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Shame. Shame. Shame on Trump and on the Republicans for bringing him to power and keeping him there. The President is sworn to protect us, but now, virtually overnight, we are in far more danger of terrorist attacks and itās just going to get worse.
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A very solid article about how the baby boomer grip on our media has polarized us.
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It seems the Impeachment Inquiry is at a crossroads. Itās time for the Democrats to decide: will they āGo Focusedā or āGo Bigā? Like this editorial, I say āGo Bigā!
Itās almost certain that the House will impeach Trump and then send the matter to the Senate for a trial. But I feel thereās no way, at this point, that the Senate Republicans will vote to remove Trump ā and if theyāre not going to do that, then I feel itās important to keep piling on charges ā this op-ed is a blueprint for that.
Iāll bet dollars to doughnuts that Trump leaned on China to investigate the Bidens just like he did with Ukraine (his China trade negotiator is not denying it) ā and turning over other rocks is inevitably going to uncover more impeachable acts.
How does everyone else feel? Should we āGo Focusedā or āGo Bigā?
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Great pointā¦Pelosi/Schiff are really staying focused on landing the Ukraine plane down on T. The Rās as has been mentioned before are showing some courage.
Getting to 20 R Senate votes is not beyond the realm of possibilities.(haveāt scanned WTFJHT well enough in the last few days) so this article may have shown up elsewhereā¦
You need 67 votes in the Senate to convict and remove a president, and there are only 47 Democrats or independents, meaning that you need 20 Republicans to break ranks and vote for removal. That is, allegedly, an impossible number to reach.
ā¦
I doubt Iām alone in thinking the Democrats in the Senate are woefully incapable of producing a coherent strategy to hold the president accountable for his apparent crimes.
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Fuckin big. Impeachment trial should/could have started way earlier anyway so thereās an almost literal laundry list of crimes that have to be relentlessly covered for public consumption, where not even my fox news-watching racist family can miss at least one thing that makes them pause (even if they wonāt admit it out loud).
There will always be that percentage of ppl who will refuse to believe any of it, and no the senate will absolutely not remove him, but that doesnāt mean the information isnāt worth the time to air out and dissect. The generations who have to clean up our mess need to know everything so they can form a battle plan.
The Mueller investigation was already too restricted, aināt nobody got time for that shit anymore.
(Never did, really, but here we fuckin are. 
)
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Havenāt seen this posted before - but it is well worth a read. A fulsome list of 82 instances that could be considered as a basis for impeachment.
Trump frankly has no conception of the what the role of POTUS entails and displays that ignorance daily.
The crimes for which impeachment is the prescribed punishment are notoriously undefined. And thatās for a reason: Presidential powers are vast, and itās impossible to design laws to cover every possible abuse of the officeās authority. House Democrats have calculated that an impeachment focused narrowly on the Ukraine scandal will make the strongest legal case against President Trump. But thatās not Trumpās only impeachable offense. A full accounting would include a wide array of dangerous and authoritarian acts ā 82, to be precise. His violations fall into seven broad categories of potentially impeachable misconduct that should be weighed, if not by the House, then at least by history.
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As the White House struggles to build an anti-impeachment strategy, President Donald Trump turned this week to Lindsey Graham, his staunchest ally in the Senate, to try to stiffen Republican spines in that chamber. Itās not going the way the president must have hoped.
On Thursday, Graham announced that heād put forward a resolution condemning the House impeachment inquiry. By mid-afternoon, when he actually announced it, the resolution had been watered down to a plea for a different and more transparent process. That was apparently a sop to GOP senators unwilling to go quite that far. And yet by Friday morning, only 44 of 53 Republicans in the Senate had signed on to the resolution. A gesture meant to be a show of solidarity by senators has instead become a sign of the weakness of the presidentās position.
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From last week.
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Omg this! 
Especially,
Most people know Federalist 65, if they know it at all, for its famous characterization of the impeachable offense: āthose offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.ā
But it is in the sentences that immediately follow these words that Alexander Hamilton peered through the ages and commented on the current Republican failure to abandon Donald Trump:
The prosecution of [impeachments], for this reason, will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community, and to divide it into parties more or less friendly or inimical to the accused. In many cases it will connect itself with the pre-existing factions, and will enlist all their animosities, partialities, influences, and interests on one side or on the other; and in such cases there will always be the greatest danger that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of the parties than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.
Nailed it.
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Favorite line:
President Trumpās substantive defense against the ongoing impeachment inquiry has crumbled entirelyānot just eroded or weakened, but been flattened like a sandcastle hit with a large wave.
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While I am often wary of Rick Wilson (I have not forgotten where his allegiances rest), his analysis here of Bill Barr is spot on.
https://gen.medium.com/is-william-barr-the-head-of-doj-or-qanon-58d68fc3a31
An older article about how not only do Putin & Russia see the fall of America as the only path to the rise of Russia, but how Trump both enables this & quite literally doesnāt even know what Western-style liberalism (aka āDemocracyā) IS.
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Call it a hunch, but I donāt think Turkey is going to take down ISIS.
Meet The Man Who Funds ISIS: Bilal Erdogan, The Son Of Turkeyās President
In addition to son Bilalās illegal and lucrative oil trading for ISIS, SĆ¼meyye Erdogan, the daughter of the Turkish President apparently runs a secret hospital camp inside Turkey just over the Syrian border.
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āOK boomerā
Gen Z speaks out.
We have left them with numerous issues to resolve.
āIf itās a jab at anyone itās the outdated political figures who try to run our lives.ā
āYou can keep talkingā¦but weāre going to change the futureā
āOK Boomerā Marks the End of Friendly Generational Relations
Now itās war: Gen Z has finally snapped over climate change and financial inequality.
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The GOP Tax Cuts Didnāt Work
Republicans said the reform would grow the economy by up to 6 percent, stimulate business investment, and pay for itself. None of that happened.
A must-read thread.
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Republicans admit they have no fact witnesses ā and Trump did it
This compelling editorial explains why, when it comes to defending Trump, the Republicans have bupkis. 
House Republicans acknowledged that they have no witnesses and no documents to dispute the main facts concerning President Trumpās impeachable conduct: a demand from Ukraine for dirt on a political rival; withholding of aid vital to Ukraineās defense against Russia; concealing evidence of the scheme by moving a transcript to a secret server; and threatening the tipster who alerted Congress to gross malfeasance. They admitted all that? Well, in a manner of speaking they did.
House Republicans sent Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) a list of witnesses they want to testify in the impeachment inquiry, including former vice president Joe Bidenās son Hunter Biden and the anonymous whistleblower who filed the initial complaint against President Trump. ā¦
Schiff is likely to reject many, if not all, of the witnesses from the Republicansā wish list.
Hunter Biden lacks any direct knowledge of anything that occurred in the Trump White House, and hence he cannot rebut evidence of Trumpās demand that Ukraine interfere with our election. By Republicansā own admission, the whistleblower lacks first-hand knowledge of events. Witnesses who testified out of public view have corroborated the crux of the case against Trump ā that he pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate his political rivals ā so the Democrats see no need for the whistleblower, who heard the story secondhand, to testify. Three career State Department officials are returning next week for the public hearings.
All Republicans have are distractions, stunts to generate claims of unfairness, and gimmicks to threaten the life and career of the whistleblower. Itās remarkable, really, that they could stipulate to every fact about which the witnesses testified under oath.
Republicans implicitly admit that there is no disputing Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindmanās testimony. Vindman testified that, in the July 25 call, āthere was no doubtā Trump made a demand of the Ukrainian president to initiate an investigation of a U.S. citizen, a ādeliverableā to help his presidential reelection. āWhen the president of the United States makes a request for a favor, it certainly seems ā I would take it as a demand,ā Vindman testified. There are apparently no witnesses to contradict his testimony and none to dispute it was of such concern that Vindman went to John Eisenberg, the top national security lawyer in the White House.
Republicans apparently have no evidence to contradict the testimony of Fiona Hill, who served as a top Russia adviser to the White House. She testified that former national security adviser John Bolton, in a meeting following an exchange between U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland and Ukrainian officials that made explicit that any White House meeting was conditioned on an announcement of an investigation into the Bidens, ābasically said ā in fact, he directly said: Rudy Giuliani is a hand grenade that is going to blow everybody up. He did make it clear that he didnāt feel that there was anything that he could personally do about this.ā In other words, the national security adviser knew hijacking foreign policy for Trumpās political gain was wrong and likely illegal.
Likewise, there is nothing to undermine Vindmanās testimony that the Office of Management and Budget put a hold on funds appropriated by Congress to Ukraine, an action contrary to U.S. policy, injurious to Ukraine and a function of the Trump-Giuliani campaign smear operation. (āBasically we were trying to get to the bottom of why this hold was in place, why OMB was applying this hold. There were multiple memos that were transmitted from my directorate to Ambassador Bolton on, you know, keeping him abreast of this particular development.ā) Republicans have no evidence to dispute that.
Republicans have no evidence to dispute Hillās complete debunking of the nutty conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Republicans have no evidence to dispute that Giuliani and his cronies obtained the removal of Marie Yovanovitch, the competent and respected U.S. envoy to Kyiv. Republicans have yet to disprove evidence that Sondland, Giuliani and acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney were acting as agents of the president.
Republicans cannot dispute the testimony of George Kent that āPOTUS wanted nothing less than President Zelensky to go to microphone and say investigations, Biden, and Clinton.ā Republicans cannot produce evidence to contradict Kentās conclusion that āMr. Giuliani, at that point, had been carrying on a campaign for several months full of lies and incorrect informationā against Yovanovitch, or was dispatched by Trump to obtain dirt on Biden. ā¦
ā¦ The Republican Party stands foursquare behind a president soliciting a bribe, endangering U.S. national security and attempting to intimidate witnesses and cover his tracks.
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