It's not a transcript.

[Lord Jim]

A face begging to have a pie thrown at it if ever there was one...

[Crackpot]

You must not whatabout his whataboutism

[Lord Jim]

Another thing that one has to be thick as a Trumpanzee to believe, is this hilarious notion that Donald Trump actually cares about corruption...



There is absolutely zero evidence that Trump has ever cared about "corruption" unless it was somehow tied to his own personal advantage...

Hell, Trump himself couldn't think of a single example...

There is however abundant evidence that Trump is perfectly prepared to look the other way, ignore (or grab his own cut) when it comes to corruption...

When I see some Trump shill pundit or politico on TV (who I know isn't actually stupid or ignorant enough to really believe it) trying to claim with a straight face that all Trump was trying to do was clamp down on corruption so that he could be a good steward of US aid dollars, I don't know whether to laugh or cry...

It's both sad and amusing to see someone willing to debase and degrade themselves in this way...

Willing to make themselves look like a complete idiot just so they can keep the support of real idiots...

[BoSoxGal]

A face begging to have a pie thrown at it if ever there was one...

Nah . . . a big fat punch.

[Econoline]

[wesw]

bigsky said that jim said that bigsky said.....

....yeah, that pretty much was h0w it went at the hearing....

[Joe Guy]

[ex-khobar Andy]

I had forgotten that Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, was nominated earlier this year to replace Dan Coats as Director of National Intelligence. The nomination was withdrawn a few days later after it was found that Ratcliffe had exaggerated his experience in legal and intelligence matters.

Trump of course painted this as getting Ratcliffe away from those rascally Dems who would stop at nothing to destroy this fine family man.

Ratcliffe had a starring role in today's questioning of Kent and Taylor and got precisely nowhere.

Oh and I did enjoy that little vignette from Rep Welch.

[Lord Jim]

the witness list is t00 scary f0r y0u dems and ever trumpers....

I'm going to guess that is wes in his cryptic and semi-coherent fashion, (and that he meant to say "never Trumpers" like your humble correspondent, not "ever Trumpers" like his own delusional self) is referring to the rabbit hole, monkey circus, joke "witness list" put together by the Intel Committee GOPers...

There's no need to "out" the whistle blower other than to smear them , expose them to danger and intimidate any future potential truth tellers from coming forward... (it's already been well established through a mountain of corroborating witnesses and evidence...including Trump's own words...READ THE TRANSCRIPT!..that the building is on fire; we don't need the guy who pulled the fire alarm...)

And while there's been absolutely no evidence that Hunter Biden did anything illegal, it wouldn't matter if he were a proven axe-murderer; it would be completely irrelevant to the central question of whether or not the President of the United States attempted to use US military aid as a bribe to extort a foreign leader to provide him with personal political assistance...

But my favorite Ridiculous Witness Request on the embarrassing Republican Ridiculous Witness Request List, has to be Nellie Ohr, peddler of the completely debunked and discredited "Ukraine Hacked The Elections, Not Russia" wacko conspiracy theory...

They might as well request witnesses to investigate whether the moon landing was faked, or whether Ted Cruz's father was on the Grassy Knoll, while they're at it...

But of course they had not one single fact witness or even expert witness to call...

The fact witnesses they could conceivably call; like Mike Pompeo or Mick Mulvaney or Rudy Giuliani...

are all fighting like hell against having to testify under oath, because they know that if they did they'd have to choose between committing perjury and incriminating Il Booce...

[Joe Guy]

It’s interesting that part of the Republicans’ defense of Trump is that Obama only gave Ukraine blankets and Hunter Biden got a job with Burisma. You’d almost think they’re trying to distract people’s attention.

[ex-khobar Andy]

The Obama Administration of course gave Ukraine a lot more than blankets. You could argue (and I think I did at the time) that they needed a lot more in the way of weaponry but it's asinine to go on about blankets.

From the CNN fact checking story:

By March 2015, the US had committed more than $120 million in security assistance for Ukraine and had pledged an additional $75 million worth of equipment including UAVs, counter-mortar radars, night vision devices and medical supplies, according to the Pentagon's Defense Security Cooperation Agency.

That assistance also included some 230 armored Humvee vehicles.

In 2014 the US pledged $1 billion in aid - energy and social, not military - and was considering sanctions on Russia. IMF did something similar. Too little? Possibly. Nothing but blankets? Fucking liars. But of course they (Jim "I saw nothing wrong while I was coaching at OSU" Jordan et al) have no interest in the truth and have long known that they can persuade enough of the population to believe them by handing out occasional candy.

[Bicycle Bill]

I Don’t Know WHO to Believe In This Impeachment Hearing
by Devorah Blachor

This impeachment is so confusing.  Both sides are making contradictory claims and it’s almost impossible to know who to trust.

On the one hand, you have George Kent, a career Foreign Service officer whose entire family served in the armed forces, including an uncle who was at Pearl Harbor and survived the Bataan Death March, and on the other hand, you have a bone spurs draft dodger whose dad got arrested at a KKK riot.

There’s this fellow Bill Taylor who served as a captain and company commander in Vietnam and who was awarded a Bronze Star, but then again, Donald Trump’s first wife Ivana and numerous other women have said that he sexually assaulted them.

If only American politics weren’t so partisan, I might be able to make sense of it all, but I can’t.

At the hearing, I saw two serious, professional men who both served under Republican and Democrat administrations.  Yet just last week, President Trump was ordered to pay two million dollars for using charity funds to pay off his business debts and promote himself.  How can a voter like me be expected to know who is more credible?

These men testified under oath that the president tried to withhold military aid to a crucial ally unless the Ukrainian president made a phony and defamatory speech about Joe Biden, and I admit that does sound slightly damning.  At the same time, there’s a white supremacist working closely with Donald Trump who orchestrated the immigration policy which separated thousands of children, including babies, from their parents.  Politics are so complicated!

What sounds more believable?  That career diplomats with everything to lose would make up a story implicating the most powerful man in America?  Or that the president’s butt-dialing, criminal-loving lawyer was involved in something nefarious?  I wish this would be easier!

I’m no political scientist, but it seems to me that a man who has told 13,435 lies and has equated Nazis with people protesting Nazis, and who publicly stated he’d date his own daughter, and who tried and failed to buy Greenland is at least as honest as the many people, both Republican and Democrat, who have testified against him in this impeachment hearing.

You know, everyone keeps repeating this story about Ben Franklin over and over again  —  you know the one  —  about how in 1787, as the Constitution was adopted, Americans gathered on the steps of Independence Hall.  When they saw Franklin, they asked, ‘What do we have, a republic or a monarchy?’ and Franklin replied, ‘A republic, if you can keep it.’

But what did Ben Franklin even mean by that?  Was he trying to say that a democracy is only as strong as its institutions and that if the people in power become nakedly corrupt and are not checked, that democracy becomes a hollow pretense that’s no better than a despotic monarchy?  Or did he mean that the newly founded nation was a banana republic?

Someone help me!  I’m utterly baffled!  How will we ever get to the bottom of these impeachment hearings?  I fear that America will be lost amidst the fog of uncertainty, destined to wander in the wilderness of chaos for a very long time indeed.  A very, very long time.
...........https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-d ... nt-hearing

-"BB"-

[ex-khobar Andy]

Fact:

Ben Franklin wasn't there on D-Day. He was hiding behind a wall in Philadelphia.

Why should we listen to him now?

[Sue U]

Fact:

Ben Franklin wasn't there on D-Day. He was hiding behind a wall in Philadelphia.

Why should we listen to him now?

Well, as you can see in the photo below, technically he was behind a fence and under a rock. But point taken.

[Lord Jim]

You’d almost think they’re trying to distract people’s attention.

Joe, you're such a hopeless cynic...

[Econoline]

[Econoline]

[Econoline]

tl;dr - "BO000O0RING!"

• There seemed to be little appetite on the part of Trump’s defenders to actually argue the facts. Nowhere in his opening statement had Nunes so much as mentioned Trump’s case for himself, which is that his actions toward Ukraine were not only proper but “perfect.” As the rest of the long day wound on, not a single Republican made the case for Presidential perfection. Instead, they decided on a safer course: trying to convince the country to tune out. Taylor’s testimony wasn’t dramatic, they said; it was a snooze. At midday, the White House press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, tweeted that the “sham hearing” was both “boring” and a waste of taxpayer money. Representative Mark Meadows, one of Trump’s closest allies, had been sitting in the committee room for the morning session, and he, too, came out to tell reporters that he didn’t think it amounted to anything. “I don’t know about you, but it’s hard for me to stay awake and listen to all of this,” Meadows said.

(source)

[Sue U]

Today we are all The Guy Behind Steve Castor.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1194685048227688449

That was an excruciating example of How Not To Cross-Examine A Witness.

[ex-khobar Andy]