monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

livinglava wrote:

Kompromat

?

The outrage over Trump’s Syria decision, combined with the growing threat of impeachment, has left the president facing a new test in his relationship with white evangelicals as signs of tensions have begun to surface in recent polls. For some, his culturally conservative agenda may not be enough to keep them from walking away if the situation in Syria deteriorates further.

It’s a dilemma that has left Trump’s biggest religious boosters asking themselves whether his sky-high support with so-called values voters will last through next November.

“If he’s going to win in 2020,” said the longtime Trump friend, “he has to be north of the 81 percent [of white evangelicals] he won in 2016. I’m not suggesting that the polling is all of a sudden going to show that his support is plummeting because of Syria. But if it stays stagnant, he’s a one-term president.”

It has nothing to do with minorities, it has to do with counting non-citizens as part of the voting block. It's about giving representation to people who are not citizens and who can't vote and shouldn't have a say about what goes on in this country. We already see the DNC making political pitches towards illegal immigrants and making promises to give them services and money reserved for citizens and paid for by US citizens.

Why do you wish to continue disenfranchising California Voters.

The Student Vote Is Surging. So Are Efforts to Suppress It.

The share of college students casting ballots doubled from 2014 to 2018, a potential boon to Democrats. But in Texas and elsewhere, Republicans are erecting roadblocks to the polls.

At Austin Community College, civics is an unwritten part of the curriculum — so much so that for years the school has tapped its own funds to set up temporary early-voting sites on nine of its 11 campuses.

No more, however. This spring, the Texas Legislature outlawed polling places that did not stay open for the entire 12-day early-voting period. When the state’s elections take place in three weeks, those nine sites — which logged many of the nearly 14,000 ballots that full-time students cast last year — will be shuttered. So will six campus polling places at colleges in Fort Worth, two in Brownsville, on the Mexico border, and other polling places at schools statewide...

By them being held to a max of electoral votes and by many of the other states having a "winner take all" electoral vote, what would you call it when, during the presidential election, the votes in Calif are worth fractionally less than electoral votes in Nebraska.

As millions of fans prepared to watch the Washington Nationals obliterate the Houston Astros on Wednesday, a tweet posted by Major League Baseball umpire Rob Drake caught the attention of an ESPN reporter.

“I will be buying an AR-15 tomorrow, because if you impeach MY PRESIDENT this way, YOU WILL HAVE ANOTHER CIVAL WAR!!! #MAGA2020,” the ump tweeted late Tuesday, ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported. Drake deleted the tweet so quickly that a screen shot had not surfaced by early Thursday. It had accompanied another tweet that said: “You can’t do an impeachment inquiry from the basement of Capital Hill without even a vote! What is going on in this country?”

That would greatly lessen the electoral disparity between large and small states.

William Barr must recuse himself from Ukraine probe, New York City Bar Association says

The New York City Bar Association is demanding that U.S. Attorney General William Barr recuse himself from the Department of Justice probe into the Trump-Ukraine phone call that is central to the impeachment inquiry against the president, citing potential conflicts of interest.

A whistleblower within the intelligence community raised concerns in a formal letter filed in mid-August, of a quid pro quo between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky after Trump allegedly attempted to persuade the foreign leader to investigate the Biden family for possible corruption in exchange for U.S. military aid during a July 25 phone call.

According to a rough log of the call released in September, Trump said: “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great.”

At the time, several hundred million dollars in military aid to Ukraine, which is under siege from Moscow, had been frozen by the Trump administration.

The Bar Association, in a statement Wednesday laying out its case for recusal, said: "As White House records made clear, the president told his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, that Mr. Barr "would be in touch with him" to follow up on the president's requests. The whistleblower found this telephone call to be of "urgent concern" because of the president's apparent intermingling of U.S. foreign policy interests with his personal political interests in apparent violation of U.S. law."

The association insisted that their focus was not on "the legality of the president's actions or even the merits of the whistleblower's complaint," nor on "whether the DOJ's review of this action was justified."

Instead, the association raised concerns about whether Barr had knowledge of promises made by Trump in the phone call. In addition, the association said Barr "was obligated to recuse himself from any involvement in DOJ's review of either the whistleblower complaint of the substance of the president's actions once the president offered Mr. Barr's services to President Zelensky."

Barr's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), under the Department of Justice, also advised Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire, a Trump appointee, to forgo forwarding the whistleblower's complaint to Congress, despite Michael Atkinson, intelligence community inspector general, saying it was credible and of “urgent concern."

The bar association wrote that Barr "appears to have participated in the DOJ review of the whistleblower's complaint and its decision not to forward that complaint to Congress" and his failure to recuse himself endangers the DOJ's "impartiality in the investigation of the Ukraine Matter."

The bar also suggested that Barr be forced to resign, face sanctions, or be removed from Congress if he doesn't recuse himself from the probe.

The Republican Party risks exile for longer than it has endured in the modern era if, in the absence of incontrovertible evidence of actual “high crimes and misdemeanors,” it deserts President Trump during the campaign to remove him from office. Democrats are pursuing impeachment because they obviously fear that they cannot defeat him at the ballot box in 2020.

It certainly would get us closer to "one person, one vote"

Unfortunately, a key difference between the Nixon era and now is the emergence of a dedicated right wing messaging universe which has successfully siloed the right wing audience into accepting a convenient storyline. Thus any/all evidence of Trump's corruption has to be and is pushed out of mind with such excuses and rationalizations. It's depressing. Actually it's worse than merely depressing.

I hope Mueller's faith in the existing institutions will be seen as warranted rather than foolishly romantic but that's far from certain.

Vice President Mike Pence’s Big Brother Is Sitting In On Congress’s Closed-Door Impeachment Depositions