November 20, 2019

Sondland Bombshell: News Homepages from around the Internet

June 5, 2019

New York Times writes Draft Articles of Impeachment, based on Nixon & Clinton text

(Full disclosure: I am undecided on impeachment at this time)

This is fascinating. The NYT has taken text from the Nixon and Clinton impeachment articles and used it as a starting point to write articles of impeachment against Donald Trump. I suggest you read the entire article to get the full impact.

Here's one screen cap to give you an idea of what they did, using the Nixon articles as a starting point:




Check out the whole thing here:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/05/opinion/impeachment-trump-democrats-nixon-clinton.html

May 6, 2019

Trump would have been charged with obstruction were he not president, hundreds of former federal...

Source: Washington Post

...prosecutors assert.

More than 370 former federal prosecutors who worked in Republican and Democratic administrations have signed on to a statement asserting special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s findings would have produced obstruction charges against President Trump — if not for the office he held.

The statement — signed by myriad former career government employees as well as high-profile political appointees — offers a rebuttal to Attorney General William P. Barr’s determination that the evidence Mueller uncovered was “not sufficient” to establish that Trump committed a crime.

Mueller had declined to say one way or the other whether Trump should have been charged, citing a Justice Department legal opinion that sitting presidents cannot be indicted, as well as concerns about the fairness of accusing someone for whom there can be no court proceeding.


“Each of us believes that the conduct of President Trump described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report would, in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice,” the former federal prosecutors wrote.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-would-have-been-charged-with-obstruction-were-he-not-president-hundreds-of-former-federal-prosecutors-assert/2019/05/06/e4946a1a-7006-11e9-9f06-5fc2ee80027a_story.html?utm_term=.4c8111d5038

April 1, 2019

The Washington Post has a cool online tool to compare the Democratic primary candidates

At the moment they are highlighting 10 different issues, and they group all the candidates based on where they stand. Hover your cursor over a candidate's picture to get a more detailed explanation. You can even select a particular candidate and have their pic highlighted on each one.

Here's a screen cap of the first issue.



Hopefully they'll add more over time. Check it out:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/policy-2020/voting-changes/

Pretty cool.

April 1, 2019

The 2020 Democratic presidential candidate supporter groups are live!

As promised in my earlier post, today we are launching new groups for supporters of the various 2020 Democratic presidential candidates.

We believe that supporters of the various Democratic presidential candidates appreciate having safe spaces where they can interact with their fellow supporters and post positive messages about their their preferred candidates. Our hope and intent is that these groups be used to positively support members' favored democratic candidates rather than to attack other candidates.

With this in mind, we have created special functionality for the 2020 candidate the groups:

+ All 2020 candidate groups can be found under the Democrats 2020 category on the left-hand side of any page.

+ All candidate groups have a small banner at the top of the group and at the top of all threads in that group containing text indicating that you are viewing a candidate group.

+ Only members who have selected a candidate as their favorite are able to post in the group for that preferred candidate.

+ If you change your favored candidate, you need to wait seven days before you are eligible to post in that candidate's group. (This is to discourage supporters of other candidates from temporarily changing their candidate preference in order to post disruptive messages in groups for candidates they do not support.)

+ If you select a particular candidate as your favorite, you will see threads from that candidate's supporter group on your Latest Page and Greatest Page. People who have not selected that candidate will not see those posts on their Latest and Greatest Pages.

+ All DU members can browse all Democratic candidate groups. All DU members may read, recommend, or alert on posts in any candidate groups.

+ Posts in the candidate groups are covered by the DU rules, like posts everywhere else on our discussion forums.

+ The first thing you should do when you go to your new candidate group is select a member to serve as the lead host of that group. That person will have all the normal functionality of a group host, including naming additional hosts, locking discussion threads, and blocking disruptive people out of the group. When you have selected a person let an admin know so we may designate that person as lead host.

So far the admins feel pretty good about how the Democratic Primaries are going here on DU. Let's all strive to keep it relatively positive. And remember the most important thing is staying unified so we can defeat Trump next year!

Skinner, EarlG, Elad
DU Admins

March 26, 2019

FYI: The Hillary Clinton group has been moved to the "Politics & Government" Category

The old "Democrats" category will change to "Democrats 2020" and will only hold groups for 2020 primary candidates.

Thank you for your understanding.

March 26, 2019

FYI: The Barack Obama group has been moved to the "Politics & Government" Category

The old "Democrats" category will change to "Democrats 2020" and will only hold groups for 2020 primary candidates.

Thank you for your understanding.

February 20, 2019

You asked for it! The Democratic Primaries forum opens TODAY!

This is kind of important. You might want to read through the whole thing.

There are only 348 days left until the Iowa Caucuses! Which means it's well past time for the official Democratic Presidential primary season to begin here on DU. As usual, we will require that all discussions about the Democratic presidential primary take place in a dedicated Democratic Primaries forum. But this year we are making a few changes that will hopefully improve the experience for everyone. Check it out....


WHERE TO POST ABOUT THE DEMOCRATIC PRIMARIES

Discussion of the 2020 Democratic Presidential primaries is only permitted in the Democratic Primaries forum, and in the dedicated candidate supporter groups. These discussions are not permitted in Latest Breaking News, Editorials & Other Articles, Video & Multimedia, General Discussion, The DU Lounge, or anywhere else. In certain forums you will be prompted with an interrupt page directing you to post your Democratic primary discussions in the Democratic Primaries forum.


THE DEMOCRATIC PRIMARIES FORUM & CANDIDATE PREFERENCE FUNCTION

In order to post in the Democratic Primaries forum, you must select your preferred candidate. (If you are undecided, don't worry -- "Undecided" is one of the options.) Your selection is logged by our software, and then presented on your Profile page, and in place of your signature line when posting in the Democratic Primaries forum. Currently you may select from the following: Undecided, Biden, Booker, Brown, Buttigieg, Castro, Delaney, Gabbard, Gillibrand, Harris, Hickenlooper, Klobuchar, O'Rourke, Sanders, Warren, and Yang. We can easily add additional candidates later if necessary, and candidates will be removed when they drop out of the race or officially declare that they're not running. You can change your candidate preference at any time.

Keeping track of members' candidate preferences has the following benefits: 1) When someone posts about the primaries, their stated candidate preference will provide useful context to their post. 2) We can tally the number of people who have indicated a preference for each candidate to get a general idea of how much support they enjoy on DU. 3) We will use stated candidate support as a means to grant access to dedicated candidate supporter groups. 4) We can potentially use candidate preferences to balance the partisan makeup of juries that are called to judge alerted posts, if we deem it necessary. 5) We can use candidate preferences to display or hide posts from candidate supporter groups on the Latest Page or elsewhere.

Members' regular signature lines and avatar images do not appear when posting in the Democratic Primaries forum. Instead, only the special candidate preference signature line appears.

Remember, if you don't want to see posts from the Democratic Primaries forum, you can trash it. Just click the "Trash this forum" button at the top of the forum.

+ The Democratic Primaries forum is here.

+ "If I were to vote in a presidential primary today, I would vote for..." Set your candidate preference here.

+ View current candidate rankings here.


CANDIDATE AVATAR IMAGES

We have added new Democratic primary candidate avatar images to our collection of available avatars. For officially declared candidates there are two avatars, a photo and a logo (potential candidates just have a photo). Currently we provide avatars for the following candidates: Biden, Booker, Brown, Buttigieg, Castro, Delaney, Gabbard, Gillibrand, Harris, Hickenlooper, Klobuchar, O'Rourke, Sanders, Warren, Yang. We can easily add additional candidates later if necessary.

To change your avatar image, click the "My Profile" link at the top of any page (or just click here) Click the "Edit" link next to "Avatar image." Candidate photos are available under the "Politicians" section; candidate logos are available under the "Logos" section.


CANDIDATE SUPPORTER GROUPS

Sometime tomorrow, we will close down the existing candidate supporter groups. Within a few weeks we will open new candidate supporter groups, incorporating some changes which we will announce later.


A REMINDER ABOUT THE DU RULES

In case there is any question, let me be very clear: DU rules apply to the entire discussion forum, including the new Democratic Primaries forum and candidate supporter groups. If you haven't read them in a while, RIGHT NOW would be a good time to go refresh your memory. They are good rules, they make DU better, and we intend to keep on enforcing them. You can read the rules on our Terms of Service page.

To preemptively respond to the inevitable complaints: The rules make clear that constructive criticism of Democrats is always welcome on DU. But if you are incapable of presenting your criticism in a thoughtful, substantive way and end up losing your ability to post, that is YOUR PROBLEM not mine.


A FINAL THOUGHT

All too often in the past Democratic Primary season on DU was a cesspool of toxic partisan ugliness, and I am much too jaded and cynical to promise you that this time will be any different. But I do believe that it is possible (maybe?) for primary season on Democratic Underground to be better than it has been in the past. If you post with the attitude that all of our candidates are good enough, and they're all far superior to Donald Trump, then you should be fine. But if post with the attitude that any Democratic candidate is The Enemy who must be destroyed by any means necessary, then you are going to cause problems for DU and for yourself.

May the best candidate win.

BTW, if you encounter any bugs or problems with the software please post them in this thread. Thanks.

Skinner, EarlG, Elad
DU Admins

February 2, 2019

Enjoying a nice hot cup of 7-eleven coffee right now