[Winstonm]

The case for an inquiry to determine is impeachable offenses have occurred:

Quote

The convention adopted “high crimes and misdemeanors” with little discussion. Most of the framers knew the phrase well. Since 1386, the English parliament had used “high crimes and misdemeanors” as one of the grounds to impeach officials of the crown. Officials accused of “high crimes and misdemeanors” were accused of offenses as varied as misappropriating government funds, appointing unfit subordinates, not prosecuting cases, not spending money allocated by Parliament, promoting themselves ahead of more deserving candidates, threatening a grand jury, disobeying an order from Parliament, arresting a man to keep him from running for Parliament, losing a ship by neglecting to moor it, helping “suppress petitions to the King to call a Parliament,” granting warrants without cause, and bribery. Some of these charges were crimes. Others were not. The one common denominator in all these accusations was that the official had somehow abused the power of his office and was unfit to serve.

my emphasis

https://www.crf-usa....sdemeanors.html

[y66]

 Winstonm, on 2019-July-11, 18:30, said:

I see the stable genius has folded his losing census hand and he is now skulking away.

+1 for "skulking away" which is reminiscent of Anthony Wood in Athenae Oxonienses: "He was..forced to..creep and sculk into every place for fear of being taken and hanged".

[jjbrr]

 johnu, on 2019-July-11, 13:24, said:

Nobody is disputing that there are bad people doing very bad things on both ends of the spectrum. What's ironic is that the (right fringe) Republicans constantly and consistently wrap themselves in the arms of god and make the unholy proclamation that they are the keepers of religion and the voice of moral authority.

This goes back farther than the "moral" majority, and now the evangelical right supports the Republicans by an overwhelming majority. Why they support Dennison is beyond me. He's as genuinely religious as most facist dictators from the past which is to say almost as religious as an atheist.

DID TRUMP FIND RELIGION? DON’T HOLD YOUR BREATH


IMO, when somebody claims the moral high ground and religious authority, they set themselves up to be judged by a higher set of standards than the average person.

*shrug*

Exodus 22:21 “You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien; for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.”

Deuteronomy 24:14-15 You shall not oppress a hired worker who is poor and needy, whether he is one of your brothers or a foreigner residing in your cities. You will pay his wages on that day, before the sun sets (for he is poor and needs the money), lest he cry out against you to the Lord, and you are guilty of sin.

Deuteronomy 1:16 Give the members of your community a fair hearing, and judge rightly between one person and another, whether citizen or resident alien.

Leviticus 19:34 The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the foreigner as yourself, for you were foreign in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.

Leviticus 25:35 If any of your people become poor and unable to support themselves among you, help them as you would a foreigner or stranger, so they may continue to live among you.

Leviticus Deuteronomy 27:19 Cursed is anyone who withholds justice from the foreigner, the fatherless, or the widow.

Zechariah 7:9-11 This is what the Lord Almighty said: ‘Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another. Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the foreigner or the poor. Do not plot evil against each other.’

Jeremiah 22:3 Thus says the Lord: Do justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor him who has been robbed. And do no wrong or violence to the resident alien, the fatherless, and the widow, nor shed innocent blood in this place.

Malachi 3:5-6 "I will be quick to testify against sorcerers, adulterers, and perjurers, against those who defraud laborers of their wages, who oppress the widows and the fatherless, and deprive the foreigners among you of justice, but do not fear me,” says the Lord Almighty.

Ezekiel 47:22 You shall allot it as an inheritance for yourselves and for the foreigners who reside among you and have begotten children among you. They shall be to you as citizens of Israel; with you they shall be allotted an inheritance among the tribes of Israel.

Job 29:15-17 I was eyes to the blind, and feet to the lame. I was a father to the needy, and I championed the cause of the stranger. I broke the fangs of the unrighteous, and made them drop their prey from their teeth.

Matthew 25:35 I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me.

[barmar]

I guess we know which are probably his least favorite.

He's probably a fan of the one about overturning the tables of the money changers, except for Deutsche Bank.

[y66]

From Jamie Condliffe at NYT:

Quote

Are we thinking about 5G all wrong?

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: We’re losing the 5G race to China, Huawei’s dominance in the technology around the globe is a threat to national security, and we had better clamp down on it.

But Tom Wheeler, a former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and now a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, explained that things were more nuanced. It’s a wide-ranging (often technical) analysis of the broader 5G policy landscape, and it’s worth a read if you have the time.

I chatted with him about it, and here are a few of his points about the China situation that I thought were interesting:

■ Coming first may not be important. President Trump has said that “the race to 5G is a race that we must win,” but it’s not clear what that means. What might winning look like? “The U.S. wasn’t first in any of the Gs, and yet it’s the dominant force in the wireless ecosystems,” Mr. Wheeler said. “I believe that winning is dominance over the things that use the network,” he added, as opposed to simply having the network in place first.

■ Railing against Huawei could undermine the United States’ dominance. The Trump administration has been trying to cut off Huawei from American tech, most recently by blocking American companies from selling to it. (That has softened a little, but the effect is unclear.) “My concern is that these trade policies are forcing the Chinese to develop their own alternatives” to United States technology, Mr. Wheeler said. The danger: that the resulting products and services are not just good but made widely available, and cheaply, too. “That will have an impact on our ability to lead,” Mr. Wheeler said.

■ So, now what? “There is a need for a policy strategy,” Mr. Wheeler said. “We’ve got to define winning, and then do it!”

Policy strategy in the Trump administration? It could happen. Ha ha ha.

[johnu]

 Winstonm, on 2019-July-11, 18:30, said:

I see the stable genius has folded his losing census hand and he is now skulking away. I suspect he got the message (from Pelosi, probably, by way of Barr) that if he tried to bypass the constitution he really would get impeached.

Democrats in Congress need to monitor the printing of the census forms very carefully. Would it surprise anybody if some unknown persons in the process "accidentally" included the citizenship question in the printings of some of the census forms destined for areas where there are a known large number of non-citizens.

The White House will immediately issue a Whoops, how did that question make its way onto the census. Dennison's government paid personal attorney Barr will immediately launch an investigation that will confirm that including the question was a total accident and won't happen again during Dennison's term in office (which won't hard because the census only happens every 10 years. No need for further investigations because it was an inadvertent mistake.

[y66]

From Acosta Resigned. The Caligula Administration Lives On. by Michelle Goldberg at NYT:

Quote

On Monday, Donald Trump disinvited the then-British ambassador, Kim Darroch, from an official administration dinner with the emir of Qatar, because he was mad about leaked cables in which Darroch assessed the president as “insecure” and “incompetent.”

There was room at the dinner, however, for Trump’s friend Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots, who was charged in a prostitution sting this year. Kraft was allegedly serviced at a massage parlor that had once been owned by Li Yang, known as Cindy, a regular at Trump’s club Mar-a-Lago. Yang is now the target of an F.B.I. inquiry into whether she funneled Chinese money into Trump’s political operation.

An ordinary president would not want to remind the world of the Kraft and Yang scandals at a time when Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest has hurled Trump’s other shady associations back into the limelight. Epstein, indicted on charges of abusing and trafficking underage girls, was a friend of Trump’s until the two had a falling out, reportedly over a failed business deal. The New York Times reported on a party Trump threw at Mar-a-Lago whose only guests were him, Epstein and around two dozen women “flown in to provide the entertainment.”

Epstein, of course, was also linked to the administration in another way. The president’s labor secretary, Alexander Acosta, was the United States attorney who oversaw a secret, obscenely lenient deal that let Epstein escape federal charges for sex crimes over a decade ago. On Friday, two days after a tendentious, self-serving news conference defending his handling of the Epstein case, Acosta finally resigned.

Even with Acosta gone, however, Epstein remains a living reminder of the depraved milieu from which the president sprang, and of the corruption and misogyny that continue to swirl around him. Trump has been only intermittently interested in distancing himself from that milieu. More often he has sought, whether through strategy or instinct, to normalize it.

Edit: From NYT: Mr. Trump’s presidency has set a first-term record for White House staff and cabinet turnover. When Mr. Acosta’s resignation is effective on July 19, four cabinet secretaries and the White House chief of staff position will all be “acting,” unconfirmed by the Senate.

[johnu]

Can anybody question that there are 2 Americas, Blue State America,and Red State America?

In Red State America:

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee Honors KKK Grand Wizard With Proclamation

Quote

Despite public outcry, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee ® re-signed a proclamation Thursday declaring July 13 as Nathan Bedford Forrest Day in the state, honoring the Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and former Confederate general.

Quote

Forrest is known to history as a bloodthirsty slave trader and the KKK’s very first grand wizard. In 1864, he led Confederate soldiers to commit what’s known as the Fort Pillow Massacre, according to The Washington Post. Three hundred Union soldiers, including 200 black soldiers, were murdered there, often at point-blank range.

Long live the Confederacy

[y66]

 johnu, on 2019-July-13, 02:12, said:

Can anybody question that there are 2 Americas, Blue State America,and Red State America?

In Red State America:

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee Honors KKK Grand Wizard With Proclamation

Long live the Confederacy

Forrest Day has been a holiday in Tennessee since 1921 and a special day of observation since 1969. You want a Republican governor to end the hate? People in hell want ice water.

[Winstonm]

I've pondered often on the causes of the notion of entitlement - which encompasses white privilege - and I've come to the conclusion that ego is at its heart, that without a comparative lesser the self is negated. In my view, the entirety of the Southern viewpoint stems from that inadequacy of ego.

[y66]

From People in Coal County Worry About the Climate, Too by Eliza Griswold at NYT:

Ms. Griswold is the author of “Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America.”

Quote

Dwayne Thomas, who is 70 years old and president of his local chapter of the United Mine Workers of America in southwestern Pennsylvania, spent 43 years working in Appalachian coal mines. For generations, in mines and the nearby steel mills that coal made possible, his family, like many others, has relied on jobs in the fossil fuel industry. Mr. Thomas knows the sacrifices that come with the work. His father, Elmer, died of black lung in 1995. His brother Robert was killed in an accident at the Maple Creek Mine in Bentleyville, Pa., in 1996.

Despite having a sense of patriotism and longstanding pride in the role that miners have played in American history, he’s also aware that his region’s dependence on fossil fuel jobs needs to end. “Climate change is happening,” he told me recently by phone from his home in Fayette County, Pa. “We have to tackle it before it becomes too large an entity to take on.”

The best way to begin tackling climate change, as Mr. Thomas sees it, is taking the Green New Deal seriously, rather than rejecting it out of hand, as President Trump did this week, complaining that “it’ll kill millions of jobs” and “crush the dreams of the poorest Americans.”

“It’s not socialism,” Mr. Thomas said of the warming temperatures and rising seas. “It’s reality.”

Now some lawmakers in Congress are attempting to address in tandem the climate crisis and the economic crisis that have cost rural Americans hundreds of thousands of jobs over the past several decades. The Green New Deal is often faulted for being overly idealistic — “a green dream,” as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called it — or vague.

But as Varshini Prakash, co-founder of Sunrise, a youth movement to stop climate change, pointed out when I spoke to her, the Green New Deal isn’t intended to be a 10,000-page policy paper. “It’s an economic agenda for the 21st century,” she said. “It isn’t just about climate; it’s about creating tens of millions of good, high-paying unionized jobs.”

Others who have spent their lives in communities that rely on extractive industries are ready to give the Green New Deal a shot, but the first step, as Mr. Thomas sees it, is to shift the positioning of the Green New Deal from addressing climate change to creating sustainable jobs for those in danger of being left behind by both the industries they served and the federal government. “You’re going to lose a lot of people if you just talk about climate,” he said.

[Winstonm]

Quote

In one 2018 cable published by the Mail on Sunday, U.K. ambassador Kim Darroch says President Donald Trump pulled out of an international nuclear deal with Iran as an act of "diplomatic vandalism" to spite his predecessor, Barack Obama.

Actions taken for reasons of personal vindictiveness instead of best interest of the country themselves are impeachable offenses, high crimes and misdemeanors, a phrase which was widely understood in 1776 to mean: egregious abuse of office.

Nancy Pelosi, get your act together.

[barmar]

 Winstonm, on 2019-July-14, 08:50, said:

Actions taken for reasons of personal vindictiveness instead of best interest of the country themselves are impeachable offenses, high crimes and misdemeanors, a phrase which was widely understood in 1776 to mean: egregious abuse of office.

Nancy Pelosi, get your act together.

Good luck proving this one.

They haven't even been able to prove that the citizenship question is intended to reduce responses by people of color and thus favor Republicans, despite finding a memoy that specifically points to research that shows that it would have this effect.

[hrothgar]

 barmar, on 2019-July-14, 15:29, said:

Good luck proving this one.

They haven't even been able to prove that the citizenship question is intended to reduce responses by people of color and thus favor Republicans, despite finding a memoy that specifically points to research that shows that it would have this effect.

There has been no attempt to formally prove this.

This seems like a nonsensical standard

[Winstonm]

 barmar, on 2019-July-14, 15:29, said:

Good luck proving this one.

They haven't even been able to prove that the citizenship question is intended to reduce responses by people of color and thus favor Republicans, despite finding a memoy that specifically points to research that shows that it would have this effect.

This doesn't have to be proven - it is enough, though, to initiate an impeachment inquiry, which is needed to prevent continued stonewalling.

[Cyberyeti]

So Trump wants a load of US born congresswomen to "go back to where they came from",I suspect various people want to send him back to Germany.

[cherdano]

 rmnka447, on 2019-April-16, 17:16, said:

Progressives aren't used to a conservative aggressively taking them on and become unhinged when Trump does so. The funny thing up that I chuckle about is that every time he tosses bait out there for the progressives, they bite. They just don't see he's setting them up and fall for his schtick every time getting more and more neurotic with each incident. For those self proclaimed, smug superior intellectuals, it just proves they think they are really smart, but in some ways are pretty dumb.

I guess yesterday has been a good day for you - Trump called for four congresswomen of color to "go back to their home countries", and liberals did bite! They did call him him xenophobic, racist, racially charged!! A great day for the intellectual conservative movement!!! You must have been chuckling on your sofa all day long!

[barmar]

And in the case of 3 out of 4 of the congresswomen, their "home countries" are the US. But maybe Trump will start a "birther" movement for AOC, just to justify his stupid tweet.

[Winstonm]

I've always had a fondness for understated headlines: https://www.thedaily...-you?ref=scroll

Quote

Trump Is a Racist. If You Still Support Him, So Are You.
(The president keeps baring his ass, and the people talking about his clothing as he does so are part of the problem.)

The president is a racist, in his words and his actions.

Before you go clutching your pearls and extolling the virtues of “civility,” let me say this: Put a sock in it.

This is not a new revelation, nor is it something that we can continue to ignore as though it were coming from a drunk uncle at the family barbecue. Bigotry is dangerous and, coming from our nation’s commander in chief, it can mean an inability to recognize individual humanity and a failure to act with moral authority in times of crisis. Every person talking about his clothes as he cheerfully bares his ass is part of the problem.

On Sunday, he claimed that newly elected progressive Democrats “originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe” and “the worst, more corrupt and inept anywhere in the world.” And he told freshmen Reps. Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar—outspoken Democratic women of color who have challenged the administration’s inhumane immigration policies—to leave the country.

Three of the four were born here in the United States. All are American citizens, and duly elected members of Congress.

Trump’s repugnant rebuke of American values did not come out of thin air. It unfolded days after “the Squad” travelled with a delegation of congressional Democrats to tour detention facilities in border states. What they found was deplorable. Reports of rampant abuse and neglect filled the airwaves, leading Trump to again dismiss accurate coverage as “fake news.” Rather than focus on improving basic conditions and getting to work on bi-partisan, comprehensive reforms, the president basically said if immigrants didn’t like how they were being treated, they should stay in their own country.

This morning, he turned his ire on some of his most vocal critics in Congress—all of whom have previously called for his impeachment.

“Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” Trump tweeted about the four congresswomen today. “Then come back and show us how it is done.”

“These places need your help badly,” he went on, “you can’t leave fast enough.”

While Republicans predictably remained tight-lipped and oblivious, Democrats reacted swiftly.

“Mr. President, the country I ‘come from,’ and the country we all swear to, is the United States,” Rep. Ocasio-Cortez responded. “You are angry because you can’t conceive of an America that includes us. You rely on a frightened America for your plunder.”

“When @realDonaldTrump tells four American Congresswomen to go back to their countries, he reaffirms his plan to ‘Make America Great Again’ has always been about making America white again,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a tweet. “Our diversity is our strength and our unity is our power.”

This isn’t simply disgusting and divisive rhetoric. Whether it is the abhorrent, inhumane treatment of immigrants detained in government-sponsored concentration camps or the slow, piecemeal aid sent to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, for some, his policies have been deadly.

Certainly, this is not the first time Trump has shamelessly revealed himself in public. His “Make America Great Again” campaign was always about catering to our lowest common denominator—a hateful sector of the electorate that believes themselves culturally superior by skin color and religion.

For years, even before mounting a formal bid for the presidency, Trump regaled television news audiences with racist conspiracy theories about former President Barack Obama. He pledged to send investigators out to prove the nation’s 44th president was not born in the United States. He later derided immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries, calling those foreign nations “***** hole countries.” He once said immigrants from Haiti all “have AIDS” and that Nigerian immigrants would never “go back to their huts.”

In Trump’s mind, a judge’s Mexican heritage made him incapable of ruling fairly in a civil fraud case against one of his companies, and he believes “laziness is a trait in blacks.” Trump, whose real estate company was sued for housing discrimination in the 1970s, went on to place a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for the execution of five innocent black teenagers. Even after the Central Park Five were exonerated, he refused to take it back. After Heather Heyer was murdered in Charlottesville, Virginia, amid a white supremacist protest, he lamented the there were “some very fine people” on “both sides.”

Trump is not a fine person. His words Sunday were not racially “charged,” “fueled,” or “tinged.” They were unapologetically racist.

And, if you support him, so are you.

[PassedOut]

I understand that many politicians are just too cowardly to speak up against a proudly racist and unfailingly vindictive president of the US. But those who actually defend Trump's indefensible statements float in the same cesspool as Trump.

On Saturday night I attended a memorial in Chicago for the co-founder of Theater Oobleck, the actor and playwright Danny Thompson. The theater was filled with folks from all over (one woman I know flew in from Berlin) to enjoy the show built around his work and to share what they remembered about Danny. My own favorite memory of Danny had nothing to do with his talent, which was great, but with his character. Like a lot of actors, Danny needed a day job to augment his income, and for several years Danny was a cab driver in Chicago. One day we were visiting a friend in Chicago when she got a call from Danny, who was phoning from a non-descript bar. A couple of guys he'd picked up at O'Hare had been making racist comments in the back of his cab, so Danny pulled over to the curb, turned off the engine, took the keys, and walked a block into a bar across the street, from which he could watch his cab. He wanted her to know where he was in case things turned uglier (they did not). We learned from our host that this was not a one-time thing.

Danny was a wonderful friend and I hate that he's dead, but it's comforting to know that there really are people in the world like Danny who are just the opposite of the ignorant racist scum infesting our white house today.