The Right Side of the News

No, they only spread shit.

Sure you can get a bunch of Democrats to agree on what it all means and tell roughly the same story although there's been a lot of dscrpancy the Republican interrogators have been exposing, and the "whistleblower" is contradicted by the phone call transcript itself, rightly understood by all the conservative commentators I hear every day.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Several of them are Republicans, especially Sondland. The two witnesses the Republicans requested supported the testimony of the other witnesses with a few discrepancies.List four significant discrepancies between any two accounts. (Slight discrepancies are characteristic of true testimony). You won't because you can't, there are none.The phone call "transcript" confirms the whistleblower's account. "We want arms" "I want a favor, investigate some Russian propaganda and revive a rightly-closed investigation against my political rival". Lots of participants were shocked at that blatant extortion. .

And those discrepancies would be? And those contradictions would be?--Percy

William Taylor was a direct witness to Sondland telling him that there was a quid pro quo. Sondland has stated that he was following Trump's orders. It isn't that hard to figure out.

It isn't Democrats testifying. These are people from the Trump Administration including non-partisan career officials.

Sondland donated a million dollars to Trump’s inauguration. Which likely had a lot to do with his appointment.

Buying an ambassadorship is a tradition practiced by both sides.But Sondland's no Democrat.

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Pay To Play? GOP Solicited $500K From Ambassador Nominee

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The Republican National Committee attempted to secure a $500,000 donation from billionaire Doug Manchester as his name was in front of the Senate awaiting a confirmation vote for an ambassadorship.

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Manchester donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and was offered the position of ambassador to Bahamas on the second day of Trump’s presidency.

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CBS News reported on Monday that in September RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel sent Manchester the solicitation as part of what the outlet described as a possible pay-for-play scheme.

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Donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration is what Sonderland did. Now we get screws turned for another $500,000 for Senate confirmation.And Sonderland, in my opinion, demonstrated amply that amateurs/pretend ambassadors do more harm than good, and that he was unsuited for the task of representing the US. He allowed Rudy to subvert the aid to Ukraine.The career diplomat ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch, wasn't going to go along with the corrupt scheme.Enjoy

Actually they think they are doing a snow-job, but it's yellow snow.

Amb. Sondland talked to Trump personally. He testifies to the fact that there was not only a quid pro quo but also that everybody (ie, Trump, Pompeo, Mulvaney, etc) was aware of it and was on board with it.Also, Pompeo was on that single phone call in question -- even though he denied it at first, he finally admitted that he had lied earlier and was indeed in on the call. LtCol Vindman was also in on the call.You did not even come close to approaching answering my primary questions in Message 3535: So then why don't Pompeo nor Mulvaney step forward and exonerate Trump with their sworn testimony? Why instead does Trump order them to not testify and they in turn order their subordinates to not testify? You know full well, as do we all, that if their truthful testimony would exonerate Trump then Trump would be ordering them to testify. So why doesn't Trump so order them? Everybody else is indeed a witness to the entire affair, which is not restricted to a single phone call summary filled with ellipses leaving out important parts according to first-hand witness LtCol Vindman (HINT: creationist quote-mining makes very heavy use of ellipses to leave out the parts of the quoted source that would place the quoted parts in context -- in at least one case, the first part of the sentence was from the first paragraph of the article and the second part was from the last paragraph such that the ellipsis covered up the entire article being "quoted").We are dealing with a months-long operation to pressure the Ukrainian government to give Trump personally something of value (ie, dirt on his leading potential 2020 opponent based on pure Russian propaganda), of which Trump's clear and admitted violation of federal law (ie, soliciting a foreign government for something of value to benefit yourself personally) is only one small part. That Trump was offering Zelensky something of value (ie, military aid) in exchange for services qualifies as a bribe, or that he was threatening to harm Ukraine in order to pressure Zelensky to accede to Trump's demands qualifies as extortion are just additional charges to pile upon Trump's long list of crimes and wrongdoing.Witnesses to the various parts of the entire operation to pressure the government of Ukraine are still witnesses. Let's use the metaphor of a fire. A whistleblower smells smoke which alerts him to the possibility that there might be a fire. Off hand, there are three possibilities: Let's consider another famous whistleblower whose name nobody remembers. During the infamous Watergate break-in, a security guard (the whistleblower in our story) found a door whose latch had been taped over to keep that door open. That led to further investigation which caught the "plumbers" in the act, which led to the White House's cover-up, which led eventually to the impeachment hearings against Nixon, which led eventually to Nixon having to resign the Presidency in order to avoid impeachment.The role of a whistleblower is to draw attention to a potential problem. The role of the investigators following up on that whistleblower report is to determine whether an actual problem exists and to refer further investigation to appropriate agencies.That is exactly what has happened. 
So, Faith, the question still stands: Why don't any of the primary witnesses (ie, Pompeo, Mulvaney, Trump, et al.) come forward to testify? If their testimony would exonerate Trump, then they should be strongly motivated to testify. The only reasonable explanation for their extremely stubborn refusal to testify would be that their truthful testimony would only condemn Trump and themselves.

Agreed. Most ambassadorships are more figurehead positions in nations with no problems. So long as you can put on a good party, etc, you're qualified. In the more troubled parts of the world, that's where we need the professionals like Marie Yovanovitch. Somebody likened it to the two different kinds of film producers: the ones who only write the checks to finance the film (eg, Steven Mnuchin who produced Wonder Woman) and the ones invested in making that film.Yet some such appointments can be surprising. When President Reagan in 1981 made actor John Gavin ambassador to Mexico, we all rolled our eyes. But then we learned that Gavin had a master's in Latin American affairs, so he actually had some useful skills. Now I find that John Gavin is himself Hispanic. So not all suspicious looking appointments are necessarily bad. Gordon Sondland turns out to have been active in politics before this, albeit on the state level (Oregon) as well as in philanthropic efforts where he is supposed to have made a good name for himself. He's not the complete babe in the woods politically, though he undoubtedly now finds himself out of his depth being suddenly thrust into the international deeps.I agree that what we're seeing is that everybody is trying to push him under the bus (AKA "the Gordon Problem"), so his response is to drag everybody else under the bus with him.

There can be times when you might want to eat the yellow snow.I've heard about Siberian shamans using psychedelics in their religious experiences which might lead to our Xmas fantasies of flying reindeer. I'm pretty sure it's mushrooms that were used, but please substitute whatever it ends up actually being. That psychedelic bio-material is poisonous to humans, but not to reindeer. Once it has been filtered through the reindeers' kidneys, the output was no longer poisionous though the psychedelic properties were still intact. Therefore, you could safely eat the yellow snow in order to have your vivid religious experiences.

Funny I recall Sondland specifically saying Trump specifically said he specifrically did not want a quid pro quo. He was simply asking Zelensky to do what Zelensky said he was going to do, clear up Ukrainian corruption, and there was no aid involved in that request. The aid was completely independent. But it's becoming pretty clear that the Democrats are going to make it all up anyway.

That was only after they got caught.

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Sondland testified that he asked Trump for clarification on what he wanted from Ukraine on Sept. 9, the same day three House committees announced they were opening an investigation into an allegation Trump had pressured Ukraine for political gain.

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"He said, 'I want nothing. I want no quid pro quo. I just want Zelensky to do the right thing, to do what he ran on,'" Sondland testified.
Trump Impeachment hearing: Key quotes from Gordon Sondland testimony

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