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tpbiker, you need to get out more; she is pure poison and unattractive in every way.
Any pardons trump issues to family and close sycophants will be challenged and tested in the courts - repeatedly.
I'm still hoping he will take the hitler exit or revolver in the library.
How long before putin dishes the dirt as trump has now outlived his usefulness and doesn't have a media platform.
Is it just me that thinks the press secretary is smoking hot?
Nope, not just you. But then I also think Melania is hot.
No idea how to just embed the 2nd clip, but that's the one I wanted - y'know, for the lolz 🤗🤗
https://twitter.com/HubUnofficial/status/1346975217541808130?s=20
https://twitter.com/LoisBeans/status/1347380784848535557
https://twitter.com/cjane87/status/1347383196435050502
Trumpets just sound like cult members to me. This on the beeb:
<p dir="ltr">It was just heart-breaking to watch what was going on and the behaviour of protesters is just not like the Trump people I've been around. If it did come from any conservatives, then I condemn it. There's no excuse for violence.</p>
<p dir="ltr">It doesn't change my support for Trump. The people that love Trump, that's not going to change no matter if he gets a second term or not. It just means we're going to hold out for 2024 and hope either he runs again or his kids do.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Our country is going to go downhill over the next four years if Biden does take office. I'm actually moving today out of the city into the suburbs of a Republican county because I am afraid of how Democratic counties will end up under a Biden presidency.</p>
<p dir="ltr">We're going to catapult towards socialism and communism. I'm worried for the country's future, but regardless of who takes office, we have a lot of healing to do. I hope we can all find our common humanity and embrace each other when this is all over, which is hopefully soon.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Lunatics.</p>
I’m actually moving today out of the city into the suburbs of a Republican county because I am afraid of how Democratic counties will end up under a Biden presidency.
Should raise the IQ of both groups.
The monster is eating Trump now.
I've deleted the link, since it's a bit NSFW (for some reason these MAGA people can't express themselves without using a potty mouth).
But they're not happy that he's thrown them under a bus.
I have been pondering the steroid suggestions. I suspect he may still be taking them and while that does not explain his behaviour it may well have made both the impulsiveness and rage / paranoia worse
Douglas Murray of the Spectator / Telegraph, mentioned here earlier, has broken cover: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2021/01/07/crowds-attract-strangest-folk-us/
Imagine for a moment that after the last UK election the Conservatives had clearly won but the Labour Party had refused to concede.
Imagine, furthermore, that the last time Labour won an election, senior Conservatives refused to accept that fact, claiming instead that foreign powers had installed the Labour government.
Play that scenario out and you get close to making sense of what the hell happened on Capitol Hill this week.
It has been plain for a number of cycles now that American democracy is close to broken, if not smashed apart. After the 2016 election, many US Democrats refused to accept that Donald Trump won legitimately. They spent four years trying – and failing – to prove it. Since November 2020, Trump himself has taken that tactic a step further by refusing to concede at all. America was already a powder-keg. But it was Trump who proved willing to run around handing out matches.
Those who stormed the Capitol on Wednesday were given a strong nod by the president. Trump has repeatedly insisted that the November election was stolen and that he won it.
As the weeks went on, he made the same claims, and every time they were looked into they fell apart. This was a point that Lindsay Graham, the South Carolina Republican senator, made from the floor on Wednesday.
The Supreme Court rejected Trump’s appeals to discount or overturn votes. As did authorities at state level. Polls suggested around nine out of 10 Trump voters believed he won the election. Trump not only refused to leave office, but bolted all the doors that would have allowed him a graceful or dignified exit from it.
And it was to avert this that Trump called on supporters to congregate in Washington. His rhetoric before the march on the Capitol will go down in history as a wildly reckless political speech. He told his supporters: “We will never give up. We will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft.”
He continued: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. And we’ll probably not be cheering for some of them. Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength.”
In pictures: Donald Trump supporters storm the U.S. Capitol Building
Imagine if someone had spoken like this in our own country. If at the height of Parliament’s Brexit stalemate before the last election, when Parliament appeared to be acting against the will of the people, a political figure in Britain had called on the public to march on Westminster and “show strength”, what might have happened? I am not certain the British scenario would have played out so very differently.Because this is what happens when you raise a crowd. All sorts of people emerge: the strange, the sincere, the silly and the sinister.
It happened last summer when many peaceful Americans horrified by the actions of one Minnesotan policeman came out on to the streets of America under the banner Black Lives Matter. As they marched, they started to learn that not everybody had the same interests. Significant numbers were out to have fun. Others wanted to riot, loot, steal and burn. They sullied themselves and the movement they professed to care for. So it was on Wednesday.
Many non-Americans will marvel at the array of attention-seekers, eccentrics and ordinary-looking people who made up the crowd that pushed its way into the Capitol. Much attention will be paid to those people waving Confederate flags – the flag of the old South. And while some will try to insist that this shows that the protesters were all racists, the flag is seen by others as a symbol of state-rights over laws dictated by Washington.
Likewise there are those who claim that if BLM or Antifa had attempted to push their way into the Capitol, the number of people shot by authorities would be far higher. In reality, BLM-Antifa protesters have been allowed to assail state and federal buildings with impunity over the last year. So that divisive claim does not hold. Most likely, law-enforcement were stunned by flag-waving Americans pushing their way forwards in such numbers and rightly reluctant to open fire on a crowd.
In recent years, Britain has seen the fall-off of trust in our institutions but it is nothing compared to the distrust and hatred of Washington emanating from every corner of the US in recent years. People believe that Washington wants to take away everything they have: their money, their rights, their guns, their religion. Pushed to such a place, and encouraged to congregate, what did Trump imagine would happen?
This has been festering for years. Joe Biden’s job – indeed the job of Americans from both sides of the aisle – is not just to work out what has gone wrong, but to work together to try to make things right.
Douglas Murray is a British author and associate editor of The Spectator
It's certainly an interesting one. As a very angry Remain voter, I do wonder if a more populist Remain leader could have whipped up support in a Trump style, and those marches might have turned ugly?
Imagine if the Leave vote had gone the other way and Farage had been whipping up his base in big marches on Parliament telling them that foreign powers had peddled lies and manipulated people via social media? As we've seen, takes only a small proportion of a disaffected minority to kick things off.
🙂
If at the height of Parliament’s Brexit stalemate before the last election, when Parliament appeared to be acting against the will of the people, a political figure in Britain had called on the public to march on Westminster and “show strength”, what might have happened?
Like this?
And we had all the bollocks about the judiciary, "enemies of the people". We're getting the same prattle from the cabinet about activist lawyers. Exactly the same play book!
it's stretching reality to blame the lefties again.
The democrats did concede.
But there were legitimate concerns about misinformation utilised by the winning side, the role of Comey and the timing of his public announcements, and Trump's campaign did have contact with russian agents.
We should also remember that the conservatives culled any investigations into Russian interference in the brexit poll.
There is a big difference between what happened and the Spectator/Telegraph's spin on what happened, which is just another "it was antifa in a fake moustache" blame piece .
It’s certainly an interesting one. As a very angry Remain voter, I do wonder if a more populist Remain leader could have whipped up support in a Trump style, and those marches might have turned ugly?
On here just a few days ago someone was claiming that was what we needed to have done here to get Johnson/Brexit out. I think we're better than that, but it's hard to argue that democracy's not broken here too when its tools are money, corruption, and lies.
it’s hard to argue that democracy’s not broken here too when its tools are money, corruption, and lies.
And it's not in the career politicians interests to fix it, of course....
In response to the ‘accusations ‘ of the democrats not accepting the result last time, the US intelligence agencies (that well known hotbed of committed antifa!) concluded that there was Russian interference in the election.
So the difference would be that one was at least based on some semblance of the facts.
Why a self-pardon attempt by Trump would probably make things worse.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/a-self-pardon-wont-save-trump/617592/
1. It would basically be admitting that there is something to investigate, so the Justice Department would be compelled politically to launch an investigation.
2. Waving a piece of paper at the Supreme Court instead of arguing on facts is unlikely to convince them.
The Supreme Court has suggested that accepting a pardon implies admitting the pardoned crime. And while some debate exists about the extent to which this is true, it is certainly the case that granting a pardon strongly implies that the president believes there is some crime that requires forgiveness. Gerald Ford would not have needed to pardon Richard Nixon had the latter not committed crimes, just as no previous or subsequent president needed to pardon his predecessor. Being both the grantee and the recipient of a pardon accentuates the guilt of the individual. Trump would effectively be announcing that he has engaged in acts that might expose him to criminal prosecution (thus alleging his own guilt); by then accepting the pardon, he would thus, to some degree, be admitting his own allegation. In pleading the pardon to the court, in other words, he would be boasting of his guilt.
So put yourself in the shoes of whomever you imagine the swing justices to be in facing such a case. They would confront a former president credibly accused of horrible things. He offers no defense, but rather asserts the claim that he can unilaterally nix an investigation or a prosecution by taking a position that defies the historic position of the branch he headed. Both the Department of Justice and the current president would be taking the opposite view. To grant him dismissal would allow every future president to negate every future criminal investigation of himself, and to give himself a get-out-of-jail-free card upon his exit from office.
I would be very surprised if there are five votes on the Supreme Court for this position.
I was hoping that one of the fixes to the US political system Biden could implement would be to end presidential/governer pardons.
Justice should be applied equally to everyone, no special dispensations for those who have a politicians ear. Not exactly a hard fix to sell.
I was hoping that one of the fixes to the US political system Biden could implement would be to end presidential/governer pardons.
It's in the Constitution. That was deliberately designed to be difficult to change. The President cannot just change it, no matter how silly the pardon power is.
It’s in the Constitution.
After seeing what happened, I'm now much less impressed that Nicholas Cage was able to steal it.
Does anyone know how long a presidential pardon takes to go through and how easy it is to slow down? Ideally if Donny issues all these parsons and they get stuck in bureaucracy for say two weeks then Biden can then dispose of them.
IANAAL* but having read a little around the US constitution there are just two parts/phrases of it that cannot be amended. Amendments need to get through both houses and then be ratified within a given time frame by 2/3rds(?) of the individual states. There's a couple of amendments in that latter part of the process.
AAAO I doubt any self-pardon would be anything but a dog whistle to his supporters.
*I Am Not An American Lawyer
*As An Alien Observer
Does anyone know how long a presidential pardon takes to go through
I think it can be formalized in an afternoon. It's not something that needs a committee meeting to approve, just the President has to sign it.
My understanding is that it needs to go thru others hands and thus can be slowed
It’s in the Constitution. That was deliberately designed to be difficult to change. The President cannot just change it, no matter how silly the pardon power is.
But like I said, it is not a difficult sell, anyone opposing that reform has a lot of explaining to do.
The constitution has been "amended" bloody loads of times, pretending it can't be done so lets not try is just an excuse, but an excuse I am expecting rather a lot from this Democrat term for doing not a lot.
The president can't pardon himself anyway, that has been gone through several times in legal arguments, and that probably extends to pardoning his own direct family, but that is more contestable.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/08/politics/donald-trump-impeachment-capitol-riot/index.html
Trump throws some more supporters under a bus
Refers to those that broke the law in the demo/riot with “you will pay” amongst other things.
Reading between the lines I think he may have been threatened with something.
Douglas Murray of the Spectator / Telegraph
That's enough for me - Murray has cheerled Trump, the Spectator & Telegraph have pushed the boundaries of misinformation to a new low.
Contrast:
After the 2016 election, many US Democrats refused to accept that Donald Trump won legitimately. They spent four years trying – and failing – to prove it.
With this:
In response to the ‘accusations ‘ of the democrats not accepting the result last time, the US intelligence agencies (that well known hotbed of committed antifa!) concluded that there was Russian interference in the election.
If a Telegraph/Spectator "journalist" acknowledges this then they're acknowledging that their own hallowed Brexit vote might not be as valid as they'd like to assert.
It’s certainly an interesting one. As a very angry Remain voter, I do wonder if a more populist Remain leader could have whipped up support in a Trump style, and those marches might have turned ugly?
I went to all of the major London protests. It wasn't just middle aged hand-wringers like me, there were families with kids, lots of pensioners and the mood was peaceful. In October 2019's march I was stood outside Parliament and there were a number of far right agitators doing their best to provoke confrontation - some mingling with crowds and pushing people. No-one took the bait. We were nice to the police and they were very nice to us, we also made a point of clearing up after ourselves too.
Five deaths seems very high for a relatively low grade building based protest, even for America. I know it was their Capitol building but the protesters were mainly white. What do you think the x3 deaths from medical emergencies were all about?
The president can’t pardon himself anyway, that has been gone through several times in legal arguments, and that probably extends to pardoning his own direct family, but that is more contestable.
This is not a certified fact. There are certainly some legal scholars who believe he may legally be able to pardon himself.
I think probably more relevant is whether it would be politically sensible for Trump. I know there's a lot of talk of locking him up, but I don't see it. The guy is like Teflon and locking him up will only embolden his supporters more against the 'deep state'. They'll cling to whichever guy Trump pledges support for. In a particularly unpleasant dystopian future, that could be Don Jr. So I don't think it necessarily makes sense for the Dems to go down that route. (Almost) half the country voted for Trump, and half of them think the riots were a good thing. It seems completely bizarre to me, but he has somehow achieved this crazy demi-God status.
I think Trump is much more likely, in true Trump style, to aim for an under-the-table deal with someone where he makes some sort of concession for a promise of immunity - or perhaps a pledge from the AG or someone not to prosecute.
Impeachment is more interesting since it would mean Trump would become ineligible to hold office again which would obviously destroy his 2024 plan. He cannot pardon himself from impeachment. The Dems would probably support this, and we may see that the Republicans want rid of him for 2024 too.
What do you think the x3 deaths from medical emergencies were all about?
Couple of strokes from overexcited obese seditionalists, and one lady who they crushed in their eagerness to pile into the Capitol.
Douglas Murray was much more scathing about left-wing peaceful protests against Boris Johnson in the UK. Funny that.
“During demonstrations in Westminster on Friday night, other sore losers congregated to attack the police and insult our democracy”.
What do you think the x3 deaths from medical emergencies were all about?
At least one of them was a 53 year old man who apparently tazered himself. I haven't been able to find a verified source for this. It sounds a bit too... poetic.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ErKLjaUXEAUUBgh?format=jpg&name=large
^^A lovely traditional American Christmas scene there.
Christmas tree, tinsel, assault rifles.
Definitely good will you all men... Of a certain colour.
This is not a certified fact
is that a special type of fact? And how does one tell the difference between a fact that’s been certified and one that hasn’t? Does it come with an actual certificate. Or a guarantee of authenticity?
enquiring minds want to know...
But like I said, it is not a difficult sell, anyone opposing that reform has a lot of explaining to do.
The constitution has been “amended” bloody loads of times, pretending it can’t be done so lets not try is just an excuse, but an excuse I am expecting rather a lot from this Democrat term for doing not a lot.
Look up the history of the Equal Rights Amendment. The amendment process is designed to favour opponents of amendments, the proponents really have to get huge momentum behind it and convince the other party to support it. The most recent proposed amendment that was adopted was in 1971, for the 26th Amendment. The 27th amendment was ratified later, but it had been in limbo for 200 years. Basically, nobody has managed to amend the Constitution in 50 years. It's not for want of trying, it because the process is designed to make it hard to do.
If Biden proposed amending the Constitution, that would instantly become a rallying point for Trumpists. No Republican from a red state could support it because it would a death sentence for their political career. You cannot amend the Constitution without getting a lot of Republicans on board. So, it's dead in the water and not worth wasting energy on.
is that a special type of fact? And how does one tell the difference between a fact that’s been certified and one that hasn’t? Does it come with an actual certificate. Or a guarantee of authenticity?
Well, I initially wrote "This is not true" that seemed a bit antagonistic. I didn't want to sound antagonistic. Perhaps 'this is not universally accepted fact' would have been more correct.
But then since our society apparently can't universally accept whether the moon even exists, there's no such thing as 'universally accepted facts'.
I’ve been informed that impeachment to ban from future office instead of removal, requires a straight majority in the senate instead of 2/3. Any experts care to comment?
So, it’s dead in the water and not worth wasting energy on.
Complete bullshit, an excuse of defeatists who wouldn't even try to make change, so fully representative of current democrats.
Removing political interference from the judicial system is an easy sell to all parties supporters, it is selling an argument their is universal agreement for, but it is a power I suspect the politicians want to weld, so that is the only reason they won't try, not because it can't be done.
I’ve been informed that impeachment to ban from future office instead of removal, requires a straight majority in the senate instead of 2/3. Any experts care to comment?
I checked Wikipedia and it seems that's correct, although it seems like it's a separate vote after the "removal from office?" vote. I suspect this second motion requires the defendant to have already been removed from office, otherwise it's self-contradictory.
Certainly in the Trump Impeachment trial (part I) they didn't vote on barring him from future office.
I.e. the Senate would have to vote to remove from office (2/3rds majority) and then only if that passes, hold a second vote to prevent future office (simple majority). Perhaps the interesting thing is that impeachment can apparently occur after 20th Jan - meaning the first vote need not be passed (since Trump would no longer hold office at that point). In theory that could mean that a vote could pass along party lines with the newly-tied Senate.
I imagine the decision of the Spectator to print that article must have been very difficult for them, most of the writers there have done love in pieces about trump since way back. He's the kind of RW arse they can get fully behind.
I'm guessing Murray drew the short straw in the office to send up that distress flair, like Tory HQ now it'll be like a scene from The Thick of It with folk running around wondering which bandwaggon to board next, who's coat tails to grab onto because they possess no solid moral direction themselves, other than follow the money
Does anyone know how long a presidential pardon takes to go through and how easy it is to slow down? Ideally if Donny issues all these parsons and they get stuck in bureaucracy for say two weeks then Biden can then dispose of them.
A pardon has to be delivered, from what I can understand from a BBC article - criminals have had a pardon, it got lost on the prison governors desk and the new president has overturned it.
From the BBC article, no one knows if Trump can pardon himself. The Constitution that gives him the power does not exclude it. There have been several theoretical legal arguments about it, but until he does, and it goes all the way through to the Supreme Court, no one knows.
It's clearly not in anyone's interest to make a President above the law, though it does only to federal offences and not state prosecution.