monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

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Right after the House voted today, I asked my colleague Carl Hulse, who covered the Clinton impeachment, what his first thought was about this vote compared to the one he covered in 1998. Here’s what he told me:

Quote:

“The vote today underscored the deep and new kind of polarization in Washington. Back then, 31 Democrats broke with the president, and Bill Clinton was happy about that! He thought it’d be more. Now, no one broke. That’s how much things have changed. If 31 people broke with Mr. Trump, we’d be proclaiming him dead. It would feel like a political apocalypse. Today, it was a rock solid party line.”

A rock solid party line. For Donald ******* Trump.

@MaxBoot
Trump is further undermining Ukraine by spreading the crazy conspiracy theory that it, not Russia, was behind the 2016 election hacking. Is this something that Putin told Trump in one of their top-secret conversations? I bet it is.

Karen Travers
@karentravers
@ABC
News/Wash Post poll:

Americans split essentially evenly on impeaching Pres Trump & removing him from office.
-49% say should, 47% say should not

-Trump is at a career low job approval among Republicans, 74%. Down from high of 87% in July.

-overall job approval 38%

President Trump is mulling a new line of defense against the ongoing impeachment inquiry into his actions with Ukraine: embodying FDR.

During an interview with the Washington Examiner on Thursday, just after the House voted to approve the impeachment inquiry process, Trump said he wanted to convince the American people that he did nothing wrong by performing a play on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “fireside chat.” He told the Washington Examiner he believes if he just read the transcript — the White House’s version of a call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky — in public, people would be on his side.

“This is over a phone call that is a good call,” Trump told the Examiner on Thursday. “At some point, I’m going to sit down, perhaps as a fireside chat on live television, and I will read the transcript of the call, because people have to hear it. When you read it, it’s a straight call.”

Trump also alluded to a fight-back campaign to convince the general public that he’s in the right, which would include t-shirts with the slogan “Read the transcript” emblazoned on them. Trump also maintained his innocence and argued to the Examiner that other past presidents who have faced impeachment were clearly in the wrong.

“Everybody knows I did nothing wrong,” he said. “Bill Clinton did things wrong; Richard Nixon did things wrong. I won’t go back to [Andrew] Johnson because that was a little before my time,” he said. “But they did things wrong. I did nothing wrong.”

MOSCOW (AP) — A senior Russian diplomat says Moscow and Washington are running out of time to extend the last remaining nuclear arms control treaty.

Vladimir Leontyev, deputy head of the Russian Foreign Ministry's arms control department, said Friday that "it's clear that we won't be able to produce a full-fledged replacement" to the New START treaty that expires in 2021. He said that Russia-U.S. talks over the past year have shown that "there are issues that require very serious examination on expert level."

Leontyev said Russia's prospective Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile and Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle fall under the pact, but other new weapons announced by President Vladimir Putin don't, including the Poseidon nuclear-armed underwater drone, the Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile and the Kinzhal hypersonic missile.

He said the U.S. sees things differently, raising the need for new, complex talks..

...The New York Times’ report on this noted that White has “a large following among Christians who believe in the ‘prosperity gospel,’ which teaches that God blesses people he deems to be of strong faith with wealth, good health and other gifts.”

The same article added that many other Christians consider the “prosperity gospel” to be “heresy.”

As is always the case in instances like these, I took a look at Right Wing Watch’s archive, which has quite a few interesting reports related to Paula White, including a recent item in which the televangelist told her viewers that they had to support her ministry, even if they’re struggling, or God would kill their dreams.

She didn’t appear to be kidding.

That was just two weeks ago. The same week, White told viewers that some states have “already passed” laws declaring the Christian Bible as “hate speech,” which is why America needs Trump’s judicial nominees to be confirmed. (There are no such state laws.)

The Hill also noted that White delivered an opening prayer before the president’s re-election campaign kickoff in Orlando in June, saying “demonic networks” have aligned themselves against Trump and vowing that the president “will overcome every strategy from hell and every strategy from the enemy.”

It’s not yet clear exactly what White’s title will be at the Office of Public Liaison – which is described as “the primary line of communication between the White House and the public” – or whether she intends to accept a taxpayer-funded salary.

A "fireside chat" you won't be hearing
.................
But the problem of course is that the call wasn't innocent. So how does he pull that off? He'll just be putting more attention on the quid pro quo.
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