"Never Biden" and "Bernie or Bust"

Okay, so, I just went the fuck off on somebody on Twitter who - like I'm starting to see from Bernie Bros - has gone all-in against a potential nominee, in this case, Joe Biden. They're all-in on Never Biden, just like I'm seeing Bernie or Bust. If the wrong candidate gets the nomination, they're either not voting, or voting for 45.

If this is you, if you're going to do that and mean it, please, unfriend me now. I mean it.

In fact, go ahead and block me. It'll save time.

Because, see - this is how some of us - the targeted groups, the ones they want dead - this is how we know that you'll let them kill us all, like they want to. Push comes to shove, you'll stand by and let it happen.

(And do not fucking come to me saying that if it gets that bad you'll be in the streets or some bullshit like that. You won't even vote for the terrible over the exterminationist, you sure as fuck won't do more.)

I've been watching leftists and liberals do this dance my entire life, I hate it so much, and I'm just done. Every election in my lifetime has been existential to one degree or another, and I don't know what it takes to get that through peoples' heads, because I sure as fuck haven't found it.

But that doesn't make it less true.

And if you don't mean it, but you're saying it anyway as some sort of "it's just a threat for the primaries, I'll change my mind in the general," fuck that too. Why?

Because that strategy is pretty much holding a gun to my head and saying, "vote my way or I'm shooting this bitch."

And you know what the alt-right and the fundamentalists will say to that?

"Great! Go ahead! Saves us a bullet!"

I am not expendable and I am not your _fucking_ poker chip. So if that's your argument, you can still fuck off.

And if you're in a "safe" state? If your vote "won't matter?"

Well, every time people who do this go off like this - particularly with a hashtag, particularly with essays, particularly with sharing it around - they convince some voters in a swing state that hey, maybe they should do the same thing.

After all, that's the point, isn't it?

And that gets right back to being somebody else's poker chip, and again: fuck that, and if you're doing it, fuck you.

So if this is you?

Save us both some time. Block me now. Because I am fucking done.

Today's News (2020/1/21)

I'm seeing reporting on some _extremely_ questionably-timed mass funds deposit from Russian government bank sources to Deutsche Bank at the same time that Deutsche Bank were bankrolling Trump with a big chunk of new loans. But it's via Scott Stedman on Forensic News which I simply _don't know_. I am therefore _untrusting_ of it and not linking.

But it's out there, and it might (and might not) be real, so I'm giving you enough to find it if you want.

Do not source, do not quote, etc.

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Garrett Haake
twitter.com/GarrettHaake

[Trump lawyer] Cipollone says “Not even Mr. Schiff’s Republican colleagues were allowed into the SCIF” during impeachment investigation.

That’s 100% false. Any member of the three investigating committees could attend, and many Republicans did!

https://twitter.com/GarrettHaake/status/1219704299669872645

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[I may have posted this in the past. I am re-posting it today because 45's proxies are saying that the released phone call summary was an exact transcript, and that is a lie, and the summary itself says it is not an exact transcript as part of the document.]

The Mystery of the Ukraine-Call Transcript

There are enough questions and inconsistencies to raise the prospect that the public version may not tell the whole story.
October 4, 2019

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/10/do-we-actually-know-what-happened-zelensky-call/599359/

Twice during a press conference on Wednesday, President Donald Trump went out of his way to assert that a transcript of his call with Ukraine’s president, released last week, was verbatim.

“I had a transcript done by very, very talented people—word for word, comma for comma. Done by people that do it for a living. We had an exact transcript,” Trump said, without any prompting. A few minutes later, he noted that it was “an exact transcript of my call, done by very talented people that do this—exact, word for word.”

Trump’s claim was peculiar not because it is false—that’s typical enough—but because one need only look at the transcript itself to know that it’s false. The document notes:

CAUTION: A Memorandum of a Telephone Conversation (TELCON) is not a verbatim transcript of a discussion. The text in this document records the notes and recollections of Situation Room Duty officers and NSC policy staff assigned to listen and memorialize the conversation in written form as the conversation takes place.


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Garrett Haake
twitter.com/GarrettHaake

Changes to McConnell’s resolution were made by hand, suggesting to me they happened LATE, like maybe just after the GOP lunch today, and before trial started at 1:15.

https://twitter.com/GarrettHaake/status/1219697699047510016


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President Trump made 16,241 false or misleading claims in his first three years

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/01/20/president-trump-made-16241-false-or-misleading-claims-his-first-three-years/

Three years after taking the oath of office, President Trump has made more than 16,200 false or misleading claims — a milestone that would have been unthinkable when we first created the Fact Checker’s database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement he has uttered.

We started this project as part of our coverage of the president’s first 100 days, largely because we could not possibly keep up with the pace and volume of the president’s misstatements. We recorded 492 claims — an average of just under five a day — and readers demanded that we keep it going for the rest of Trump’s presidency.

Little did we know what that would mean.


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Lawmakers in the US Unleash Barrage of Anti-Transgender Bills

Proposed Laws Threaten Health, Rights of Trans Kids

https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/01/20/lawmakers-us-unleash-barrage-anti-transgender-bills

Protecting children’s health is critical, and that means allowing doctors and their patients to decide what care is needed to keep a child physically and mentally healthy.

Yet on Wednesday, lawmakers in the US state of South Dakota will consider a bill that would make it a felony for healthcare providers to give gender-affirming care to minors. If passed, medical professionals who provide transgender children with puberty blockers, hormones, or other transition-related care would face up to 10 years in prison.

...

But this year, other states are pursuing a similar path. Lawmakers in Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, South Carolina, and Texas are considering similar bills this session to prevent trans youth from accessing gender-affirming care.

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Northeastern student from Iran removed from US before court hearing, won’t be returned
Despite a judge’s order that he remain in custody, Mohammad Shahab Dehghani Hossein Abadi was flown out of the US, according to his attorney.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/01/21/metro/iranian-student-removed-us-before-court-hearing-lawyer-says/

An Iranian student planning to attend Northeastern University was removed from the country overnight Monday in defiance of a court order, his lawyer said, and a federal judge said Tuesday there was nothing that he could immediately do.

Mohammad Shahab Dehghani Hossein Abadi, 24, had been detained by Customs and Border Protection at Logan International Airport since arriving in the US on Sunday. Hossein Abadi’s lawyers filed an emergency petition to block his removal Monday night, and Judge Allison D. Burroughs ordered a 48-hour stay.

But before that hearing took place, Hossein Abadi was flown to France, one of his lawyers, Susan Church, said Tuesday.

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Trump and his Republican cronies have made three big mistakes

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/01/21/house-managers-scorn-trumps-brief/

A Democratic aide working on impeachment scorned the 110-page brief President Trump’s lawyers filed on Monday. “It’s an 110-page tweet. … Maybe the longest tweet in history,” the aide said. Another aide pointed out that the argument that abuse of power is not impeachable was rejected even by Jonathan Turley, the attorney called by Republicans during House proceedings.

The president’s argument comes down to the bald assertion that a president can abuse power by enlisting a foreign power to corrupt an election — a trifecta (abuse of power, betrayal of national security, election rigging) that the Framers saw as precisely the sort of conduct deserving of impeachment.

While the two aides agree with the reference from Trump’s attorneys on page 81 of their brief that the July 25 call was the most important piece of evidence, they remind us it is also the most damning. In that call, Trump, like a mob boss, makes Ukraine an offer it cannot refuse (“do us a favor though”): Trump will release aid the Congress deemed to be in our national security interest in exchange for investigating Burisma and former vice president Joe Biden. Put differently, Trump will endanger national security to get a foreign government’s help smearing an American political opponent.

Given the absence of factual evidence disputing key facts against the president, his defense boils down to the assertion that “what Trump did was okay,” one Democratic aide pointed out. Trump has attempted to use “national security as a sword” against a domestic political adversary. Now, Senate Republicans are being dragooned to approve that stunning proposition.

But Trump, his lawyers and the Republicans have made three critical errors. The first was White House counsel Pat Cipollone’s Oct. 8 letter in which the White House flatly refused to allow any witnesses to testify or documents to be produced. It was not a formal assertion of executive privilege but rather a more egregious version of obstruction that was the basis for President Richard M. Nixon’s third article of impeachment. This was blunder by Cipollone, in essence putting Trump’s obstruction in writing.

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North Korea abandons nuclear freeze pledge, blames 'brutal' U.S. sanctions

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-nuclear-usa/north-korea-abandons-nuclear-freeze-pledge-blames-brutal-u-s-sanctions-idUSKBN1ZK1FX

GENEVA (Reuters) - North Korea said on Tuesday it was no longer bound by commitments to halt nuclear and missile testing, blaming the United States’ failure to meet a year-end deadline for nuclear talks and “brutal and inhumane” U.S. sanctions.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un set an end-December deadline for denuclearization talks with the United States and White House national security adviser Robert O’Brien said at the time the United States had opened channels of communication.