It was a bit of a nailbiter, but it looks like Nancy Pelosi will be the Speaker for the House of Representatives in the 117th U.S. Congress.
She has been officially sworn in now. Congratulations, Madam Speaker.
Speaker Pelosi
Tag: Nancy Pelosi
Counting Votes
…7 million more votes for Biden don’t matter. That is the crime here. I don’t have any condolences to the losers mourning Trump’s loss today because they crowed victory when three million more votes for Hillary didn’t mean that she won. The struggle over the next four years will be to make sure that Donald Trump is the LAST president to hold the office without ever earning the support of the majority of Americans. No other political task is as important as this one goal. Destroying minority rule in the United States FOREVER.
one of the things that that has happened at least three times in American history is we go from a period where there is a focus on equality and on rights. And when that happens, when people, ordinary people start to have political power, they do, in fact, guarantee that they retain more of the value that they produce. And they want they want what they have done. They don’t want what anybody else has done, but they actually want what they have produced. And when that happens, the people who have tended to be able to accumulate wealth into their own hands start to worry that they are going to lose that power.
slate.com
When Mitch McConnell says we can’t call out Caudito Trump’s tantrums for what they are, he is pretending that other leaders in US history acted as he did. That is simply not the case.
Both Al Gore and Hillary Clinton should have been president. That didn’t stop them from graciously conceding the races they were deemed to have lost by legal fiat. Contrast Al Gore’s performance with Donald Trump’s, as was done in the above referenced episode of What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law. Or you could just watch this video of Obama graciously explaining how Americans were just going to have to lie back and accept Donald Trump as president for four years.
Facebook (Obama’s announcement of coordination with the Trump Administration)
Ask any woman who is told that they have to “lie back and take it” about how well that suggestion goes over for them. If you survive the experience you will be able to appreciate the kind of hell that is waiting for Donald Trump and his Republicans as soon as they are no longer in power.
There are many out there who think that Trump is engaged in yet another con, when it comes to his shenanigans concerning the counting of votes, and on some level I imagine that Trump thinks this too. This doesn’t change the fact that he will do everything in his power to wreck the office that he will be kicked out of in January because he doesn’t care about anyone other than himself.
I don’t know if his destructiveness will lead him to try to call out the military to kill people directly. He is a pathological liar and a narcissist that could easily qualify as confinable by court ruling if he was brought before the court in a competency hearing. But he hasn’t shown himself to be capable of killing people on his direct order yet. One might actually say that he has tried to keep his hands clean so far, understanding that being seen to be a murderer would alienate the people who love him, no matter what he says about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue.
It is one thing to shoot someone that the crowd encourages you to shoot. It is another thing entirely to shoot someone that the crowd is sympathetic to. That would be a game changer in the true sense of the phrase.
I would never have agreed to run a stand-up campaign against Donald Trump and his merry band of felons-in-waiting. This is the difference between me and Joe Biden. Me and the press. Me and the Democratic party. To my mind, there is nothing legitimate about Donald Trump or his presidency. There never has been anything legitimate about it. I would never have stooped to covering his Tweets or his press conferences. I would never have assigned a reporter to the White House. I would never have agreed to debate Donald Trump on stage.
I expected either or both of the candidates to sabotage the debates simply because the debates were going to be shitshows no matter what. Either Biden would mop the floor with a clueless Trump or Trump would be allowed to bully Biden. In any case, I wasn’t going to watch because I can’t stand to listen to Donald Trump utter three words consecutively.
…I said this all five years ago. Donald Trump should have been hauled off in handcuffs the first time he told someone to rough up a protester at one of his events. He should have been hauled into tax court in 1980 when it was clear he was cheating on his taxes. Had the law been enforced then, we wouldn’t be here now.
Strangely, the evangelicals started abandoning Donald Trump after he contracted the coronavirus. I think I need to get one of them to explain to me why he can’t be god’s chosen one after he was diagnosed with the disease. I’ve also heard that the Qdrops are saying that he didn’t really catch it, it’s all part of the plan to surprise and start arresting those baby-eating sex fiends that run the Democratic party. I think they’ve all been mainlining whatever that is he puts on his face. That might explain everything.
(This trend reversed before the date of the election. I remain puzzled as to why it started and why it reversed. Looking forward to reading that research someday. -ed.)
It is most infuriating that so much of this Trump bullshit is still topical, and it is still topical because they are still doing the stupid stuff that failed to gain them victories in the midterms. There is landslide turnout across the country. Landslide turnout.
Now, you can ask, are Democrats the only ones that vote early? (many have asked that) and my response to that question is to ask a few questions of my own. Do you really think that this president is inspiring landslide turnout in favor of killing an additional four million Americans with COVID? Or do you think that this collapsed economy is the reason that people have turned out in record numbers in support of Donald Trump? Which is it?
…of course it is people who are dissatisfied who are voting. Stormtrumpers are defensive about voting for him in 2016, and fewer of them will be voting for him now. That is not the characterization of what most of us would think of as “winning.”
He can still cheat his way into a stalemate, and I expect that he will come very close to doing that. It won’t matter in the end. With no clear victory in the election, the military will simply hand the nuclear codes to the Speaker of the House (most likely Nancy Pelosi) on January 20, and we’ll just continue on from there. I’m good with that outcome too.
This is how Trump treats America. Trump doesn’t listen. Trump is a bully. Trump talks over the experts, the courts, congress, and every citizen. You’re looking right at it. How he treats Biden is how he treats YOU.
Stonekettle
Line of Succession
I’ve had to type these words a few times today. Typed them more than a few times over the last few days, especially since listening to this podcast.
What happens if Trump doesn’t go? What if he stays in the White House?
I would like to point out that this contingency is covered. There is no need to fret about this subject. If the election is muddied to the point where there is no clear victor, then Donald Trump’s term in office still ends on January 20, 2021.
Donald Trump will not be president after that date. (especially since the election says he didn’t win. -ed.) It is a fixed point in time beyond his ability to alter. The nuclear codes will go to the next person in the line of succession. That person is also set in stone in a way that he cannot change it. The presidency will pass over the Vice President, who will also no longer be an office holder on that date, and it will come to rest on the speaker of the newly seated House of Representatives.
If there is one thing that you can rely on in this alternate reality we currently inhabit, it is that the military will follow procedure and dutifully remove the codes from Donald Trump’s hands on that date and they will hand control of the military to the next person that law dictates is his successor as president. That person will most likely be Nancy Pelosi. That is, if Joe Biden doesn’t win outright. We’ll know when the new legislature takes office.
Everyone can calm down now. Please.
facebook & Radiolab feedback
What about a contingent election?
…you think you know something and then someone asks a question that you don’t have an answer for. A contingent election?
In the United States, a contingent election is the procedure used to elect the president or vice president in the event that no candidate for one or both of these offices wins an absolute majority of votes in the Electoral College. A presidential contingent election is decided by a special vote of the United States House of Representatives, while a vice-presidential contingent election is decided by a vote of the United States Senate. During a contingent election in the House, each state’s delegation casts one en bloc vote to determine the president, rather than a vote from each representative. Senators, on the other hand, cast votes individually for vice president.
The contingent election process was originally established in Article Two, Section 1, Clause 3 of the United States Constitution. The procedure was modified by the 12th Amendment in 1804, under which the House chooses one of the three candidates who received the most electoral votes, while the Senate chooses one of the two candidates who received the most electoral votes. The phrase “contingent election” is not found in the text of the Constitution but has been used to describe this procedure since at least 1823.
Contingent elections have occurred only three times in American history: in 1801, 1825, and 1837. In 1800, Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, the presidential and vice-presidential nominees on the ticket of the Democratic-Republican party, received the same number of electoral votes. Under the procedures in place at the time, this necessitated a contingent election the following year to decide which would be president and which vice president. In 1824, the Electoral College was split between four candidates, with Andrew Jackson losing the subsequent contingent election to John Quincy Adams, despite having won a plurality of both the popular and electoral vote. In 1836, faithless electors in Virginia refused to vote for Martin Van Buren‘s vice-presidential nominee Richard Mentor Johnson, denying him a majority of the electoral vote and forcing the Senate to elect him in a contingent election.
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I had heard of those three instances in history. I had never looked at how the votes are cast in the House of Representatives. Now that I’ve looked I don’t think I’ll sleep well until after December 8th or December 14th. I won’t sleep well, because the Republicans do control more states in the House than the Democrats do. Once again I’m struck with the injustice of 7 million more votes for Joe Biden not counting as a victory in and of itself.
If Trump succeeds in corrupting the vote certification process in an attempt to throw the election to the House of Representatives, all bets are off. Never mind that Donald Trump didn’t win in any real sense of the word, not even the technicality that he took the presidency with in 2016. This time he will steal the election right in front of our faces. What will we do then?
Since the Democrats do control the House of Representatives and since the vote certification can be shown to have been corrupted, I would think that the House could simply refuse to act and allow the line of succession rules to take over, as I originally theorized. It’s not like Mitch McConnell hasn’t done exactly the same thing for the last decade. I guess we’ll find out.
GDP Shrinkage
This is the news that President Trump doesn’t want anyone to notice right now. This is what has his rapidly thinning hair on fire.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis released second quarter gross domestic product data today. The number shows how much the economy has grown in a given quarter. And in the second quarter, the BEA says, the American economy grew at an annualized rate of…wait for it…negative 32.9%.
…this is why he is talking about postponing or cancelling the elections in November. It isn’t because of the COVID hazards. It isn’t because of any other reason that people might toss around in an attempt to obscure his motivations.
It’s the Economy, Stupid
Caudito Trump knows that the economic success of the average American is what they will be voting on in November, those people who aren’t interested in politics, health or climate change anyway. Everyone else (the average wage-earner) is going to vote on their own economic status, and right now the average person’s economic status is not good.
They’ve been out of work since March. They have rent due. They are running out of food. They are terrified of catching the plague that is sweeping the nation. Too terrified to send their kids to school, with good reason. The economy is melting down all around us and the Party of Trump is busy trying to talk about budget overruns and how we can’t afford to keep paying people to stay at home as if they have any choice in the matter now.
The Democrats are rolling out election strategies in states they haven’t even bothered to contest in decades. They are campaigning all across the nation in ways that haven’t been seen before, their candidate running double-digit polling projections. Remembering 2016, the Democrats will not lay back and expect votes from average working people. They are going to go out and ask these people to support them, and they probably will.
President Trump has to know that this is not good news for him. He is smart enough to see that writing on the wall. That is why he is talking about postponing the election. Plain and simple. Nevermind that he can’t do it. He will try every trick that he can utilize to see that the election, when it occurs, is contested. This is why he is talking about the insecurity of mail-in ballots. This is why he will roll out the specter of brown people voting against him. Non-citizens voting. He will try to tamper with the counts, stop counts from happening, stop the mail service from delivering ballots.
None of this matters aside from the parlour game that it has been and will be. Oh, he’ll do any number of things to try to stay in office, but unless he can make the count go his way, he ceases to be president on January 20, 2021 anyway.
Why is this? Because the system is more than the election. Barring a winner in a contested presidential election, on January 20, 2021 the president of the United States will be Nancy Pelosi. He can’t stop this from happening. A majority holding for the Trumpists in the Senate can’t stop it. His term of office ends on that day, and the presidency will pass to the successor to the office.
Then the real work begins, for the first time in I don’t know how many years. New Year’s Eve can’t come soon enough to suit me this year.
Featured image: Screenshot from fred.stlouisfed.org – twitter.com
Face Covering
Facebook – Austin Mayor Steve Adler – Got a Minute? – Monday, April 27
I resisted wearing face covering for as long as I could. I did this not just because I have a hard time reading faces and so want to make myself more easily read by people I might talk to, but also because I have a hard enough time breathing while out on a walk or doing any strenuous activity without having a barrier between me and the air I so desperately need. Austin made face covering mandatory, so I finally gave in and started wearing something to cover my mouth and nose.
I wear a bandanna tied in the classic bandit style to go along with my straw hat and tinted prescription glasses. I’m sure I strike a menacing appearance in this getup, or would if it wasn’t for the bright blue sweatpants and bright yellow walking shoes. The bandanna does seem to reduce the amount of pollen that I am exposed to, even if it doesn’t remove all of it, so I may have to keep wearing the damn thing on high allergy days even after all this coronavirus madness is nothing more than an almost forgotten nightmare.
I don’t care what Governor Abbott or his lunatic Lieutenant Governor, Dan Patrick, think about anything. They are taking marching orders from the madman in the White House, and so consequently what they might say or do is pretty much irrelevant if not downright harmful or possibly fatal in the long run. Don’t listen to the madman in the White House. That is the best advice I can offer to anyone. I have no idea why anyone does listen to him anymore.
I’ll continue wearing my bandit mask for as long as it suits me. If they make me go physically to the polls during the runoffs and then in November, I will go there wearing the thing as well. I will wear the mask and vote all of them out of office. This is proof positive that real criminals don’t wear bandannas and straw hats. Real criminals wear business suits and ties and they lie right to your face with not a hint of insincerity. “I have a great deal for you!” Sure you do.
I have been experiencing some deep depression lately. It came to me last night what this depression probably stems from. I don’t know what to write about in this time of coronavirus that isn’t somehow related to the coronavirus. All of my podcasts are going full-on coverage of the subject, and most of the news is also about it.
I’ve been deleting most news podcasts for weeks months. Over the last week I have finished two books on tape rather than listen to any of the podcasts that I usually spend time listening to. I have no use for more news about this disease. I know what I need to know to stay healthy, and most of what is being said is correction of the misinformation that the President has been spreading about the disease on a nightly basis, with the help of the media that can’t seem to stop spreading his lies for him. The WaPo ran a piece today title Trump has played the media like a puppet. Ya think? I’ve only been trying to say this for four years now. Nice that you’ve finally noticed that you are being used. Maybe you should fix that problem before it gets out of hand.
The Wife came to me today and said she had a revelation. “The blame game is about to start.” I tried to be patient with her, but this really isn’t a revelation to me. Donald Trump has been engaging in the blame game for four years now. He and his cronies are clearly gearing up to start blaming the Democrats for cracking down on the populations under their control, imposing restrictions that the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (Covid-19) did not require. They’ll say people aren’t dying at greater rates than previously. The cities and states will point to the elevated numbers of deaths. Trump will say those aren’t coronavirus deaths. The cities and states will say they were coronavirus deaths. Trump will say they weren’t because they weren’t tested for coronavirus. The cities and states will object and point out that there aren’t enough tests to test all the dead people. Trump will shrug and go back to golfing. Just like he has always done.
It’s important to remember that this guy complained bitterly about all the time that Barack Obama spent on the golf course. What he hates most about Barack Obama on the golf course (other than he is a black man on a golf course that isn’t a caddy) is that Obama is a better golfer than he is, and Barack Obama spent less time getting there than Caudito Trump has already spent on the golf course during his joke of a presidency.
Donald Trump wants to open the country back up so he can get back to golfing and get back to charging people to golf with him. It hasn’t got anything to do with the deaths and the suffering, or how much worse it will all be after we end social distancing. He just wants to keep doing what he has always done. Screw people and steal their money.
This is par for the course. This is how every single embarrassing event has been played since Trump blundered onto the political stage and demonstrated that he has no capacity to feel shame for his shameful behavior. There is a fly in this ointment though. There are records of his malfeasance.
For weeks, the PDB — as the report is known — traced the virus’s spread around the globe, made clear that China was suppressing information about the contagion’s transmissibility and lethal toll, and raised the prospect of dire political and economic consequences.
But the alarms appear to have failed to register with the president, who routinely skips reading the PDB and has at times shown little patience even for the oral summary he now takes two or three times per week, according to the officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified material.
The advisories being relayed by U.S. spy agencies were part of a broader collection of worrisome signals that came during a period now regarded by many public health officials and other experts as a squandered opportunity to contain the outbreak.
The Washington Post
Trump was ignoring the signs that COVID-19 was going to be a problem until he couldn’t ignore them anymore. Then he blamed the CDC, the WHO and the Chinese government for the things he had every right to have known months previously if he had only bothered to pay attention.
He tried to blame the Democrats for not giving him the funds that he needed to combat the disease until Nancy Pelosi handed him a check for two trillion dollars. A check that Caudito Trump then promptly put in his and his closest buddies pockets. That bit of malfeasance will be coming back to bite him right about the time elections roll around in November.
Texas may open back up on Friday or Monday. Austin won’t be following the governor’s direction. Neither will Houston, Dallas or any other city that understands what the real problem is here. The real problem is that these Republican morons think they can bluff a virus. That they can lie to mother nature and she won’t punish them for it.
I feel bad for those people who can’t afford to stay home any longer. Those people who have purposely been kept poor by the system they are part of in some ill-gotten belief that you have to keep people hungry, homeless or on the edge of homelessness, in order to get them to work. We have all be stolen from over the course of our lives by these people in suits and ties who think they are better than we are because they have money and we don’t. They don’t understand, any more than the poor do, that they are rich because the system allows them to be rich.
The system could be adjusted so that everyone is at least comfortable with some pretty minor tweaks. The two trillion dollar coronavirus rescue package? The country’s entire population could be granted a guaranteed minimum income for an entire year for that amount of money (Andrew Yang’s Freedom Dividend) What are the benefactors of most of that money doing with it right now? Driving the stock markets up with all this extra cash they just stumbled into. Pretty much the same thing they were doing before the pandemic hit with all that free money that Trump gave them in his tax bill.
So instead of making sure that no one has to work that isn’t constitutionally set up for the kind of risky work that is required right now, instead of making sure that no Americans are homeless and have enough food to eat, we’ve given billionaires even more money to play around with. Now the poor feel compelled to return to work having burned through the $1200.00 pittance that was allowed to them.
People are going to die. Most likely a lot of people are going to die. I’m going to do my best to not be one of them. I’m not planning on going anywhere (other than to vote as I noted previously) until right about January the 20th of 2021. I might not even go out then other than to abandon this hellhole that we’ve made, heading for greener pastures if there are any of those left by then. We’ll just have to see whether the tide turns or not.
Postscript
July 4, 2020. Governor Abbott swerved to miss the oncoming train today. He has reinstated the statewide requirement for masks, with several very large exceptions. Too large, according to Mayor Adler. Weirdly, I never stopped wearing a mask outdoors even though I didn’t have to wear one and still don’t have to since I won’t go into a crowded public space so long as the pandemic rages. Hopefully I will get my ballots by mail as I requested. Hopefully there will be people present at the vote counting that will ensure that mail-in ballots are not simply thrown in the trash. There are some very thin shoe-strings of hope weaving the future of the country together. That is not a reassuring thought.
October 29, 2020. I’m still wearing a mask outdoors to walk. I have made a total of three forays outside the house that were more than just taking a walk, all of those were to go to a doctor’s visit or to get my flu shot (Get your flu shots) I have worn a mask every time I have met anyone at a distance of less than six feet anywhere that I meet people who are not my immediate family. My ballot did show up early, and it was mailed back early. Fingers crossed that they clerk has it already and that it avoided being delayed by Donald Trump’s perversion of the Post Office. Just another impeachable act in a near-infinite list of impeachable acts committed by Donald Trump while in office.
Mayor Adler has become my own personal Mr. Rogers. I listen to him whenever I feel stressed and need to calm down. He is the spiritual opposite of the poisonous snake that currently inhabits 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Despite Mayor Adler’s best efforts, Austin has never gotten a low enough case count for life here to return to something akin to normal. This is the new normal. Hiding in our houses. Wearing masks when we go out. No bars or clubs (not that I went to those anymore anyway) Restaurants all but completely closed, takeout the normal way that you get food you don’t prepare yourself now.
Wearing a burqa seems sane now. Biometric identification seems necessary now. How can you trust a photo ID when you can’t see someone’s whole face? The backlash against even the minimal health requirements that have been put in place says to me that there will be blood spilled over the subject of complying with health standards soon. There will be blood spilled because we’re going to have to get serious to beat this bug and the other bugs that we have been ignoring at our own peril for decades. Don’t get me started on the subject of Antimicrobial resistance. Solving that medical problem is going to also take the kinds of controls that Americans in general will not be ready to embrace.
The State of the Union? It Sucks
Tomorrow will make only the third time in my adult life that I have consciously skipped the State of the Union (SOTU) address. I don’t listen to the Orange Hate-Monkey (OHM) talk. As in, I don’t ever allow myself to hear his voice if I can help it. I talk about how I evolved this maintenance strategy here,
I did contemplate watching the first SOTU that the OHM stank up the House of Representatives with, but I decided that my mental state simply couldn’t cope with that much hatred and disinformation so shortly after I had to come to grips with the fact that no-one was going to do their job and keep the unstable piece of shit out of the office of the president. So many people not willing to do their jobs before it became my quandary whether I should do my job as an informed citizen and tough out the bullshit, or simply admit that there was no benefit to be had in listening to the speech at all.
That decision is what lead to my ultimate decision to block all the things the OHM said, and limit myself to just noting all the things that he and his administration did. A much less daunting task than sorting the bullshit into (yuge) piles.
We have now come full circle as a country. What was so evident for me in 2015 when I tripped over the obvious hatred of elected Republicans,
Is now apparent to the vast majority of Americans. The Republicans? They only care about power. They only care about holding power, and they think that is all anyone around them cares about. They are, to paraphrase one of my favorite political commentators, despicable people or to quote Hillary Clinton, They are a basket of deplorables. They are so proud of being deplorable people that they wear that label on their clothing.
“Yes” they say “I’m in it for the power alone. I have no morals, I have no standards. I just want my party to be the party in power. That’s all you want, so why not?”
This attitude was on display as far back as Bill Clinton’s SOTU when Newt Gingrich orchestrated the Republican dismissal of Democratic legislative proposals because they came from Democrats, even if those proposals originated in conservative think tanks. It reached it transparent heights during the Obama administration when the Republicans pissed on the Affordable Care Act and called it Obamacare even though it was a direct copy of the Massachusetts system proposed and signed into law by Governor Mitt Romney, now Senator Mitt Romney.
So no. I won’t even be watching tonight. I will not be the hypocrite who boos ideas that he approves of just because they come out of the OHM’s mouth. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, and the OHM can mistakenly do right things or propose the right ideas for the wrong reasons. The problem is the man, not the office or the party, when it comes to the SOTU. The man is a charlatan, and I refuse to listen to his lies.
I have always hated the responses to the State of the Union address. I went so far as to write this article,
…after the Republicans in the legislature cluelessly continued to offer their unwanted #MeToos to Obama’s excellent speeches. But my loathing for them goes back to when the practice first caught my eye, back in the days of Newt Gingrich’s bad faith demonstrations against Bill Clinton. But even during the eight years of W.’s pathetic leadership I thought the Democratic responses were lukewarm at best. Mostly because the opposition never seems capable of capturing what it is that the the people opposed to the president really think about his speech and his policies.
This year was different. For the first time in my adult life, the response seems more like what the average citizen might be thinking right now. Not the official response which is still cringe-worthy. No. I mean the radio interview that she gave to NPR afterwards.
Nancy Pelosi tearing up the Orange Hate-Monkey’s speech was the highlight of the evening. Why? Because it’s all the Stormtrumpers and the media want to talk about. They all look like fools. Did she do something illegal? Get a life, people.
The manifesto of mistruths presented in page after page of the address tonight should be a call to action for everyone who expects truth from the President and policies worthy of his office and the American people. The American people expect and deserve a President to have integrity and respect for the aspirations for their children.
Pelosi Statement on State of the Union Address
She gets it. She understands what Trump is. So does Veronica Escobar,
the greatest threat to our security is a president and a Republican-controlled Senate that act only in their own interest
NPR – KUT
I was raiding in World of Warcraft while all of this went on. I think I spent my hours more productively that way.
Dear Republicans. What Does Trump’s Cock Taste Like?
This should be the question that every pundit asks every Republican who won an office in the election on November 6, 2018, since every one of them swore fealty to King Trump in order to win their elections. The question should be asked every time they hold a presser. It should be asked every time they are seen in public. It should be asked in front of their wives. Their children. Their families. Everyone needs to have the blatant corruption at the heart of every Republican victory last night spelled out in the most graphic, disgusting terms possible. Trump can get away with the shit he says every day? Ask that fucking question every fucking day until they crack.
“what does Trump’s cock taste like, Mr. Senator? Mr. Representative? Mr. Secretary?”
Maybe, just maybe, they’ll fucking wake up then. But I doubt it.
In the meantime. The weasel will try to squirm out of harm’s way. Trump has already signaled that he’ll play ball with the Democrats. Nothing doing. Not unless he turns states evidence on all his Russian contacts, fires all his children, divests from all his businesses. And when I say divest I mean sell every one of his properties to the highest bidder with all proceeds going to pay off the design and construction professionals he’s screwed over the last forty years. He has to agree to replace his entire cabinet with people who will not attempt to undermine their departments. Essentially he has to agree to congressional oversight of everything in the presidential administration, and he loses control of the military. He has to rubber-stamp everything the congress sends to him and he has to tell all his supporters how much they’ll love it.
Oh, and he also will have to insist on IRS prosecutions for the entire DeVos family.
If. If he does all of that, he can stay president for two more years. No running for re-election either. Take your pension, sit down and shut up after January 20th, 2021. If he doesn’t go for all of that, the anal probes start moving in on January 20th, 2019. Or he could just quit now and take his chances. It’s all up to him now. Let’s see which way the weasel runs.
…I spoke too soon post-election. Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh scared Trump into demanding congress do his bidding instead of trying to do something that made sense, like bow to the will of the majority of US citizens. He said (paraphrasing):
Build my wall with your money since Mexico won’t pay for it!
Unsurprisingly the answer from Nancy Pelosi and her majority of the House has been no. Also unsurprisingly the art school turtle, Mitch McConnell, refused to do anything unless Trump tells him to. So Donald Trump shut the government down.
He, the president, the man charged with keeping the government running, turned the government off. This is probably the most impeachable act we’ve seen a president do, ever. Another history-breaking action from this, the most corrupt, the most fraudulent, the most ridiculous president in the history of this country.
The standoff cannot last, and Trump will not be getting money for his wall from the Democratically lead house. They know what kind of thief he is already:
If the shutdown doesn’t end in less than a month, I predict impeachment hearings will begin to be discussed seriously. The only thing standing in the way of the government reopening is the idiot sitting in the White House not doing the job he was elected to do.
The government stayed shut down from December 22, 2018 until January 25, 2019. 35 days. For more than a month, there was no United States government. Let that sink in. There was no capacity to do anything that required the federal government to operate for almost the entire month of January, 2019. The president turned the government back on at that point. The house passed some meaningless legislation so that Trump could save face, and he grudgingly allowed the United States to continue to exist, until he changes his mind again.
…and the outrage rolled on through the year of 2019. Trump’s new flunky, AG William Barr, ensured that the Mueller investigation ended. AG Barr then lied about what was in the report, and refused to re-characterize his assessment of the report even after Bobby-Three-Sticks testified before the House. Mueller said in very precise terms (paraphrasing)
Weirdly, people keep telling me Mueller didn’t find anything. That isn’t what I heard in his testimony. What I heard him say was he found a lot of stuff, he just couldn’t prove any of it as a prosecutor tasked with building a case against Donald J. Trump; because that guy is the president and a president has to be impeached. That is the prosecutorial remedy for bad presidents.
Finally. On December 19, 2019 Donald John Trump was impeached by the House of representatives. It was then that speaker Pelosi proved she was the canny operator that everyone says she is. She held the impeachment articles until after the Christmas holiday (Die Hard Christmas) so that the Senate would have had time to think about the job before them, and possibly get an agreement to call the witnesses that are needed to prove the case they’ve built against the President. That process is going on now, so I have moved this article forward in time to the day the House Managers began presenting the prosecution’s case in the Senate. That date (for the later clarity of this article, so I don’t have to move this fucker forward in time. Again. -ed.) is January 22, 2020.
Side note
On January 14, 2020, the new P.M. of the United Kingdom (soon to be just the Kingdom of England and Wales once again. After Brexit that is. AB? –ed.) the infamous Bojo is also on his knees sucking Donald Trump’s cock. I wonder if he has an opinion about the flavor? The BBC reports that Bojo wants to Replace Iran nuclear plan with the Trump deal. That’s rich. Like there will be a Trump deal with Iran short of full-out war. Yeah, that will happen.
I’m watching the case being put before the Senate as I write this (January 22, 2020, 6:30 pm, day three according to C-SPAN) I moved this article forward to the date of the impeachment trial in the Senate while watching the opening arguments yesterday (01/21/2020) seemingly endless arguments over the rules that the Senate would follow during the trial. I have now updated the article with links to some of the Trumpismo articles that I’ve written since the 2018 elections. It is now time to get busy watching this rare political event unfold.
Facebook – PBS News
Make no mistake here. If the Senate acquits Donald John Trump without calling witnesses, every Republican Senator who votes to acquit will have taken their turn at sucking the President’s cock. Every single one of them. This act of theirs will make them complicit with Trump’s official crimes when they finally come to light.
More importantly, every one of them should be investigated by the next president who takes control of the office, and that investigation could very well be conducted by foreign governments interested in seeking favor with the president of the United States. They should probably think pretty hard about acquitting Donald John Trump. You never know who the next person who holds an office might be. Just ask Barack Obama if he’s happy about his current predicament. Ask him if he thinks the future turned out the way he wanted.
Back in January of 2017 when I said:
Was the phrase that we needed to understand the most in the time of Trump, this is pretty much where I saw us ending up. I didn’t know when and I didn’t know exactly how, but I knew that impeachment and ignominy were in the GOP’s and Trump’s future.
The basis of the conflict in question left us no wiggle room. This is where we were heading as soon as the political system allowed Trump to hold the office of President. We were heading for the kind of crisis that this country hasn’t seen since the lead-up to and then resolution of the Civil War, no matter what the actual events that transpired in the then future were. It has been 3 years, 2 days, 13 hours and 22 minutes since Donald Trump should have been removed from office, basically the day after he was sworn in. It will have been a bit longer by the time you read this.
Postscript
I wrote the beginning segments of this article after the 2018 Democratic midterm victories while still under the delusion that we would see a change in President Trump’s behavior. Would see him modulate after the drubbing he suffered in that election. Once again, I was wrong. Against all the evidence of history, the Republicans and their president continued on their merry way pretending that they didn’t have anything to worry about.
The government shutdown also derailed my train of thought and I forgot about this article until I went back over the year’s articles trying to decide what I would use to anchor that first day of testimony that so many of us had been waiting for, for over a year. Finally that day had come. Not that it amounted to much.
Nor did the second impeachment make any fucking difference. Donald Trump was impeached twice, made a pandemic worse:
Attempted a coup:
…and still the GOP sucks on that tiny little cock of his. None of the treasonous acts that Donald Trump has committed since the Republican party made itself the party of Trump, irrevocably welded itself to Trump and his crimes when they acquitted him that January; none of it has made any difference in the calculations of the drivers of Republican thought and the Republican party as a political entity. They still slog on in service of Trump, his corrupt businesses and their own continued unbridled desire for power.
This is why we cannot accept a Republican victory in the next set of federal elections (2022, 2024) even if it seems like they were a real result. We can’t accept it because the Republican party is a criminal enterprise attempting to take over our government and we can’t allow this to happen. I don’t know what comes after the vote that puts them back in power but I know that the US probably stops existing not too long after that point.
They’re still kicking out perfectly good Republicans just because Caudito Trump, the Orange Hate-Monkey, doesn’t like the way they talk about him. He still thinks he’s president even though he ran away to hide at Mar-a-Lago rather than die behind the resolute desk in the same way that a respectable captain should go down with his ship. I hate to break it to him; he held the office but he never was and never will be president.
The presidency is more than an office, it is a frame of mind. A frame of mind that Donald Trump simply can’t achieve. He hasn’t got the balls to do the job necessary. His daddy took them away and never gave them back.
Featured image: Esquire – Stormy Daniels’s Detailed Description of Donald Trump’s Penis Explains a Lot
Donald Trump Impeached. Forever.
He just got impeached. He’ll be impeached forever. No matter what the Senate does. He’s impeached forever because he violated our Constitution
Nancy Pelosi
It’s done. It’s done. The articles were delivered to the Senate today.
I just watched the Senate be convened as a court to render impartial justice on the subject of the impeachment of Donald John Trump as the president of the United States. Not only has the House impeached the Orange Hate-Monkey, they have delivered that indictment to the Senate in order for it to be heard as a legal argument against the president.
What happens now is on the shoulders of Mitch McConnell and the Republican-controlled Senate. They will reconvene next Tuesday as a court to begin the deliberations of the articles of impeachment. If they fail to do justice to our country and our laws, this Senate will be judged harshly by future historians on this fact. McConnell, who has promised to walk in lock-step with the the White House on seeing the president acquitted of all charges, should think long and hard on what his history in the Senate will ultimately mean.
Will he be remembered for allowing this menace to the safety of the world, to the financial security of the United States, to continue in office? Or will he do the right thing and see him removed and barred from seeking a second term in office? Only time can tell.
What can be said, without argument, is that this action by the House is three years late in execution. Part of the blame for this is that the Senate allowed McConnell to hijack it’s authority so as to insure that the Supreme Court would be stacked with justices that he felt were loyal to his brand of conservatism. He should have been punished for his intransigence, and ejected from the Senate. But he wasn’t. Because party loyalty and the naked exercise of power mean more to today’s political actors than honesty and due diligence. This action set the stage that made getting a Republican elected in 2016 a must-do event that every Republican was determined to support. This gave us President Trump.
The other part of the blame rests on the 2016 House of Representatives lead by Paul Ryan, the one-time Republican nominee for Vice President. He should have seen that the President-elect was unsuited for his job, and made plans to have him impeached on January 21st, 2017. But again, just like McConnell, party loyalty and power kept him from doing his job even though the evidence of Trump’s incompetence was irrefutable at the time. His decision made flipping the House of Representatives into Democratic control essential to see the Presidency of Donald Trump brought to heel, if not to an end.
So here we are. January 16th, 2020. Mere weeks away from the first primary votes for the November 3rd general election, and we don’t even know if the sitting president can run for office again. We don’t know how many of his administration officers are also guilty of crimes, and thereby barred from taking his place on the ballot. And all of this harm is lying at the feet of the Republican party and it’s officers, people who allowed party to mean more than country.
How Dare You
Greta Thunberg
Featured image is from The day Donald Trump’s presidency changed forever by Chris Cillizza – December 18, 2019
President Pence? Unlikely
So, if impeachment IS a coup as Republicans say it is, well, then the primary suspect behind this illegal power grab wouldn’t be Nancy Pelosi or Adam Schiff or Hillary Clinton.
No. It would be the guy who ends up in power. That’s how coups work.
You want to call it a coup? Maybe wonder where the fuck Mike Pence has gotten to lately.
Stonekettle Station
Because Pence is implicated in Trump’s crimes, he can’t serve either. I’ve heard that scenario run down on Today, Explained, The Nine Impeachment Scenarios
Continue reading “President Pence? Unlikely”Explaining Impeachment
Everybody and their dog is now talking about impeachment. It’s about fucking time. Where were they three years ago? Donald Trump was impeachable from the day he lied taking his oath, and we knew he was lying when he did it. We simply lacked the political will to do the work required to set the misfire of the 2016 election aside back when it would have made a real difference.
…and the 2016 election was a misfire. The Electoral College should never have been required to vote for Donald Trump in the first place. The political gerrymandering that has made the Electoral College into the dysfunctional thing it is today should disqualify relying on the Electoral College to render a verdict on anything in the first place, never mind an election that hinged on a fraction of a percentage point in three minor US states instead of the overwhelming majority of Americans who voted for sanity instead of insanity. That’s why anyone who runs around screaming about the calamity of the Trump presidency is a #MAGA Nimrod. All of this has happened before and it will happen again.
But hey, Nancy Pelosi is on board with impeachment, so everyone thinks they have to talk about it now. Now that the bus of the US federal government is on fire, plummeting downwards at a predictable rate of V = gt, now they want to apply the brakes. Well that’s fine. I’ll have another bottle of spirits over here in the meantime. If you don’t mind.
Exhibit A
The comparative difference between Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton & Donald Trump is easy to discern. Donald Trump is a fraud, plain and simple. He has sold his Stormtrumpers a bill of goods that he could never deliver, and had no intention of delivering. This is his standard of practice. Donald Trump was a fraud way, way back. All the way back to the 1970’s & 80’s when he cheated on his taxes stealing the wealth of his father’s company. When he built his first building. When he bought out and then bankrupted his casinos. He is still a fraud, a tax cheat and a money launderer. All of this will come out, eventually.
All the other guys who have faced impeachment had some good thing they hoped to achieve in the public service. The same cannot be said of Trump.
Exhibit B
This episode of the 538 Politics podcast is the best explainer I’ve run across on the subject of impeachment. Kate Shaw even picks up on what the guest on Today Explained missed (Exhibit C) She goes point by point through the process as it will most likely progress. Since we only have three cases of presidential impeachment to measure with, it will be hard to say exactly how this will manifest itself. Stay tuned.
Unfortunately for the people who don’t (or won’t) listen to podcasts, there isn’t a transcript for 538 podcasts, and therefore no quick reference for those who just want to get to the facts of the subject directly. You’ll just have to listen. (Editor’s note: Now you can watch, too. I haven’t seen the video which isn’t available on the podcast feed. Yet)
Exhibit C
Unlike the Vox-produced Today Explained.
Which not only adds itself into WordPress articles as a playable embed, but you can find the transcript right in the embedded interface. (Not on Spotify, the current streaming source. -ed.) Given what this episode is, a light brush over the subject of where the Trump impeachment goes from where we are now, it’s not too bad. If you understand the subject.
What did Laura McGann miss? The entirety of Scenario 9 is no mystery. Impeached officials, once successfully removed from office, can be barred from serving in public office again. Subject to a simple majority vote of the Senate. It’s right there in the rules. Or Wikipedia.
Exhibit D
The Daily from the New York Times is more of a cautionary tale. The Times, in its usual attempts to prove that they aren’t liberal by literally (or audibly) embracing the most insane rantings of whichever pundit they choose to give publicity to, chose to give publicity to the guy who brought us Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, et all. His name is Mike Davis.
…everybody told us that he was sort of an unabashed advocate for Judge Kavanaugh and really sort of the torch-carrier politically through this process. And what he did in terms of not just managing the technicalities of the Senate investigation and the Senate process, but also waging this sort of cultural war for conservatives that was crystallized during the Kavanaugh confirmation process and is now being deployed as a defense against impeachment.
Kate Kelly, The Daily
The fact that he was sort of an unabashed advocate for Judge Kavanaugh should have been the first reason not to give the guy a microphone and several uninterrupted minutes to rant. Just flat out don’t do that. There are far, far too many people who will not understand how to dissect his rantings with a skeptical eye. Mike Davis is a poster child for motivated numeracy if not the face on the poster advertising the shortfalls of relying on the reasoning of people who cannot divorce themselves from the things that they believe.
What do I mean by that? If everything Trump is accused of doing was something Obama had been accused of doing how would Mike Davis react? If asked that question on the podcast he would prevaricate. He might even understand the hypocrisy of saying that it would be different for Obama and thereby say “it’s no big deal” but that would be a lie.
We know what would have happened because we lived through eight years of outrage directed at what could objectively be determined to be the best president since Dwight D. Eisenhower (the tan suit, anybody?) If Dwight D. Eisenhower’s portrait is on display anywhere in Washington D.C., the place in the same building that would be appropriate for Donald Trump’s portrait is wherever the garbage is stored before being hauled to the landfill. Which is where Donald Trump’s portrait should go after that. The landfill. With the rest of the garbage.
The New York Times illustrates again exactly why I don’t spend money supporting their reporting. If I had money to support investigative journalism these days I’d have to give it to Vanity Fair, Propublica, The Guardian or The Atlantic. It is a sad day for journalism today, folks.
Impeachment is dangerous. And that danger – that very danger right there, the very nature of it — is why it must be done. And it is in the crucible of crisis, facing the greatest of dangers, when true, authentic greatness is forged.
Stonekettle
Starting the second week in October, 2019, there are now three podcasts that I’ve found that deal specifically with the subject of impeachment and only that subject. The first one is Impeachment, Explained from the same people who bring you the podcast Today, Explained linked above. This is the first episode. It will come out weekly on Spotify.
Then there is the daily podcast from WNYC, called simply Impeachment. I like titles that just say what they are about. This podcast is compiled from content that is aired on the Brian Lehrer show.
…was the episode that followed up the voicemail I left two days previously asking why Trump hasn’t been impeached already based on his emoluments violations. I’m sure I’m not the only one asking that question. The Trump Doral debacle is, as the title suggests, a perfect slice of the subject.
The third podcast is Article II from MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki. Of the three, this one is the one I have the least hope for. I’m not sure why, it just seems that MSNBC manages to shoot themselves in the foot about every other time they try to do something. Since Bagman was such a hit and The Oath is making waves, I’m betting that Article II is doomed to failure. But I’ll give it a few weeks to see what Steve manages to pull out of the hat.
Article II: Inside Impeachment – Star Witness
In testimony on Tuesday, Bill Taylor, the top US diplomat in Ukraine, described what he saw as a high-stakes decision by President Trump to withhold $391 million in aid to Ukraine. Dan De Luce, national security and global affairs reporter for the NBC News investigative unit, recounts Taylor’s opening statement and whether it support the theory of a “quid pro quo.”
Then Wednesday the Republicans in the House of Representatives proved themselves unfit for office by staging a juvenile stunt during the hearings. Such is life in the US in 2019. I sent #ImeachTrump? #ExpelMcConnell! to the show as a comment.