USA: President Trump's Turning Point USA Speech Features Slurred Speech, Windmill Rant

You will be shocked to learn that the Center for Public Integrity obtained emails this weekend that show a Trump administration official put in place a hold on nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine just 90 minutes after the president's infamous July 25 phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky. The senior budget official in question, Michael Duffey, even asked the folks he was emailing at the Pentagon to keep the whole thing on the low. This is the quid pro quo, which they already admitted to, but here it is again in the contemporaneous emails. As a reminder, even Jonathan Turley—the witness Trump's Republican allies called before the House to naysay the impeachment proceedings—admitted a proven quid pro quo would be impeachable.

Everyone knows what happened and why. And yet we're still subjected to Republican senators saying Donald Trump was gravely concerned about generalized corruption in Ukraine. Right, just like his anti-corruption initiatives at his hotels, where he rakes in money from corporate and foreign interests—some of whom don't even stay in the rooms they pay for!—while his government makes policy that may affect those interests. The audacity of these people. Meanwhile, they refuse to allow any direct parties to the scheme—including, say, Duffey—to testify in the Senate trial. Surely, since these folks are all telling the truth about how innocent the whole thing was, they would offer the same story under oath (and penalty of perjury)?

Read more at: President Trump's Turning Point USA Speech Features Slurred Speech, Windmill Rant

USA - the Trump impeachment: Nobody is above the law’: Americans take to streets in support of Trump impeachment

Hours before Congress began to convene for Wednesday’s vote to make Donald Trump only the third US president in history to be impeached, thousands of Americans from across the country gathered to make their views plain under the banner: “Nobody is above the law”.

From snowy Portland in Maine to an even chillier Anchorage in Alaska, 4,500 miles away, protesters turned out on the eve of the impeachment vote to lend their voices to the effort to hold Trump accountable for the abuse of power and obstruction of Congress of which he is accused. Organisers of the nationwide demonstrations, drawn from a coalition of groups including Indivisible, MoveOn and Greenpeace, recorded 617 events nationwide.

The protests ranged from tiny to thousands strong. In Concord, Massachusetts, a small crowd gathered at the historically poignant spot of the Battle of Lexington and Concord that sparked the revolutionary war.

They waved placards that quoted one of the founding fathers, John Adams, who said: “Facts Are Stubborn Things”. That paean to truth was poignant too. At the very moment the Concord protesters were braving the sleet, Trump was delivering a six-page letter full of insults and ranting to Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the House, denouncing the impeachment process.

Note EU-Digest: Trump is a man for whom everything is transactional, and who is engaged in a constant struggle for short-term advantage. Blustering, bullying, threatening and arm-twisting are his tools. He doesn’t feel bound by the rules and niceties that have guided most of his predecessors, or by the constitutional and institutional limits that have constrained them. Norms, shared values, civil institutions and even the rule of law take a back seat, in his playbook, to the ceaseless struggle for the upper hand. He doesn’t seem to make much distinction between what’s good for America and what’s good for him personally. His disdain for the truth and his attraction to conspiracy theories are well known. Republicans will pay a heavy price for following him.

Read more at: ‘Nobody is above the law’: Americans take to streets in support of Trump impeachment | US news | The Guardian