babylonsister
babylonsister's JournalSusan Collins Sent Note to Dais
Of course she did.
https://politicalwire.com/2020/01/22/susan-collins-sent-note-to-dais/
Susan Collins Sent Note to Dais
January 22, 2020 at 7:55 pm EST By Taegan Goddard
“It is unclear if the note from Collins led directly to Roberts’ comments, or had specific language for him, but the note came shortly before the chief justice spoke. The note was sent as House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, a Democrat from New York, spoke and appeared to accuse senators of a ‘cover-up.'”
Calls for Pat Cipollone's Disbarment Swell After 'Brazen Lack of Candor' During Impeachment Trial
Calls for Pat Cipollone’s Disbarment Swell After ‘Brazen Lack of Candor’ During Impeachment Trial
by Colin Kalmbacher | 5:31 pm, January 22nd, 2020
Pat Cipollone, President Donald Trump‘s lead defense attorney in the Senate impeachment trial, lied to lawmakers and the world during his opening remarks on Tuesday. Now, people are calling for Cipollone to be be disbarred.
“Not even Mr. [Adam] Schiff’s Republican colleagues were allowed into the SCIF,” Cipollone said.
A SCIF is essentially a place where purportedly classified information is relayed to interested and acceptable parties. The acronym stands for Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. But, contrary to Cipollone’s assertion, Republicans were regularly allowed into the SCIF while members of the House Intelligence, Oversight and Foreign Affairs Committees heard impeachment witness testimony last year. Members from both sides of the aisle, and counsel for each party, were also allowed to ask the witnesses questions behind closed doors.
Outrage about Cipollone’s inaccurate statement went viral and many critics were quick to call for the credential-surrendering version of the White House counsel’s head.
Progressive Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) called out Cipollone’s subterfuge via Twitter.
Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe echoed Raskin’s criticism and explicitly called for Cipollone to lose his license.
more...
https://lawandcrime.com/impeachment/calls-for-pat-cipollones-disbarment-swell-after-brazen-lack-of-candor-during-impeachment-trial/?fbclid=IwAR3ovheMBD-YpcEg_ywvqNV6dX_RoadKP-qP4ZjUy9elJBX7dEzO5xCSVh0
Trump Breaks His Record for Tweets In a Day
He appears to have a lot to say 
https://politicalwire.com/2020/01/22/trump-breaks-his-record-for-tweets-in-a-day/
Trump Breaks His Record for Tweets In a Day
January 22, 2020 at 5:53 pm EST By Taegan Goddard
And the day is not over.
Jon Stewart's New Political Satire Will Come Out Just in Time for Election Season
he’s baaaack
Jon Stewart’s New Political Satire Will Come Out Just in Time for Election Season
Rejoice, for this film’s press cycle means the former Daily Show host will once again be doing what he does best: making fun of politicians.
By Yohana Desta
January 22, 2020
From CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images.
Dear Republic: Jon Stewart is coming back to us. On Wednesday, Focus Features revealed that Stewart’s upcoming movie—a political satire starring Steve Carell—is going to hit theaters on May 29. And would you look at that? The release date comes just in time to get Stewart on a press circuit where he’ll likely be asked over and over about the 2020 election, forcing him to pontificate about politics once more—just like he used to in the Daily Show days. Rejoice!
The film, titled Irresistible, was announced back in October 2018, though further details about it weren’t revealed until last April.. Written and directed by Stewart, the film will follow a Democratic strategist (Carell) who sees political potential in a retired, Wisconsin-based Marine colonel (Chris Cooper) after the colonel stands up for the town’s undocumented workers and goes viral. But it’s not long before a Republican strategist named Faith (Rose Byrne) swoops in to throw a wrench in the political race. The film also stars Mackenzie Davis, Topher Grace, Debra Messing, and Natasha Lyonne.
This is Stewart’s second movie, following his 2014 directorial feature debut, Rosewater. Based on a true story, that drama starred Gael Garcia Bernal as journalist Maziar Bahari, who was detained and tortured in Iran. It earned decent reviews, though it didn’t quite gain traction on the awards circuit. Stewart made the film while he was still behind the Daily Show desk, which he left in 2015 after handing the reins over to Trevor Noah.
Post–Daily Show, Stewart has kept a low profile. He signed a deal with HBO that has yet to yield any fruit (two stand-up specials are allegedly forthcoming). Instead, he’s passed the time by occasionally popping up to visit old pal Stephen Colbert on The Late Show and ferociously advocating for 9/11 first responders who have yet to receive proper health care benefits from the government. Stewart delivered an emotional, instantly viral testimony before Congress last June, excoriating the politicians who have withheld the benefits. “It’s an embarrassment to the country, and it is a stain on this institution,” he declared.
But Irresistible’s release date means Stewart will be out on the promo cycle this spring—a publicity blitz perfectly timed to the whirligig presidential race. Which may mean this is as close as we’re gonna get to having the Daily Show staple back in the political circus.
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/01/jon-stewart-irresistible-release-date?utm_social-type=owned&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&mbid=social_facebook&utm_brand=vf&fbclid=IwAR0sMBIupxPOOb3dspv82ETnta93XPLYTuER3nUuAiCzQ1CadlTpf5MYJFc&fbclid=IwAR2rKOadVDw6eWArnOjAFVXFUntzQLiuW9tEFblPaLiLfihS0Pur6QVpNqw
Senate Republicans Will Pay a Price for Helping Trump Conceal Evidence
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/01/impeachment-senate-evidence-testimony-trial-mcconnell-trump-ukraine.htmlSenate Republicans Will Pay a Price for Helping Trump Conceal Evidence
By Jonathan Chait
The first day of President Trump’s impeachment trial centered on the rules of evidence. Democrats want to admit documents and testimony the administration has blocked, and Republicans want to, well, block them. So far, Mitch McConnell is winning. He held his entire caucus together in a series of votes to block any new evidence from being admitted before the trial begins.
But the victory is Pyrrhic. Given that a vote to remove is almost inconceivable — Trump could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and all that — the trial is fundamentally an exercise in shaping public opinion about Donald Trump and his abuses of power. By voting to withhold evidence, Republicans are placing themselves in the unpopular position of abetting a cover-up.
snip//
The Democratic case is fairly clear: The evidence they managed to obtain proves Trump’s guilt, but if Republicans aren’t satisfied, they should examine the rest of the evidence. The Republican case for withholding it is absurd. McConnell has attacked the House case as a “shoddy work product” and “the most rushed, least thorough and most unfair impeachment inquiry in modern history,” while blocking all efforts to broaden it. If the House has indeed failed to do its job, shouldn’t the Senate correct the error? Instead, McConnell insists the House has done a rushed and shoddy job of collecting the evidence, and therefore the Senate must not collect any more. Claiming the House has failed to do its job, he now insists the Senate must likewise fail to do its job.
Whatever value this position has to the GOP, it is not a political asset. Polls show some three-quarters of the public want the Senate to admit new evidence. Trump’s own rhetoric hints at the vulnerability. Interviewed by reporters at Davos, Trump claimed he would like former national security adviser John Bolton to testify, but, “I’ll leave that to the Senate.” Feigning transparency while pretending the decision is out of his hands is a familiar Trump gambit. He repeatedly generated headlines quoting his alleged desire to testify to Robert Mueller under oath (“Trump says he is willing to testify under oath in U.S.-Russia probe”; “Trump says he still ‘would like to’ testify before Mueller”) with the fine print buried lower (“He later said that the decision to talk to Mueller would be ‘subject to my lawyers’ but that he personally would like to do it”). With Mueller, Trump was hiding from the truth and foisting it on his lawyers. Now he is foisting it on Senate Republicans.
McConnell has held his handful of wavering members together by delaying any decision on new evidence. It is obviously not a choice he relishes. The impeachment trial is an exercise in displaying the Republican Party’s institutional culpability in Trump’s contempt for the rule of law. At some point, they will have to decide to damn the president or to damn themselves.
Trump Roars, and Davos Shrugs
I sincerely hope this pissed him off.
Trump Roars, and Davos Shrugs
The crowd at the World Economic Forum used to be obsessed with Trump, but they've moved on.
Donald Trump
By JOHN F. HARRIS, FLORIAN EDER and RYAN HEATH
01/22/2020 01:10 PM EST
DAVOS, Switzerland—Two years ago President Donald Trump flew here and took the gathering of elites at the World Economic Forum by storm. Every conversation seemed to revolve around the American leader and his signature brand of political disruption.
Trump came back this year, and was greeted with a shrug.
Make no mistake, all the standard elements of the Trump tornado were on display. There was his keynote address boasting about how well the U.S. economy is doing on his watch. There was a blizzard of meetings with foreign leaders and U.S. finance and tech CEOs, at which he reportedly said he wished he owned stock in their firms because of how much money he had made them. There was the honking news conference with its usual lamentations about impeachment and the “major sleaze bags” trying to drive him from office.
The big difference was the way most people at Davos, including Americans but especially the non-Americans, were responding to this flamboyant but familiar show. The consensus reaction: Whatever.
This year’s Davos gathering featured several preoccupations—subjects that seem to come up at every panel, in every sidewalk encounter—and it is striking that Trump is a marginal figure in all of them.
Christian Rhally, an executive at LinkedIn who emphasized he was speaking in a personal capacity, said Trump lacks “the aura or the respect” that a president might ordinarily command at Davos. Echoing a common refrain, he said Trump’s Tuesday address sounded more like a “campaign speech,” raising the question of whether he was even trying to engage with the global audience. “You can’t ignore him but it’s nothing people really talk about.”
more...
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/01/22/donald-trump-davos-102147
Beware When 'Three Fat Guys' From the Trump Organization Knock on Your Door
Old article from Joe Conason...goes to character, or lack thereof.
https://www.villagevoice.com/2018/09/07/beware-when-three-fat-guys-from-the-trump-organization-knock-on-your-door/?fbclid=IwAR3K1naChAcSsY4dGAkXty7xu73GR7-hA_WQNae7xP0Xd9AFuuNzW6oO2c8
Beware When ‘Three Fat Guys’ From the Trump Organization Knock on Your Door
All presidents have something to be ashamed of. Donald Trump is the first one who evicted a stroke victim in order to get a higher rent payment
by Joe Conason
September 7, 2018
All of our presidents did things in their youth that they were not particularly proud of: George Washington chopped down that cherry tree; Bill Clinton famously didn’t inhale, but Barack Obama did. And when he was 30, George W. Bush was caught driving under the influence. (He quit drinking for good ten years later.)
Donald Trump has been a teetotaller from the jump, but when he was 33, his company evicted a 74-year-old widow from her Queens apartment. As Joe Conason reported in the May 5, 1980, edition of the Voice, the Trump Organization sent “three big fat men” to Mary Filan’s apartment to clear both her belongings and her bedridden body out of the building on Barclay Avenue in Flushing.
Filan, who had recently suffered a stroke, told Conason, “They said they’d come to put me on the street because I owed four months rent. I don’t owe back rent. The last thing I got from Trump was a bill for $10.20, about two weeks ago, and I sent that. They just want me out because they can get twice as much rent.”
When Conason followed up with Trump’s spokesman, he was told, “The Trumps don’t get involved in any of that.” The spokesman added that he didn’t know why Mary Filan had been evicted, and Conason further reported that Filan didn’t “give loud parties, or cause property damage, or threaten her neighbors, who are actually fond of her.” Conason also discussed the generous tax exemptions Trump was getting around the city, concluding: “Two thoughts persist: How would Donald Trump feel if some corporation evicted his ill and aging parent, without notice or compassion, removing all possessions to some unknown location? And how does Trump manage to have taxpayers subsidize so many of his enterprises?”
Well, Trump couldn’t give up drinking, because he never started. Maybe he should’ve given up evicting tenants who had never done anything wrong instead.
May 5, 1980
For more that 30 years Mary Filan — widowed, 74 years old, and half-paralyzed from a recent stroke — has lived in apartment 6B, 143-15 Barclay Avenue in Flushing. Last Friday afternoon, she answered the insistent doorbell, only to be pushed aside by the henchmen of city marshal Norman Katz, who proceeded to cart her belongings out to an idling truck. Taped to her door was an eviction notice from her landlords, the Trump Organization.
They took Filan’s sofa, chairs, TV, jewelry, dishes, and silverware, leaving nothing but a hamper for her to sit on. The marshals and the police tried to convince her to leave, but she refused to go until a neighbor, Bob Hennessy, convinced her to stay in his apartment until she could get help.
“She was distraught,” said Hennessy, and by Monday afternoon he was still unable to ascertain where her belongings had been taken. Thanks to her doctor and the Human Resources Administration, Mary Filan is resting in a bed at Parsons Hospital.
“They rang the bell,” recalls Filan, “and I was still in bed.” U don’t get up much unless I have to. They rang and rang, and when I got to the door they pushed it open, and walked in, these three big fat men. They went right in the kitchen and sarted pulling out drawers, turning ’em upside down into one of these big cartons.
“They said they’d come to put me on the street because I owed four months rent. I don’t owe back rent. They last thing I got from Trump was a bill for $10.20 about two weeks ago, and I sent that. They just want me out because they can get twice as much rent.” Mary Filan currently pays about $200 a month for her apartment. Her income — from Social Security and a telephone company pension — is under $500 a month.
The Trump Organization is one of the biggest landlords in the this city, a dynasty passed from father Fred to son Donald. Like most dynasties, it has flourished through the exercise of power; in earlier time, mostly through the Brooklyn Democratic machine; now, through Donald’s liaisons with the governor and a variety of state agencies, particularly the Urban Development Corporation, which paid Donald Trump more than $800,000 for brokering its convention center deal. He has used political clout to obtain more than $160 million in tax exemptions for his renovation of the old Commodore Hotel on 42nd Street. Donald Trump is a very successful 33-year-old dealer and developer. So why did Trump evict Mary Filan?
“The Trumps don’t get involved in any of that,” said a spokesman at their Manhattan office. “The management corporation handles that kind of thing. It’s part of the company, but the Trumps don’t get involved with individual cases.” He didn’t know why Mary Filan had been evicted. She doesn’t give loud parties, or cause property damage, or threaten her neighbors, who are actually fond of her.
“The Trump Organization doesn’t evict people indiscriminately,” he said at last, and suggested another number to call for specific comments on the Filan case. There was no answer at that number; nobody seemed to care about the details.
Two thoughts persist: How would Donald Trump feel if some corporation evicted his ill and aging parent, without notice or compassion, removing all possessions to some unknown location? And how does Trump manage to have the taxpayers subsidize so many of his enterprises? Mary Filan’s hospital stay is being paid for by Medicare and Medicaid.
Jerry Nadler Storms The Senate And Accuses Republicans Of Treacherous Cover-Up For Trump
ICYMI-I did.
https://www.politicususa.com/2020/01/22/jerry-nadler-republican-treachery.html
Posted on Wed, Jan 22nd, 2020 by Jason Easley
Jerry Nadler Storms The Senate And Accuses Republicans Of Treacherous Cover-Up For Trump
House impeachment manager Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) took the Senate by storm after midnight ET and accused Republicans of a treacherous cover-up for Trump.
Nadler said:
A real trial, we know, has witnesses. We urge you to do your duty, permit a fair trial. All trials have witnesses that’s elementary in American justice. Either you want the truth, and you must permit the witnesses, or you want a shameful cover-up. History will judge, and so will the electorate.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1219857500251545602
As the trial moved toward its 12th consecutive hour, because Mitch McConnell won’t postpone the votes until tomorrow, Jerry Nadler’s remarks were a jolt of caffeine wrapped in the American flag.
Nadler summed it up perfectly. Cynical Republican Senators think that they can speed through this trial, let Trump off of the hook, and voters will forget, but the voters are going to remember. Just like they remembered, the effort to kill Obamacare before the 2018 election.
Republicans never learn. The bill for this Trump cover-up will come due on Election Day in November.
How Democrats Won Day One of the Impeachment Trial
https://politicalwire.com/2020/01/22/how-democrats-won-day-one-of-the-impeachment-trial/How Democrats Won Day One of the Impeachment Trial
January 22, 2020 at 6:14 am EST By Taegan Goddard
“Politically, though, there is some upside for Democrats. If you accept the argument that President Trump is likely going to be acquitted, isn’t it better for Democrats to own no part of the trial, so they can call it a sham and beat Republicans over the head with it later this year? They will lose these procedural fights, complain loudly about it and wave the trial in the faces of vulnerable Republicans as an example of the party’s fealty to Trump.”
Budget Officials Laid Groundwork to Freeze Ukraine Aid
So, is this cya after the fact? Does this make it better?
https://politicalwire.com/2020/01/22/budget-officials-laid-groundwork-to-freeze-ukraine-aid/
Budget Officials Laid Groundwork to Freeze Ukraine Aid
January 22, 2020 at 8:03 am EST By Taegan Goddard
“On the evening of July 24, the night before the call, OMB officials shared a ‘Ukraine Prep Memo’ with Michael Duffey — the office’s associate director of national security programs, a political appointee and the budget official who would play a direct role in carrying out Trump’s funding freeze.”
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