All purpose news and politics thread part v: The quickening

[Tami]

'Vote against the president, and your head will be on a pike': GOP Senators 'are warned' not to break ranks with Trump in impeachment vote

Republican senators have been warned in stark terms not to break ranks with President Donald Trump during the impeachment trial, according to a new report.

'Vote against the president, and your head will be on a pike,' the senators were warned, an unnamed source close to the president told CBS News.

It's unclear from the report whether the warning was issued by the White House or Republican leadership in the Senate.

So far, no Republican yet has defied the party on a series of procedural votes that set the rules for the trial — but the true test of loyalty is yet to come on the vote to convict.

[Tami]

Lindsey Graham Flees Senate Before Nadler Plays 1999 Clip Of Him Saying Impeachment Doesn’t Need A Crime

Although Graham is in attendance for the impeachment trial, The New York Times’ Catie Edmondson reports the Republican senator “left the Senate floor minutes before Nadler started playing the video of him.”

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Steve Schmidt explains what happened to Lindsey...

Twitter Link

[PwrdOn]

Seems prudent to pin our hopes on a bunch of corrupt and unprincipled Republican senators to make history and vote to remove a sitting president when it goes completely against their own political self interest to do so.

[kidfresh512]

Seems prudent to pin our hopes on a bunch of corrupt and unprincipled Republican senators to make history and vote to remove a sitting president when it goes completely against their own political self interest to do so.

Which is why most people already know the outcome and have known it from the beginning. It was still the right thing to do. We still got the testimony of Fiona Hill, Alexander Vindman. People could see how serious they are firsthand. They came off as credible and acting in the interest of the people and their duty. There was a clear juxtaposition shown of how these witnesses were attacked and treated along with the whistle blower. And the extent that the GOP will go to cover for Trump and absolve and be complicit in Anything he does.

The impeachment served its purpose. Mitch and his co horts will not convict, or pay attention. Now its up the the voters, as it was always going to be. We either accept that the GOP will go on and keep doing this ****. Or we get off our asses and vote them out.

[Michael Watkins]

And you wonder why people say Bernie supporters are unreasonable....

yes, i am wondering why you would be saying that. i thought that the goal was to beat trump in the next election. how does the taunting aid that goal or comply with board rules?

You can literally read the thread for yourself, .

we're on page 330. you made a very specific claim that i asked you back up with evidence. but i'm the one who is unreasonable?

Also? Lol. ‘Hatred of Sanders’? Seriously? So criticizing his most fervent and unreasonable supporters = hating him?

Sure, Jan...

he has been referred to as unlikable more than once in the past few pages. you are incapable of constructive criticism, apparently.

[worstblogever]

'Vote against the president, and your head will be on a pike': GOP Senators 'are warned' not to break ranks with Trump in impeachment vote

But Trump's not acting like a king, and clearly isn't while offering a threat worthy of Henry VIII.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2019, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profiled the former 2018 candidate for U.S. Senate from West Virginia, Don Blankenship, whose claim to fame is as a coal mining company executive who just so happened to get sentenced to a year in jail for conspiring to skirt federal laws that regulated his coal mine (specifically, the safety laws) that led to the deaths of 29 workers in a mine explosion, the deadliest accident in mining in four decades. Blankenship, a true exemplar of the GOP’s “party of responsibility” ethics blames everything on the Obama administration for putting him behind bars. Anyway, in 2018, Blankenship tried aping much of Donald Trump’s talking points, including the insane plan to build a border wall along the U.S./Mexico border, and calls to “Drain the Swamp”, but his flat, deadpan delivery of a rant against Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in his initial 30-second ad spot really cemented why the coal baron was not ready for politics, where he called him “Cocaine Mitch”, accused him of creating “millions of jobs for China-people and claiming that “Mitch has gotten rich. In fact, his China-family has given him tens of millions of dollars”. Don Blankenship only managed 20% of the vote in the GOP Primary for Senate in West Virginia in 2018. He recently filed paperwork to run for President of the United States as the nominee for the Constitution Party in 2020 so he has a snowball’s chance of hell in winning. We’ll set aside his profile at this time and profile someone else who just will not go away…





On this date in 2015, 2016, 2017, as well as 2018, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day posted profiles of former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore, who is most famous for battling in the United States' culture wars since 2001, in particular his fetish for placing monuments of the Ten Commandments in government buildings. That battle led to a series of unsuccessful lawsuits, and eventually was tossed off the bench in 2003 for staunchly refusing to honor a superior federal judge's decision that the monument should be removed, as it violated the First Amendment rights of non-Christians. In 2012, for whatever reason, the people of Alabama returned him to the bench, where he's resumed his mad push for making America a theocracy. Incidentally, Moore has gone on record before and stated his opinion that non-Christians like Hindus or Buddhists aren't "real" religions, and don't deserve 1st Amendment protections, and even has stated his belief that an unborn zygote should have more rights than they do.

He founded a SuperPAC that funded a celebration of the anniversary of the day Alabama seceded from the union to join the Confederacy in 2010, claims Thomas Jefferson did not intend for the First Amendment to apply to non-Christians and that he was a fierce opponent of abortion, and has called for the impeachment of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Judge Moore is also stubbornly anti-gay, and is not only opposed to gay marriage, but believes that gay couples who have adopted should have their children taken away from them, arguing that "the laws of our state have always recognized the Biblical admonition" and comparing the acceptance to same sex marriage as being akin to "following Nazi orders". In fact, it was his refusal to acknowledge the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges ruling that got Moore removed from the Alabama Supreme Court a second time in 2016. He also floated his belief that Congressman Keith Ellison was illegitimate because he was sworn in with a Quran, and not a Bible (go figure, Ellison's a Muslim), and advised parents to pull their children out of public school if it dares to teach evolution.

Where things got truly interesting was when Moore decided to run for office to replace Sen. Jeff Sessions as a U.S. Senator for Alabama in 2017… we had no idea how staggeringly more insane the story of this little lunatic might get. With the help of white supremacist supporters like Steve Bannon, Breitbart News, and every intolerant ideological extremist in the GOP, Roy Moore threw down in the GOP Primary for U.S. Senate against establishment GOP candidate Luther Strange. Moore was eccentric as ever, pulling out a pistol in front of a crowd at a campaign rally, and riding a horse to the polls to vote. The unthinkable happened… Roy Moore won that primary. Some national Democrats began to wonder that in a matchup between Roy Moore, if his opponent, attorney Doug Jones, could win. Yes, it was Alabama, one of the reddest states in the union, but Jones was actually a pretty solid candidate, with his history of successfully prosecuting members of the Ku Klux Klan who carried out a church bombing that resulted in four girls’ deaths decades earlier. And, y’know, Moore had already shown himself bats*** extreme enough to have been not once, but twice removed from office for refusing to honor the rulings of the Supreme Court. It shouldn’t have even been a question if Jones should have had a chance, but… Alabama.

Well, then the question got easier to ask, because as it turns out, Roy Moore’s reputation of a dedicated Christian man neglected to include that while he was an assistant prosecutor in Gadsden, Alabama four decades ago, he was a serial pedophile. When one woman comes forward, maybe there’s some chance people might not believe them. But when seven of them come forward, and members of Gadsden law enforcement and people who run both the Gadsden Mall and Gadsden YMCA come forward and say they banned Roy Moore from the premises for creeping on teenage girls? Kinda hard for even the biggest misogynist to disregard that accusation as having been true… but then again, many Alabama Republicans actually started to argue that they believed his accusers, but that they still would vote for a pedophile before they voted for a Democrat.

Hell, Donald Trump even decided it would be a great time to endorse Moore, because sexual predators stick together in the face of accusers. Polls started coming out showing that Doug Jones was tied with Roy Moore after the accusations first hit the news, some even with Jones in the lead. An ideological, fanatical man who preyed on teenage girls like Moore knew he had to dig deep to pull out a victory in the end. And so, he had all the people closest to him talk up how great he was at a last minute rally… that included one friend of Moore’s from his tour of Vietnam talking about how they went to a sex club where you could get child prostitutes together back in the day, and Roy Moore’s wife insisting he wasn’t a bigot because “one of our attorneys is a JEW”. (Note: As it turned out later, their lawyer isn't Jewish, but actually Christian.)

The day of the election came, and for the first time in a quarter century, a Democrat was elected to the U.S. Senate in Alabama, with Roy Moore losing to Doug Jones by 22,000 votes. Roy Moore did not accept defeat gracefully, instead insisting that there was “massive voter fraud”, posting insane conspiracy theories about how that happened, and starting to attack Doug Jones’ gay son in social media posts. Nobody bought his voter fraud theories, though, because Alabama has a Republican Secretary of State whose entire reputation is about stomping out voter fraud with Voter ID laws and voter suppression tactics (the latter of which did pop up to HELP Roy Moore, and there are ACLU lawsuits filed to prevent them in future elections). A judge certified Doug Jones’ victory, and that was that. Roy Moore currently has bigger problems, though. Like being sued by his accusers for defamation for all the ways he called them liars after they came forward, and he and his wife should probably pay their “not actually Jewish” lawyer a bunch of money to protect them from the fact that the charity they run is being investigated for fraud by the IRS.

And YET… we have an update. Yes, we thought last year that we would have heard the last of Roy Moore, but we’ll be goddamned if this creeptastic, intolerant old sumb**** didn't file to run for U.S. Senate again in 2020. He is believed to be a long-shot what with only $34,000 in donations on hand as of October, and several more renowned Republicans without a track record of being alleged of trying to woo teenage girls running in the primary against him, including former Attorney General Jeff Sessions trying to slide his way back into the Senate on a slime trail, Congressman Bradley Byrne taking a crack at things, and former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville throwing his hat in the ring.

We still think Roy Moore is a long shot… but somehow, this guy keeps turning up like a homophobic, racist, skeevy little penny. Every year, we think it’s the last we’ll hear from him, and then… sure as s***, he’s back.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

'Vote against the president, and your head will be on a pike': GOP Senators 'are warned' not to break ranks with Trump in impeachment vote

Midnight Mitch is as Machiavellian as they come, but I can't imagine him going full blown thug and issuing threats like a mob boss straight out of a Scorcese movie. I'm guessing that deadly directive came from the White House, to be more precise, from Kid Jackboot (Stephen Miller). He's just deranged enough to do crazy **** like that.

[Malvolio]

'Vote against the president, and your head will be on a pike': GOP Senators 'are warned' not to break ranks with Trump in impeachment vote

So now Trump is guilty of jury tampering, along with the rest of it.

[kidfresh512]

Interesting Opinion piece considering the flow of this thread this week in particular.

Why Democrats Still Have to Appeal to the Center, but Republicans Don’t

Appealing to Democrats requires appealing to a lot of different kinds of people with different interests. Republicans are overwhelmingly dependent on white voters. Democrats are a coalition of liberal whites, African Americans, Hispanics, Asians and mixed-race voters. Republicans are overwhelmingly dependent on Christian voters. Democrats are a coalition of liberal and nonwhite Christians, Jews, Muslims, New Agers, agnostics, Buddhists and so on. Three-quarters of Republicans identify as conservative, while only half of Democrats call themselves liberals — and for Democrats, that’s a historically high level.

As a result, winning the Democratic primary means winning liberal whites in New Hampshire and traditionalist blacks in South Carolina. It means talking to Irish Catholics in Boston and atheists in San Francisco. It means inspiring liberals without arousing the fears of moderates. It’s important preparation for the difficult, pluralistic work of governing, in which the needs and concerns of many different groups must be balanced against each other.

The Democratic Party is not just more diverse in who it represents; it’s also more diverse in whom it listens to. A new Pew survey tested Democratic and Republican trust in 30 different media sources, ranging from left to right. Democrats trusted 22 of the 30 sources, including center-right outlets like The Wall Street Journal. Republicans trusted only 7 of the 30 sources, with PBS, the BBC and The Wall Street Journal the only mainstream outlets with significant trust. (The other trusted sources, in case you were wondering, were Fox News, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Breitbart.)

Fox News, in particular, holds a unique centrality in Republican media: 65 percent of Republicans say they trust it, more than twice as many as trust any other outlet, and 60 percent of Republicans said they relied on Fox News in the previous week — again, more than twice the proportion who relied on any other news brand. Among Democrats, by contrast, the most-trusted and frequently consulted outlet was CNN.

Republicans control the White House, the Senate, the Supreme Court and a majority of governorships. Only the House is under Democratic control. And yet Democrats haven’t just won more votes in the House elections. They won more votes over the last three Senate elections, too. They won more votes in both the 2016 and 2000 presidential elections. But America’s political system counts states and districts rather than people, and the GOP’s more rural coalition has a geographic advantage that offsets its popular disadvantage.

To win power, Democrats don’t just need to appeal to the voter in the middle. They need to appeal to voters to the right of the middle. When Democrats compete for the Senate, they are forced to appeal to an electorate that is far more conservative than the country as a whole. Similarly, gerrymandering and geography means that Democrats need to win a substantial majority in the House popular vote to take the gavel. And a recent study by Michael Geruso, Dean Spears and Ishaana Talesara calculates that the Republican Party’s Electoral College advantage means “Republicans should be expected to win 65 percent of presidential contests in which they narrowly lose the popular vote.”

Instead, Republicans are trapped in a dangerous place: they represent a shrinking constituency that holds vast political power. That has injected an almost manic urgency into their strategy. Behind the party’s tactical extremism lurks an apocalyptic sense of political stakes. This was popularized in the infamous “Flight 93 Election” essay arguing that conservatives needed to embrace Trump, because if he failed, “death is certain.” You could hear its echoes in Attorney General William P. Barr’s recent speech, in which he argued that “the force, fervor, and comprehensiveness of the assault on religion” poses a threat unlike any America has faced in the past. “This is not decay,” he warned, “it is organized destruction.”

This is why one of the few real hopes for depolarizing American politics is democratization. If Republicans couldn’t fall back on the distortions of the Electoral College, the geography of the United States Senate and the gerrymandering of House seats — if they had, in other words, to win over a majority of Americans — they would become a more moderate and diverse party. This is not a hypothetical: the country’s most popular governors are Charlie Baker in Massachusetts and Larry Hogan in Maryland. Both are Republicans governing, with majority support, in blue states.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Remember those mere 11 U.S. soldiers who, according to Dolt45, came down with "headaches" after the Iran missile attack? Well, those numbers are now higher, and the injuries more severe:

U.S. says 34 troops diagnosed with traumatic brain injury after Iran strike

[jetengine]

Remember those mere 11 U.S. soldiers who, according to Dolt45, came down with "headaches" after the Iran missile attack? Well, those numbers are now higher, and the injuries more severe:

U.S. says 34 troops diagnosed with traumatic brain injury after Iran strike

Well thats another Republican talking point smashed

[Jack Dracula]

'Vote against the president, and your head will be on a pike': GOP Senators 'are warned' not to break ranks with Trump in impeachment vote

Why the voting should be anonymous IMO.

[worstblogever]

Trump claims he doesn't know Lev Parnas and never really considered firing Marie Yovanovitch.

*pause*

Audio has emerged of Trump talking with Lev Parnas (who he doesn't know) ordering Yovanovitch fired, yelling, "TAKE HER OUT!"

[InformationGeek]

Trump claims he doesn't know Lev Parnas and never really considered firing Marie Yovanovitch.

*pause*

Audio has emerged of Trump talking with Lev Parnas (who he doesn't know) ordering Yovanovitch fired, yelling, "TAKE HER OUT!"

Holy ****. I feel like we're just constantly falling down the rabbit hole at this point.

And I thought I found a crazy news story regarding Trump's treatment of Yovanovitch.

At the end of this remarkable exchange, during which @NPRKelly asks @SecPompeo why he hasn't defended Amb. Marie Yovanovitch, the Secretary of State ends the interview:

Just... just wow.