[cherdano]

I have to say, I am not impressed by Pelosi in this saga.

cherdano, on 2021-January-10, 04:13, said:

@pwnallthethings said it better than anyone else:

Quote

The question for America is: is calling the election "stolen" for months after losing an election, poisoning supporters' brains until they riot at the Capitol to overturn it, while prowling the halls looking to execute legislators and the VP outside of the limits of US democracy?
To ask it is to answer it, of course. But that's the question impeachment asks. And why the US can't move on, and why no national healing can happen without first answering it. It is a baseline question on which democracy itself rests.

https://twitter.com/...013517702631425

Once you ask that question, you don't answer it saying "Dear Cabinet, won't you please invoke the 25th amendment? If not, we'll go ahead and decide on our action. No? Ok, well then. Hmm. We are going ahead to impeach! - Maybe Wednesday - but please, can't you go ahead and invoke the 25th so we don't have to do this please? Please?? And also, once we do it, I guess we'll find time this summer to send it to the Senate for impeachment, because we don't really want to wait one day to get the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Environmental Observation and Prediction confirmed because of this."

[Winstonm]

y66, on 2021-January-11, 17:22, said:

Maggie Haberman at NYT reported that Trump feels "gutted" by the PGA move. That sounds right to me. Professional golfers are his homies (or so he probably thinks).

Yes, and I read he is more concerned about losing the tournament than the second impeachment.

[Winstonm]

cherdano, on 2021-January-11, 17:22, said:

I have to say, I am not impressed by Pelosi in this saga.

Once you ask that question, you don't answer it saying "Dear Cabinet, won't you please invoke the 25th amendment? If not, we'll go ahead and decide on our action. No? Ok, well then. Hmm. We are going ahead to impeach! - Maybe Wednesday - but please, can't you go ahead and invoke the 25th so we don't have to do this please? Please?? And also, once we do it, I guess we'll find time this summer to send it to the Senate for impeachment, because we don't really want to wait one day to get the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Environmental Observation and Prediction confirmed because of this."

Nancy Pelosi reminds me of Robert Duvall's character in The Godfather - she's not a wartime consigliere.

[Winstonm]

This is an important Twitter thread from a husband and wife who photograph DC events, including Black Live Matter protests and the Trump insurrection on Jan. 6.

[johnu]

cherdano, on 2021-January-11, 17:22, said:

I have to say, I am not impressed by Pelosi in this saga.

Once you ask that question, you don't answer it saying "Dear Cabinet, won't you please invoke the 25th amendment? If not, we'll go ahead and decide on our action. No? Ok, well then. Hmm. We are going ahead to impeach! - Maybe Wednesday - but please, can't you go ahead and invoke the 25th so we don't have to do this please? Please?? And also, once we do it, I guess we'll find time this summer to send it to the Senate for impeachment, because we don't really want to wait one day to get the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Environmental Observation and Prediction confirmed because of this."

If the 25th Amendment was invoked, the Manchurian President could be removed in a matter of hours. The country wouldn't have to worry that the Criminal in Chief would take a presidential action that could endanger national, or world security.

If articles of impeachment were drawn up and voted in the House the next morning after the attack by Domestic Terrorists, the Seditionist in Chief would not be removed before January 20 when Biden takes office. That is, if he is going to be removed. If every senator voted, at least 19 Republican senators would need to vote to convict. In last year's impeachment, only Romney voted to convict on 1 of the counts. Currently, only 2 or 3 Republican senators have given any indication that they may even consider conviction. Instead of Repugs saying let the voters decide like they did the 1st impeachment, now they're saying an impeachment is divisive to the country and of course, they are uniters, not dividers. IMO, there is close to 0% that the Senate will vote to convict, and 0% that an impeachment vote will happen before noon, January 20.

So, as a practical matter, impeachment has 0% chance of actually removing the Manchurian President from office before January 20. Impeachment will not make the US, and the world, safe from the Sociopath in Chief.

[pilowsky]

johnu, on 2021-January-12, 00:32, said:

If the 25th Amendment was invoked, the Manchurian President could be removed in a matter of hours. The country wouldn't have to worry that the Criminal in Chief would take a presidential action that could endanger national, or world security.

If articles of impeachment were drawn up and voted in the House the next morning after the attack by Domestic Terrorists, the Seditionist in Chief would not be removed before January 20 when Biden takes office. That is, if he is going to be removed. If every senator voted, at least 19 Republican senators would need to vote to convict. In last year's impeachment, only Romney voted to convict on 1 of the counts. Currently, only 2 or 3 Republican senators have given any indication that they may even consider conviction. Instead of Repugs saying let the voters decide like they did the 1st impeachment, now they're saying an impeachment is divisive to the country and of course, they are uniters, not dividers. IMO, there is close to 0% that the Senate will vote to convict, and 0% that an impeachment vote will happen before noon, January 20.

So, as a practical matter, impeachment has 0% chance of actually removing the Manchurian President from office before January 20. Impeachment will not make the US, and the world, safe from the Sociopath in Chief.

I'm a reasonable judge of character, and it sounds to me like you aren't all that fond of Mr Trump.
Hard to believe really since he's such a tolerant amiable and genteel person whose only concern is others' wellbeing.

I wonder if any of the lawyers know if Trump could be Impeached (=indicted) and then a Trial could occur after Jan. 20.
What I'm getting at is that removal from office is not the only reason for impeachment. Consequences other than removal from office can follow.

I don't think anything like this has happened in America in the past. Now might be the time for a Presidential Precedent.

[Winstonm]

I think the most likely outcome of this is not the best outcome: impeachment without conviction.

However, I hope even after Trump is removed from office that the 14th Amendment is invoked and voted on (only a majority is needed) and then the courts uphold the vote so that he becomes ineligible to hold elected office ever again. It seems appropriate to use an Amendment that targeted ex-Confederate soldiers and officials in order to hold a white supremacist president accountable.

[y66]

Isaac Chotiner at The New Yorker said:

Seems quite possible that Trump getting to stay on Twitter for four years cost him re-election, and getting banned last week saved him from getting impeached and convicted this month.

[kenberg]

I often start with simplicity. Donald Trump's actions on Jan 6 justify putting him in jail. I am, for the moment, speaking in what I think is right. But legally? I think if I gathered a bunch of hot heads around me and spoke for an hour or so about how the election was stolen and ho they should march down to the capitol to fix this, telling them they have to be tough etc (I have not read the speech in its entirety) and then if they did that, they broke into the capitol trashed the place, and people died, if this had been me I believe I would right now be in jail as would any of you. Giuliani, if he keeps his license, can launch a defense. The big boys will play and I am not a big boy. But I do no believe that I could do what Trump did without going to jail, and he shouldn't either.

I am fine with impeaching him but I want him out of the presidency and I want him in jail. Politics always gets involved in impeachment but I think 12 jurors would have no trouble at all seeing the jail thing my way.

A word about impeachment. Some R's should welcome it. It gives them a clear chance to vote as they believe. And I think the tice has been shifting with voters, and I think it will be shifting a good deal more. People really don't like seeing a mob invade the capitol and drag cops around and whack cops over the head with a fire extinguisher. Some do, but really most don't. And so Trump didn't do that? Right. He got other people to do it and then made sure he was far enough away so that he could say "Wasn't me". Some people are crazed enough to buy this sham. Most, at least after they take some time and think about it, aren't.

He stoked a riot, a rebellion against the government, lawmakers had to flee, they could have been killed. some people were killed, I think "Wasn't me" just is not going to cut it, not legally and not with voters.

[Winstonm]

Quote

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), No. 3 Republican in the House, said Tuesday she will vote to impeach President Trump, saying there has “never been a greater betrayal” by a president to his office and his oath to the Constitution days after a pro-Trump mob attacked the Capitol.

Perhaps now the dam will break...

[johnu]

Winstonm, on 2021-January-12, 17:43, said:

Perhaps now the dam will break...

Maybe there will be a split from the Republican party with the new branch forming under the #ISP label, Insurrection and Sedition Party.

[johnu]

The Insurrection and Sedition Party (AKA Republican Party) has reached depths only possible when your members are all sociopaths

GOP Refuses To Follow New Capitol Safety Rules In Aftermath Of Riot

Quote

A group of lawmakers then formed at the metal detectors outside the floor, consistently setting the machines off and needing to be inspected by Capitol Police. Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.) yelled that he was “physically restrained” from entering the floor, while Rep. Steve Stivers (R-Ohio) told police that he believes the metal detectors are unconstitutional.

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), who has bragged before about wanting to carry a firearm at the Capitol, was in a standoff with Capitol Police over her bag setting off the metal detector, according to CNN’s Ryan Nobles. Boebert refused let Capitol Police search her bag even when they told her she could not be let onto the House floor until she did so. She was eventually let into the chamber, but Nobles could not confirm if Capitol Police ended up searching her bag beforehand.

Needless to say, there may be more than a few "sleeper" Domestic Terrorists who are members of Congress who may be activated at any time.

[kenberg]

johnu, on 2021-January-13, 01:33, said:

The Insurrection and Sedition Party (AKA Republican Party) has reached depths only possible when your members are all sociopaths

GOP Refuses To Follow New Capitol Safety Rules In Aftermath Of Riot



Needless to say, there may be more than a few "sleeper" Domestic Terrorists who are members of Congress who may be activated at any time.

I hope our representatives that are intelligent, responsible and serious. It is dismaying find out that not being brain dead stupid is beyond the reach of some. Maybe Georgia isn't the only state that needed to have a special election to move forward.

[y66]

Matt Yglesias said:

We are less than a week from Inauguration Day, which means that — strange as it seems — we are drawing closer to the inevitable moment when Donald Trump will be fondly remembered by liberals as an avatar of a saner brand of conservative politics.

A joke, of course, but not really. In a great essay written a while back, the historian Cory Robin documented Philip Roth’s continual re-writing of his own recollections — Nixon was the absolute worst in 1974, but by the Reagan Era he was fondly remembered in contrast to the Gipper. It was Bush’s tenure in office that prompted The Plot Against America as allegory, but then by 2017 he was complaining that neither Nixon nor Bush “was anything like as humanly impoverished as Trump is: ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English.”

I don’t know exactly what drives this perennially retrocasting of past iterations of conservatism as reasonable, but I was reminded of Robin’s essay when I read Ezra Klein and Tim Alberta commiserating on the idea that “there is no longer any buffer between mainstream thought and the extreme elements of our politics.”

Ezra Klein said:

You should read this whole piece by @TimAlberta. One thing it makes clear: It's not just that "the fringe" no longer exists. It's that what was recently seen as the fringe is now the majority of, at least, the House Republican Conference.
https://www.politico...e-making-455797

As a description of the present this is absolutely correct. Conservative thought exists on a spectrum between Q Anon lunatics putting on horns and storming the capital and guys with PhDs arguing that in the long-run corporate tax cuts raise wages. But there is no firewall between these groups. The Covid cranks and the distinguished Federalist Society legal scholars not only sit side-by-side at the Hudson Institute, they are sometimes the same person.

But while I obviously understand the rhetorical potency of claiming that the bad actors in today’s politics are not just bad but uniquely so, I don’t think the claim holds up to analytic scrutiny. Right from the start the conservative movement was a stew of highbrow policy objections to the New Deal Consensus (some of which were even correct!) with paranoid conspiracy theories about communist control of the government and with hard-core white nationalism. Mediating between the respectable and less-respectable faces of conservatism is often a group of grifters, largely because the whole premise of the enterprise is that pitching the long-term benefits of regressive tax policy is not an electoral winner. So different notions ranging from Ike being a Communist to Obama being a Kenyan to the idea that Bill & Hillary Clinton have been assassinating political enemies for decades come and go according to the whims of the moment.

Quote

The relationship between the racist and conspiratorial fringe and mainstream conservatism has always been fluid, and there has never been a group of “grown ups” who keep the kooks in check. But what does keep them in check is a desire to win elections. In the modern day, thanks to polarization, the electoral penalty for kookery or extremism has fallen; and thanks to unfair maps, the Republicans don’t need electoral majorities to win and govern. The combination has allowed kooks to be elevated to the highest ranks of power, and ensures that Senate Republicans put a much higher premium on preserving party unity than on checking even Trump’s most unpopular or inappropriate actions.

This is a genuinely dangerous situation, and nostalgia for the alleged guardrails of the past is not the answer.

https://www.slowbori...y-club/comments

[y66]

Jonathan Bernstein said:

My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Francis Wilkinson, seeing Republicans turning against Trump Tuesday afternoon, said on Twitter that “This feels like it might — might — be the first time in more than a decade that significant numbers of GOPers turn *away* from extremism instead of *toward* it. Might.” On the other hand, political scientist Dan Drezner published a Washington Post column Tuesday evening in which he wondered whether the Republican Party was turning into Hezbollah. Both of them sound plausible to me.

[shyams]

There is a football (soccer to you Americans) chant used by fans of one club in particular --- which goes "No one likes us, we don't care"

I am invoking this tangential reference for a reason.

While it is true that some fans of this club were very much into violence, they were not representative of the club's fanbase as a whole. However, as the club kept getting called out as the main (sole?) culprit every time the media talked about football hooliganism, it created an unexpected reaction within the fanbase. It established almost a siege mentality amongst ordinary, law-abiding fans; so much so that the chant ("no one likes us") became enshrined in the culture of this club.

The incidents of hooliganism reduced sharply within a few years. But even today, 20-30 years later, the club seems unable to rid this tarnished image. In reality, all those years when this club had hooliganism, it was also rife elsewhere in the UK with numerous other clubs having a chunk of hooligan fans. No other club was reviled the way this particular one; others always seemed to get off lighter.

The situation is similar to what is happening with the GOP voter base in the US today. No doubt some are horrible people but all Republicans are being tarnished & made to feel like the dregs of society. No wonder the siege mentality within the GOP base is growing. {Many are now convinced that Democrats will not stop until they have converted them into saying "Amen and Awoman" at the end of each prayer. OK, that's a joke!}

Be careful what you wish for.

[Winstonm]

shyams, on 2021-January-13, 08:02, said:

There is a football (soccer to you Americans) chant used by fans of one club in particular --- which goes "No one likes us, we don't care"

I am invoking this tangential reference for a reason.

While it is true that some fans of this club were very much into violence, they were not representative of the club's fanbase as a whole. However, as the club kept getting called out as the main (sole?) culprit every time the media talked about football hooliganism, it created an unexpected reaction within the fanbase. It established almost a siege mentality amongst ordinary, law-abiding fans; so much so that the chant ("no one likes us") became enshrined in the culture of this club.

The incidents of hooliganism reduced sharply within a few years. But even today, 20-30 years later, the club seems unable to rid this tarnished image. In reality, all those years when this club had hooliganism, it was also rife elsewhere in the UK with numerous other clubs having a chunk of hooligan fans. No other club was reviled the way this particular one; others always seemed to get off lighter.

The situation is similar to what is happening with the GOP voter base in the US today. No doubt some are horrible people but all Republicans are being tarnished & made to feel like the dregs of society. No wonder the siege mentality within the GOP base is growing. {Many are now convinced that Democrats will not stop until they have converted them into saying "Amen and Awoman" at the end of each prayer. OK, that's a joke!}

Be careful what you wish for.

Did 74 million people fans vote for the hooligans?

[y66]

Peter Baker, Maggie Haberman and Annie Karni at NYT said:

WASHINGTON — For Vice President Mike Pence, the moment of truth had arrived. After three years and 11 months of navigating the treacherous waters of President Trump’s ego, after all the tongue-biting, pride-swallowing moments where he employed strategic silence or florid flattery to stay in his boss’s good graces, there he was being cursed by the president.

Mr. Trump was enraged that Mr. Pence was refusing to try to overturn the election. In a series of meetings, the president had pressed relentlessly, alternately cajoling and browbeating him. Finally, just before Mr. Pence headed to the Capitol to oversee the electoral vote count last Wednesday, Mr. Trump called the vice president’s residence to push one last time.

“You can either go down in history as a patriot,” Mr. Trump told him, according to two people briefed on the conversation, “or you can go down in history as a pussy.”

The blowup between the nation’s two highest elected officials then played out in dramatic fashion as the president publicly excoriated the vice president at an incendiary rally and sent agitated supporters to the Capitol where they stormed the building — some of them chanting “Hang Mike Pence.”

Evacuated to the basement, Mr. Pence huddled for hours while Mr. Trump tweeted out an attack on him rather than call to check on his safety.

It was an extraordinary rupture of a partnership that had survived too many challenges to count.

The loyal lieutenant who had almost never diverged from the president, who had finessed every other possible fracture, finally came to a decision point he could not avoid. He would uphold the election despite the president and despite the mob. And he would pay the price with the political base he once hoped to harness for his own run for the White House.

“Pence had a choice between his constitutional duty and his political future, and he did the right thing,” said John Yoo, a legal scholar consulted by Mr. Pence’s office. “I think he was the man of the hour in many ways — for both Democrats and Republicans. He did his duty even though he must have known, when he did it, that that probably meant he could never become president.”

Quote

On Thursday, the day after the siege, Mr. Pence stayed away from the White House, avoiding Mr. Trump. The next day, he went in, but spent most of the day at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door, where he held a farewell party for his staff.

But aides said Mr. Pence did not want to become a long-term nemesis of a vindictive president, and by Monday he was back in the West Wing.

Unlike Mr. Trump, Mr. Pence plans to attend Mr. Biden’s inauguration, then expects to divide time between Washington and Indiana, possibly starting a leadership political committee, writing a book and campaigning for congressional Republicans.

But no matter what comes next, he will always be remembered for one moment. “We’re very lucky that the vice president isn’t a maniac,” said Joe Grogan, Mr. Trump’s domestic policy adviser until last year. “In many ways, I think it vindicates the decision of Mike Pence to hang in there this long.”

https://www.nytimes....pgtype=Homepage

“We’re very lucky that the vice president isn’t a maniac"? This is what passes for exceptionalism these days.

[Winstonm]

What should be done about this?

Quote

Weeks before a mob of President Trump's supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, right-wing activist Ali Alexander told his followers he was planning something big for Jan. 6.


Alexander, who organized the "Stop the Steal" movement, said he hatched the plan — coinciding with Congress's vote to certify the electoral college votes — alongside three GOP lawmakers: Reps. Andy Biggs (Ariz.), Mo Brooks (Ala.) and Paul A. Gosar (Ariz.), all hard-line Trump supporters.


"We four schemed up of putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting," Alexander said in a since-deleted video on Periscope highlighted by the Project on Government Oversight, an investigative nonprofit. The plan, he said, was to "change the hearts and the minds of Republicans who were in that body, hearing our loud roar from outside."

my emphasis

[shyams]

Winstonm, on 2021-January-13, 08:19, said:

Did 74 million people fans vote for the hooligans?

In the event I wasn't very clear in my analogy,
.... The club fanbase = The GOP voting bloc (i.e. 45+% of your nation's population)
.... The hooligans = The lunatic fringe within the GOP voting bloc (be it MAGA maniacs, QAnons, whatever else)

The equivalence of the English soccer club in the NFL context is the Philadelphia Eagles! Most Eagles fans normal people, yet I'm sure there is prevailing reputation in the USA that Eagles fans are hardcore nutcases.