Monday, October 28, 2019

Latest Whopping Trump-Level Lie by Joe Biden

Biden says the reason Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama hasn't endorsed him for president is because Biden himself asked him not to.

Now, why the hell would anyone NOT want the endorsement of a popular former president of his own party?

Who knows? Biden didn't explain. He just did his usual thing of spewing out a bunch of words devoid of real meaning. Rather like Trump does so often.

But that's okay. Because he's obviously lying.

He also repeated another ridiculous lie he's been making repeatedly of late: that he never ever discussed the business dealings of his black sheep son Hunter with Hunter. This despite the fact that he flew Hunter on his official government jet, Air Force Two, to China with him when he was vice president, and on that trip Hunter finagled a bunch of sweetheart deals from entities connected to the Chinese government. And when Biden was in charge of U.S. dealings with Ukraine, Hunter just coincidentally was appointed to the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma, with pay of $50,000 a month, a position he held for five years until resigning this past July, obviously because his father was starting his latest run for president. Hunter was paid a total of $3,000,000 for holding a title. He has zero experience in the gas industry or in Ukraine, at least when he was rewarded with this plum position.

Biden made his absurd statements, reminiscent of many of Trump's preposterous lies, in an interview on 60 Minutes, a TV 'newsmagazine" program on CBS, aired Sunday October 27, 2019.

If Biden manages to snag the Democratic Party's nomination for president for 2020, Americans will get a choice between two of the most mendacious men on the political scene.



Joseph R. Biden and son Hunter. Talking business? They're barely on speaking terms, 
don't you know!

Saturday, October 26, 2019

Erstwhile Goldwater Girl Hillary Clinton Returns To Her Roots as a Far Right-Winger

Hillary Clinton, a twice-loser for president of the U.S., has savagely smeared Democratic Party Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, claiming the Kremlin was "grooming" the military veteran "to be the third party candidate," presumably to "steal" as the Democrats like to say, votes from themselves. In other words, Gabbard is sort of a Manchurian candidate, a Kremlin "asset" in the current race for president. The corporate propaganda system (aka "the media") responded quizzically to this, rather than with the outraged denunciation it deserves (and which they regularly dump on Trump's head, so we know it isn't "objectivity" that prevents them from doing so).

Now as I said, Gabbard is a Democrat, and has never indicated she might run outside that party. That part of the smear was almost as baseless as the slander that Moscow was pulling her strings.

Gabbard responded to Clinton with a withering Tweet that hit the mark, because unlike Clinton's slanderous attack, it was true: "You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain."

Adopting the vicious, slanderous, redbaiting-style tactics of the 1940's Richard Nixon and 1950's Republicans, the demented Queen Bitch of the "Democratic" Party is dropping the disciplined mask she has long worn to fool the public. Her actions over the decades have put the lie to her pose as a faux feminist and ersatz progressive. Her dream of being president irrevocably shattered at last, she has become terminally embittered and feels she has nothing to lose by letting her true attitudes leach out into the public domain.

Far from being a feminist, she has only ever harmed women: millions of Iraqi women by her support of the war against them, millions of Honduran women by her promotion of the military coup there. (She even boasted in one of her awful, disingenuous, and self-serving books that she quashed a feeble effort by European nations to condemn the coup.) Before she was murdered in her own home, Honduran environmental activist Berta Cáceres held Clinton directly responsible for the military coup. [1]


Clinton has always been an accomplice in her husband's repressive and murderous policies. Together they demonized blacks as "superpredators" and created policies to imprison over time millions of African-Americans. The Clintons economically devastated the black community by limiting so-called welfare to a lifetime limit of five years, and need be damned, ramping up the "war on drugs," an unleashing  the greedy and venal economic predators of finance capitalism to prey on African-American homeowners. As a U.S. Senator she compiled a record of reaction. (Some examples: her consistent support for the police state PATRIOT ACT, for the invasion of Iraq, for gigantic military budgets, for funding the secret police at ever increasing levels.)

Hillary Clinton started political life as a far rightwing Republican, a Goldwater Girl in college. That was at a time when Goldwater implacably opposed civil rights legislation to ease the incredible racist repression of African-Americans. The Goldwater who seemingly favored nuclear war. One of the most extreme reactionaries in the U.S. Senate (and that's really saying something). Now she has come full circle and returned to her political roots as a quasi-fascist.


Her whopping lies are THIS BIG!
 


Saturday, October 19, 2019

Trump Hails Ethnic Cleansing of Kurds

Under withering criticism from all sides of the U.S. political elite, including politicians of the party he commandeered, the Republican Party, U.S. president Donald J. "Jackass" Trump sent two of his top lackeys, vice president Michael "Holier Than Thou" Pence and Secretary of State Michael "Brought To You By The Koch Brothers" Pence, to Turkey to try to wheedle Turkish autocrao Recep Tayyip Erdogan into dialing back his military attack on the Kurds in Syria which Trump gave the green light to just days earlier.

The fact that Erdogan had enough leverage to force the U.S. to send two top level officials in person to plead with him is a symptom of the depreciation of U.S. sway under the mismanagement of the inept and blustering and totally unqualified Trump.

The dynamic duo managed to finagle a "ceasefire" (misrepresented as a truce) which Trump hailed as the Greatest Deal. Of course, Trump hails everything involving himself as the "greatest," "tremendous," etc. etc.

Under the five day "ceasefire" deal Erdogan expects the Kurds to completely clear out of the region of Syria bordering Turkey- or else. In other words, the Kurds are expected to ethnically cleanse themselves. Erdogan calls the Kurdish-majority areas bordering Turkey "a terrorist corridor." if they fail to do so, the violence resumes.

Although the violence hasn't actually ceased, but merely diminished. The Turkish military and the puppet militias of Islamofascist cutthroats accompanying the Turkish invasion are still bombing and shelling and mortaring. More civilians and Kurdish fighters have been killed.



An estimated 100,000 to 200,000 people have been driven from their homes by the Turkish attack.

Erdogan's stated plan, after all Kurds have been eliminated from the region, is to repopulate it with refugees from Syrian cities who fled previously into Turkey. As the area in question is farmland, apparently these city folk will quickly have to learn how to subsist as farmers.

While his V.I.P. errand boys were in Ankara jawboning Erdogan, Trump undercut them with more threats to devastate the Turkish economy, and sent Erdogan an insulting letter of juvenile insults, which, it is reported, Erdogan filed in the circular file. (That means he threw it in the trash.)

The emptiness of Trump's bluster have been thoroughly exposed by the effeteness of actual U.S. actions.

Over the years, Trump has branded himself (with the invaluable assistance of U.S. corporate media and book publishers) as a master negotiator. ("The Art of the Deal" was one of the self-serving books he paid someone to write while pretending he wrote it.) This master negotiator apparently doesn't realize that he was revealing himself to the world as a hollow bluffer.

Not a good thing when dealing with foreign heads of state.



    In his imagination, he's The Greatest President Ever.

                     Also see "U.S. Stabs the Kurds In The Back Yet Again," Oct. 7, 2019.

 

Friday, October 11, 2019

Trump Calls The Kurds On the Carpet For Going AWOL In World War II

In his latest starring performance as the President of the United States playing in the Theatre of the Absurd, Donald J. "Jackass" Trump is justifying his abrupt betrayal of the Kurds by pointing out how feckless they were for not being part of the Normandy Invasion of France ("D-Day") in June of 1944: "They didn't help us in the Second World War, they didn't help us in Normandy,"  and they were absent from "other battles." If that wasn't bad enough, "in addition we've spent a TREMENDOUS amount of money," apparently the Kurds' fault. Trump cited "a very very powerful article" in substantiation of his lunatic statement. [1]

See? The U.S. doesn't owe the Kurds anything! They should have had the foresight to declare war on Nazi Germany. (A stateless people can't declare war? No Kurds were in any war zone? Excuse me, excuse me, Donald Trump is a very stable genius. He has the best brain, the most fantastic brain you're ever gonna see. Believe me. The Kurds should've helped out if they wanted us to help them.)

Is Trump justified in badmouthing the Kurds for not helping the U.S. Fight World War 2?


Actually Trump went very easy on the Kurds. He did mention "other battles" they were AWOL from. He could have noted that they were no help at all in helping the U.S. destroy Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. And where were they during the Korean War? Sure could have used a hand against those hordes of Chinese troops that came pouring in after Truman ignored Zhou EnLai's warning that if the U.S. advanced up the peninsula, China would intervene. (Luckily the U.S. Air Force and Marine Aviation was able to bomb North Korea into rubble.)

And it wasn't just during World War II that the Kurds just sat on the sidelines. Why weren't they fighting on the U.S. side in World War I? They were no help then. (Oh, and did you notice? they did help the other side, participating in the Ottoman Empire's extermination of the Armenians and Greeks.)

How about the Spanish-American war? The U.S. had to seize all Spain's colonies in the Caribbean and Pacific by itself. No help from the Kurds at all!

Where were Kurds when the U.S. invaded Mexico in 1846? The Kurds sat that one out too. All the U.S. got out of it was half of Mexico's territory.

The U.S. sure could have used the Kurds' help in the War of 1812, when the U.S. was looking to rip off a chunk of Canada. Didn't get one square inch! Thanks a million, Kurds!

Need I mention that they were no-shows in the War of Independence that created the U.S.? True to form, they didn't lift a finger to come to the aid of the American rebels! Just sat on their hands, as usual!

Oh sure, the Kurds sacrificed over ten thousand lives fighting ISIS for the U.S. But really, bottom line?

The Kurds are fair weather friends.


"Let's Be Honest; the Kurds are Turds."

1]  While noting the Kurds' abysmal, cowardly failure to hit the beaches on D-Day, Trump tossed out the disingenuous line "We like the Kurds," in a transparent attempt to deflect the near-universal criticism from establishment media and politicians of both parties. (But not from "peace activists," whose moral compasses are apparently permanently broken by their knee-jerk anti-Americanism and Manichean world view in which all the world's ills are the fault of the U.S. and the only thing in the way of universal peace is U.S. militarism.)


Tuesday, October 08, 2019

Trump's Betrayal of the Kurds, and The Limits of Lying

Trump is a sleazy carnival barker style huckster and con man. He's gone through life trafficking in outrageous bluster and preposterous lies, and getting away with it.

While that works well in the realms of real estate, or junk television, or fake "universities," that existential modus operandi is a poor fit for the milieu of chief executive officer of U.S. imperialism. (The fact that a narcissistic racist blowhard like Trump was made into a figure of admiration in the U.S. speaks volumes about the tawdry nature of U.S. culture and society.)

Perhaps Trump was understandably misled by the fact that for decades he never had a real problem politically on the levels of New York City or New York State, or the media which always fawned over him. Why should anything be different in Washington, D.C.? Why should the media suddenly be against him?

Now, however, with his placing the Kurds in extreme danger at the hands of their mortal enemies, the Turks, lying isn't cutting it. We should note that he's doing nothing different from what Henry Kissinger and Gerald Ford did to the Kurds in 1975, as my previous essay explains.

Trump has ludicrously boasted that the U.S. has eliminated ISIS. But with establishment media, the imperialist state structures, and even Republican senators demurring, this doesn't fly.

For decades, Trump used to be able to make any absurd boast he wanted and "the" media would credulously report them without contradiction. No longer.


The Kurds are holding about 10,000 ISIS terrorists prisoner. When the Turks launch their latest exterminationist offensive against the Kurds, the Kurds will have their hands full trying to survive. What will happen with those ISIS terrorists?

Well Trump doesn't want them. He says Europe should take some of them.

While he was running for president, Trump bellowed that he was going to "fill up" the illegitimate naval base cum prison on Cuban soil, Guantanamo Bay, with "a lot of bad dudes." Guess that was just more bluster and bluff and bullshit.


Oh, to be young again, when my lies were never contradicted.

 

Monday, October 07, 2019

U.S. Stabs the Kurds In The Back Yet Again

For the third or fourth time, the U.S. has double-crossed the Kurdish people.

For almost two decades now, the U.S. has used Kurdish militias as their proxy forces in Iraq and Syria, to fight groups the U.S. regards as terrorist, such as Al-Qaeda and especially ISIS. These Kurdish forces have frequently been referred to by U.S. elites as the U.S.' "boots on the ground."

Now the U.S. has suddenly pulled the rug out from under the Kurds, removing U.S. forces embedded with the Kurds in Syria in the dead of night. This frees Turkey to launch a long-threatened military offensive against the Kurdish fighters in Syria, whom Turkey brands "terrorists." Turkey is eager to wipe out the Kurds' militias.

The Kurds had cleared ISIS from Turkey's border. ISIS had laumched lethal rocket attacks into Turkish villages.

So much for gratitude.

Some background is necessary here. The Kurds in Turkey inhabit the eastern portion of Turkey. For many years they have been subjected to cultural genocide by Turkey, which banned their language, symbols, etc, among other repression. This prompted some Kurds to launch a guerrilla movement.

Turkey responded in the way that regimes virtually always do when faced with popular armed resistance movements, with repeated gross atrocities against defenseless civilians. Tens of thousands of Kurds died at Turkish hands.

Then a truce was reached, and the repression of Kurds was eased.

However after the current Turkish strongman, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, came to power, he apparently was unhappy with the new arrangement, and reverting to the old policy of trying to force Kurds to be "Turkish." Once again Turkey instituted harsh repression and military attacks on the Kurds.

Erdogan has been chomping at the bit for several years to wipe out the Kurdish militias in Syria. Now that the protective U.S. umbrella has been removed, he's getting his chance.

This is the second time in recent years the U.S. has betrayed the Kurds, and there
were other times in the past. A few years ago, the Kurds of northern Iraq held a referendum and voted in favor of autonomy for themselves. The Iraqi regime responded with a military attack, driving the Kurds out of territory they had recently fought to take back from ISIS. The U.S. didn't back the Kurds at all.



The current betrayal has an awful antecedent which occurred in the 1970's. The Shah of Iran, at the time the world's worst dictator and who was installed as ruler of that nation by the CIA in 1953 in a coup that destroyed democracy in that country, had a spat with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. The Shah used the Kurds of Iraq as a proxy force to fight the Iraqi regime. The Shah enlisted the help of president Richard Nixon and Nixon's evil henchman Henry Kissinger to supply arms to those Kurds. Israel also supplied weapons.

Then in 1975 the Shah cut a deal with Saddam Hussein, and the Kurds became expendable. President Gerald Ford, Nixon's successor, and Kissinger (now working for Ford) allowed the massacre of Kurds by Saddam Hussein to proceed, coldly brushing aside pleas for help by remarking  that “One should not confuse undercover action with social work.” [1]

There have been other U.S. backstabbings of the Kurds, which I am not going into now because I want to get this out in a timely fashion.

The Kurds are an oppressed minority in all the countries they inhabit. They are spread out among Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, none of which will ever cede an inch of territory to a Kurdish state, nor treat Kurds as equal citizens. Unsurprisingly, the Kurds have long desired their own nation. But what's good enough for Jews isn't good enough for Kurds, it seems. The U.S. has long strung them along, using them as cannon fodder, while the Kurds hope that eventually the U.S. will enable them to achieve statehood.

But the U.S. has never intended any such thing, no more than it intends to force Israel to grant the Palestinian peoople statehood.

Being against a people's self-determination is the same as being against democracy. The most fundamentally democratic thing is self-determination.

The Kurds have been fighting the U.S.' wars in Iraq and Syria. Today Trump stood reality on its head, cynically saying he doesn't want America fighting other people's wars. But it has been the Kurds fighting America's wars. The U.S. screeches a lot about "terrorism," but won't shed its own blood to fight the terrorists. It gets others to fight and die for it, them abandons them, leaving them in the lurch.

And every day brags about how it's The Greatest Country On Earth, the most moral, the most humane, the freest, the blah blah blahest.

If the U.S. really believed in the values it professes ad nauseam, the Kurds would be its most cherished allies in that region. They are democratic, and so non-sexist that Kurdish women form all-female combat units that fight ISIS.

But the U.S. is much tighter with the likes of Saudi Arabia instead.

By your friends shall ye be known.












Herr Doktor Heinz "Henry" Kissinger of Death.

 1]  See "Kissinger and the Kurds," Kurdistan Commentary, Feb. 4, 2010, and "Telling It Like It Is: Kissinger and the Kurds," Christian Science Monitor, Oct. 18, 1996.







Elizabeth Warren Defends Israeli Slaughter of Palestinians With Israeli Propaganda Talking Points



Senator Elizabeth Warren toes the Democratic Party's line on Israel, 1000% support for that racist, settler colonialist nation's slow-motion destruction of the Palestinian people, a project that began in 1948 with terrorism and massacres and has continued non-stop ever since.

Warren parrots the themes of Israeli propaganda: Israel has no choice but to periodically destroy the infrastructure of Gaza and slaughter people there in "self-defense," and only kills civilians and destroys schools, UN shelters, and critical infrastructure because Hamas uses the population as human shields (among themselves the Israelis refer to their regular wars on defenseless Gaza as "mowing the lawn"); Israel is in "a dangerous neighborhood" (Israel's neighbors are in far more danger than Israel ever was in, from Israel); Israel "has the right to defend itself;" no one says it doesn't. What Israel does is NOT self-defense, it is oppression and assault on the Palestinian people with the aim of making a Jewish state that extends from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River. That has always been the project.

Warren is even against the U.S. NOT supporting continued Israeli Jewish expansion with the ceaseless theft of Palestinian homes, lands, and means of economic livelihood. The U.S. literally funds the dispossession of the Palestinian people.

The U.S. itself being a colonialist settler nation that virtually exterminated the previous inhabitants of the land that is now the U.S., one could see a natural affinity for Israel by U.S. elites.

Anti-Semitism in Western societies has been replaced with anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry. Conveniently, Islamofascist terrorism periodically creates small massacres in Western nations which are hyped to mega-significance my saturation media coverage to create fear and panic, providing justification for the bigotry. (Every few days in Afghanistan, and frequently in Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, Muslims are the victims of far bloodier atrocities by the Islamofascists.)
  




Wednesday, October 02, 2019

"No One Is Above The Law," Except Untouchable Joe Biden

When Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi announced on September 24th that she was siccing her political underlings on president Donald J. "Jackass" Trump to trump up excuses to impeach him, one of the hackneyed political themes in the canned announcement she intoned was "No one is above the law."

Except, apparently, Democratic Party poohbahs like Joseph Biden, Bill and Hillary Clinton, et al.

The Clintons ran a super-grifting operation called the "Clinton Foundation," which collected BILLIONS of dollars from foreign governments and corporations (domestic and foreign), including millions of dollars from Russia that resulted in Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signing off on a deal allowing Russia interests to buy 20% of the U.S.' uranium reserves. [1]

As for Biden, when he was vice president in the regime of Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama, Obama put him in charge of dealing with the Ukraine after the U.S. seized its government and made it into a newly-minted U.S. quasi-satrapy.  PURELY COINCIDENTALLY, the Democrats and most of the U.S. corporate media want us to believe, Biden's neer-do-well son Hunter was appointed to the board of directors of Ukrainian gas company Burisma, owned by a Ukrainian plutocrat, with "compensation," as they say, of $50,000 a MONTH. By the time Hunter resigned from his post this year, he had pocketed $3,000,000. Hunter Biden has exactly zero experience in the fossil fuel industry.

Now, if that was perfectly legitimate, why did Hunter resign this year? He resigned because his Dad is running for president, and they didn't want any questions about this, apparently.

The U.S. propaganda system is almost uniformly claiming there's "nothing there" and "no evidence" of anything wrong with the Bidens's Ukraine scam. At the same time, they think it is illegitimate to investigate the matter to find evidence. And the Democrats are OUTRAGED at the betrayal of the national interest, the "threat to national security" Trump committed by delaying arms delivery for a few days to the Kiev regime so they can kill more people in the breakaway eastern Ukraine, how venal that Trump acted for "personal interest," not the national interest (it was apparently in the national interest that vice president Biden's son get $3 million from a U.S. client regime) by trying to "get dirt" on a rival for the 2020 presidential election. (The power elite have already chosen Biden to run against Trump: the voters will have to be manipulated to get into line.)

By the way, "the" media almost always "forgets" to mention how much Hunter was being paid, or that he had ABSOLUTELY NO QUALIFICATIONS to be serving on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.

Except one perfect qualification: he's the son of Joseph Biden. On its face this is corrupt. You only need to know the facts I've stated.

SIX- Count 'Em. SIX!- committees in the House have been unleashed to cobble together excuses to impeach Trump. One, the "Intelligence" committee, is led by one of the most dishonest political mountebanks in the country, Adam Schiff. He's spent the past three years spewing disinformation about Russian subversion of U.S. "democracy" and (non-existent) slam dunk "evidence" "proving" Trump is a Russian agent/puppet/captive of Putin. Another committee, the Judiciary, is headed by Jerrold Nadler, who has also spent the past three years demagogically pushing the Russiagate hoax. Nadler insisted that the (actually nonexistent) Russian hack of a DNC computer was just the same as the Japanese bombing of U.S. military bases at Pearl Harbor in World War II. (Why the U.S. didn't declare war on Russia- the Democrats' man, Obama, was president at the time- Nadler didn't explain.) [2]

As in the failed Russiagate hoax, this latest pseudo-scandal rests on the thinnest tissue of actual facts. [3]

On July 25th Trump called Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky (the TV comedian who replaced billionaire president Petro Poroshenko, installed after the U.S.-sponsored coup overthrew president Viktor Yanukovych). The notes of the phone call reveal that it was friendly, and contrary to Adam "Schifty" Schiff, not at all like a "Mafia" gangster "extorting" someone. You can read it for yourself online as the notes of the government drones listening in have been made public.

A so-called "whistleblower" (a CIA officer) filed a complaint August 12th with the Inspector General in the office of the Director of National Intelligence. This CIA person was complaining about Trump's phone call to the Ukrainian president based on what other people told him. In other words, the content of the complaint is entirely hearsay. And before the Democrats even got a chance to see the transcript of the call OR the CIA officer's complaint, Pelosi announced the start of impeachment "investigations."

First the verdict, then the evidence.

This Alice In Wonderland-style political offensive against Trump is being promoted relentlessly every day by most U.S. media. They are making a mountain out of a molehill.

Trump was mainly concerned with getting facts about Ukraine's interference in the 2016 presidential election, during which they provided financial information about Paul Manafort, who was forced to resign as Trump's campaign manager as a result. (Trump went through several campaign managers, including the thuggish Corey Lewandowski, who notoriously manhandled a female reporter and is a nasty goon.) Secondarily he asked for Ukrainian cooperation with Attorney General William Barr and with Rudolph Giuliani, working as a private attorney for Trump, and who was once dubbed "America's Mayor" by that arbiter of reality, Time magazine. (Giuliani was an assistant U.S. Attorney General in the fascist Reagan regime, then U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, then New York City mayor, then a spectacularly failed presidential candidate.)

Of course, Trump and the opportunists who gather around and cling to him like dust on a dust mop are grifters just as the Democratic Party is a party of grifters. What we are seeing is a tawdry power struggle between factions of the power elite. Don't be fooled by the ludicrously grandiloquent rhetoric of Democratic Party hacks. (I'll have more on that in a later essay.)

Why is the scandal-ridden Joe Biden being protected by a solid wall of lies by "the" media and Democratic Party politicians?

Obviously because the bulk of the power establishment has already chosen him to be the next emperor- I mean president of the U.S. As a fallback, they are promoting Senator Elizabeth Warren, who projects a false front that is superficially similar to Senator Bernie Sanders, who is also running. Warren is, like Hillary Clinton, scamming the public. Secretly in bed with big money interests, she is doing a political chameleon act of sounding politically like Sanders in public. Warren recently edged ahead of Biden in the polls, so she has become the "safety" candidate for the corporate/imperialist power structure.

Thanks to the sheeplike quality of the mass of the citizenry, the next president won't be from the Green Party or the Libertarian Party. It will be either more Trump or a Democratic Party political stooge of big capital.

The U.S. oligarchy will have the populace choose between cyanide and arsenic. Let Freedom Ring!


    
  Nancy Pelosi. "When I said 'No one is above the law,' what I MEANT 
                                     was we are going to find reasons to impeach Donald Trump."

1] The New York Times even ran an extensive expose of this matter, which has been chucked down the memory hole by U.S. media, including by the NYT itself. You'd never guess from reading any article since that it was ever published in that paper. See "Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal," NYT, April 23, 2015, and "Donations to the Clinton Foundation, and a Russian Uranium Takeover," NYT, April 22, 2015.
2] Both chambers of the U.S. Congress are structured in hierarchical fashion, with the Speaker of the House controlling that body through her various powers, such as appointing and removing committee chairs, who in turn wield power over the committees. In the Senate, the Majority Leader of whichever of the two-parties of the political cartel that monopolized political power in the U.S. has the majority of Senators, has near total control in that body. Nothing can come up for a vote unless he allows it. (Currently that person is Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, a venal being.)

The Speaker of the House is chosen by majority vote of the Representatives (Congresspeople), which in practice means the party with the majority chooses the Speaker. Obviously the Speaker has to be politically adroit so as not to alienate the members of her party. In the Senate, the caucus of the majority party chooses its leader, who in turn is effectively boss of the Senate.

The way impeachment works is this: impeachment is akin to an indictment. Under the U.S. Constitution, any Federal official can be impeached for "high crimes and misdemeanors," a completely vague term that is otherwise unexplained in that document. It is obviously subjective, yet legal "scholars" and "experts" and even run-of-the-mill politicians pontificate in tones of certainty as to what is and isn't "impeachable." In practice it is whatever the House of Representatives decides.

If a majority of the House votes to impeach, the matter is presented to the Senate for a simulacrum of a "trial." The Senate has to vote by a two-thirds majority to actually remove the accused official from office.

A handful of Federal judges who were guilty of outrageous behavior and refused to resign (they have lifetime appointments, a stupid feature of the Constitution) have been impeached, convicted, and removed from office.

Two presidents have been impeached: Andrew Johnson, a virulent racist who became president at the end of the U.S. Civil War when president Abraham Lincoln was murdered by Confederate agents AFTER the Confederacy had surrendered, and Bill "This Isn't A Pickle In My Pocket, I'm Actually Glad To See You" Clinton. Neither was convicted, so neither was removed from office.

it is virtually impossible to imagine a scenario by which Trump can be convicted in the Senate. The Senate has a Republican majority, and with a handful of exceptions, every Republican politician is slavishly behind Trump, because almost all Republican voters are enthusiastic Trump fans. Nothing is going to change that. Trump has a lifetime of experience sensing just how far he can push things, just how much he can get away with. So far, over three years of machinations by the secret police Deep State, and the relentless pushing by the Democrats and most of the corporate media of sham reasons for criminal charges or impeachment, first the Russiagate hoax, now the Ukraine phone call, have been utter failures. All the while, the valid reasons to criticize Trump (other than his chronic lying, which has been covered ad nauseam, and some but too little and too tame coverage of the atrocities of ICE and the Border Patrol) are mostly ignored.

3] Here's the unrefuted proof that there was no Russian hack of a DNC server (which the Democrats and their media foghorn accomplices inflated into "hacking the election" and "attacking Our Democracy).

  • The DNC refused to allow the FBI to examine their computer! This is supposedly the Crime of The Century, a foreign enemy "attacking Our Democracy," and the Dems withhold the evidence! So the FBI just took the word of the hired liars of the Dems, the notorious company Crowdstrike, who sent the FBI a censored ("redacted") report!

  • NO evidence was ever presented to back up the assertion of the Russian hack and subsequent appearance of the Democrats' emails in WikiLeaks, which revealed how the Democratic National Committee, while feigning neutrality in the primaries for the Democratic presidential nomination, was in fact a wholly owned subsidiary of the Clinton campaign and repeatedly cheated her main rival, Bernie Sanders. Obama's Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, hand-picked 3 "analysts," one each from FBI, CIA and NSA, to write the report which concluded, sans proof, that Russia was guilty. And the NSA was equivocal. Yet if there had been such a transfer of data from ANY U.S. computer to Russia, the NSA would have a copy of the data flow, since they collect and store ALL Internet traffic. These 3 analysts were inflated into "16 (sometimes 17) intelligence agencies say Russia hacked" and "the intelligence community concluded that Russia hacked" in the ensuing propaganda campaign.

  • Two of the NSA"s top technical officers (who were retired after long careers at the agency), William Binney and Kurt Wiebe, analyzed the download speed of the data transfer and tested to see if the Internet transfer speeds available at the time made such a transfer possible. Not even close. But the speed matched a transfer to a flash drive.

  • Seth Rich, a young Democratic Party worker who had access to the computer system and is suspected of being the one who passed the emails along to WikiLeaks, was murdered in Washington, D.C. His murder is unsolved. Out of all the thousands of murders committed annually in the U.S. each year, this is the ONLY ONE for which WikiLeaks has offered a reward for information on, $25,000. And Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, in an interview on European television, tiptoed right up to the edge of admitted that Rich was the source.

  • Most importantly, if we pretend Russia did it, that was NOT an "attack on democracy," it was a GIFT to democracy, because it enabled the American public to be BETTER INFORMED ABOUT ONE OF THE CANDIDATES, HILLARY CLINTON. It revealed her secret speech to the Goldman Sachs conference of financiers, in which she nakedly stated that she's a two-faced manipulator and that the financiers should ignore what she says in public to the dumb rubes whose votes she needs, in fact she'll be defending THEIR interests- as indeed she always has throughout her career. When she lived in Arkansas as wife of that state's Attorney General and then Governor Bill Clinton, she sat on the board of the union-hating Walmart corporation. Her class loyalties have always been evident. In college she was a Goldwater Girl, Barry Goldwater being a fascist and racist. As virtual co-president with her husband, she was foresquare behind all his class war policies and attacks especially on the black population.