regime is causing!”

And Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Thursday directly appealed to the Iranian protesters, asking for “videos, photos, and information documenting the regime’s crackdown,” adding, “The U.S. will expose and sanction the abuses.” He then trumpeted new sanctions on an Iranian official over the internet shutdown.

But cracking down on the Iranian regime could cause Iran to lash out elsewhere in the region, analysts said, putting pressure on the U.S. to respond with more than statements and sanctions.

Iraq is one place where the U.S. is monitoring Iran’s violent behavior. In recent weeks, Iraqis have taken to the streets to demonstrate against Iran’s influence in the country, where Tehran wields power at the highest levels of the military and government. The situation has turned deadly, with the government’s Iranian-backed militias firing off tear gas and live ammunition, killing at least 320 people since the unrest began in October, according to The Associated Press.

Protesters are calling for a complete overhaul of the government in response to Iran’s influence, lack of jobs, rampant corruption and failed public services.

The protests “are not necessarily pro-American, but they’re very distinctly anti-Iranian,” said a senior administration official. “And we think that’s one of the most positive developments we’ve seen in Iraq in a long, long time.”

It’s unclear that the situation will ultimately benefit the U.S., though. In addition to the violent crackdown that has occurred, Iraq’s ruling parties are considering an Iran-blessed package of political reforms to try and address protesters’ demands.

The Trump administration has not yet signaled it will take any action to try and influence the outcome beyond public statements. Pompeo has said the U.S. is watching the protests “very, very closely,” adding, “we support the Iraqi people as they strive for a prosperous Iraq that is free of corruption and Iranian malign influence.”

The White House has not publicly said much about the protests, issuing only one statement earlier this month.

“It’s a great opportunity for Iraq, but obviously it’s a very dangerous time,” said the official. “It will be an enormous shame if they decide to embrace the Iranian repression apparatus that’s on offer to them and quell these protests violently.”

A similar calculus is playing out in Lebanon, where protesters have marched against dysfunction, corruption and Iranian influence. While Prime Minister Saad Hariri announced his resignation in response to the crisis, there’s no clear succession plan. The country’s leaders have called for a new government of technocrats, but concerns remain about the role that Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia that looms over Lebanese politics, might play in forming a new government.

Anti-government protesters block off a street in Beirut. | Sam Tarling/Getty Images

So far, the White House has not weighed in on the situation in Lebanon. But days after the protests broke out, it emerged that the White House had halted all military aid to the Lebanese army. It’s unclear why the White House made the move. The White House did not comment on the aid.

Pompeo, for his part, has said the protests send “a clear message. The Lebanese people want an efficient and effective government, economic reform and an end to endemic corruption.” On Friday, he tweeted out more support, declaring that the U.S. “proudly stands with the Lebanese people in their peaceful demonstrations calling for reform and an end to corruption.”

As Iran struggles with how to manage protesters’ rebukes in other countries, it has also been confronted with demonstrations at home over fuel price hike that was done, in part, to counteract the economic squeeze of U.S. sanctions. The protests quickly turned deadly, with security forces killing over 100 protesters according to Amnesty International.

It’s the second time during the Trump administration that mass protests have swept across Iran. In late 2017 and early 2018, the Iranian people took to the streets over economic anxieties and opposition to Iranian leadership. The senior official said the administration didn’t do enough to support the demonstrators during that stretch.

“I think we really did miss an opportunity with Iran in the 2017, 2018 time frame with the protests and our ability to respond effectively to those and support those aspirations of the Iranian people,” the official said.

McGurk, the former U.S. envoy for the coalition fighting ISIS, argued the Trump administration misses such opportunities because it doesn’t proactively plan for these inevitable Middle East hot spots.

“The Middle East is combustible, and it’s combustible somewhat on its own but also because American policy has not taken into account second- and third-order effects of our own actions. Trump then seems surprised when friction points inevitably arise,” McGurk said.

And some fear that with so much political attention diverted toward impeachment and reelection, the Trump administration is going to face similar tough decisions without proper planning.

“The Trump administration response is purely reactive and scattershot,” said Mike Rubin, a Middle East scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. “You have so many moments where a more proactive strategy might nudge trends in the right direction. But we have seemed a.) completely obsessed with our own politics; and b.) even when we are paying attention abroad, we don’t have any coherent strategy.”

Others say the U.S., for now, is right to let things play out.

“The United States has done the right thing by staying away from heavy-handed interference, unlike what the U.S. did in Venezuela,” said Dr. Abbas Kadim, director of the Iraq Initiative at the Atlantic Council, referencing the administration’s vocal public campaign to oust Venezuela’s strongman leader, Nicolás Maduro. “You could criticize the United States for a lot of things in Iraq, but not this.”

McGurk simply fears the uncertainty of a major conflict exploding overseas.

“If you think things are bad now, imagine how this administration would handle a major crisis,” he said.

© 2019 POLITICO LLC

People are taking notice

Tucker Carlson: Democrats have lost the Trump impeachment war. Even Adam Schiff knows it

Can Trump be defeated?

The New York Times

THE CONVERSATION

Can Anyone or Anything Dislodge Trump From the White House?

Diplomats and Democrats are doing their level best.

By Gail Collins and Bret Stephens

Ms. Collins and Mr. Stephens are opinion columnists. They converse every other week.

Nov. 26, 2019

Fiona Hill, former National Security Council senior director, testifying before the House Intelligence Committee last week.Credit…Damon Winter/The New York Times

Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. I hope you have plans for a beautiful Thanksgiving.

Gail Collins: Happy holidays to you, Bret. I bet I can guess what you’re not going to be thankful for.

Bret: Bill Belichick?

In the meantime, here’s a riddle for us: Donald Trump just had what most of us thought was, for him, a no good, very bad week. His ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, acknowledged after past equivocations that there was indeed a quid pro quo with Ukraine — and that everyone senior in the administration knew about it. Then Fiona Hill, the Russia expert formerly on the National Security Council, gave a stark warning to congressional Republicans that they risked becoming dupes to Russian propaganda being peddled by the president himself.

So what happens? Trump gets a modest bump in the polls. Are we in Media World just completely misreading the mood in the rest of America regarding this impeachment inquiry?

Gail Collins: Don’t let polls ruin your week. For one thing, they’re not all that reliable, particularly in the short term. For another, I’m pretty sure most of the people who were really paying attention to the impeachment hearings had long since decided how they felt about the president.

The 2020 election will probably be all about turnout. And the recent state contests suggest we’re going to have a heck of a lot of anti-Trump voters showing up next year.

Bret: This is the (inflation adjusted) $64 trillion question. If it’s a turnout contest, then Democrats will do better with a more polarizing candidate, like Elizabeth Warren, though I’m beginning to doubt she can win the nomination, never mind the general election. And yet I still think the race is going to come down to a fairly small number of persuadable voters in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, who will be won over by a centrist Democrat in the same mold of other centrists who helped flip the House in the midterms.

But go on.

Gail: Another observation from the sunny side: My biggest takeaway from the hearings was the quality of the people who testified. You had a bunch of career diplomats nobody had ever heard of, who the right wing might call denizens of the deep state. And they were incredibly impressive — smart and so clearly dedicated to their jobs.

Bret: Agreed. If this is the “deep state,” well then, please, sir, I want some more. And it’s worth pointing out that people like Bill Taylor and Fiona Hill were never a part of any “resistance.” They were public-spirited people who believed that, when the president of the United States asks you to serve, the answer should be yes, no matter who the president may be. That they are now being treated so disdainfully by the G.O.P. is yet another one of those Joseph Welch “have you left no sense of decency” moments.

But we’ve had so many of those in the past three years.

Gail: Let’s gossip for a minute. All of a sudden we’re hearing rumorsthat Mike Pence might be on the way out, that Trump will replace him on the ticket next year with somebody with more appeal, like Nikki Haley. Think there’s any chance?

DEBATABLE

Bret: A strong one, yes. Trump has no sense of loyalty, so the thought of dropping Pence isn’t exactly going to keep him up at night. And Pence is so loyal that when Trump dumps him (probably via Twitter) he’ll just give that constipated nod of his.

Gail: And tell his wife: “Mother, it’s time to go bye-bye.”

Bret: As for Haley, she does everything Pence does in terms of her appeal to the Trump base, including with evangelical voters, and probably widens Trump’s appeal somewhat, for instance with Republican-leaning suburban women. And her new book goes out of its way to showcase how loyal she was to Trump, as opposed to people like the former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the former chief of staff John Kelly. That’s purposely designed to ingratiate herself with the Trump voters who weren’t entirely sure she was onboard the MAGA Express.

Gail: And, of course, to ingratiate herself with the president. Who I’m sure didn’t read the book, but probably got a one-paragraph summary.

Bret: Whatever Trump decides — and whatever she decides — she’s clearly setting herself up for a presidential run in 2024. She’ll be formidable. The shame is that, after being an early Trump critic, she clearly feels she can win the nomination only by drawing closer to the president, not distancing herself. It just shows how thoroughly Trump has captured and corrupted the party.

Meanwhile, Democrats! I thought that last debate was a bit of a snoozefest. The big story, it seems to me, is that Pete Buttigieg is approaching front-runner status, at least when it comes to Iowa. I’m more of a fan than you are. Can he go the distance?

Gail: Don’t think so. And it’s not a good idea. We just talked about the importance of turnout next year, and a lot of that is about making sure younger people and people of color show up to vote. That’s exactly where Mayor Pete is weakest.

Bret: I understand his weakness with African-American voters but remain mystified by why he isn’t polling better with the younger electorate. Even so: Wouldn’t it be nice to have a president who makes you enjoy the English language every time he speaks?

Gail: Mayor Pete is certainly a good speaker, but he’ll be even better when he runs again a few years down the line. I don’t think it’s a rejection if you just feel he could use a little more political experience outside of South Bend.

And speaking of mayors, are you still high on Mike Bloomberg? Talk about terrible poll numbers. How much do you think he’d need to spend to turn things around? More or less than the national budget of Canada?

Bret: He is my first choice by far, whatever misgivings I might have about his micromanaging style. (We former Republicans have to stick together.) I’m convinced he can trounce Trump in a general election, and he would have a winning message to the so-called exhausted majority that is sick of our hyper-ideological, polarized politics. And I wouldn’t read too much into his poll numbers right now. He’s a candidate of the head, not the heart. He has the money to keep going all the way to the convention, which might prove very useful if, as I think is entirely possible, the Democrats wind up with a brokered convention between two or three uncertain or unpalatable front-runners.

Gail: Ah, yes, a brokered convention. The last one was so exciting. King George VI had just died, the hydrogen bomb was about to get its first test and people were talking about the great new picture “Singin’ in the Rain.”

We haven’t had one since 1952, Bret. But tell me what you’re envisioning.

Bret: Imagine a scenario in which Buttigieg wins Iowa, Warren wins New Hampshire, Biden wins South Carolina and then goes on to win Super Tuesday, causing Bernie Sanders to drop out of the race. Some Sandernistas will go to Biden, but I suspect most of his supporters then shift to Warren. The rest of the field drops out for lack of funds — except, of course, for Bloomberg. At that point, the Democratic Party takes a deep breath, clenches some posterior muscles and realizes the former mayor offers the best shot at dethroning Trump, who at that point will be celebrating his impeachment “victory” after an acquittal in the Senate.

Am I 100 percent insane, or just 95 percent?

Gail: Hesitant to dismiss any wild possibility in the current climate. But when crazy stuff happens, it’s always because of Donald Trump. On the Democratic side things are actually pretty boring considering that we’ve got a wide-open presidential race.

Bret: Too boring. I really think posterity will look back at this election as an inflection point. Are Democrats up to their historical responsibility to nominate the candidate most likely to defeat Trump? Or are they too consumed by ideology to appeal to the middle of the country, politically speaking, and win over the voters who aren’t in sync with everything Democrats stand for but are ready for a change?

Gail: Sounds like a post-turkey thought to me, Bret. Enjoy your family and friends. Watch some football games. Think of all our politicians as leftovers you’ll deal with next week.

By Tucker Carlson | Fox News

The Democrats have been talking about impeachment since the very day that President Trump was inaugurated. But until recently, no one here in Washington took that idea very seriously. Maxine Waters would rant about a trial. Then Pilates moms in Santa Monica would fantasize on Twitter about removing Trump by force.

But the adults in the party – Nancy Pelosi, for example, the House Speaker – opposed impeachment on the grounds that it was bad politics, and might boomerang on them.

HOUSE DEM NOW SEES NO ‘VALUE’ IN IMPEACHMENT, AS POLLS SHOW FALLING SUPPORT AMONG INDEPENDENTS

And then in what seemed like a day, everything changed completely. Suddenly, we had impeachment hearings playing out live in TV. Nobody explained why. Looking back, what exactly happened? Well, part of the answer is the Democrats were simply responding to their own cheerleaders on cable news.

Lawrence O’Donnell, host of “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell” on MSNBC: If precedent means anything in the Trump era, Donald Trump will be, must be impeached.

Chris Matthews, host of “Hardball with Chris Matthews” on MSNBC: But if they don’t impeach, Democrats will abdicate a clear, constitutional chance to hold this president fully accountable.

Chris Todd, MSNBC host: The national nightmare is upon us. The basic rules of our democracy are under attack from the president. We begin tonight with a series of admissions by the president that all but assures his impeachment in the House of Representatives.

Nicolle Wallace, MSNBC host: I don’t understand why the fact that impeachment is polarizing is some sort – it makes them just as cowardly as the Republicans.

Eddie Glaude, Princeton University professor and MSNBC contributor: Absolutely. And to my mind, it also is an abdication of their constitutional responsibility.

Don Lemon, CNN host: Will there be any consequences for this president, who is continuing to defy the rule of law?

“The rule of law.” Hear that, Mr. and Mrs. America? It’s a national emergency! And if they don’t impeach, Democrats – listen carefully – Democrats will abdicate their solemn, constitutional responsibility. Democrats literally have no choice but to undo the 2016 election.

Yeah. That’s what the hair hats on TV, the men who wear makeup and yell at their assistants, were telling Democratic leaders night, after night, after night. And remarkably – and it is remarkable looking back – Democrats believed them.

So, what happened next? Let’s see. Have you read the new Vanity Fair? Sorry, rhetorical question. Nobody reads Vanity Fair anymore. It likely won’t exist by this time next year.

But before the title disappears forever, check out this month’s issue. There’s a fascinating piece by Ken Stern that assesses new polling on impeachment. Here’s the headline: Among independents, the only group that matters in an election, support for impeachment – impeaching Trump – has dropped by 10 points since the process started.

How to explain this? In political terms, this is the Andrea Doria, a routine cruise that suddenly becomes a disaster, a debacle. They spent two weeks telling you that Donald Trump is a criminal. And by the end, more people sympathized with Donald Trump.

How’d that happen? Take a close look at the numbers and it’s obvious how it happened. Independent voters were asked to rank 11 issues in order of their importance. First on the list was fiscal health. Seventy-four percent of independent voters said that the budget deficit was their main concern. Seventy-two percent said health care was the main concern. Seventy percent said infrastructure. Pretty conventional.

This is what happens when you let Jeff Zucker run your political party. You start to imagine that CNN’s primetime lineup somehow speaks for America, rather than for a tiny, out of touch little part of it.

Impeachment? That came in dead last, 11 out of 11. Only 37 percent of independents thought it was a priority – at all. By a margin of 3 to 1 – and this is hilarious – independents said that impeachment was more important to politicians and to the media than it was to them.

These are not subtle numbers. So, how did Democrats miss them? Well, because they only talk to each other. This is what happens when you let [CNN President] Jeff Zucker run your political party. You start to imagine that CNN’s prime time lineup somehow speaks for America, rather than for a tiny, out of touch little part of it.

Zucker tells you that impeachment is the only issue that matters. His unit agrees with him. And you believe them. Come fall, you lose the election.

In a moment like this, weirdly, it’s the non-politicians who seem to see things the most clearly. Here’s Andrew Yang after last week’s presidential debate.

Andrew Yang, 2020 presidential candidate: When I talked to voters around the country, well, I have to say, I get very, very few questions about impeachment. I know that there are people who are very intent on the impeachment proceedings day-to-day, but that doesn’t line up with what I’m hearing from voters here on the ground.

New York Times

The beat go on:

New revelations put Trump on shakier ground
Analysis by Maeve Reston, CNN
Updated 10:19 AM EST, Wed November 27, 2019

(CNN) New transcripts of witness testimony and news reports revealing key details on the Ukraine scandal timeline show in vivid detail the way President Donald Trump and top officials maneuvered behind the scenes to block aid to Ukraine as the President sought an investigation into his political rival Joe Biden.

The new revelations, coming at a time when half of Americans support impeaching and removing the President even though impeachment proceedings have not moved the needle of public opinion, underscored the problem for Trump and his supporters in Congress: Public hearings in the impeachment inquiry may be in the rearview mirror, but new details about his pressure campaign on Ukraine continue to trickle out.

The developments on Tuesday illuminated the fact that there’s still much to learn about the President’s actions regarding Ukraine as the House races toward a potential vote on impeachment by Christmas.

Budget official testimony undermines impeachment defense on freezing Ukraine aid
Budget official testimony undermines impeachment defense on freezing Ukraine aid

The President’s claims of innocence looked even more incredulous Tuesday night after The New York Times reported that Trump released the hold on Ukraine aid after he was briefed on the whistleblower report outlining his dealings with Ukraine.

That report and newly released transcripts of impeachment witness testimony undercut key arguments that the Republicans have been making as they have defended the President, who cast the impeachment inquiry during his Florida rally Tuesday night as a “scam,” a “witchhunt” and a “hoax.”

During the impeachment hearings earlier this month, Republicans spooled out various theories about why the White House might have frozen aid to Ukraine – from the notion that Trump was concerned about corruption to the idea that he wanted to see more financial contributions to the Ukraine aid from other foreign countries.

But the timeline revealed Tuesday, in conjunction with the transcript of testimony from Office of Management and Budget Official Mark Sandy, outlines an indisputably clear set of facts about the bizarre way the Ukraine aid was handled.

The confusion that Sandy and other line-level OMB aides felt about why the Ukraine aid was being withheld, along with their inability to get answers, showed how the Trump administration’s unusual enterprise was shrouded in secrecy, even from the very people who were handling the money.

Timeline undercuts Trump’s defense
First the timeline: We now know that White House budget office took its first official action to withhold $250 million in aid to Ukraine on the evening of July 25, according to a House Budget Committee summary of the office’s documents.

That was the very same day that Trump spoke by phone with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, prefacing his request for an investigation of the 2016 election with the now infamous phrase “I would like you to do us a favor, though.” Agencies had been notified at a July 18 meeting that the aid had been frozen by the President, a week before the call.

Sandy, the Office of Management and Budget official who signed off on the initial Ukraine aid freeze before a Trump political appointee took over that task, testified that the President’s interest in the aid dated back to June, but that he couldn’t get an explanation of why the aid was withheld in July or August.

The request was so unusual that Sandy immediately told his boss that the freeze could violate an obscure federal law known as the Impoundment Control Act, which prohibits a sitting president from unilaterally withholding funds that were appropriated by Congress.

Sandy knew that the aid fell into the category of “one-year funds” – meaning the money (totaling nearly $400 million) was only available until September 30. He told his boss, Trump political appointee Michael Duffey, that he wanted to talk to the lawyers at the Office of Management and Budget.

Sandy and other OMB aides were so alarmed by the inexplicable hold that they also sent a memo to Duffey recommending that hold be released because “assistance to Ukraine is consistent with the national security strategy,” Sandy testified, and had the added benefit of “opposing Russian aggression.”

In his closed-door deposition, Sandy also directly debunked the Republican talking point that the hold on the aid was related to Trump’s concern that other nations should be contributing more in national security assistance to Ukraine.

Sandy testified that the White House didn’t ask the budget office for information about how much other nations were contributing until September – months after the hold was placed.

“I recall in early September an email that attributed the hold to the President’s concern about other countries not contributing money to Ukraine,” Sandy testified. By that time, lawmakers were asking questions about the freeze on aid to Ukraine and reports questioning the reasons for the withholding had already hit the press.

New testimony from State Department official Philip Reeker underscores the fact that the administration’s hold on aid to Ukraine was orchestrated at the highest levels of power in the White House.

Reeker, the acting assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, testified that he believed the security assistance to Ukraine was “being held by Mr. Mulvaney, the White House Acting Chief of Staff,” but that he did not have “definitive knowledge that Mulvaney was behind the holdup.”

“Our operating understanding was that this was being held by Mr. Mulvaney, the White House Acting Chief of Staff,” Reeker told lawmakers, according to the transcript.

READ: State Department official Philip Reeker’s closed-door impeachment inquiry testimony
Reeker also testified about the concerns of veteran diplomats like Kurt Volker about the maneuverings of Rudy Giuliani, the President’s personal lawyer, who has been accused of trying to orchestrate the quid pro quo of a White House meeting in exchange for an investigation of the Bidens. There is no evidence of wrongdoing by either Biden.

“I do recall him telling me … that, well, he was going to reach out to or was going to speak to Giuliani,” Reeker said of Volker, the former US special representative to Ukraine. “And I think Ambassador Volker felt that there was this very good story to tell about President Zelensky and a new chapter in Ukraine. And that was his goal, was to hopefully take away some of that, what we sense was a negative stream coming from Mr. Giuliani to the President.”

Court of public opinion
It remains unclear whether the new details of the President’s Ukraine timeline will do much to move public opinion.

The inquiry moves to a new phase next week with the Judiciary Committee, holding its first hearing on December 4, and Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler has also extended an invitation to Trump and his lawyers to participate in the probe. So far the Trump administration’s strategy has been to stonewall and not participate in the process.

For now, Trump is trying to claim victory after the two weeks of blockbuster testimony by pointing to a new CNN poll showing that 50% of Americans believe that he should be impeached and removed, because that figure was unchanged from mid-October when CNN asked the same question.

At his rally on Tuesday night, Trump described Democrats leading the inquiry as “maniacs” who are “pushing the deranged impeachment.”

“The radical left Democrats are trying to rip our nation apart,” Trump said Tuesday night to boos at his rally in Florida. “First it was the Russia hoax, total hoax. It was a failed overthrow attempt and the biggest fraud in the history of our country and then you look, the Mueller deal, you remember that mess? They had nothing.”

No, the new CNN poll is not good news for Donald Trump on impeachment
“Now the same maniacs are pushing the deranged impeachment – think of this: Impeachment. Impeachment. A witch hunt. … They’re pushing that impeachment witch hunt and a lot of bad things are happening to them. Because you see what’s happening in the polls? Everybody said, that’s really bulls—,” Trump said to cheers and applause.

But beneath the steady topline poll numbers on impeachment, there is strong evidence that the Ukraine matter has eroded confidence in the President’s motives – and that many Americans have heard enough to disapprove of his conduct.

While the views on impeachment and removal did not change in the CNN poll released Tuesday, 53% of Americans said Trump improperly used his office to gain political advantage, up from 49% who said the same in October.

Moreover, 56% said the President’s efforts to get Ukraine to launch investigations into the Biden family, a Ukrainian energy company and the 2016 election were intended to benefit him rather than root out corruption in Ukraine.

The question looming over the 2020 election is whether the stain of impeachment could irreparably damage Trump and cost him the White House.

It too early to draw conclusions, but the ground he is standing on gets shakier each day as new revelations point toward questionable conduct on his part.

© 2019 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Trump Has Begun the Process of Selling Out Rudy Giuliani

It might not make a difference, but anyone still arguing for the defense on Ukraine now looks even dumber.

BY CHARLES P. PIERCE

NOV 27, 2019



THE WASHINGTON POSTGETTY IMAGES

And, right before the holiday season officially begins, the last piece of the puzzle locks into place, and the last alibi falls apart like an overcooked turkey. From The New York Times:

Lawyers from the White House counsel’s office told Mr. Trump in late August about the complaint, explaining that they were trying to determine whether they were legally required to give it to Congress, the people said. The revelation could shed light on Mr. Trump’s thinking at two critical points under scrutiny by impeachment investigators: his decision in early September to release $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine and his denial to a key ambassador around the same time that there was a “quid pro quo” with Kyiv. Mr. Trump used the phrase before it had entered the public lexicon in the Ukraine affair.

Now we have the whole thing. The president* used military aid money already appropriated by Congress to shakedown the government of Ukraine, an ally, in order to get Ukraine to help him ratfck one of his prospective opponents in the 2020 presidential election. As last week’s testimony confirmed, everyone in this massive loop knew this at the time. Then someone, and we still don’t know who, took a complaint to the intelligence community’s inspector general. This was at the end of July. And, by August, they had briefed the president*, who, having been caught borscht-handed, released the aid in early September. Every episode in that chronicle is an impeachable offense, and the entire timeline is one very big one.

Remember what Rep. Adam Schiff said last week, when the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee tried to argue that nothing untoward had happened because the president* eventually released the aid?

"My Republican colleagues, all they seem to be upset about with this is not that the president sought an investigation of his political rival, not that he withheld a White House meeting and $400 million in aid we all passed in a bipartisan basis to pressure Ukraine to do those investigations.Their objection is that he got caught. Their objection is that someone blew the whistle, and they would like this whistleblower identified, and the president wants this whistleblower punished. That’s their objection. Not that the president engaged in this conduct, but that he got caught.”

Now, even that most threadbare irrelevancy is denied to all but the most fervent members of the cult. The president* released the aid because his lawyers told him he’d been caught. On this matter, at least, the case is airtight, and there is no daylight to be found. The president*, among others, is stone busted. That may matter. It may not. But anyone arguing for the defense on the Ukraine matter is bound to look like even more of an idiot than they already do, and those people look like the succulent, ripe fruit of the Stupid Tree already. That’s something, anyway.

Trump’s Ukraine defenders now look even dumber.

As this news was breaking, the president* was having another one of his traveling wankfests, this one in Sunrise, Florida. His trolley left the track early and never returned. From NBC News:

“The same maniacs are pushing the deranged impeachment. Think of this. Impeachment. Impeachment. A witch hunt. The same as before,” he said referring to former Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report. "And they’re pushing that impeachment witch hunt. And a lot of bad things are happening to them. Because you see what’s happening in the polls? Everybody said: that’s really bullshit.”

He looked awful and sounded worse. There’s something hinky about one of his arms. His voice was raspy. I’m beginning to think it was a bad idea to let the story of his Midnight Ride to Walter Reed fade as quickly as it did. Before the rally, the president* did an interview with Bill O’Reilly in which he began the process of selling out Rudy Giuliani. From The Daily Beast:

Asked point-blank if Giuliani was acting on his behalf in trying to dig up dirt on former vice president Joe Biden—an issue now at the heart of an impeachment inquiry—Trump said, “No, I didn’t direct him, but he is a warrior, he is a warrior…I know that he was going to go to Ukraine and I think he cancelled the trip. But Rudy has other clients, other than me. He’s done a lot of work in Ukraine over the years.”

That’s his story and he’s sticking to it. For now, anyway.

CHARLES P. PIERCECharles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

©2019 Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Perceptions change within folksy fox news: Tucker Carlson uses reverse psychology.

Some suggest Senate may actually change opinions when the trial begins in Congress:

NEWS
FOX NEWS’ TUCKER CARLSON ADMITS TRUMP IS A ‘FULL-BLOWN BS ARTIST’ AND ‘COMPULSIVE SELF-PROMOTER’

NEWS TUCKER CARLSON FOX NEWS DONALD TRUMP

Conservative commentator Tucker Carlson launched an unusual defense of President Donald Trump Wednesday night, describing the president as a “racist liar” and a “full-blown BS artist.”

Carlson made the claims on his Fox News show Tucker Carlson Tonight. He began by bringing up the Washington Post’s claim that Trump has made more than 13,000 “false or misleading claims” since taking office in January 2017. Carlson seemed to agree that the president frequently fails to tell the truth and used a clip of Trump wrongly claiming that the crowd attending his inauguration ceremony was the “biggest ever.”

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Trump Legal Adviser Insists Ukraine Call Was Perfect
“We’re not going to lie to you: that was untrue,” said Carlson. “The crowd at the 2017 inauguration was not the largest ever measured on the national mall. Sorry, it wasn’t.”

The pundit then explained he believes Trump made the false claim because it is part of his nature, likening the president’s alleged repeated lying to the skill set of a car salesman.

“That’s who he is,” said Carlson. “Donald Trump is a salesman. He’s a talker, a boaster, a booster, a compulsive self-promoter. At times, he’s a full-blown BS artist. If Trump hadn’t gotten rich in real estate, he could have made a fortune selling cars.”

Carlson appeared to discount the importance of Trump lying, saying that “most people know” Trump is a frequent liar because it’s “obvious.” Although Carlson’s monologue initially seemed bizarre coming from a Trump supporter, it soon became clear that he was setting up an attempt to defend the president, suggesting progressives focused on lying are using it as a type of smokescreen to obscure the supposed anger they have over Trump “telling the truth.”

“Is lying really the reason the left despises Donald Trump?” Carlson asked. “Or could the real problem be, as is so often the case, the exact opposite of what they claim it is? Think back over the last four years. When have the CNN anchors been the angriest? Was it when Donald Trump told some whopper, or exaggerated his own accomplishments? No. They’re used to that kind of lying, everyone who spends time around politicians is used to it. What infuriates official Washington is not when Trump lies, it’s when he tells the truth. Truth is the real threat to their power.”

Carlson claimed that “people in charge of our country” avoid any reflection on societal problems, while participating in an “increasingly strict policy of mandatory reality avoidance” to avoid the truth as presented by Trump.

“Diversity is our strength! Shut up, or we’ll hurt you,” shouted Carlson, apparently impersonating a fictional person he disagrees with politically.

“But Trump won’t shut up, he keeps talking,” Carlson said. “That’s his crime, that’s why they hate him.”

In support of what he believes is Trump’s truth-telling, the Fox News host recalled the then-candidate’s statement in 2015 regarding undocumented immigrants from Mexico. Trump claimed the immigrants were “bringing crime” and drugs and consisted of “rapists” before qualifying the statement by adding “and some of them, I assume, are good people.”

Carlson claimed progressive opposition to the statement was evidence that “you are absolutely, under no circumstances allowed to say” undocumented immigrants ever commit crimes. The pundit did not specify who was prohibiting the speech, or what happens when the supposed prohibition is broken.

Later in the show, a graphic claimed “left hates Trump because he exposes their flaws” as Carlson blamed crime in Baltimore, Maryland on “50 years of uninterrupted Democratic rule” while praising controversial disparaging statements Trump has made about the city, before mockingly taking on the screeching tone of a fictional political opponent, saying “let’s just agree that Trump is a racist liar and move on.”

Fox News host Tucker Carlson described President Donald Trump as a “racist liar” and “full-blown BS artist” during a segment defending Trump on the Wednesday edition of his television program

© Copyright 2019 NEWSWEEK

Comment: {Here comes the inverted paradigmn, which is precedential, as in ductatirs’s attempt to invert truth from falsity, to inadvertently put a smokescreen, upon preceptions, by projecting the idea underneath unto the public opinionated media.

This 'objectuvisation of the inversion, in-version, where the public’s -shaped- version, is inauthentic, puts the public media pitted against the "outed’president.

No less, the middle waters created by a collusive media/public hype, creates an image of a hard working-mashable genius, who is trying to swim upstream by any means possible, back there, where the absolute executive power lays.

This is why his biographer if his deal making characterizes this ‘pricess’ as nothing more as an effort to gain power, an illusive effort , underlying which is the reversal, where the public’s pretension of backward look into investigation after investigation , creates the effect of confusion from undermining or, revising ‘facts’.

It becomes a show of effects, rather then the original points that would still exist, if they could still be retained in the loop.

This transcendental objectivity, in Stalin’s time-was the much hyped t year plan, very much material fodder of trying to substantiate the Engels’immaterial Heglelian dials tic.

The emperor can go around with no clothes for only so long, before credibility is heavenly attacked by some brave souls.

{Arminius where are You?

The major premise (Russia) and the minor one, Ukraine have been colluded , yes but the collusion, the primal collusion is the military egalitarian mix of both - Russia and the USA, with the
former nuke blackmailing the latter, with the mix of applied force to create a new world-consisting of the rightness of territorial expansion into a -remade revised great USSR again.
The threats are obvious, and planners developed the minor key as am adjunct of rationality tied to public awareness.
Are the Dems the ones who don’t think in terms of public safety but to ‘prninciples’?}

So if it Your partner are out there, or anyone concerned enough to raise the issue, can you comment?

If any of you are actually giving credibility to The New York Times, Washington Post, or Daily Beast, you are getting very seriously mislead into a very contorted bubble of misbelief.

Opinions can and do change. The many facets of opinions pfnmedia so change, as well, with in and without the multiform personalities of each person reading them

Lately the awareness of this has been noticed by both pro and con party line and media outlets.
In fact Fox News opinions have lately begun to have negative opinions while some liberal commentators expressed increased positive opinions about Trumpism.

The media is not a static opinion based outlet, and this bears true by opinions that really show the public polls mainly unaffected either way.

IMPEACHMENT INQUIRY
Six degrees of Rudy: Giuliani’s web tangles three Trump controversies
Ukraine only skims the surface of the former mayor’s influence in the administration.

Nov. 30, 2019, 7:46 AM EST
By Dareh Gregorian
All roads lead to Rudy.

Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who is now President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, is in the news constantly for his role in the impeachment inquiry. But while Giuliani’s efforts to have Ukraine launch investigations politically beneficial to Trump are much discussed, it’s not the only way he and his associates have woven themselves into the fabric of Trump’s world.

Asked in a text Wednesday by NBC News about how his circle has been able to be so influential in the Trump administration, Giuliani responded, “I don’t know.”

Here’s a look at Giuliani’s key players and how they intersect with Trump:

UKRAINE
Giuliani’s ties to Ukraine go back to at least 2008 when he did consulting work for Vitaly Klitschko, a former boxer who is now mayor of Kyiv. While he’s had other business dealings there over the years, Giuliani said he started focusing on Ukraine’s alleged role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election as a way of countering special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian election interference.

This year, Giuliani seized on unfounded allegations that Ukraine had scuttled an investigation into Hunter Biden at the behest of his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, a leading 2020 Democratic presidential rival. Giuliani said his investigative efforts had the president’s blessing, which has been confirmed by multiple witnesses in the impeachment inquiry.

But Giuliani had some help with his efforts.

LEV PARNAS and IGOR FRUMAN
Parnas, a Trump donor, told the New Yorker earlier this year that he became “good friends” with Giuliani after the 2016 election. The friendship was lucrative for Giuliani, who told Reuters that Parnas’ company Fraud Guarantee paid his consulting company Giuliani Partners $500,000 for business and legal advice last year.

Parnas, who was born in Ukraine, told the New Yorker he volunteered to help Giuliani’s efforts there. “Because of my Ukrainian background and my contacts there, I became like Rudy’s assistant, his investigator,” he told the magazine.

Parnas and Fruman, his business partner in another company called Global Energy Producers, had already been agitating against U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. Federal prosecutors said they raised money for a congressman in 2018, later identified to NBC News as former Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, in order to push for his help in getting rid of the ambassador.

Igor Fruman exits federal court after an arraignment hearing in New York on Oct. 23, 2019.Stephanie Keith / Getty Images file
As NBC News reported in October, the plot against Yovanovitch was driven by Ukraine’s former chief prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, who claimed without evidence that the ambassador had given him a “do not prosecute” list. Parnas and Fruman helped Lutsenko connect with Giuliani, and the two discussed a possible investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden. Lutsenko later said that he didn’t think Hunter Biden did anything wrong.

Parnas and Fruman also helped connect Giuliani with Lutsenko’s predecessor, Viktor Shokin, who claims he was fired for investigating Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company where Hunter Biden worked. There’s never been any evidence of wrongdoing by either Biden, but that hasn’t stopped Trump and his allies from pushing this narrative.

In addition to their work for Giuliani, Parnas and Fruman had another side gig — doing work for two of Giuliani’s longtime friends.

JOE diGENOVA and NANCY TOENSING
DiGenova is a longtime friend of Giuliani’s who was the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., while Giuliani was the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. DiGenova and his attorney wife, Victoria Toensing, have their own Washington-based law firm, diGenova & Toensing, and are fixtures on Fox News, where they’ve been staunch defenders of the president.

Trump announced they were joining his legal team in March of last year, but had to pull back the offer because of conflicts of interest involving the Mueller probe. “However, those conflicts do not prevent them from assisting the president in other legal matters,” Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow said at the time.

As the New York Times and Washington Post reported on Wednesday that the couple, along with Giuliani Partners, had been in negotiations to represent Lutsenko earlier this year.

The husband and wife also worked with a Ukrainian oligarch, Dmytro Firtash, who has been fighting extradition to the U.S. Firtash told The New York Times he’d hired the couple in June at the urging of Parnas and Fruman. Toensing has said she hired Parnas as “a translator” to do work on Firtash’s case.

TURKEY
Giuliani has strong ties to the Turkish government and represented a Turkish-Iranian banker, Reza Zarrab, who was jailed in March 2016 on money laundering charges. Zarrab, who had an office in Trump Tower Istanbul, was close friends with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and had politically damaging information involving a government-run Turkish bank, Halkbank.

In February 2017, Giuliani met with Erdogan in Turkey about the case, and he later met with Trump and then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson about Zarrab as well. He had company at both meetings.

MICHAEL MUKASEY
Mukasey, a former prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, worked with Giuliani at a New York City law firm, and the pair remained close over the years even after Mukasey became then-President George W. Bush’s attorney general.

Former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey.Yuri Gripas / Reuters file
Mukasey teamed with Giuliani on the Zarrab case, but their addition to Zarrab’s legal team did not sit well with New York prosecutors or the judge presiding over the case. The judge, Richard Berman, accused the men of having conflicts of interest — Mukasey’s law firm had represented eight of the banks that were victimized by Zarrab, as had Giuliani’s firm. Giuliani’s law firm had also served as an “agent” of Turkey, Berman found — but he allowed them to stay on the case because Zarrab had “voluntarily and knowingly” waived the issue.

How far they went to do so became clear recently. While NBC News first reported Mukasey and Giuliani’s meeting with Erdogan in 2017, the Washington Post last month reported that Mukasey and Giuliani had also met with Trump in the Oval Office about Zarrab that same year. Trump called Tillerson in to meet with them as well. “The president says, ‘Guys, give Rex your pitch,’” a source familiar with the meeting told the paper.

They suggested swapping Zarrab for an American pastor who was in Turkish custody. Tillerson considered the request inappropriate, and later complained to Trump’s chief of staff, John Kelly, who told him to ignore it, the Post reported.

Zarrab wound up pleading guilty and giving testimony in a related case that was devastating to Erdogan and Halkbank. Federal prosecutors in New York charged Halkbank last month in a multibillion-dollar scheme to violate U.S. sanctions on Iran, and Zarrab is expected to be the star witness at trial.

NAVY SEAL CASE
Two other Giuliani associates have been center stage in a case involving Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL acquitted of murder in the death of a wounded ISIS prisoner.

His cause had been championed by Fox News personalities and was taken up by another Giuliani friend.

BERNIE KERIK
Kerik, an Army veteran, is a former New York City police officer who once worked on Giuliani’s security detail when he was mayor. Giuliani gave Kerik the top job in the city jail system, and in 2000 named him police commissioner. The pair worked side-by-side on the day of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

In 2010, Kerik would be sentenced to four years in prison for offenses including failure to pay taxes and lying to the White House during his scuttled nomination to be Homeland Security chief.

Since his release, he’s become an advocate for prison reform. Like diGenova and Toensing, he’s also a frequent presence and Trump advocate on Fox News.

Kerik started acting as an adviser in the Gallagher case earlier this year. He helped set up a legal team that included Timothy Parlatore, who’s worked for Kerik in the past, and another Giuliani friend: Marc Mukasey.

MARC MUKASEY
Mukasey, the son of Michael Mukasey, is a former federal prosecutor who worked with Giuliani at two law firms. Mukasey left the firm Greenberg Traurig earlier this year to start his own firm and quickly landed high-powered clients, representing members of the Trump family and the Trump Foundation in a civil case that had been brought by the New York State Attorney General’s office. That case officially settled in early November.

Marc Mukasey, defense lawyer for Navy Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher, arrives to military court on Naval Base San Diego on July 2, 2019, in San Diego.Julie Watson / AP file
Kerik, Parlatore and Mukasey scored a huge victory over the summer when Gallagher was acquitted of the most serious charges against him. Gallagher was convicted of posing for a picture with the corpse, and the court ordered him to be dropped in rank from chief to petty officer first class. The legal team vowed to fight the rank reduction, too.

Trump became a vocal advocate for Gallagher, both restoring his rank and ordering the Pentagon to drop a planned disciplinary hearing against him that could have resulted in his expulsion from the elite unit.

Kerik celebrated the developments with a picture of him, Mukasey and Gallagher. His “prayers have been answered,” Kerik wrote.

Giuliani weighed in on Twitter as well, saying Trump’s actions in the case “shows his courage and integrity.”

“Not many Presidents would put their neck out on the line,” Giuliani said. “It shows how much he values those who protect us!”

Dareh Gregorian
Dareh Gregorian is a politics reporter for NBC News.

Allan Smith contributed.

Trump better Potus then Lincoln?

Stone

POLITICS NEWS

53 Percent of Republicans Say Trump Is a Better President Than Lincoln

Yep, you read that right

PETER WADE

NOVEMBER 30, 2019 1:24PM EST

Susan Walsh/AP/Shutterstock

According to a new weekly tracking poll from the Economist/YouGov, a majority of Republicans prefer President Donald Trump over former President Abraham Lincoln. Yep, you read that right.

The poll, which surveyed 1,500 Americans, showed Republicans favoring Trump over Lincoln by 6 percentage points, 53 to 47. But the same poll gave us hope that not all Americans have lost their minds, with a total of 75 percent saying that Lincoln was indeed the better leader.

Both Democrats and independents disagree with Republicans by a wide margin. Ninety-four percent of Democrats saying that Lincoln was the better president, and 78 percent of independents agree that Lincoln was better.

After former Hillary Clinton press secretary Jesse Ferguson tweeted the Lincoln/Trump poll nugget, the term “53% of Republicans” began to trend on Twitter.

One reaction that garnered a lot of engagement on social media was a GIF from actor Billy Baldwin. Baldwin posted an animated photo of the Lincoln Memorial with the former president flipping the bird at both President Trump and Melania Trumpand included the viral phrase along with a shot at the GOP faithful, writing, “53% of Republicans apparently don’t even know who Abraham Lincoln was…”

However, the never-ending love from party loyalists for former president Ronald Reagancould not be toppled even with the seemingly unshakeable support for the current president. Reagan still bests Trump 59 percent to 41 percent as their favorite.

;

© 2019 PMC. All rights reserved.

Trump’s week: from ‘ordained by God’ to dethroned by a judge
Opinion by Richard Galant, CNN
Updated 10:21 AM EST, Sun December 01, 2019

(CNN) The sweetest sound Donald Trump could hear last week was that of his outgoing Energy Secretary, Rick Perry, proclaiming him the chosen one “ordained by God” to be President of the United States. But this was soon followed by the ringing declaration of Ketanji Brown Jackson, a US District Court judge: Trump is no king, she said, decisively rejecting Trump’s effort to shield his former White House counsel Donald McGahn from testifying before Congress.

“The primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that Presidents are not kings. This means that they do not have subjects, bound by loyalty or blood, whose destiny they are entitled to control,” Brown wrote.

“Perry says he told Trump to his face that he was ‘the chosen one,’” wrote Jay Parini. (Perry also said he believed Barack Obama had been ordained by God.) “This notion has been going around the administration like a strange virus, infecting Sarah Sanders and Mike Pompeo as well,” Parini suggested. “I don’t have any easy answers, and it worries me to see evangelicals who do. There is a deep mystery here that precludes the arrogance implied in Rick Perry’s stance. We just don’t know what the Divine has in mind.”

Anthea Butler noted the support for Trump that comes from such inheritors of the American evangelical tradition as Jerry Falwell and Franklin Graham. “Trump’s popularity with leading evangelical Christians brings a lot of 20th-century religious history full circle,” Butler wrote. “Perhaps what the Trump era has laid bare is how nakedly church leaders’ support of him is about political power.”

Perry is one of the onetime Trump critics and opponents who surrendered to him as he gained mastery of the GOP, wrote Michael D’Antonio. Along with Sen. Lindsey Graham, Perry and others are “too weak to resist” and “see survival in joining the cult that degrades the nation a little bit more every day.”

The President’s week had it all – a rally in his new home state of Florida, an unexplained tweet of Trump’s head on the body of Rocky Balboa and a surprise visit to American troops in Afghanistan.

Bring on Bolton
While religion’s connection to politics may be a matter of mystery, the law on the limits of presidential power is clear in Judge Jackson’s view. Ken Ballen, staff counsel to the congressional committee that investigated the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s, applauded the judge’s ruling and argued that its logic, “that White House aides must answer congressional subpoenas to testify applies to former national security adviser John Bolton’s possible testimony before the House Intelligence Committee as well.”

Bolton has been strongly hinting that he has a compelling story to tell about the withholding of aid from Ukraine, which is the subject of House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry into Trump. But he also has resisted testifying. And Democrats, eager to move ahead on impeachment before the 2020 primary voting begins, may not wait to hear from him.

That’s a mistake, argued Charlie Firestone, suggesting that censuring the President and continuing to investigate him would be a wiser course. “It essentially places a marker of condemnation pending a further possibility of bringing in an impeachment”.

Trump’s defense doesn’t hold water
Circumstantial evidence of a plot to withhold military aid from Ukraine in return for a political favor for President Trump continued to accumulate: the aid was ordered withheld the same day Trump had his now famous phone call in July with Ukraine’s president, and Trump knew of the whistleblower complaint against him before he decided to release the money. But the President stuck to his “I want nothing. I want no quid pro quo” defense.

The problem, according to Elie Honig: “The vast weight of the evidence – supported by logic and common sense – indicates Trump wanted a quid pro quo. And upon scrutiny, Trump’s self-serving denial carries little persuasive or evidentiary weight, and provides a flimsy shield for Trump and his supporters to hide behind.”

Regular rules of evidence don’t apply to an impeachment proceeding, Honig noted, but “our established legal rules likely would deem Trump’s self-serving denial too unreliable to use in court. The logic is so plain that even a child can understand it: Once you’ve been caught with your hand in the cookie jar, it doesn’t make you innocent to announce, ‘I want no cookies!’”

As more facts come out, you might expect public sentiment to shift, but so far the pro- and anti-Trump camps have become only more entrenched. Writing for CNN Opinion’s Fractured States of America project, Martin Bisgaard noted, “Republicans and Democrats have the same evidence at their disposal – the log of the call, the text messages and the depositions – and still they reach opposite conclusions about whether the President should be impeached.” Rather than being swayed by facts and then arriving at a conclusion, “they do the exact opposite – deciding on a conclusion and then twisting the facts to support it.”

SEALs and military justice
Trump sided with a Navy SEAL who had been accused of committing crimes on the battlefield. Rather than support the findings of the military justice system, he used his presidential powers to undercut them, and in the process the Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer was fired. In the Washington Post, Spencer wrote that the case offered a reminder that “the president has very little understanding of what it means to be in the military, to fight ethically or to be governed by a uniform set of rules and practices.”

A Navy commander will have to clean up the mess left behind by the case, observed Retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling. “There will be repercussions within the command, and within the Special Operations community, if someone who violated the standards and the culture of the military and his force is treated as ‘special.’”

John Kirby, a retired rear admiral in the US Navy wrote, “What makes our military great is not the money Trump claims he has thrown at it, but the standards of conduct to which it adheres and the high bar for ethics to which it subscribes. We do not always reach that bar, to be sure, but in the struggle to do so we have earned a reputation for integrity, fairness and professionalism that is the envy of the world.”

View on CNN
© 2019 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

{I think fiscal conservatism will trump Democratic Wefare conduits, at a time of critical opinions on good economic indicators cover middle-class insecurities-it’s once again-‘the money, stupid’ that deflects the vagaries of political wrongdoing from effective adjudication. }

The New York Times and The Washington Post have been caught lying very often since Trump got on the US political stage. They don’t lie as badly as CNN, but still. When it comes to politics, they have zero credibility.

???

{Yes, that is near absolutely true. But in another sense, the public has had far more political awareness than being given credit for lately, and the zero sum aspect of data, that senses and directs public opinion has altered political correctness significantly nowedays.
In particular, the absolute opined measures have translated into this change, by more use of relatively inspired, skeptical devalued reliance on other public opinions, emerging markets of opinions, as admixstures
of variability and proximate truth.

Quantified, the relative erosion of truth can be seen as an an adjunct of computation ofand denigration to an acceptable level of uncertainty, whereby falsity and truth becoming conflated themselves -can adapt a different procedural language -, which , according to the Republicans reduces the significance of formal rule to the letter of the law.
Hence the vocabulary of collusion can be enumerated into another language based on a probable distinction of how politics are conducted.
Such conduct can be argued, changes the stage upon which international focus, deals have to take place, out of the media spotlight.
This point was argued by detractors, who saw political dealings of the Trumpism as fairly common methods, the faults becoming. the ones, where fact finding by intelligence lost it’s covert aspect.
This is why it became an asset to institute a clown into top , -(topical)-performances, since there, the procedures and the performance of applying laws became seen as intertwined .
The universal order of an emerging new world needed more transparency, and that transparency could not have been revealed without substantial bending of rules deriving from the methods by which procedure had to accommodate them.
The Republican inversion of no procedural oversight, was a genius of managed intelligence, that reduced the Dems, to a public sentiment of childish understanding, (a slap to the middle class, of the middle of the road sentiments that became the movers toward conservatism as a solution)

This inversion did not fit well with the view that it be transparent, and that lack led to a necessary cover.

But, the cover up so obvious during Watergate , needed a higher intelligence with Trump, considering the entrance of Capitalism into world market policies. Recall the earliest corruption with Dad Capital, and that work being a primary source of Sentiment, reacting the extreme methods by which it became an appearent mode of production to sustain it’s self! Only after, this large gap was reduced to a tolerated procedure of daily affairs, could the rules that govern them were instituted.

The management , by which such policy genius could be instituted, became a necessary procedure, hence giving rise to the anomaly, and the characterization of Trump as ‘genius’
merely elicited the political genius of political science to control it’s unassailable symbol: Mr. Trump.

Hence genius of the one dimensional man, can transcend the evil in the Descartes era into the post Nietzchean stage that brought political collusion out of it’s negatively loaded connotation.

All this is accommodation, a necessary procedural one, that became the inverted battle cry of the Republicans against the Democrats(-, in effect destabilizing the rules- by which the impeachment hearings were conducted.)-could the hearings move on to higher uses of oversight and adjudication.

The media are mere pawns in this effort to arrive at some approximated zero sum, a quasi synthesis of several dialectical layers, rather than either a substantially material one or, one that is purely academic.

Trump at a brain dead NATO- French President Macron says

As he left the White House for London, President Donald Trump complained the House Judiciary Committee will hold an impeachment inquiry hearing while he attends a NATO summit that comes at a critical moment for the 70-year-old military alliance. (Dec. 2)
AP
Blasting Democrats and their investigation of him from overseas, President Donald Trump said Tuesday he does not deserve censure or impeachment for his actions with regard to Ukraine.

“Unacceptable," Trump told reporters during a meeting in London with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. “I did nothing wrong … You don’t censure somebody when they did nothing wrong.”

Trump also said Democrats are “unpatriotic” for pursuing impeachment in the way they are doing it, accusing them of looking at evidence of wrongdoing that justify such a sanction.

Some political commentators have suggested censure as an alternative to a House impeachment vote and trial in the Senate. But there is no evidence the idea has taken hold among House Democrats who are pursuing an impeachment inquiry over Trump and Ukraine.

The House Intelligence Committee is putting out a report saying Trump tried to get Ukraine to investigate U.S. Democratic political opponent Joe Biden, and threatened to withhold aid from Eastern European country if it did not comply with his request.

More: While focus is on Ukraine, here’s the evidence committees have compiled to bolster Trump impeachment case

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, noted that Trump has also said China should investigate Biden and his son Hunter Biden, who has had business interests in China and Ukraine.

“President Trump has sought foreign intervention in US elections—twice,” Schiff tweeted. “He poses a real and present danger to the integrity of the next election.”

Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee have prepared their own report defending Trump.

In the meantime, the House Judiciary Committee, which is expected to draw up impeachment articles against Trump, has a hearing set for Wednesday, the day Trump is scheduled to return to Washington from the NATO meetings in London.

Trump, who flew out Monday, has attacked the impeachment process and congressional Democrats throughout his trip.

“The impeachment is going nowhere,” Trump said Tuesday with Stoltenberg at his side. "They are wasting their time. It’s a disgrace.”

Originally Published 1 hour ago

© Copyright Gannett 2019

Are the Democrats crazy to try to go after Trump? Or maybe , paranoia has literally arisen from the level of latent hate that the Republicans project unto the unfathomable abyss?

Wednesday’s hearing will address constitutional grounds for impeachment. Democrats invited three witnesses — Noah Feldman of Harvard Law School, Pamela S. Karlan of Stanford Law School and Michael J. Gerhardt of the University of North Carolina Law School — and Republicans invited Jonathan Turley of the George Washington University Law School. All are scholars of constitutional law.

{Let’s see how this goes down}

washingtonpost.com
© 1996-2019 The Washington Post
Democracy Dies in Darkness

Impeachment hearings live updates: Scholars called by Democrats testify that Trump’s conduct is grounds for removal from office
By

Dec. 4, 2019 at 10:51 a.m. PST

Three constitutional scholars summoned by Democrats are testifying Wednesday that President Trump’s conduct toward Ukraine rises to the level of impeachment, as the inquiry moves to a new phase with the first hearing by the House Judiciary Committee, a panel prone to theatrics and partisan brawls.

Another law school professor, tapped by Republicans, is cautioning against impeachment. The focus has shifted from the House Intelligence Committee, which voted along party lines Tuesday to approve a 300-page report that concluded Trump had “compromised national security to advance his personal political interests.”

Impeachment: What you need to read
Updated December 3, 2019
Here’s what you need to know to understand the impeachment inquiry into President Trump.

What’s happening now: The House Intelligence Committee sent the report summarizing its findings after two weeks of public hearings to the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, paving the way for possible articles of impeachment. The public hearings followed closed-door hearings and subpoenaed documents related to the president’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

What happens next: The Judiciary Committee has scheduled its first impeachment hearing for Wednesday. President Trump was invited to participate, but White House counsel declined. Here’s a guide to how impeachment works.

washingtonpost.com
© 1996-2019 The Washington Post

…

The New York Times

Mocked Abroad and Assailed at Home, Trump Returns to Face Impeachment
Two days in London on the world stage provided him no respite.

By Peter Baker
Dec. 4, 2019
WASHINGTON — When times turn tough, presidents can hop on Air Force One to escape the country for a while and stride purposefully across the world stage. But the world stage was not so friendly this week for President Trump, who landed back in Washington on Wednesday night to confront a grim couple of weeks ahead.

Mocked by peers behind his back at a NATO meeting in London, Mr. Trump abruptly canceled a news conference and bolted early, only to fly home to a capital in the throes of judging whether he is fit for office. After hobnobbing with the queen, the president now faces the daunting likelihood that by Christmas he will become the third president impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors.

The NATO meeting had seemed like an opportunity to demonstrate his global leadership like Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Bill Clinton sought to do with overseas trips during their own impeachment struggles. Scheduled long ago, the meeting allowed Mr. Trump and his allies to assail his domestic foes as “unpatriotic” for proceeding with an impeachment hearing while the commander in chief was overseas and gave him a chance to boast of his success in pressing the allies to invest more in defense.

But the visit was soured by a contentious meeting with President Emmanuel Macron of France and a hot-mic video that captured other world leaders making fun of Mr. Trump. In response, a sullen president said one of the leaders caught talking on the video, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, was “two-faced,” and then slipped out of town without the scheduled wrap-up session with reporters, seemingly intent on not further spoiling the image of a successful visit.

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“The Fake News Media is doing everything possible to belittle my VERY successful trip to London for NATO,” he wrote on Twitter as Air Force One streaked across the Atlantic. “I got along great with the NATO leaders,” he added, claiming credit for persuading them to increase their military spending, although wildly inflating the actual numbers. “No increase for U.S., only deep respect!”

Quarreling with foreign leaders, of course, never troubled Mr. Trump before and in some ways has domestic political appeal with a Republican base that cheers on his defiance.

“The president has never been much bothered by shaking up international conventions, so tussling with foreign leaders, by those standards, isn’t a bad thing from his perspective,” said Antonia Ferrier, a former aide to Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader. “For many Americans, having their president stand up to foreign leaders is a sign of strength.”

Sam Nunberg, a former political adviser to Mr. Trump, said the optics of the London visit would appeal to different elements of his base. “He held contentious press conferences with world leaders who are disdained in conservative circles while also getting the all important 10 Downing Street visit and greeting with the queen at Buckingham Palace, which always plays well with mid and high income voters,” he said.

Still, Mr. Trump seemed bothered by the conversation between the other leaders. Mr. Trudeau seemed to deride Mr. Trump for going off schedule to answer questions from reporters on Tuesday. “He was late because he takes a 40-minute news conference at the top,” the prime minister told Mr. Macron, Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the Netherlands, Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain and Princess Anne.

“You just watch his team’s jaws drop to the floor,” Mr. Trudeau said at another point in the video, expressing astonishment at Mr. Trump’s behavior. The other leaders are seen smiling in seeming sympathy or adding their own unheard comments to the discussion.

The overheard conversation came after Mr. Trump and Mr. Macron had engaged in a somewhat testy public session earlier in the day. “Let’s be serious,” Mr. Macron chided the president at one point during a discussion of Islamic State fighters.

At a separate session with reporters, Mr. Trump had complained that Mr. Macron’s recent comments bemoaning American disengagement with NATO had been “very, very nasty.”

The joking may have touched a nerve with Mr. Trump, who has long resented elites he felt did not show him proper respect or welcome him into their circles, whether it was Manhattan business titans or Washington political veterans. He visibly seethed in 2011 when President Barack Obama ridiculed him from stage during a black-tie Washington dinner.

“Trump doesn’t just want to be in the club, he wants to be the unquestioned leader and center of attention,” said Gwenda Blair, a Trump biographer. “It had to be both humiliating and infuriating that the other heads of state who were mocking him were untouchable by tweet or insulting nickname, but no doubt he was already calculating the next round of tariffs he would send their way.”

Foreign trips were a relief for Mr. Nixon and Mr. Clinton at similar points in their presidencies. As Watergate bore down in the summer of 1974, Mr. Nixon traveled to the Middle East and then the Soviet Union, reinforcing his peacemaking initiatives. Mr. Clinton similarly headed to Russia and Northern Ireland just after a grand jury appearance in 1998 and then later in the fall to the Middle East.

But in both cases, any relief was short-lived. Mr. Nixon ended up resigning weeks after getting home, and Mr. Clinton was impeached by the House only days after his return. The complaints about impeachment interfering with foreign policy rang loud then as well; Mr. Clinton was in the midst of bombing Iraq for defying international weapons inspectors even as the House took its vote.

There is no escape for Mr. Trump either, not in foreign cities, not in the Oval Office and not on the television he stares at upstairs in the White House for hours each day. His presidency is tethered to impeachment, his legislative agenda mostly on hold, his foreign policy overshadowed, his re-election on the line. He takes refuge in the boisterous and jampacked campaign rallies he holds and in the morning and evening lineups on Fox News.

While in London, Mr. Trump defiantly declared he would not watch the opening of the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearings because he would be too busy conducting affairs of state, even as he lashed out at Democrats as “deranged,” “sick,” “nuts,” “crazy” and, in one case, a “maniac.” But while his blue-and-white jet headed back to Washington, he (or aides operating his account in his name) nonetheless blitzed out a couple dozen tweets recirculating posts from Republican allies castigating the hearing as it progressed.

At the White House in his absence, the atmosphere was somewhat surreal. The televisions around the building were tuned to the various news networks, especially Fox News, as they broadcast the hearing, but the volume was usually muted and aides sought to go about their business.

The White House refused to participate in the hearing, arguing that the process has been rigged by partisan Democrats, but it did send a couple of aides to sit in the hearing room and monitor the proceedings.

The assumption there, as elsewhere, was that the hearing changed no minds and the course of the next few weeks is already set — the House will probably vote by the end of the year to impeach along party lines, and the Senate will then hold a trial in which the president will not be convicted, setting him up to litigate the case during his re-election campaign.

“While I wouldn’t say impeachment is a good thing for the president, it is a highly divisive and partisan issue breaking down on party lines,” Ms. Ferrier said. “It has not changed people’s minds on the president. His approval ratings are remarkably consistent, in particular with Republican voters, and he clearly relishes a fight.”

But some who have been through this before said it was hard to put it aside. Dennis Ross, a foreign policy specialist who accompanied Mr. Clinton on his trip to the Middle East days before he was impeached, said that an impeachment vote remains part of a president’s legacy, even if it does not lead to his removal.

“Even though he may feel that he will be acquitted in the Senate because Republicans will not break ranks, and however much he tries to turn this to his advantage at a later point, the truth is no matter how you slice, it you can’t run away from the fact you were one of the few presidents who was impeached,” Mr. Ross said. “He obviously likes to be singled out, but not like this.”

Text from the Constitution was displayed Wednesday during the House Judiciary Committee hearing.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York Times
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Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent and has covered the last four presidents for The Times and The Washington Post. He also is the author of five books, most recently “Impeachment: An American History.” @peterbakernyt • Facebook

© 2019 The New York Times

Very true,

The Liberal-Left Media Conglomerate: Yahoo, ABC, MSNBC, CNN, Washington Post, NY Times, etc.

All a bunch of fucking disgusting liars, degenerates.

90% of US Media is lined-up against Trump. It’s a disgrace to this country.

Perfect example of the Lies right here.

As-if the “Abrupt Exit” has anything to do with the “embarrassing video”. These fucking liars know no depths of depravity. “Abrupt” exit, instead of just a regular exit? These liars don’t know how or why Trump does what he does. They don’t know the reason. They make everything up. They say “Abrupt Exit” and “embarrassing video” as-if there were any sort of connection between the two when there’s not. NO CONNECTION. Trump probably left for an unknown, to the public, reason. Secondly, “embarrassing” video, is it really embarrassing what these foreign faggot leaders care or think? As-if they rule America? As-if they have more authority than US? As-if their opinion matters? These liberal-leftists should go live in their countries. Anti-American. Traitors.

If you’re an American, you stand by your President when confronted by foreign enemies or “allies” pretending to be an ally.

Lastly, these foreign “leaders” are ten-times the embarrassment of what’s presumed here. Canada, France, EU? Pathetic leaders. Trump is right, by the way, these foreign countries have been “taking off the top”, taking billions and billions of OUR MONEY for free, for nothing to benefit US. Democrats-Liberals have sold US down the river. Trump is actually getting our money back.

Fuck you!