US Politics March 2019: “I can’t say I’m happy. I can’t say I’m thrilled”

ref to idiot thread

That was already posted twice in the Venezuela thread.

🔥Mueller has “completed his report. It is said to recommend indicting 3 of @realDonaldTrump’s children—Don Jr, Ivanka & Eric—as well as Jared Kushner...Mueller wants Trump himself to be indicted. Barr is said to oppose this.”

Hence, the delay...🧐https://t.co/7Htd7mOhJS

— Dr. Dena Grayson (@DrDenaGrayson) March 10, 2019

what is spectator.us

The Spectator is a right wing UK magazine.

... don't know if they're connected.

there's a 'go to spectator uk' link at the top of the page which leads to the right-wing uk magazine, so i assume they must be?

The columnist had predicted — in a piece published earlier this week in The Spectator — that Mueller would submit his report in an official capacity on Friday, March 8. But that did not happen. Cockburn then went back to his sources to find out why his earlier prediction was wrong. That is when he was told by his sources that the report had been scheduled for a March 8 delivery, but the disagreement between Mueller and Barr over an indictment caused the announcement to be postponed.

see i'm still right

I thought that guy who predicted the rapture died

At a recent round table meeting of business executives, & long after formally introducing Tim Cook of Apple, I quickly referred to Tim + Apple as Tim/Apple as an easy way to save time & words. The Fake News was disparagingly all over this, & it became yet another bad Trump story!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 11, 2019

but he just said yesterday that he actually said "Tim Cook Apple"

yeah but that's a complete sentence. no one really believes he's spoken one of those.

this happened on wednesday - good to know trump's definitely not been stewing on it for nearly a week before taking to twitter to explain that his brain isn't melting, actually, how dare u

Holy shit, he used a big word almost correctly.

By which I mean "recent."

I know it shouldn't be shocking to see the President of the United States get himself caught up in such an obvious and pointless lie, and yet here we are. it's like I'm not fully desensitized yet

not to mention the idea of Donald Trump trying to save "time & words"

when you spend 2+ hours humping the flag and screaming about socialism to a room full of mutants you gotta make up that time on the back end.

Is there like a filter I can use to have every presidential utterance sent directly to my spam folder?

I mean, give me a heads up if he announces that he's sent the missiles a-flying but I'm otherwise just done being reminded of his blighted existence.

DONALD TRUMP ON MARCH 12, 2019: "actually I said tim cuck apple"

The American public could take a page from the book of Trump's parents re: neglecting the living fuck out of him.

yeah, I don't think I recall anything GWB said or did in the final year he was in office. I wish I could tune Trump out like that.

At least GWB was smart enough the stfu during the financial crisis.

Dem 2020 convention: Milwaukee

good morning!

why would they want fucking Milhaukee when they can have Miami

tribute to recently-departed working-class hero penny marshall iirc

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/b9/SawyerBronzeFonz2008.jpg/200px-SawyerBronzeFonz2008.jpg

that's an hour away, should I try to go ???

xpost, but of course, great minds, etc.

!!!

why would they want fucking Milhaukee when they can have Miami

presumably surrendering FL to Yam already

I like Milwaukee, fun town

a buncha late night writers furiously pitching beer jokes right now

presumably surrendering FL to Yam sea level rise already

― a Mets fan who gave up on everything in the mid '80s (Dr Morbius

Milwaukee's great.

Guess they want to make sure they don’t accidentally forget to campaign in the upper Midwest again

that's why Clinton lost, recall

Pelosi:

There have been increasing calls, including from some of your members, for impeachment of the president.

I’m not for impeachment. This is news. I’m going to give you some news right now because I haven’t said this to any press person before. But since you asked, and I’ve been thinking about this: Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country. And he’s just not worth it.

https://t.co/VJq71C7F83

She's right. Why announce what you're going to do before the evidence has accumulated and anyone has voted? The House Judiciary Committee has launched an investigation. That's how Watergate began.

healthy government

To slow down Democrats, Colorado Republicans requested a 2,000-page bill be read in its entirety. But Democrats then decided to have the bill read by a computer at a speed incomprehensible to humans https://t.co/uZxQfOIUJf via @denverpost

— Mitchell Byars (@mitchellbyars) March 11, 2019

maybe i'm giving pelosi too much credit, but there's an argument that trump is the ideal candidate to run against in 2020, and impeachment is likely to be a distraction from that, perhaps even one that benefits him.

enh fuckit let’s just hand control of the government over to skynet at this point why not xp

https://twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1PlKQyaneAvKE

It's true that, if the country at large does not endorse impeachment, then pursuing it will only cause a reaction by a majority of voters against the Democrats in 2020. Pursuing investigations, otoh, does not carry the same dangers as continuing straight to impeachment proceedings.

I'm actually with Pelosi on this. Impeachment qua impeachment is way too charged. Far better to just investigate and investigate and investigate and report the results of those investigations and keep a running tally of all of it in easy-for-even-morons-to-understand form so every Democrat running for office, from the local level on up, can run on the platform "Donald Trump is a criminal and a shambling mountain of garbage in vaguely human form - vote Democrat in 2020."

Either that, or hire a disgruntled ex-military sniper to camp out in the woods near Mar-a-Lago. I'm good with either one.

Impeachment is not removal -- the Senate ain't moving an inch on removal. It doesn't mean you don't investigate. Plus, she's the speaker. She can change her mind.

Yeah seriously. I have friends whining and it's like hmm...do I publicly as Speaker indicate impeachment is coming or a high possibility when the House investigation just launched and Mueller report is forthcoming? Where AT BEST both investigations miraculously present open and shut cases and somehow the GOP discovers scruples.

Or, more likely, the narrative that the House investigation has already made its conclusion and is looking for confirmation bias facts only, which could disengage some indie voters, plus be a PR nightmare for her with her leftist supporters if she has to reverse course.

Why choose the option of zero flexibility which only placates your base and leaves you no room to maneuver? She's just preventing cheap, easy sound bytes. Lesser ranking reps have more latitude to be reckless than she does.

The most annoying thing is the press changing her quite cutting statement - "he's just not worth it" - to "[impeachment is] just not worth it".

I've no doubt Pelosi has read Laurence Tribe's To End a Presidency (review in The Atlantic). I haven't read the book, but the review offers a really chilling reason why impeachment isn't worth it (at least until Trump becomes an immanent risk of nuclear conflict): like or not, an impeachment campaign risks a widespread outbreak of right-wing extremist terrorism, or worse. Quotes from Tribe:

Well-justified calls to impeach the president can simultaneously empower him, harm his political opponents, and make his removal from office less likely … Because removing a truly determined tyrant may unleash havoc, the risks of impeaching a president are apt to be most extreme precisely when ending his tenure is most necessary.

Many Americans who voted for Trump view themselves as belonging to a victimized, disenfranchised class that has finally discovered its champion. For some of them, Trump’s appeal is less what he will accomplish programmatically than whom he will attack personally. Were Trump removed from office by political elites in Washington, DC—even based on clear evidence that he had grossly abused power—some of his supporters would surely view the decision as an illegitimate coup. Indeed, some right-wing leaders have already denounced the campaign to remove Trump as a prelude to civil war. This rhetoric, too, escapes reality and indulges pernicious tendencies toward apocalyptic thinking about the impeachment power.

That argument is making a weird (and unsupported by evidence to date) assumption that the right-wing extremist terrorism isn't coming anyway.

there's an argument that trump is the ideal candidate to run against in 2020

That's what they said in 2016