Sunday Morning

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2020

A billionaire heiress, connected to Wall St, the DNC, CAP, and Cory Booker speaks out against Bernie and for Warren. Last week we heard the billionaires hated Warren. We know they hate Bernie. They do love Cory Booker though. With Biden fading fast and Warren jumping over Bernie, I'm guessing this is the first shot fired in the VP race, i.e. we might back Warren if she puts Booker on the ticket.

Politics

Lindsey Graham needs to go



Impeachment

From The American Conservative: A Flagrant Abuse of Power

When Trump says, “I would like you to do us a favor though,” he is linking the favor to continued U.S. military assistance to Ukraine. I don’t agree with the policy of providing that assistance on the merits, but withholding it and then using it as a bargaining chip in an attempt to get a foreign government to engage in dirty tricks against a political rival is outrageous. It raises obvious questions about other foreign policy decisions that the president has made and whether he has engaged in similar behavior in dealings with other governments. 

Impeachment is the constitutional remedy for such abuses of power. These are exactly the kinds of self-serving abuses that impeachment was designed to check. Abuse of power need not be a crime to be deserving of impeachment, and there is already enough evidence of abuse to warrant finding out just how far the rot goes. Under the circumstances, an impeachment inquiry is entirely appropriate, and that inquiry may bring evidence of more abuses to light. The House should take its time and discover the full extent of the corruption in this administration, and then it should do its constitutional duty.

Still a bad idea for the Ds politically.


Though this sure sounds like an abuse of power - Washington Post: State Department steps up email probe of dozens of former Hillary Clinton aides


Lefsetz: Trump Resigns - If I had to bet on how it will play out, I'd have my money on something like this. It's the only way to keep the Rs from going down with the Dumb Orange One and would be a great way to fire up the R base for 2020.




Media - The Impeachment

Trump, the TV president, finally meets a media story he can’t control - It's not Trump who's lost control, it's the conservative propaganda network. Trump is a piece of it of course but without Fox, Sinclair, Facebook robots, and talk radio, Trump would have lost control ages ago. Still, it's only been a couple of days. They are dancing as fast as they can and may regain their footing.


Will Rs or R voters turn on Trump?  SteveM thinks no. NO ENEMIES ON THE RIGHT, ESPECIALLY NOW - I think it depends on Fox and R propaganda machine.




Head in the Sand 

I always wonder how the Reagan-loving Rs and Libertarians can look at this chart and blame our health care cost crisis on liberal policies, Obamacare, etc. Found here Mish

American Crapitalism

Felix Salmon: The cost of unstable norms - A good short read that is right on.

Capitalism works best when everybody is playing by the same rules. Right now we seem to be moving away from that ideal.

Americans spent decades discussing rule of law. Why would anyone believe us now?

"And now, after nearly 30 years of Western and U.S. talk about justice and courts and democracy, after all of that time and money invested in judicial training and rule-of-law seminars, now it turns out that the critics, the cynics, the would-be authoritarians and the corrupt politicians who seek to use the organs of justice to their own advantage — now it turns out that they are right. The United States is not an example to be admired; it is a rule-of-law catastrophe. Its elected president has spent months trying to persuade his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, to return to Soviet-style ways of doing things, to bring back politicized justice and to put pressure on Ukrainian prosecutors to fabricate evidence and pursue a fake “case,” in an effort to help his own reelection campaign."

Of course we also talk democracy and free elections while supporting dictators along with peace and diplomacy while bombing the shit out of people. So really,  we need to work a helluva harder on practicing what we preach.

examples ....

War - Why They Hate Us, part 73  - US-made bomb used in deadly Saudi-led air raid in Yemen


Media - Whistleblowers - MSM Defends CIA’s “Whistleblower”, Ignores Actual Whistleblowers