I confess I’m slightly saddened it isn’t Seb Gorka they’ve asked back to head up their genius defense team.

Yep, this. Amongst the hissing and gibbon-shrieking commentary over on that National Review article analyzing the phone-call memo (the author lays out a case proving the quid-pro-quo elements) are some actual conservatives muttering that this was not the way to go about assessing corruption in a foreign country.

Trump has made numerous “jokes” about Pence, like “that guy really hates the homos, lolol” that might lead one to conclude that even for two people who have no friends, they are pretty frosty with one another.

Yet you really gotta appreciate how this concern-troll-wokest-Berniebro here has to rely on the exact same misunderstanding of Hunter Biden’s utter non-role in this that Trump’s rightwingers do.

Nah, it’s just their version of “no puppet, YOU’RE the puppet!”. The GOP’s strategy lo this past decade or so has been based on the simplest of toddler-level projection mechanisms. If they’re about to be exposed for doing something, their unfailing response is to try to blame someone else for the same thing.

Yeah, between the toxic narcissism and the utter lack of ethics, I don’t think Trump is capable of perceiving “wrong” as normal humans would. For Trump, “wrong” is simply another mercantile quantity that must be balanced in his favor at all times.

People have muted Coats or Sue Gordon, who was passed over for the promotion she would have normally gotten, correct?

If only they’d gone for Johnny Unbeatable, we wouldn’t be in this fix!

I personally loved the reports that he phoned Pelosi this morning to try to call off the impeachment, like he was gonna buy her off with a truckload of slightly dented electronics at a really good special friendship price.

For any normal admin, this would be a concern; for this heap of psychopathically self-invested imbeciles, I say release the hounds and just watch them shit themselves pointing at each other.

Actually no, fuck him for not recognizing that the votes that got him into his seat in Maine’s new ranked-choice voting system — he was an instant-runoff win by a very slim margin — were not Republicans or conservative Dems but all the third-party Green voters who likely hold positions to the left of the Dem party…

There is a large contingent of possibly even otherwise well-meaning reporters and pundits who appear to prefer leaping on any spin of Pelosi’s decisions that’s most negative — I’d hang fire for now until more details are share about what’s really being planned.

Hey fellow Mainer — I know, Golden turned out so disappointing. He seems to forget that a large number of the third-party votes that got him that ranked-choice seat were actually to the left of his mainstream-D views. Still, he’s a (literal) ass in the chair for purposes of majority counting, just like Manchin. Me, I…

Hey, John Yoo says that’s perfectly A-OK. Although apparently impeaching an in-your-damn-face corrupt president isn’t.

It’s because you live in America and watch only American news. I spend a good part of my life in Germany and the German news media focuses as much — if not actually a good bit more — on German crimes against the environment and what we Germans can all do.

That’s true. On the other hand, whoever the whistleblower is, they will have to endure death threats etc and it will radically change their life, so I can think of nobody more deserving of this than Bolton.

Welp. It was announced a few minutes ago that Trump just retroactively classified the whistleblower report right as Congress was receiving it — so there’s a huge honking cloud of smoke they’re trying to puff away while they insist there ain’t no fire.

“Trump asked a foreign country to dig up some dirt on his competitor Joe Biden for the upcoming election. Looks a lot like he also tried to extort taxpayer aid money in exchange for this.”

(pedant’s note: I suspect this is a British/Amurrcan spelling divergence, actually, like aluminum/aluminium.)