nobody reads what you link

Fixed it for you

"You could have just read the whole article that I linked"

No one has the time to do that.

"As far as the "evidence" you require, diplomacy and foreign policy are skills not science, "

In other words, there is no tangible evidence that Trumps obnoxious personality is actually harming America on the world stage, certainly not to the degree to negate the economic gains we are enjoying.

Obama was supposed to make everyone love us, he toured the world and told them all how we're nothing special. The he made a pitch to the International Olympic Committee for Chicago to host the Olympics, and we were eliminated in the first round.

The likeability of the POTUS, probably doesn't mean much, because America is so much more than one person. I find it hard to believe that foreign leaders make big decisions based on how much they like the current occupant of the White House. If they did, the entire civilized world would have imposed sanctions on us.

Find a soapbox that has some substance to it?

I read fine...though I'll admit to struggling to decipher some of the gibberish here

And you call my posts gibberish

new Quinnipiac national poll on 2020 general election shows every prospective Democratic nominee beating Trump :

Biden 51%, Trump 42%
Sanders 51%, Trump 43%
Warren 50%, Trump 43%
Bloomberg 48%, Trump 42%
Buttigieg 48%, Trump 43%
Klobuchar 47%, Trump 43%
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that's what hillary said

This is great news, obviously the #^&#^&#^&#^&#^&#^&#^&s will roll.👍🏿
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From the law-and-order party to the I'm-voting-for-the-guy-who-calls-the-FBI-scum party...

...in 48 months.

What a *powerful* set of principles the GOP had.
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This next election will certainly be a great opportunity to finish draining the swamp.
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With Mulvaney, Jared, Ivanka and Miller advising Trump what could possibly go wrong. Maybe in another four years, he could finally get all the required cabinet heads appointed and cleared. He knows how, oil executives run the EPA, get some bankers to control the money, Miller of course will be in line to run homeland security and we probably will get Rudy to be our Russian ambassador; assuming he can keep himself out of jail.

You want to drain the swamp, don't put more scumbags in it, think more along the lines of term limits and better regulations on lobbyists and campaign contributions.

I appreciate your perspective
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Can this be right ?

If a Democrat is President, lying about a blow-job is grounds for impeachment

If a Republican is President, betraying his country's defence policy again Russia...isn't

What am I missing here ?

Generally, Presidents are in charge of defence policy.

In this case Floridaman withheld aid appropriated by Congress, after the statutory requirements set by Congress were met and still continues to hold 35 million in aid.

Temporary withholding funds for assuring that they are not wasted on corruption should not be cause for impeachment, nor even be considered a crime. Nor should lying about getting a blow job--unless it was under oath. But even then, a lesser slap on the wrist would be appropriate.

On the other hand getting the blow job could put the President under threat of blackmail which could be used to influence how he would apply or skew defense policy. It can be argued that any misstep of the President could be used as a means to influence his decisions on any policy, defense or otherwise. The point being, not that it would necessarily be impeachable, but that there need not be a distinction between missteps in regard to the effect on defense policy.

I have no idea what you are trying to say in the last paragraph, I tried to parse it?
Are you saying his actions were because he was incompetent and therefore the missteps should not be impeachable?

The last paragraph was not specifically about Trump. It was a general comment pointing out that any inappropriate action by any President could be used (e.g. blackmail) against him to skew his handling of defense policy. So there would be no need for a distinction between a blow job or most any other misdeed that a President committed in terms of its potential impact on his defense policy.

Ergo, as for your implied comparison between the Trump and Clinton impeachment, they can both be considered a possible impact on defense policy. And, in my opinion, neither amount to an impeachable offense.

Although, clearly, Trump is not ultimately guilty of withholding funds. And he did, on a few occasions, explain why he temporarily did And Clinton, clearly, lied under oath.

It's not clear at all, and the testimony conflicts with your statement.

Also the documents that would prove one way or another are being withheld as part of Floridamans obstruction, so just what do you think the documents say?

This is the stuff that people in previous administrations have been indicted for and likely will this time also.

Cooper, during Oct. 23 testimony before the three House committees leading the impeachment inquiry into Trump's Ukraine dealings, also said that she had been told Trump had repeatedly expressed concerns about Ukraine and military aid to the country — weeks before the aid was frozen.

Cooper told impeachment investigators that she and other Pentagon officials had answered questions about the Ukraine assistance in the middle of June — so she was surprised when one of her subordinates told her that a hold had been placed on the funds after an interagency meeting in July 18.

“I got, you know, I got a readout from the meeting — there was discussion in that session about the — about OMB [Office of Management and Budget] saying that they were holding the Congressional Notification related to” Ukraine, Cooper testified, according to the transcript.

Cooper, according to the transcript of her testimony, described the hold as "unusual."

Cooper said that she attended a meeting on July 23, where "this issue" of Trump's "concerns about Ukraine and Ukraine security assistance" came up. She said in that meeting, the president's concerns were "conveyed" by acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney.

Asked by lawmakers if the president was authorized to order that type of hold, Cooper said there were concerns that he wasn't.

"Well, I'm not an expert on the law, but in that meeting immediately deputies began to raise concerns about how this could be done in a legal fashion because there was broad understanding in the meeting that the funding — the State Department funding related to an earmark for Ukraine and that the DOD funding was specific to Ukraine security assistance. So the comments in the room at the deputies' level reflected a sense that there was not an understanding of how this could legally play out. And at that meeting the deputies agreed to look into the legalities and to look at what was possible," she said, according to the transcript.

At the next meeting with national security personnel, she said she told attendees "there were two legally available mechanisms should the President want to stop assistance" — a presidential rescission notice to Congress or for the Defense Department to do “a reprogramming action.”

“But I mentioned that either way, there would need to be a notification to Congress,” she said, according to the transcript.

Asked if that happened, Cooper said, "That did not occur."

In all the relevant inter-agency discussions, Cooper testified, it wasn't just Defense Department officials who believed the aid should flow to Ukraine.

"It was unanimous with the exception of the statements by OMB representatives, and those statements were relaying higher level guidance," she said, according to the transcript.

Investigators have zeroed in on the testimony of several key figures in the Ukraine affair — including Bill Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, and George Kent, a deputy assistant secretary of state who worked on Ukraine and five other countries — to support the allegation that the Trump administration froze aid intended for Ukraine as part of an attempt to pressure the country to open probes that would benefit Trump politically.

I said the he is ultimately not guilty of withholding the funds. The funds were delivered. If there is still some relatively small amount left, there may still be a reason for that. I don't know.

Lots of people have gone been convicted for taking money "temporarily"

Of course Floridaman doesn't believe that attempting to get something for performing an official duty is a crime, or even something you shouldn't do. And you know: "say Norway"

Maybe that's why he is looking at pardoning Blagojevich.

“Lobbyists for a children’s hospital wanted Blagojevich to increase Medicaid reimbursement rates, which meant eight million dollars in revenue to the hospital, But he put out the word through intermediaries that he would only do it if he got fifty thousand dollars in campaign contributions. That quid quo pro was a violation of the Hobbs Act. With Trump, the quid pro quo is taxpayer money in return for political dirt, but the idea is the same.”

By the way, Blagojevich is currently serving time and not just for that.

Trump didn't take any money.

The ask is the crime and dirt on an opponent has value
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yawn

Asking for investigation of corruption is not a crime, and Hunter Biden was not running for President, and portraying a search for truth as a search for dirt is spin. What is obviously dirty is a corrupt corporation hiring someone with little, if any, qualifications, paying him more than just about anyone else at his corporate level in the company, in order to have some powerful insurance against an investigation into the company's corruption.

You've made a lot of assumptions there.

Let's get this straight

We are really supposed to believe that Floridaman, who tolerates and even admires some of the most corrupt leaders in the world, suddenly got concerned about corruption just in time to demand an investigation of the Bidens?

Or that it’s a coincidence that the ONLY two corruption investigations Floridaman has ever demanded from a foreign country—a debunked conspiracy theory about Ukrainian interference on behalf of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election and an investigation of the Bidens—happen to correspond exactly to the baloney Floridaman dishes out at his campaign rallies?

And what about the fact that Floridaman didn’t even really demand an investigation, only a public announcement that one would be conducted? Isn’t that exactly how Trump got elected in the first place? Wasn’t Comey’s last-minute announcement of the reopening of a criminal investigation against Hillary Clinton exactly what handed Trump a comeback victory in 2016?

It worked once for Trump, so why would anybody doubt that he tried to use the same winning formula again, this time with Ukraine?

You've made a lot of assumptions there.

No, very few

Ukraine got U.S. aid in 2017.

They got U.S. aid in 2018.

Then in 2019, Vice President Biden announced he was running for president, and all of a sudden President Trump held up the aid while asking Ukraine to investigate Biden.

This debunks the false argument that the president simply doesn't like foreign aid.

He gave Ukraine the aid before 2019.

He gave them the aid after getting caught.

The only difference earlier this year is that he knew he had leverage, and he used it for personal gain.

You assume that Trump was using a formula. Everything you said was an assumption.

You're assuming that he didn't have "leverage" before. If he didn't, it may well have been due to those in power not being amenable to more American interference in their affairs, and to the possibility that they were also linked to aiding the Clinton campaign against Trump. And he was dealing with a new President in 2019. A Ukrainian President who had run an anti-corruption campaign. The previous administrations had been riddled with corruption. A supposedly corrupt prosecutor had reluctantly been removed by the previous President by the quid pro quo pressure, demand, of Joe Biden. The newly appointed prosecutor, who was also known to be corrupt, stopped the investigation of Burisma, and we are supposed to assume that it was a mere co-incidence that Biden's son had unqualifiedly been hired by them with an unduly high salary. And there was no demand that the new prosecutor be fired even though he too was considered to be corrupt.

The meeting was a recognition of the new President, and it created the occasion to ask him to actually fulfill his promise to clean up the corruption in Ukraine.

And will be until the Senate trial, when unless McConnell conducts a sham trial and allows no testimony, we will see evidence.

Till then I'll make assumptions based on past behavior in which Floridaman never gave a damn about corruption, praised the most corrupt dictators in the world, asked embattled leaders of other countries to announce investigations of his political opponents and obstructed the investigation of his misdeeds.

The Trumplican defense is LOUD and LOUDER or Dumb and Dumber as directed by the Farrelly Brothers and played by the Trumplican Reps, but no substance or exculpatory evidence.

And that's the last choice for defense of the guilty, after you've moved the goalposts to the edge of the ocean.

Other than resigning..........

the case for impeachment is pathetically weak...why waste everyone's time?...though I am rooting for a long process with lot's of witnesses

Pretty good case for one that has been so thoroughly obstructed.

Trust me PeteF., I am willing to match the $100 all of you snowflakes owe JohnR come Election Day in donations to the Republican Party.
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Your all set because the GOP position is that, if President Trump thinks he did nothing wrong, he can deny the validity of an impeachment proceeding and refuse to participate at all, because if he ever did commit an impeachable offense he'd recognize the proceeding was valid and cooperate in full.
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BINGO!

The real answer comes at the ballot. This election will be more lopsided than the last. Easy
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Keep believing
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no obstruction...tump is perfectly within his right to not cooperate with the lunatic democrats, if they don't like it they can take him to court...ironically it's the lunatic democrats that are abusing power...no surprise

unless it's valid to impeach a president because your panties are in a bunch this is entirely invalid

If Trump were to offer a blanket pardon in advance to anybody who kills a member of the Democratic congressional leadership, that would not be a crime. If he were to knowingly and deliberately understate his income by $1,000 on his federal income-tax form in order to reduce his tax burden, that would. But the former would obviously be much stronger grounds for impeachment than the latter.
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