Not Watch.

I will probably turn the TV on two or three times during the day, for a combined 7 minutes of viewing.

Their next opponent is the 49ers, who play on Monday night. That’s not going to sit well with them.

But I’m okay with it.

That was a better game than the Bucs game, obviously. The Rams lost that on a missed FG. That’s it. A couple of bad breaks were the difference in this game. And that penalty that pushed them back right before the FG could also be pinned as the reason they lost, I suppose…if you are a believer in one play making the difference in the game.

Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda.

nittany ram wrote:

I’ve got a 12 hour shift tomorrow beginning at 4am so I won’t be able to stay up and watch the Rams tonight.

That means the rest of you are going to have to pick up your game.

Somehow you’re going to have to come up with enough mojo to make up for my absence, and will the Rams to victory.

Gawd knows it won’t be easy. But we’re Rams fans. If we cared about ‘easy’ we’d be Pats fans.

Your lies are as transparent as any teenager’s.

All of that was “double-speak” for, “I will be rooting for the Seahawks.”

4am shift {/eyeroll}.

Yeah. So I found somebody near me. Once a month.

But I want to talk my wife into it, and I don’t know how to do that.

There’s a strong pull on my imagination to believe that what comes next is Mad Max.

But I also think that visions of the apocalypse have always seeded the imaginations of humans, and humans have had a tendency to believe throughout history that the apocalypse is just over the horizon. I dunno. Maybe humans just lurch along as always, finding ways to adapt, finding ways to eliminate other humans from competition for food and water, and doing without polar ice and commercial salad dressing.

So I have a slightly different take on the value of impeachment.

I completely understand (and agree with) wv’s fatalistic perspective that it doesn’t matter because it won’t change the system, and it’s quite possibly too late to do any good even we could change the system. And I understand Nittany and wv’s skepticism about this changing anybody’s mind. It won’t, at least in the sense that people aren’t going to change their party affiliation as a result. Ya know, Max Boot, and George Will, and Bill Kristol, and all those other famous assholes have repudiated Trump, but they aren’t exactly cancelling their subscriptions to National Review and subscribing to Current Affairs instead.

But as Billy pointed out, the support for impeachment has already risen. Historically, support for Nixon’s impeachment rose after the hearings began as well (and, in fact, the support for Nixon’s impeachment began with lower support than this impeachment proceeding started with).

Clinton’s situation was different, I think, because Clinton’s impeachment was a tempest in a teapot. The guy had sex with a consenting adult outside of marriage, and lied about it. It was probably abusive in a # MeToo sense, and Clinton is a pig. And he lied under oath. But I think most observers believed that the impeachment was unwarranted. Lying about having sex, even while under oath, is just not a threat to the State, especially when stacked up next to Nixon’s misdeeds.

Trump’s misdeeds exceed Nixon’s, and there is no question that they are far more damaging to the country, and far more deserving of impeachment than Clinton’s crime. I think you undersell the American public – which IS largely uninformed and apathetic about politics, etc. – if you think that distinction is lost on everybody. When the case is laid out, piece-by-piece, people are going to recognize the shape of Trump’s presidency, and understand that he has committed multiple impeachable offenses beyond the ordinary, and that he deserves reprimand. There are numerous actions that deserve impeachment in and of themselves, and the heft of the Articles will be damning. The situation is so bad, in fact, that privately a significant number of Republicans wish he was never born, or that the Kanamits would take him to visit their home planet.

The Senate probably will not convict him, but we are a long way from that vote hitting the floor. Given their history of party discipline, it would seem unlikely. But according to Jeff Flake, if the vote were held privately, Trump would be convicted. It is important to note that the GOP is a House Divided, in spite of their ability to stick together publicly…so far. So what’s stopping them from turning on Trump? Fear of voter reprisal. Well…a lot is going to happen between now and the time the Senate takes this up, and the circumstances of each senator are different, and the public’s attitude will take some turns between now and then. Still…it would take nearly half of the Republicans in the Senate to convict him. So if actually removing Trump from office is the standard for making this worthwhile, then…yeah…probably not happening.

But this is really more about the effect Impeachment has on the voters than it is about when Trump leaves office. And here is where Impeachment has value.

If the Democrats make a good case for Impeachment (and I don’t know how they can screw this up, honestly, even as ineffectual as they are in some respects. Donald Trump has been on a crime spree in broad daylight, and the evidence is overwhelming)…if they make a good case, voters WILL take it out on the GOP in 2020. If Trump is repudiated formally, especially if some Republicans break ranks to condemn him, it will demoralize the party, even many of the orcs. And demoralized orcs are less likely to vote. Furthermore, impeaching Trump will excite voters on the left, and increase their turnout in 2020.

And that matters a great deal. I believe that the district lines are redrawn after the 2020 elections, and that affects representation for the next decade. The more Democrats that get elected in 2020, the more the GOP will be marginalized. And that is important. These people want to stack the court with Ayn Rands, ban abortion, take away Medicare and Social Security, roll back environmental regulations, further undercut public education, take away pensions, food stamps, health insurance, safety protections…the whole thing. They have got to be weakened and outnumbered as much as possible. It won’t save the planet, but it will make a big difference in the quality of lives of millions of people.

Finally…and this may be the most important aspect of this so far…this Ukraine story, and the Impeachment hearings, have ALREADY created fractures within the right wing propaganda machine. FOX News has already had some fractures, and they are reportedly debating a Donald Trump exit strategy. That is gigantic. If there is any disarray in the mouthpieces, that will create disarray in the party. The value of that would be significant.

This will also demoralize the nazis. Impeaching Trump will lead to a surge in rhetoric, and maybe even violence from the orcs, but a successful Impeachment – especially if a clear majority of Americans support it along with some GOP politicians – will reduce their confidence and resolve. For all their big talk of a popular uprising and launch of the Race Wars, the nazis have historically largely sat on their asses waiting for somebody else to start it, so they can join. If their dream guy fails to lead them, they are going to be left standing there all dressed up for Halloween, and no party to go to.

Impeachment will not change the system, and it won’t change the political loyalties of Americans.

But it could shift the balance of power with significant consequences for the lives of millions of people.

I would take that logo. They may have “leaked” it to test the waters. Or it could be somebody trying to promote something, or start an internet rumor, or a host of other motives.

But I like it, actually. It does combine the two, and I never loved either one of them: the skull, or the newer one. This is a living Ram resembling the old logo. I like it, fwiw.

As for the heavily-armed nazi neanderthals…I worry about them, too, sometimes.

But…I have to say, I take solace in the fact that they haven’t ever organized to do anything, really. There have been a few individuals who have done terrible, violent acts, but so far they haven’t put together any unified act. The day that happens…jeezus. I’d hate to see that barrier break.

However, given their numbers, their extremely loud and belligerent talk, they appear to be just a bunch of tough-talking bullies without the actual balls to follow through. They all seem to be waiting for other people to go first. It is frightening that we are poised here. Hopefully, we can turn back the tide, and make Nazis unpopular again before a group DOES make a concerted action. Because I fear that once that boundary is crossed, other groups will be emboldened to follow.

And of course…you know…

What Isn’t Mentioned About the Trump-Ukraine ‘Scandal’

What Isn’t Mentioned About the Trump-Ukraine ‘Scandal’

This article was originally published on Consortium News.

The most crucial aspects of the Trump-Ukraine “scandal,” which has led to impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump, are not being told, even by Republicans.

Trump was very likely motivated by politics if he indeed withheld military aid to Ukraine in exchange for Kiev launching an investigation into Democratic presidential frontrunner Joe Biden, though the transcript of the call released by the White House between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelinsky does not make certain such a quid-pro-quo.

But what’s not being talked about in the mainstream is the context of this story, which shows that, politics aside, Biden should indeed be investigated in both Ukraine and in the United States.

We know from the leaked, early 2014 telephone conversation between Victoria Nuland, then assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, and Geoffrey Pyatt, then U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, that then Vice President Biden played a role in “midwifing” the U.S.-backed overthrow of an elected Ukrainian government soon after that conversation.

That’s the biggest crime in this story that isn’t being told. The illegal overthrow of a sovereign government.

As booty from the coup, the sitting vice president’s son, Hunter Biden, soon got a seat on the board of Ukraine’s biggest gas producer, Burisma Holdings. This can only be seen as a transparently neocolonial maneuver to take over a country and install one’s own people. But Biden’s son wasn’t the only one.

A family friend of then Secretary of State John Kerry also joined Burisma’s board. U.S. agricultural giant Monsanto got a Ukrainian contract soon after the overthrow. And the first, post-coup Ukrainian finance minister was an American citizen, a former State Department official, who was given Ukrainian citizenship the day before she took up the post.

After a Ukrainian prosecutor began looking into possible corruption at Burisma, Biden openly admitted at a conference last year that as vice president he withheld a $1 billion credit line to Ukraine until the government fired the prosecutor. As Biden says himself, it took only six hours for it to happen.

Exactly what Biden boasted of doing is what the Democrats are now accusing Trump of doing, and it isn’t clear if Trump got what he wanted as Biden did.

Threats, Bribes and Blackmail

That leads to another major part of this story not being told: the routine way the U.S. government conducts foreign policy: with bribes, threats and blackmail.

Trump may have withheld military aid to seek a probe into Biden, but it is hypocritically being framed by Democrats as an abuse of power out of the ordinary. But it is very much ordinary.

Examples abound. The threat of withholding foreign aid was wielded against nations on the UN Security Council in 1991 when the U.S. sought authorization for the First Gulf War. Yemen had the temerity to vote against. A member of the U.S. delegation told Yemen’s ambassador: “That’s the most expensive vote you ever cast.” The U.S. then cut $70 million in foreign aid to the Middle East’s poorest nation, and Saudi Arabia repatriated about a million Yemeni workers.

The same thing happened before the Second Gulf War in 2003, as revealed by whistleblower Katharine Gun (who will appear Friday night on CN Live!). Gun leaked an NSA memo that showed the U.S. sought help from its British counterpart in signals intelligence to spy on the missions of Security Council members to get “leverage” over them to influence their vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq.

In 2001 the U.S. threatened the end of military and foreign aid if nations did not conclude bilateral agreements granting immunity to U.S. troops before the International Criminal Court.

More recently, the U.S. used its muscle against Ecuador, including dangling a $10 billion IMF loan, in exchange for the expulsion of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from its London embassy.

This is how the U.S. conducts “diplomacy.”

As former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros Ghali wrote:

“Coming from a developing country, I was trained extensively in international law and diplomacy and mistakenly assumed that the great powers, especially the United States, also trained their representatives in diplomacy and accepted the value of it. But the Roman Empire had no need for diplomacy. Nor does the United States. Diplomacy is perceived by an imperial power as a waste of time and prestige and a sign of weakness.”

This fundamental corruption of U.S. foreign policy, which includes overthrowing elected governments, is matched only by the corruption of a political system that exalts partisan political power above all else. Exposing this deep-seated and longstanding corruption should take precedence over scoring partisan scalps, whether Biden’s or Trump’s.

I think it’s probable that he flew to the bay area because it’s the dark, librul heart of Commiefornia.

You guys may have seen this, but Jeff Flake said that if the impeachment vote were private rather than public, about 35 Republican senators would vote to impeach Trump. His support is razor thin and completely dependent upon Fear of Reprisal (from voters or the party machine).

I wanna say that, in my study of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (as well as my personal experience with narcissists), one characteristic is the complete inability to accept blame for anything. They have a extremely strong compulsion to deflect any criticism at all.

I think that we could see a Great Unraveling.

Trump already said to the cameras that Pence’s phone calls should be looked at. Whether there is anything there or not, he is pushing his VP into the spotlight as a deflective shield. And he won’t hesitate to do that to ANYBODY (with the exception of Ivanka).

There are a lot of people involved in this. Trump didn’t classify all these phone calls in an inappropriate place. He isn’t smart enough to do that, and probably has no understanding of classifications anyway. Somebody else did that. Probably multiple people. And we’ve just started on this. Given what we’ve seen over the past 3 years, does anybody doubt that there is an exceedingly long and impressive list of illegal maneuvers like this that have taken place to cover up the narcissistic lawlessness of this overconfident, entitled, ignorant, and frankly stupid man?

The more Trump unravels, the more people are going to try to save themselves, and the more people who head for the lifeboats, the more he is going to unravel.

And there are already people who have left – Tillerson and others – who may decide to speak their minds.

Dunno. Hate making predictions because I get so many wrong, and that’s humiliating. But this looks like the beginning of the Grand Finale in a 3-year long fireworks show. And I say that based mostly on my certainty of what to expect from Donald Trump. It IS safe to predict that he will lose his shit. A “normal” person might be patient and ride out the storm, tacking this way and that, absorbing a hit here and there with an eye on the shore, but Trump is not that guy. He’s not. And nobody has been able to restrain him yet.

Billy_T wrote:
Apologies for actual opinion posts in the meme thread.

Yeah, and I’m going to respond, so…zn…maybe you could cut this all and start a new thread with Hedges as the anchor?

IMO, this is more than just about Trump. It’s about the presidency…for me it is, anyway. Who knows what everyone else wants. The power of the executive has been growing, and over the decades, it has swallowed up some power that used to belong to the legislature. Trump has expanded it. And, sure, some of his crimes are the Same Old crimes that he just is too stupid to conceal. Hedges is right about that; he’s right that the oligarchy doesn’t mind what Trump does so much as the manner in which he does it. But the fact that he is doing in brazenly – $274 million in taxpayer money to go golf at his own course, for example – expands what future presidents can do without reproach. I don’t like it.