Category: Politics

So, Lindsay Graham is pro-impeachment?

UncleScoopy

Good speech. He convinced me!

Pretty sure he didn’t convince himself.

But I guess we have a chance to see if he is a man of integrity who says what he truly believes, or is simply a hypocrite who makes up whatever argument suits his party at the moment.

(If you’re willing to bet the “integrity” line, I will take that bet.)

Hey, Ukraine, whaddaya got on Pocahontas?

UncleScoopy

Elizabeth Warren is now the official front runner, per RCP. Their average of the polls now stands at Warren 26.6, Biden 26.4!

They use five credible polls to form the current average, and Warren has the edge in four of them. I personally expect Warren to pull quite a bit ahead, not so much because of Trump’s ongoing slander of Biden, but because of Bernie’s heart attack. I think we are going to see the Warren/Bernie wing consolidate behind Warren. We have seen little evidence of that so far, but I think it is inevitable. IBD shows that Bernie has dropped to 10%, which is the lowest he has been on any poll from a firm rated A- or better.

Kamala Harris is in fifth place behind Mayor Pete, and she’s also losing ground to Andrew Yang. (In fact, Yang beats her 8-to-4 in the latest Emerson poll, which is not used in the RCP average.)

Two of the five polls used in the average, Quinnipiac and IBD, are rated A- or better by the stats nerds at 538. Both of those polls show Warren in the lead. Both of those polls show that Buttigieg is in 4th, and that Yang has pulled into a tie for fifth with Harris.

“Trump Taxes: President Ordered to Turn Over Returns to Manhattan D.A.”

UncleScoopy

That’s not really the interesting thing about the case, because that ruling will drag on through level after level of appeals.

No, the most interesting thing is a contention by Trump’s own attorneys. They did not stick to the basic defense that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted. Instead, they also insisted that releasing his returns would cause him “irreparable harm”!

They know we can see that, right?

The point can’t be related to the fact that he’s the president, because every other recent president has released his returns, as have all major candidates, and it did them no harm at all. Therefore his own lawyers are admitting that he’s different, that his returns are filled with all kinds of shady shit that he doesn’t want people to see!

That’s some good lawyering right there! Is this a Giuliani strategy?

Imagine if everyone was allowed to use this as a legal defense. After all, any good evidence causes the defendant irreparable harm. No, your honor, I can’t allow the video tape of my client and his late wife at the moment of her death to be admitted into evidence. It might cause him “irreparable harm.” Especially the part with the knife.

Wait, don’t impeach Rick Perry or me, impeach Romney!

UncleScoopy

It’s always disheartening to see that our country’s president doesn’t have any idea how the government actually works. Good thing he’s not on “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” Just for the record, as any good 5th-grade student knows, senators can’t be impeached. No such thing. The impeachment process is for officials outside the legislative branch.

Senators can be expelled from their chamber, but it requires a 2/3 vote of their colleagues. Good luck with that.

In another tweet, ever the classy guy, Trump called Romney an ass

CrowdStrike?

UncleScoopy

Even people who study conspiracy theories are baffled by this one. Trump seems to have taken the core of a totally preposterous “flat earth” sort of theory and added even more far-fetched details that he just made up on his own

“I do this for a living, and I’d never heard anyone say the servers were in Ukraine.”

And with good reason. Why would they be? That entire idea makes no sense at all. If you wanted to hide activity that took place on a server, you wouldn’t ship it intact to another location, thus taking a chance that somebody could intercept it, or find it later. You would scrub it, shatter it to pieces or incinerate it, then dump any remaining traces of it into the Pacific, over the deepest part of the Mariana Trench.

The servers do seem to a have a virtual life somewhere. Before CrowdStrike could repurpose the DNC servers and get the organization back online safely, they made a digital image of everything and shipped that evidence to the FBI. I don’t know if that record is still intact somewhere.

Another bizarre detail Trump seems to have concocted is the idea that CrowdStrike “was owned by a very rich Ukrainian.” Nobody can figure out where he even got that idea. One of CrowdStrike’s co-founders, Dimitri Alperovitch, has an Eastern European name, but his family fled from the Soviet Union when he was a child, and they fled Russia, not Ukraine. He was born in Moscow to Russian parents, although even that is irrelevant because, like me, he’s totally American except for his name. He grew up in Chattanooga and took his higher education in Georgia. He looks and talks like your friendly, awkward, slightly doughy uncle. If you are picturing some sinister Bond villain, well, you have it back-asswards. (See for yourself). Could Trump have based his entire wacky scenario on the fact that one smart, avuncular guy has a Slavic-sounding last name? That is bizarre even by his own deviant standard.

China, if you’re listening …

UncleScoopy

“China should start an investigation into the Bidens”

That’s what Trump told reporters as he left the White House to travel to Florida. That came just moments after he said of China:

“If they don’t do what we want, we have tremendous power.”

I can’t imagine why China would want to help Trump get elected. If they ever got involved, it would probably be to help his opponent. It seems to me that they would prefer any sensible person to Mr. Tariff War.

Damn, it’s difficult to keep up with all of Trump’s shenanigans. In that sense, he’s the Bella Thorne of politicians. Yesterday Trump said Adam Schiff was not worthy to carry Mike Pompeo’s “blankstrap.” Get it? ____strap.

He loves Match Game!

He definitely saw this episode, as noted by Jimmy Kimmel:

Pompeo wants to know if he can punish people for following the law

UncleScoopy

Well, HR is not my field, but I’m gonna guess that’s a negative.

DJT: usual shenanigans

UncleScoopy

Man, Trump will believe absolutely anything he hears if he thinks it might be favorable to him. If Sean Hannity said that all-knowing, super-intelligent aliens are among us and support Trump’s presidency, he would tweet about it!

NOTES:

  1. The same rules have been in place since 2014
  2. The whistleblower filed his or her complaint on the same form which has been used since May 24, 2018. There are some new online forms, but the whistleblower did not use them.
  3. Having first-hand knowledge of the event has NEVER been required in order to submit a whistleblower complaint, but the Inspector General, in his investigation. must be able to verify that first-hand evidence exists. None of this has changed during the Trump presidency.

Trump vs his rivals – up from another thread

UncleScoopy

From another thread:

This has nothing to do with the the Joe Biden story. It has to do with Uncle Scoopy’s post in another thread:

“Potential Democratic voters are definitely split into two camps – those who want to return the USA to some kind of normality and business-as-usual, and those that desire a bold break from America’s past.

I am in the former camp: ex-Republican who would support Biden just because he’s a normal human being and is running against a monster. I just don’t know which way I would go in a Warren-Trump match-up. I’m ashamed to type that, but it is true, sadly. Warren is obviously a better human being (who isn’t?), but she’ll get no support from me until I know EXACTLY what my new tax bill is going to look like. Will I have to pay for everyone’s medical care and education? If she can pay for all of her pie-in-the-sky by her wealth tax, corporate taxes, closing tax loopholes and asking the top 1% to do more, then I’m all in, but if it’s all about fucking the middle class once again, then she can return to her wigwam.”

I think you need to think about this. I think you need to think about how much damage a re-election of Trump – essentially saying that the majority of the US should support Trump – would do to the future of the United States. I did not know Americans were so poor that they would put their tax bills ahead of that.

Maybe I am wrong. is there really not much at stake? Scoopy has always been more intelligent, better informed, and just a much clearer thinker than I am. On the other hand. I think that even if far left Democrats sweep Congress, they will know that the surest way to lose Congress and revive the Republican Party would be big tax increases on the majority of voting Americans.

I don’t know what to think about this. Except that Trump is vile, and should never have been President, and should not be President for four more years. NO ONE who has any chance of being nominated by the Democrats could be as bad as Trump. Are Americans really in such dire straits, financially, that their taxes matter more than that? Then Republican policies really have triumphed.

Scoop’s response:

I understand your argument completely, and I sympathize with it, but …

You asked another commenter why he thought it was a poor idea for Democrats to go left. I answered you honestly. I trust that Joe Biden would be fiscally responsible. I don’t feel the same about Sanders and Warren. I’ve seen the rough math on Medicare for All, and it is frightening. I’m willing to sift patiently through all the details to see how all the medical care and education will be paid for, and I have not done that yet, so I can be persuaded that it is feasible, but if it is another “fuck the middle class” scheme, I won’t get on that bandwagon.

The reason I used to be a Republican is that I believe the federal government, especially the executive branch, should stay relatively small. The fact that Trump is an evil entity doesn’t change that. In fact the possibility that a Trump-like character can be elected is all the more reason to restrict executive power. Do you want independents and disgruntled former Republicans to come over to your side? Then don’t make us choose between two radical ideologues who want to break the system, albeit in different ways.

Plus you have to understand that I am still a moderate traditionalist, and there are many like me who hate Trump, and hate the Republicans’ disregard for truth and common sense, but that doesn’t mean our basic ideas have changed. We are not suddenly going to turn into Trotskyites or start singing “L’Internationale” side-by-side with Bernie.

Trump says making fun of him is treason!

UncleScoopy

“I want Schiff questioned at the highest level for Fraud & Treason.”

“Was this person SPYING on the U.S. President? Big Consequences!”

“What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric?”

Henry II, referring to ol’ Tommy Becket

It’s sad and scary that the President of the United States seems completely unhinged

Continue reading “Trump says making fun of him is treason!” →

Trump told Russian officials he wasn’t concerned about Moscow’s interference in U.S. election

UncleScoopy

“President Trump told two senior Russian officials in a 2017 Oval Office meeting that he was unconcerned about Moscow’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election because the United States did the same in other countries.”

What makes this particularly noteworthy and confusing is that Trump was publicly denying that such interference had ever happened. Looking back on it through the prism of this revelation, we see that he obviously realized that it had happened, and by his statements to the Russians, he invited its continuance.

There is a pee tape – a fake one

UncleScoopy

Somebody went to a lot of trouble to create a fake Trump pee tape. Here it is.

Twitter version

Slate’s analysis of the tape. Slate’s key points: (1) it can’t be real, but (2) somebody worked very hard and spent a lot of money trying to make it look real, then just let it languish in obscurity. (It has been around since January, with almost no attention drawn to it.)

Gov. Cuomo blames angry ‘leftists’ for impeachment of Trump

UncleScoopy

That’s a surprise!

We are about to enter a period which may someday be viewed as America’s darkest hour since WW2, perhaps worse that WW2 in one sense. At least then we stood united against a common enemy. Now all we do is fight with one another. It’s more like the Civil War.

Continue reading “Gov. Cuomo blames angry ‘leftists’ for impeachment of Trump” →

A quick overview of Biden-Ukraine

UncleScoopy

Needless to say (when you consider the source), the Biden connection is utterly concocted. Like the famous Uranium One “scandal” there is not one word of truth to the whole Biden/Ukraine story, other than that Joe Biden did tell Ukraine they needed to remove the prosecutor in order to get US loan guarantees.

Continue reading “A quick overview of Biden-Ukraine” →

White House will release the whistleblower complaint and has released a transcript of the Trump call

UncleScoopy

In theory, both will be complete and unredacted.

UPDATE: Apparently the whistleblower complaint will be redacted.

UPDATE: The DoJ has released its memo concerning the whistleblower complaint.

UPDATE: Here is the transcript of the phone conversation.

The Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel opinion, which was released today, says the whistleblower’s complaint centers on the July phone call between the President and the Ukrainian president, the rough transcript of which was released by the White House earlier today.

The opinion further notes that the intelligence community inspector general said the whistleblower, who is still unknown to the Justice Department, as having “some indicia of an arguable political bias.”

Even so, the inspector general determined that the whistleblower’s complaint was credible, that Trump’s actions could be a violation of the campaign finance law.

Notably, yesterday the General Counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence wrote in a letter to the whistleblower’s attorney, that the whistleblower acted in “good faith.”

I am reserving all judgment on this for now.

  • We don’t know who the whistleblower is or what (if any) axes he has to grind.
  • We don’t know how much the whistleblower actually knows. Some have suggested he or she had to rely on second- or third-hand knowledge of the events or phone calls in question.

We shall see.

De Blasio out

UncleScoopy

Gee, there’s a shocker.

Given that he was preferred by a hearty 0% of Democratic primary voters, per the latest Fox News poll, you have to think that his exit was imminent.

538 has an analysis of this with a great headline: “Why Bill de Blasio’s Campaign Failed (Hint: Nobody Liked Him)”

On the other hand: there are other zero percenters (from that Fox Poll) still in the race, including Julian Castro, who is still qualified for the debates.

SIDEBAR: Marianne Williamson was in a category by herself. While some low-tier candidates like de Blasio had preference scores that rounded to zero percent, Williamson literally had zero percent – not a single supporter. That may have had something to do with using mind power to ward off hurricanes.