leader of the free world

Strange reply, because both tourism and rents/real estate investment are obviously major sources of income for the Catholic Church. What are its most important sources of income? Publishing and merchandising?

Some will claim donations as the principal source, but as it is difficult to imagine a better vehicle for massive money laundering, such claims have to viewed with at least a bit of skepticism. Such a claim seems plausible for dioceses in the US, in particular, but the US is a special case in many ways.

In a lot of Europe (e.g. Italy, Spain, Germany) the state directly gives money to the Catholic Church (one checks a box on one's tax return and some euros go the Church).

To the extent that they are even available, what pass for the official figures for the Holy See's income and budget and the Vatican city's income and budget obviously don't include most of what most of us mean by the Catholic Church (they are far too small compared to the size of the institution and correspond just to the personnel and expenses of those two institutions as such). The Archdiocese of Chicago has more money than the Vatican, but when I say "Church" I mean the whole big monster, not the formal legal entities that constitute it. But I'm not sure what to say if you think the fees charged to tourists to view the Cathedrals in Barcelona aren't important parts of the financing of the Catholic Church in Catalunya.

In many locales the Catholic Church has a serious interest in maintaining in secrecy its income sources and assets because it is exposed to multibillion dollar&euro judgments for its organized protection of criminal behavior. In other cases, e.g. in Spain, it simply appropriated a lot of lands during a dictatorship. The dispute over the owernship (public or church) of the Mezquita in Cordoba is a typical example.

You'd think they'd at least have fire insurance, no?

There's an entire book about the Catholic Church and their finances called God's Bankers. From what I recall the basic takeaway is that while they have money spread across the world, their books and accounting systems are a mess.

We have that in inso.

Everybody trying to rule the day.

if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state.

-Mueller report

I think if he could, Mueller would have indicted Trump for obstruction. But since the DOJ believes the President is immune from indictment, Mueller's hands were tied. Mueller would be fine with Congress taking up the obstruction question in impeachment proceedings, but its so clear that Senate Republicans wouldn't convict. That's just where we're at.

Democrats can't impeach, and this is why. They'd look horrible to a lot of the public and it would give Trump a second term.

If a president can’t be indicted and congress won’t impeach for political reasons then the system is just flat broken

the president can do anything he wants as long as congress doesn’t deem it bad enough to impeach

This is correct.

Ingenious system of checks and balances folks.

Just goes to show that everything we learned in social studies class was wishful thinking at best, pure propaganda at worst.

It was all held together by shame. This is what you get when shameless people are running everything.

Definitely broken. I think Democrats would be fine with impeachment if Republicans were fine with conviction. But since the outcome of those proceedings has already been pre-determined, the decision to impeach is rejected for practical reasons as well as political ones.

The system is broken because too many off the electorate are ignorant. This is due almost entirely to the press which is the way it is because of capitalism. It works until it doesn't. Sucks because all the other systems are worse.

I'm an atheist but it does make me wonder that when we as a species understand almost all about how we function and the world around us functions, at least on a seemingly fairly advanced level, we are heading full steam to a catastrophic end of our own making. There is a divine beauty to that.

They should still do impeachment proceedings so the investigation can happen and so they can do their constitutional duties

But instead dems won’t due to politics because republicans won’t convict due to politics

Therefore we have an executive branch and a legislative branch breaking their oaths to uphold the constitution and the judicial branch with the updated Supreme Court will likely follow when given a chance

If the Dems impeached him in the House, they'd be giving him four more years. So it sucks that they aren't proceeding as they should based on their oaths, but it's better than handing him a second term. If they impeached him, the conviction vote in the Senate would be like 56-44 against conviction. At least 2-3 Democrats would side with the GOP, it would be a total trainwreck.

So don’t do constitutional duty to investigate and check an out of control despot because it may hurt politically...


As long as politics >>>>> doing the right thing, we will continue this downward spiral

They can investigate him, but if Dems impeach him in the House, it has 0% chance of leading to a conviction in the Senate and a >>>>>> 0% chance of leading to an electoral backlash that boosts Trump's chances. Why in the world would they do that?

You're essentially arguing that boosting Trump's odds of re-election is how we stop the downward spiral.

I mean Jake Tapper and Anderson Cooper are literally discussing right now whether or not even investigating Trump is a huge losing play by Democrats. They think it is. I agree. Dems win 2020 if it's about healthcare, jobs, income inequality, etc... If they make it about Trump, well how did 2016 go?

The campaigns can campaign on healthcare, education, wages, etc.


But the duly elected officials should investigate formally Trump’s fitness for office even if they don’t think republicans will convict


Otherwise we are at an impasse where all that has to happen if a president allegedly does bad things is his party comes out and says they won’t convict or act against him and the investigations don’t happen

We also see that the executive branch is fully non-cooperative at this point with the Treasury breaking the law and the AG shilling for the president.

Because;

It’s their job
It’s core to a functioning democracy
He is not fit for office.

Your take is absolute poison. Sure it helps in 2020 but it is toxic to your functioning democracy.

It stopped functioning 2 years ago.