Play Nice Random Chat Thread IV

[ferball]

Despite his shirt the guy is a traitor.

We formed an alliance that went to war with Nazi Germany. We fought them till they were broken, demanded their unconditional surrender then executed their leaders. We destroyed their nation and made it into something else.

We never made peace with the Nazis even tho our allies sheltered some of them.

So he can fly whatever flag he wants but the guy is technically a traitor and should get a bullet in the head.

 

[Tectonic]

They actually have a point.

Only Scotty could screw up putting out a fire, so I'll play along and condemn his poorly implemented rain-on-fire policy

'The water was thick and black': Bushfire ash causes major fish kill in NSW river

'This has just been on a scale that's never be seen before.'

7news.com.au

 

[Snake_Baker]

Only Scotty could screw up putting out a fire, so I'll play along and condemn his poorly implemented rain-on-fire policy

 

[DesertRoo]

Anyone following the Daphne Galiaza assassination, Malta’s police commissioner just resigned.

 

[Tectonic]

I mean if you interpreted my post in a serious manner your gif is better directed at the man in the mirror, but cheers for the reply.

 

[Snake_Baker]

 

[DesertRoo]

Looking forward to some juicy Hunter Biden emails? “my dad will take care of it....”

 

[ferball]

Only Scotty could screw up putting out a fire, so I'll play along and condemn his poorly implemented rain-on-fire policy

'The water was thick and black': Bushfire ash causes major fish kill in NSW river

'This has just been on a scale that's never be seen before.'

7news.com.au

Only an idiot would confuse weather with failure to act because of political optics and general incompetence.

Then support the senseless murder of thousands of fish.

 

[Tectonic]

Only an idiot would confuse weather with failure to act because of political optics and general incompetence.

Then support the senseless murder of thousands of fish.

Seriously though, it's a horrible outcome and I'm shocked at how bad the season has been (and we still have Feb to go)
There's smoke over South America now from what's happened

There's going to be a cascade of bad news stemming from these fires for a while to come.

 

[benbanjo]

Also hope someone is crazy enough to take DeNiros metaphor seriously and literally rub a bag of shit in Trumps face. That would be amazing

What is so bad about Trump, honest question? I'm talking about his term as president that is.

You don't think Bernie comes off as a Socialist?

 

[ferball]

Seriously though, it's a horrible outcome and I'm shocked at how bad the season has been (and we still have Feb to go)
There's smoke over South America now from what's happened

There's going to be a cascade of bad news stemming from these fires for a while to come.

I think the smoke is gonna be back here soon isn't it? After circumnavigating the globe the first time.

I wonder what effect it will have on climate change, if any. It won't be neutral but it'd be good if it was more like clouds than standard gh gases in terms of climatic effect. Ie keeps some heat out of the lower atmosphere or actual surface of the planet.

 

[Tectonic]

I think the smoke is gonna be back here soon isn't it? After circumnavigating the globe the first time.

I wonder what effect it will have on climate change, if any. It won't be neutral but it'd be good if it was more like clouds than standard gh gases in terms of climatic effect. Ie keeps some heat out of the lower atmosphere or actual surface of the planet.

There'll be some sort of knock on effects but I don't think the smoke itself will be the issue.

Swirling smoke

Animated maps and satellite data show how Australia's bushfire smoke has spread.

graphics.reuters.com

This is a really interesting little bit about it

 

[Snake_Baker]

Breaking news: Shit show is not popular

Ten confirms The Project is set for a re-shuffle to boost ratings

Channel Ten has confirmed The Project is set for a re-shuffle this year, in an effort to boost its early evening ratings.

www.dailymail.co.uk

 

[giantroo]

The Wiggles Singer Greg Collapses into a Heart Attack last night

 

[Snake_Baker]

 

[Gasometer]

The Wiggles Singer Greg Collapses into a Heart Attack last night

Saw them a few times in Concert and they were full on energetic. Hope he is okay. Wags and the rest seem to be the ones who notice it first.

 

[Val Keating]

What is so bad about Trump, honest question? I'm talking about his term as president that is.

You don't think Bernie comes off as a Socialist?

I have my own thoughts on the bloke, I think he’s a racist narcissist. I’m genuinely worried about what he’s going to do when he’s on his way out. His attack on Iran recently has strengthened those fears.

Bernie is a Democratic Socialist. It’s why I like him. It’s why the DNC doesn’t.


Anyway I’ll leave it to the experts,

The A to Z of things Trump should and would be impeached for,

AMAZON

Trump has personally and repeatedly instructed the Postmaster General to double shipping rates for Amazon, in an attempt to inflict billions of dollars of new costs on founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post. “Some administration officials,” reported the Post in May 2018, “say several of Trump’s attacks aimed at Amazon have come in response to articles in The Post that he didn’t like.”

BIGOTRY
This is a president who has referred to African countries as “shitholes;” to Mexicans as “rapists;” to neo-Nazis as “very fine people.” To be clear: bigotry, racism, and white nationalism are impeachable offenses. Ask Andrew Johnson.
CNN
In the summer of 2017, Trump personally intervened to try and block a merger between AT&T and Time Warner — in order to try and punish CNN, which is owned by Time Warner, for its unfavorable coverage of him. Per the New Yorker, Trump told aides, “I’ve been telling [then-National Economic Council Director Gary] Cohn to get this lawsuit filed and nothing’s happened! I’ve mentioned it fifty times. And nothing’s happened. I want to make sure it’s filed. I want that deal blocked!”

In the summer of 2017, Trump personally intervened to try and block a merger between AT&T and Time Warner — to try and punish CNN for its unfavorable coverage of him.

DEATHS
Over the past 12 months, six migrant children aged between 2 and 16 — five from Guatemala and one from El Salvador — have died in federal custody. Over the previous 10 years, not a single migrant child died in custody. Is this not impeachable? It gets worse: As BuzzFeed News reported recently, “Immigrants held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement jails around the U.S. received medical care so bad it resulted in two preventable surgeries … and contributed to four deaths.”
EMOLUMENTS
From pitching his struggling Doral resort as a venue for the next G-7 summit, to making more than 400 lucrative visits to his own properties and businesses, to having Saudi royals bail out his underperforming hotels, Trump has been violating both the domestic and foreign emolument clauses of the Constitution from day one of his moneymaking presidency. His response to such criticisms? “You people with this phony emoluments clause.”
FRAUD
The president of the United States is a fraudster. Don’t take my word for it. In November 2016, less than two weeks after he was elected, Trump settled three different fraud lawsuits related to his Trump University for $25 million. Earlier this month, as the New York Attorney General Letitia James formally announced, the president was “forced to pay $2 million for misusing charitable funds for his own political gain,” and his Trump Foundation was “shut down for its misconduct.” Trump isn’t fit to run a university or a charity, so how is he fit to run the country?
GENERAL SERVICES ADMINISTRATION
As the New York Times reported in October 2018, the General Services Administration, which manages real estate for the federal government, had planned to turn the FBI’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. “over to a commercial developer” — until, that is, the president intervened to veto the sale. As a group of Democratic lawmakers pointed out, Trump was “‘dead opposed’ to the government selling the property, which would have allowed commercial developers to compete directly with the Trump Hotel” only a block away. Is this not worthy of further investigation and, possibly, impeachment?
HUSH MONEY
We know that Trump’s former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, who is serving a three-year prison sentence for campaign finance violations, tax fraud, and bank fraud, made illegal hush money payments to two women — Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal — who claimed to have had affairs with Trump. We also know, thanks to federal prosecutors, that Cohen “acted in coordination and at the direction of” the president himself. How is this brazen violation of campaign finance laws not an impeachable offense?
INCITEMENT OF VIOLENCE
The president is a threat to law and order. As New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait has observed: “On at least eight occasions, he has encouraged his supporters — including members of the armed forces — to attack his political opponents.” In addition, a bevy of domestic terrorists arrested since 2016 have cited either Trump’s name, his inflammatory rhetoric, or both.
Read Our Complete CoverageAll the President’s Crimes
JARED
Trump demanded that his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, be granted a security clearance, despite objections from intelligence officials who warned that Kushner could be compromised by his business ties to foreign governments. The president may have the right to give anyone a security clearance and yet, as House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerrold Nadler explained in March, “You can do things that are within your power that are abuses of power and that are crimes.”
KIDS IN CAGES
The Trump administration, as a matter of policy, separated more than 5,400 children — including babies and toddlers — from their migrant parents at the Mexico border. Hundreds of those kids were locked up in cages. This was a clear violation of international law, and experts with the United Nations’ Human Rights Council also said the policy may have amounted to “torture.”
LIES, LIES, AND LIES
Trump has told more than 15,000 falsehoodssince coming to office. To quote presidential historian Douglas Brinkley: “There is no president that lied as if they were a form of breathing, except Donald Trump.” But lying isn’t an impeachable offense, right? Wrong. The very first article of impeachment against Nixon accused him of “making or causing to be made false or misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States.”

The very first article of impeachment against Nixon accused him of “making or causing to be made false or misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States.”

MEDIA ATTACKS
Trump, as even Fox News host Chris Wallace observed last week, “is engaged in the most direct, sustained assault on freedom of the press in our history.” The president has asked the FBI to jail reporters who publish leaks, threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of media organizations that criticize him, and relentlessly attacked and demonized journalists as “scum,” “slime,” “sick people,” “fake news,” and “the enemy of the people.” Members of the press have received death threats from people echoing the president’s vile language.
NEGLIGENCE
Local officials in Puerto Rico have blamedpresidential negligence and incompetence for the deaths of nearly 3,000 people in Puerto Rico, in the wake of Hurricane Maria in 2017. Trump’s response? He falsely claimedthat 3,000 Americans didn’t die. He also tried to “illegally withhold” much-needed and congressionally appropriated disaster relief money. According to the Washington Post, Trump told White House officials that “he did not want a single dollar going to Puerto Rico. … Instead, he wanted more of the money to go to Texas and Florida.”
OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election identified 10 instances of possible obstruction of justice by the president. More than 1,000 former federal prosecutors agreedthat Trump’s conduct, had he been a private citizen, would have resulted “in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.”
PERJURY
We know Trump lies all the time — but how about the lies he tells under oath? The president told the Mueller inquiry: “I do not recall discussing WikiLeaks with [former adviser Roger Stone], nor do I recall being aware of Mr. Stone having discussed WikiLeaks with individuals associated with my campaign.” In November, however, his former deputy campaign manager, Rick Gates, said in court that Trump had been aware in advance of WikiLeaks’ disclosures in 2016, based on his conversations with Stone. The response of conservative lawyer George Conway, husband of Kellyanne? “Perjury.”
QANON
You’ve heard of QAnon, right? The batshit crazy group of online conspiracy theorists obsessed with a deep-state plot against Trump? The president has retweeted QAnon supporters on multiple occasions; invitedthem to speak at his rallies; and hosted them at the White House. Why does this matter? The FBI has warned that QAnon will “very likely” drive extremists “to carry out criminal or violent acts.” So how is it OK for the president to endorse or promote such a dangerous group?
RAPE
Trump has not only been accused of sexual assault and harassment by dozens of women, but in June, the writer E. Jean Carroll also accused him of raping her in the dressing room of a luxury department store. “I haven’t paid much attention,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters, when asked to comment on Carroll’s shocking claim. But why not? Shouldn’t rape be an impeachable offense? “I wish there had been a third Article of Impeachment against Donald Trump,” Carroll tweeted last week. “The Abuse Of Women.”
SYRIA
Less than three months after entering office, in April 2017, Trump launched airstrikesagainst Syria, without a vote in Congress. Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu, a former attorney in the Judge Advocate General Corps of the U.S. Air Force, called the strikes “FRICKIN ILLEGAL.” And remember: As former deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes has acknowledged, the lack of congressional authorization, and threat of impeachment from House Republicans, “was a factor” in the controversial decision by the Obama administration not to bomb Syria in 2013.

Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu called Trump’s airstrikes on Syria “FRICKIN ILLEGAL.”

TAX EVASION
In October 2018, a blockbuster 13,000-word investigation by the New York Times found that Trump “received at least $413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate empire, much of it through tax dodges in the 1990s.” What kind of dodges? “He and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents. … Records indicate that Mr. Trump helped his father take improper tax deductions worth millions more.”
ULTRA VIRES
Remember how Trump declared a fake “national emergency” in February to circumvent Congress and fund his border wall? Well, Trump himself bluntly admitted that there was no emergency or even urgency: “I didn’t need to do this. But I’d rather do it much faster.” His critics, therefore, argue that the president acted “ultra vires,” a Latin phrase meaning “beyond the powers.”
VLADIMIR
The Mueller report may have ruled out a criminal conspiracy between Trump and Vladimir Putin, but we know that Trump welcomed Russian help during the 2016 campaign and later suggested that he wasn’t bothered by Moscow’s interference in the election. We also know that Trump handed over classified intel to the Russians in the Oval Office. As Harvard law professor and former Bush administration official Jack Goldsmith co-wrote, “Questions of criminality aside … if the President gave this information away through carelessness or neglect, he has arguably breached his oath of office,” and there is “thus no reason why Congress couldn’t consider a grotesque violation of the President’s oath as a standalone basis for impeachment.”
WITNESS INTIMIDATION
In January, Cohen announced that he was postponing his public congressional testimony because of “ongoing threats against his family” from the president and his attorney Rudy Giuliani. In November, Trump attackedformer U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch as she was testifying in front of the House Intelligence Committee, prompting committee Chair Adam Schiff to accusethe president of “witness intimidation in real time.” This is the behavior not of a president but of a mob boss.

Deconstructed PodcastMehdi Hasan unpacks the most consequential news of the week. Listen and subscribe.
XI
Why is there no mention of the Chinese President Xi Jinping in either of the two articles of impeachment? Why only the Ukrainian president? If the Democrats’ argument is that involving foreign governments in U.S. elections is an impeachable offense, as well as a threat to national security, then why stop at Ukraine? What about China? Listen to the president himself, speaking to reporters outside the White House in October: “China should start an investigation into the Bidens, because what happened in China is just about as bad as what happened with Ukraine.”
YEMEN
In Syria, Trump dropped bombs without congressional approval. In Yemen, the scene of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, Trump has helped Saudi Arabia to continue to drop bombs despite explicit opposition from both chambers of Congress. As an analyst in The Guardian argued, Trump’s decision to veto a bipartisan bill calling for an end to U.S. military involvement in the Saudi air war amounted to “flagrant defiance of the 1973 War Powers Act that checks a president’s ability to engage in armed conflict without express consent of Congress.”
ZELENSKY
The president of the United States didn’t just abuse his power in attempting to pressure the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden; he tried to bribe him. Pelosi accused Trump of bribery and so, too, did the House Democrats’ 169-page impeachment report. Yet, as Vox noted, “When Democrats actually unveiled their articles of impeachment last week, bribery was MIA.” Why?

The A to Z of Things Trump Could and Should Have Been Impeached For

Are we expected to believe that House Democrats really think Trump has only committed two impeachable offenses?

theintercept.com

 

[Val Keating]

Only an idiot would confuse weather with failure to act because of political optics and general incompetence.

Then support the senseless murder of thousands of fish.

To be fair Scotty from marketing has probably been praying to his god for that rain. He would literally see it as divine intervention

 

[Snake_Baker]

I am bringing out my own line of "scented" candles.



Only $149.99 (including postage).

PM to place your order before stocks run out.

 

[Snake_Baker]

 

[Snake_Baker]

Can one of the resident "Laborites" confirm the authenticity of this?

 

[Val Keating]

Can one of the resident "Laborites" confirm the authenticity of this?

View attachment 807678

Wouldn’t be surprised. When it comes down to it they’re all the same. I see there’s a lot of ex politicians going on about climate change action on Twitter. The hypocrites didn’t do anything when they were in.

 

[Orange Peanut]

Albanese seems to be setting Labor up as the alternative to Liberal if you want them out but don't want your life to change.

Probably a decent strategy tbh.

 

[Snake_Baker]

Albanese seems to be setting Labor up as the alternative to Liberal if you want them out but don't want your life to change.

Probably a decent strategy tbh.

If they cut the crap and just focused on basic workers & underprivileged folks, then I reckon they would romp in the next election.

However, they just have too much bullshit baggage on board at the moment. The party needs a serious enema.

 

[Snake_Baker]

One of the more common sense political critiques you will find (~54:00 onwards)