Trump

[merman]

Deutsche Bank refusing to do new business with the orange one.
Good job he gritted millions out of his supporters then, to pay back over £30 million in loans due over the next four years.

Impeachment articles going to the House of Representatives.
The key now - at least 17 Republican Senators need to sign up.
At the least the process could stop him running for President again.

[gilesgoat]

Deutsche Bank refusing to do new business with the orange one.
Good job he gritted millions out of his supporters then, to pay back over £30 million in loans due over the next four years.

Impeachment articles going to the House of Representatives.
The key now - at least 17 Republican Senators need to sign up.
At the least the process could stop him running for President again.

THIS is very interesting ( Legal Eagle ) :



In very short :

- political speech has THE HIGEST LEVEL OF PROTECTION/FREEDOM from all the USA laws

- LEGALLY is VERY hard VERY questionable if the wording used by Trump actually INCITED a riot or not ( MORE NOT than "yes" LEGALLY speaking )

- the definition of "incited" is a bit of a difficult one for the USA system ( i.e. is not so simple as the one you pick up from the vocabulary )

- "on technicalities alone" is more likely that Trump won't be impeached BUT

- on the MORAL content/issue here and the OVERALL RESULT he SHOULD be impeached

- if he DOES NOT get impechead then ( super distater ) "NOTHING CAN BE IMPEACHED" then ( unless proven stuff like high treason or such )

The last point "seems to be it", there are so many technicalities in the middle that it's not so clear cut .. BUT as he said "if this is not an impeachement case then NOTHING is" ...

So we'll see what happens.

[(o)(o)]

Taught this be a better outcome, if impeachment results in fullscale civil war?

USA is a fkn tinderbox right now!

[tufty]

Taught this be a better outcome, if impeachment results in fullscale civil war?

USA is a fkn tinderbox right now!

That's the argument that's being made by the repugnicans. Wave around the "oh noes the right wing cunts will rise up" bogeyman as reason for why Trump should be allowed to get away scot free. Problem is that they've already risen up, they're planning on raising all fucking hell on the 20th whatever happens. A line needs to be drawn, and examples need to be made.

It is, of course, very easy to say that from this side of the Atlantic.

[(o)(o)]

Suspect this needs to be approached in a tactical calculated sense. Chatting to someone during the Capitol storming after which that female was shot she says “I wish it had been trump!” Well yes that is preferable choice yes but, could trigger a bloodbath! I guess what I’m saying is it looks like the situation needs diffusing carefully like a bomb.

That said I heard from a reliable source that every scenario had been wargamed out by military intelligence and all arrived at the same conclusion : The only scenario in which civil war would be avoided was if Trump was reinstated.

I saw MMM stuff proliferating on Twitter days ago.. think that’s all been driven off Twitter now but the next few days could be interesting, to say the least.

[Harlequin]

That said I heard from a reliable source that every scenario had been wargamed out by military intelligence and all arrived at the same conclusion : The only scenario in which civil war would be avoided was if Trump was reinstated.

For which definition of 'civil war'? It could be said that it already exists.

[(o)(o)]

That said I heard from a reliable source that every scenario had been wargamed out by military intelligence and all arrived at the same conclusion : The only scenario in which civil war would be avoided was if Trump was reinstated.

Here's the source of that Noam Chomsky;

“He’s already announced repeatedly that if he doesn’t like the outcome of the election he won’t leave. And this is taken very seriously by two high-level military officers, ex-military leaders, who’ve just sent a letter to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, reviewing for him his constitutional duties if the president refuses to leave office and gathers around him the paramilitary forces that he’s been using to terrorise people in Portland.

“The military has a duty in that case, the 82nd Airborne Division, to remove him by force. There’s a transition integrity project, high-level people from the Republicans and the Democrats; they’ve been running war games asking what would happen if Trump refuses to leave office – every one of them leads to civil war, every scenario that they can think of except a Trump victory leads to civil war. This is not a joke – nothing like this has happened in the history of parliamentary democracy."

In another interview he refers to an article in the Washington Post on this, which no doubt goes into the deets.

For which definition of 'civil war'? It could be said that it already exists.

I guess when it progresses from sporadic incidents to systematic bloody combat?

Dunno really not sure what the rules are.. does someone have to declare war to make it official?

[tufty]

So Trump keeps winning. The only president ever to be impeached twice.

[Little stoned kiwi]

According to the Wikipedia entry:

James Fearon, a scholar of civil wars at Stanford University, defines a civil war as "a violent conflict within a country fought by organized groups that aim to take power at the center or in a region, or to change government policies".[2] Ann Hironaka further specifies that one side of a civil war is the state.[4] The intensity at which a civil disturbance becomes a civil war is contested by academics. Some political scientists define a civil war as having more than 1,000 casualties,[2] while others further specify that at least 100 must come from each side.[6] The Correlates of War, a dataset widely used by scholars of conflict, classifies civil wars as having over 1000 war-related casualties per year of conflict.

[tufty]

The Fail is reporting that Trump is stiffing Rudy Giuliani. That's going to help in his impeachment trial.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... y-fee.html

[merman]

Ten senior Republicans did the decent thing and voted to impeach.

But the party as a whole cannot just step back and blame it all on Trump - ultimately they enabled him to be President.

[KlaxonCow]

https://metro.co.uk/2021/01/15/rudy-giu ... -13909390/

Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani thinks Game Of Thrones is documentary about ‘fictitious medieval England’
[...]
President Trump’s lawyer was attempting to explain his recent appearance at a rally ahead of the Capitol riots, which culminated in the deaths of five people, seemingly hailing George RR Martin’s fantasy tale – sorry, we mean ‘documentary’ – as the inspiration behind the speech. Earlier this month the New York Mayor whipped up a crowd of angry Trump-supporters shortly before they marched the Capitol in Washington DC, telling them ‘let’s have trial by combat!’
[...]
He told The Hill’s White House reporter Brett Samuels: ‘I was referencing the kind of trial that took place for Tyrion in that very famous documentary about fictitious medieval England.
[...]
Trying to make his comments seem any better, Giuliani – who went on to claim that Antifa was behind the violence and that Mr Trump bears ‘no responsibility’ for the events – attempted to explain he meant a combat ‘between machines’ and not people.

Yes, combat between machines, just like we see in the "documentary" Game of Thrones.

Because when you want machines, not people, to have a trial by combat, you shout "let's have a trial by combat" at a big crowd of armed insurrectionists who clearly had a pre-meditated plan to attack the Capitol, and were going to kidnap and execute lawmakers, instead of, you know, programming the machines to do that. As there's no possible way that that could be ambiguously mistaken by the large crowd of armed racist people, with mischief on their minds, as an instruction to them, when you meant it about machines that, you know, don't speak English and aren't watching the news to hear your speech, even if they could understand you, so that's absolutely not the way you initiate a machine to attack another machine.

Which, by the way, if we're talking about computers attempting to hack each other - and not, like, massive anime robots that are literally going to punch each other, which is not a thing in actual reality, as those Japanese cartoons are not a "documentary" either - then that's an illegal act anyway (unauthorised access to a computer system is a crime unto itself). So, he's joining the insurrectionists in this strange behaviour of waiving your rights not to self-incriminate under the Fifth Amendment. And has decided to admit to fictitious crimes that aren't even possible.

[ThetaReactor]

Deutsche Bank refusing to do new business with the orange one.
Good job he gritted millions out of his supporters then, to pay back over £30 million in loans due over the next four years.

Impeachment articles going to the House of Representatives.
The key now - at least 17 Republican Senators need to sign up.
At the least the process could stop him running for President again.

THIS is very interesting ( Legal Eagle ) :



In very short :

- political speech has THE HIGEST LEVEL OF PROTECTION/FREEDOM from all the USA laws

- LEGALLY is VERY hard VERY questionable if the wording used by Trump actually INCITED a riot or not ( MORE NOT than "yes" LEGALLY speaking )

- the definition of "incited" is a bit of a difficult one for the USA system ( i.e. is not so simple as the one you pick up from the vocabulary )

- "on technicalities alone" is more likely that Trump won't be impeached BUT

- on the MORAL content/issue here and the OVERALL RESULT he SHOULD be impeached

- if he DOES NOT get impechead then ( super distater ) "NOTHING CAN BE IMPEACHED" then ( unless proven stuff like high treason or such )

The last point "seems to be it", there are so many technicalities in the middle that it's not so clear cut .. BUT as he said "if this is not an impeachement case then NOTHING is" ...

So we'll see what happens.

The good thing here is that impeachment is not a legal process. It's not court, there's no "due process", despite what all the toadies screamed last time. The technicalities don't matter. All the Senate has to do is agree that he was not acting very Presidentially and that he should be shitcanned. That's it. This is getting called into your bosses' office to be fired, not a criminal case.

[KlaxonCow]

And the good thing is that Mitch McConnell - the Republican majority leader - has done the correct and decent thing, in telling Republicans that this is a "vote of conscience" and, therefore, there is no "party line" that they must all adhere to:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/worl ... 88207.html

Which is basically the Republican party officially abandoning Trump. They're not whipping (well, I don't know that it's called whipping in America, but that's what we're talking about, using British terminology) to back the President. If Republicans want to vote him out then the party's saying "that's just fine with us". Or, in other words, "he's no longer our man anymore, do what you will with him".

This is also a worry:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... mp-tore-up

Implications for public record and legal proceedings after administration seized or destroyed papers, notes and other information

Basically, Trump has a horrible habit of destroying records.

I guess it's second nature for a guy with a dodgy business record - the only modern President who's refused to show his tax records - who's committing fraud all the time that he just automatically shreds everything, so there's no paper trail.

But this is a problem regards the US government, because America does have some pretty good "open government" laws, where everything must be documented and those documents do get de-classified after a set period of time. Well, there's going to be a big gap in the records now, as Trump, apparently, has a habit of tearing up documents after he's read them. Which he absolutely should not do, as it's a breach of the whole "open government" thing - but, well, this is hardly the only non-traditional thing that Trump's White House has engaged in.

[tufty]

And the good thing is that Mitch McConnell - the Republican majority leader - has done the correct and decent thing,

Has he bollocks. McConnell has *never* done the correct, or decent, thing.

He kicked the can down the road, in order to put the Trump impeachment on the Democrats' watch, and push any fallout onto the Democrats. He could and should have ordered the impeachment trial to start immediately. Before that, he should have put pressure on Pence to invoke the 25th. He could have made it clear *last time* the dear leader was impeached - after all kicking Trump out would not have handed anything to the Democrats, merely put the marginally more sane Pence in the White House.

McConnell is working a power play for control of the Republican party. Nothing more, nothing less. He's scum, and has supported Trump for the last 4 years.