Un-Presidential

As I understand from my upbringing, the “end of times” will be the result of the return of Satan and / or his son, the Antichrist.

So, are these fundamentalists saying Trump is the Devil and / or his son? Pretty much sounds that way to me.

Of many things, I am unsure. But I truly believe there is no way in this or any other world Trump is Satan or Damien.

If W had a pair or wasn’t hamstrung by Congress, Iran, Iraq and all of those crazies would have been wiped off the planet before the first tower fell.

I find it amusing that the left is calling Trump out for killing a known terrorist to “detract from his impeachment” and other issues.

Yet when Obama’s approval rating was falling deeper into the crapper, he breaks into national programming to announce the capture and killing of Bin Laden (a farce you’ll NEVER convince me ever happened or he ordered / had a hand in), and he was once again anointed our “grand savior”.

Such sickening hypocrisy.

GO DODGERS!!!

Remembering two of my Arab buddies. One is a Christian from Lebanon. His family was killed by Israelis. He has a remarkably sunny disposition despite that. One of his sons is a Muslim. I went to mosque with him, out of curiousity. Nice kid.

The other is Jordanian. That guy was a full on psycho. I happen to like psychos though. He liked me so much he moved in across the street. We would go back & forth partying. I had a bar. He always had weed. He did flooring. Got me started doing it too. Many a night was spent here getting loaded & laughing at The Simpsons.

Since he did contracting work, he often subcontracted. He took a job for painting a house & handed it off to some meth heads. Fronted them money for supplies. You did what?! Naturally they smoked up the advance. Then they made the mistake of telling him to go F himself.

We were making a beer run at the 7/11 on Hawthorne Blvd. & 137th St. My truck hadn't even stopped rolling before my friend saw one of these guys emerging. He jumped out of a still moving vehicle & started to bitch slap this guy across the parking lot. I came in from behind & bear hugged him. Literally lifted him off the pavement & took him back to my truck.

"Are you f'n stupid? You're already on probation. (He was rounded up after 9-11 because he left Jordan after shooting a rebel dissident in the head. The victim survived.). Just wait until he's alone. We can beat the crap out of him & make it look like a robbery."

Was I nuts? The last time I saw him he wanted to 'borrow' a gun. "Oh, so sorry. I sold that gun." Just as he was veering more towards the Dark Side, I felt The Force. Still miss him though. The younger version. Not the guy who wanted to borrow a cup of bullets.

I've known & dealt with Americans FAR worse than Arabs. Eastern Europe has a reputation as being a hub of organized crime. Our current First Lady is Slovenian. Trump behaves like a Mafia don. He couldn't intimidate witnesses anymore if he left one doubled over in a trash can.

Hope you're right about Iran blowing smoke. But they've been backing terrorist organizations throughout the region. They had to have followed the Persian Gulf War & learned from Saddam's mistakes. Don't fight a conventional war with America. If you're stupid enough to threaten a "mother of all battles," & actually follow through on it, we'll kick your ass sideways. The Vietnamese never engaged us that way & we eventually gave up.

Expect any 'war' with Iran to be surriptious & by proxy. We've been bogged down in Iraq & Afghanistan forever. Bush Jr. 'trumped' up evidence of weapons of mass destruction. We're still looking.

Trump may have just enlarged the theater, after promising less involvement. I fully believe he did so to distract American voters from his pending impeachment. Just like he wanted to put the Bidens on trial when he was totally unwilling to testify at his own trial. GOP actually expected us to buy that because their boss said so. They've lost touch with reality.

Then why did Trump tweet the name of the alleged whistleblower? He could have only had strong suspicions & speculation to go on. Even if he had hard evidence, there was nothing to be gained by tweeting his or her name. Trump has zero impulse control. His handlers realize this & they have been replaced one by one. He's left with toadies.

We haven't had a president this dangerous since JFK.

McConnell backs off, abruptly eases impeachment trial limits

LISA MASCARO, ERIC TUCKER and ZEKE MILLER

,Associated Press•January 20, 2020

WASHINGTON (AP) — Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell abruptly backed offsome of his proposed rules for President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial on Tuesday, easing plans for a tight two-day schedule and agreeing that House evidence will be included. He acted after protests from senators, including fellow Republicans.

The trial quickly burst into a partisan fight at the Capitol as the president's lawyers opened arguments in support of McConnell's plan. Democrats objected loudly to his initial rules, and some Republicans then made their concerns known in private at a GOP lunch.

Without comment, the Republican leader submitted an amended proposal after meeting behind closed doors with his senators as the trial opened. The handwritten changes would add an extra day for each side's opening arguments and stipulate that evidence from the Democratic House's impeachment hearings be included in the record.

There is still deep disagreement about calling additional witnesses.

“It’s time to start with this trial,” said White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, the president's lead lawyer in brief remarks as the proceedings opened in public.

Chief Justice John Roberts gaveled open the session, senators having taken an oath last week to do “impartial justice" as jurors. House prosecutors were on one side, Trump's team on the other, in the well of the Senate, as senators sat silent at their desks, no cellphones or other electronics allowed.

Senators were stunned by McConnell's shift, which came during the private lunch and briefly delayed the start of the historic session.

A spokeswoman for Republican Sen. Susan Collins said that she and others had raised concerns. The Maine senator sees the changes as significant improvements, said spokeswoman Annie Clark.

Collins, Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio and a substantial number of other Republicans from across the party's ideological spectrum wanted to make the changes, according to two people familiar with the matter but unauthorized to discuss it in public. Some argued that the two-day limitation would have helped Democrats cast Republicans as squeezing testimony through in the dead of night.

The turnaround was a swift lesson as White House's wishes run into the reality of the Senate. The White House wanted a session crammed into a shorter period to both expedite the trial and shift more of the proceedings into late night, according to a person familiar with the matter but unauthorized to discuss it in public.

“READ THE TRANSCRIPTS!” the president tweeted from overseas miles away, as he returned to his hotel at a global leaders conference in Davos, Switzerland.

That's the transcript of his phone call in which he asked new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy for “a favor.” A whistleblower's complaint led the House to impeach Trump on a charge of abuse of power for pushing Ukraine to investigate Democratic rival Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden as the White House was withholding military aid from the U.S. ally at war with bordering Russia. The Democrats cite that transcript as solid evidence against Trump, though he repeatedly describes it as “perfect.”

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York was to offer the first amendment to the rules — a proposal to issue a subpoena to the White House for “all documents, communications and other records” relating to the Ukraine matter.

It seeks records about Trump’s orders to hold off military aid to Ukraine, along with White House communications about any investigations it wanted about the Bidens. In a vote later Tuesday, it was likely to be rejected by Republicans.

Democrats had warned that the rules package from Trump's ally, the Senate GOP leader, could force midnight sessions that would keep most Americans in the dark and create a sham proceeding.

“This is not a process for a fair trial, this is the process for a rigged trial” Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Ca., the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee leading the prosecution, told reporters. He called it a “cover-up.”

Schiff opened his arguments before the Senate playing a video of Trump calling for more witnesses to testify. Schiff noted the sudden change in proposed rules, made moments before he rose to address the chamber.

“The facts will come out in the end,” Schiff told the senators. “ The question is, will it come out in time?”

McConnell said, “The president's lawyers will finally receive a level playing field," contrasting it with the House impeachment inquiry.

The rare impeachment trial, unfolding in an election year, is testing whether Trump's actions toward Ukraine warrant removal at the same time that voters are forming their own verdict on his White House.

Four senators who are presidential candidates are off the campaign trail, seated as jurors.

“My focus is going to be on impeachment,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, told reporters. He said his supporters would keep working “to defeat the most dangerous president in American history.”

The Democrats say the prospect of middle-of-the-night proceedings, without allowing new witnesses or even the voluminous House records into the trial, would leave the public without crucial information about Trump's political pressure campaign on Ukraine and the White House's obstruction of the House impeachment probe.

Trump's legal team doesn't dispute Trump's actions — that he called the Ukraine president and asked for a “favor” during a July 25 phone call. In fact, the lawyers included the rough transcript of Trump's conversation as part of its 110-page trial brief submitted ahead of the proceedings.

Instead the lawyers for the president, led Cipollone and a TV-famous legal team including Alan Dershowitz, say the two charges against the president don't amount to impeachable offenses and Trump committed no crime.

Legal scholars have long insisted the framers of the Constitution provided impeachment as a remedy for “other high crimes and misdemeanors," a particularly broad definition that doesn't mean simply specific criminal acts.

Democrats in prosecuting the case against the president point in particular to a General Accountability Office report that found the White House violated federal law by stalling money to Ukraine that had been approved by Congress.

House Democrats, responding Tuesday to arguments by Trump's legal team, said the president's legal filing confirmed that "his misconduct is indefensible."

They wrote, “President Trump’s lengthy brief to the Senate is heavy on rhetoric and procedural grievances, but entirely lacks a legitimate defense of his misconduct.” The president would "rather discuss anything other than what he actually did," the Democrats wrote.

Roberts administered the oath to one remaining senator, James Inhofe, who was attending a family medical issue in Oklahoma last week when the other senators vowed the oath and signed the oath book.

Also Tuesday, the House Democratic managers overseeing the impeachment case asked Cipollone, the president's lead lawyer at the trial, to disclose any “first-hand knowledge” he has of the charges against Trump. They said evidence gathered so far indicates that Cipollone is a “material witness" to the allegations at hand.

House Democrats impeached the Republican president last month on two charges: abuse of power by withholding U.S. military aid to Ukraine as he pressed the country to investigate Biden, and obstruction of Congress by refusing to cooperate with their investigation.

No president has ever been removed from office by the Senate. With its 53-47 Republican majority, the Senate is not expected to mount the two-thirds voted needed for conviction. Even if it did, the White House team argues it would be an "'unconstitutional conviction'' because the articles of impeachment were too broad.

Bolton testifies, Trump is dead. In obvious desperation the GOP wants an exchange of witnesses. This isn't Bridge of Spies. They're still attempting to try someone else at Trump's trial. I would tell them to stuff it. See you at the polls if you continue to lobby against witnesses & evidence.