Infidel753 dives into the deep right wing bubble and emerges back into the light with a thoughtful, as always, conclusion. The impeachment hearings will change no minds. We should finish them and get back to the reality of electoral politics. Largely true, I suspect. Still, I won’t be surprised at a profound political effect. There were many problems in 2016 – Putin subterranean interference, Comey mountaintop interference, the Electoral College. The biggest anti-democracy influence was resigned apathy. The hearings may, without changing minds, get democracy back to work.
Marie Yovanovitch served for thirty years for presidents of both parties, sometimes in highly dangerous situations. She is a hero. tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors covers my president’s smear attacks on her during her testimony and the stunned reaction of some at Fox News.
Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged brings us a 27 second video of Nancy Pelosi explaining how exculpatory evidence could work for Donald Trump while gently burning his lack of intelligence. He’ll get angry. As soon as someone explains it.
Andy Borowitz reports as angry Republicans address a long simmering injustice, demanding that everyone in the federal witness protection program appear on national television. It’s only fair.
Dreamers are Americans who were brought here as kids, average age 6, and who grew up in the United States. Most do not even remember any other country. News Corpse reports as Donald Trump attacks Dreamers themselves, and President Obama for letting them stay. NC points out the high number of falsehoods in a single Donald tweet and refutes each lie.
Oh my. Tommy Christopher quotes the recently discovered white nationalism communications of Trump advisor Stephen Miller. Conservative MSNBC co-host Joe Scarborough blasts the GOP for silent complicity with racism.
Ah, a competition! Max’s Dad may be the world’s best ranter. If you ever tick this guy off, you’ll want to apologize RIGHT away. Turns out he doesn’t much care for former Ambassador to the UN and former Governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley. And he doesn’t much care for US Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee. He runs a comparison to figure out which of these two Trumpers is worse.
So Donald Trump, Jr. toured Arlington National Cemetery. As he listened to the slow, mournful, notes of “Taps”, his thoughts, according to his own words, went to horrific, heroic sacrifices. No, not the sacrifice of life for freedom – the sacrifice made by those in final rest at each marked grave.
Rather he was thinking of the sacrifices he, his siblings, in fact the entire Trump family, made to install Donald Trump in the White House. Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit reads those words and manages to express a calm bit of disapproval.
Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara saluted veterans this past week, but reserved his highest praise for those most responsible for supporting the military, productive, wealth producing, wealthy Americans. This anti-government ideologue embraces a case study: the astonishing production of weaponry during World War II. An interesting illustration, since the mobilization was organized and carried out by government.
Ant Farmer’s Almanac apologizes in advance to Rodgers and Hammerstein, offering anti-boomer lyrics to the tune of Oklahoma. Okay, so we’ve attacked the climate, the seas, the economy, the society, and simple morality in the treatment of refugees and their children. But we should at least be allowed to scream at kids to get off our lawns.
After six decades of the pure joy and relief of being too young to be a boomer, nojo is outraged to find his generation grouped with mine. So now he’s as guilty of OK-boomer-itis as am I. You know this piece will be good. For one thing, it’s by nojo, who seems congenitally unable to write anything that isn’t golden. For another, the first sentence is: We’ve hated our generation since Disco.
Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson is a genuinely good writer. His thoughts are insightful. He presents those thoughts crisply and clearly.
But he’s not perfect, a fact he illustrates while complaining about a Republican passed state law that says a state commission is required to use a disreputable method that has a history of disenfranchising legitimate voters. James is not complaining about an unjust, anti-democratic law. His beef is with a state election commission that is not using the law as it was intended. Instead, members voted to add safeguards to be sure valid voters are still allowed to vote.
The practice is known as voter caging. When used unethically, a mail piece is sent to voters. The piece is non-forwardable. Non-wealthy, non-owners are more likely to move short distances away. Those pieces will be returned as non-deliverable. Around the country, Republicans have used the method to file legal complaints against voter registrations. When voters show up to vote, they are told they are no longer registered. When used aggressively, tens of thousands of legitimate voters are told they are no longer voters. Some don’t show up, since reminders are sent only to those still on file.
The national Republican Party eventually signed a consent agreement that has the force of law. They agreed never to use voter caging again, because … well … the rights of voters should be protected.
Sometimes, today’s Republicans use state governments to get around the consent agreement. When they get control of a state legislature they use the state itself to perform voter caging. The consent agreement only keeps the Republican Party from unfairly keeping voters from voting. It doesn’t keep state governments from doing the disfranchising.
In Wisconsin, the Election Board is using caging, but they are taking additional steps, like giving voters more time to show they are still state residents.
James is pretty upset. He approves of a lawsuit by a conservative organization that seeks to force the commission to cancel voter rights within 30 days after a mailing is returned. After all, the law is the law, right?
There could be reasoned arguments against additional safeguards. Perhaps the national Republican consent agreement against caging was a bridge too far. Maybe, if done carefully, caging is okay. Perhaps a call or visit could ensure that only folks who move out-of-state are purged. Or perhaps there are other arguments for what otherwise would look like a naked attempt to undermine democracy.
If a voter shows up to vote and is unexpectedly barred from voting, Wisconsin does allow that voter to go home and dig up hospital birth papers, marriage licenses, and other documents, then to return and re-register on the spot, and vote. Many forms of ID are not allowed. This is a bit of a burden, especially for non-drivers who rely on bus schedules to commute to work, to shop, and to vote. James argues that the Wisconsin same-day home trip document provision is absolute proof that caging presents no burden on low income voters.
Aside from that, James relies primarily on accusation. He charges that a failure to purge these voters will cause voter fraud. In reality, when elections are stolen, it is by behind-the-scenes fiddling with vote totals, not illegal voters showing up to vote. An amazing number of studies have shown voter fraud is vanishingly rare, while the denial of voting rights is alarmingly common.
James does not document his discredited accusation. He does not bother to defend his stance from well-known arguments against it. In fact, he does not mention those arguments.
He neglects the Republican history of abuse, and the Republican consent agreement, and the danger of purging valid voters and making it impractical for them to re-register.
To be fair, James has, over his writing career, repeatedly proven he can do better than this.
Hearsay evidence is considered statements that one person says that a third person had said. In the jurisdictions or venues, I worked that could be one neighbor telling another that he overheard a subject say, “I am going to kill you”, shortly followed by 2 gunshots. That is hearsay evidence and normally would be disallowed in court. However, if, while investigating a murder at the subject’s home that the second person told the investigator, that subject would soon be in an interrogation room for a long, long time trying to convince interrogators that it was not him.
There are several factors that would go into getting the hearsay statements admitted into evidence. One, of course, is statements made during the interrogation. If he or someone with direct knowledge, like his chief of staff, basically said that he did make the statement, then the overheard statement becomes evidence and the hearsay statement becomes a corroborating statement. In other words, you can believe the overheard statement because he immediately told another person. That is the point that Representative Jordan was trying to make. What he didn’t understand, however, was that the alleged hearsay witness was simply carrying out his sworn duties as an official representative of the United States government.
Is this representative more believable than the neighbor, probably, within the same consideration of a police officer telling a judge and jury what another officer told him? Both are representatives carrying out their sworn duties.
This is the legal landscape now before the man who must be identified as the attorney general of the United States: The unanimous consensus of the American intelligence community, the findings of the Mueller investigation, and the bipartisan conclusion of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence all agree that the Russian Federation interfered in the 2016 presidential election “by harming Hillary Clinton’s chances of success and supporting Donald Trump at the direction of the Kremlin.” Special counsel Robert Mueller documented numerous interactions between Russian actors and Trump campaign officials and laid out 10 instances of obstruction of justice committed by President Donald Trump. And now Trump faces impeachment over his illegal solicitation of foreign intervention for his 2020 reelection campaign and his shocking quid pro quo withholding of military aid to Ukraine unless its government publicly promised to investigate groundless allegations against his potential opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden.
In response, William Barr, the man columnist William Safire aptly called the “Cover-up General” almost 30 years ago, is functioning as Donald Trump’s consigliere, not as the chief law enforcement officer for the American people. Barr’s mission now is to manufacture evidence to paint the very investigations into Trump’s lawlessness as illegitimate themselves.
One side took a serious approach aimed at persuading the undecided. The other doubled down on conspiracy theories and debunked claims.
House Democrats have finally figured out how to hold a hearing.
The first public congressional session of the impeachment inquiry aimed at President Donald Trump probably wasn’t compelling television for most voters. Most people just aren’t very interested in fine details. Nor did Democrats bring a lot of drama or theatrics.
And yet I suspect that for those who are interested in government and public affairs — including the news media — there was plenty of substance in the testimony before the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday of two State Department officials responsible for U.S. policy in Ukraine.
The Beltway gang – or the Village, as Digby’s sometimes called it – generally doesn’t like accountability for their own, regardless of political party. The powerful rarely learn the error of their ways unless they are held to account. And when they’re not held responsible, it also sends the message to other powerful people that they can get away with misdeeds as well. Even if no one served jail time for lying the U.S. into the Iraq War or the Bush administration’s torture regime, at least we still could have a truth and reconciliation commission or something similar. But even that would go way too far for Beltway insiders like Peggy Noonan, who in 2009 said in reference to the torture regime:
Some things in life need to be mysterious. Sometimes you need to just keep walking. . . . It’s hard for me to look at a great nation issuing these documents and sending them out to the world and thinking, oh, much good will come of that.
Noonan, of course, was concerned with “good” coming to people in her social circle, of her class, not about justice for torture victims or all the other harm caused by the torture program. Nor was she concerned about ordinary U.S. citizens who might be bothered by abuses of power and might suffer the effects, later on if not immediately. She needn’t have worried; no one was held accountable, and indeed no good came of it, if not the way she meant.
From the Washington Post (passed off as a paragon of the liberal press) today:
“On eve of open hearings, GOP and Democrats lay out competing cases
The memos show the parties are fundamentally at odds over everything from key pieces of evidence to the legitimacy of the process.”
I heard the same thing on NPR this morning, which did a long segment on the “competing narratives” about impeachment coming from our two political parties.
Neither one of these miserable excuses for journalists thought it worth mentioning that one of these “narratives” is true and the other, as they all know damned well, is a compendium of vicious lies.
Hannah Williams & The Affirmations
Jay-Z is the most popular rap artist ever. Everybody who matters loves the way he moves rap into and out of accompanying music. Which actually means, I guess, that I love the way he makes the music part of the rap. He moves rhythm and rhyme into words from the heart that just happen to rhyme. That’s art.
That’s what made Jay-Z into JAY-Z.
So when he introduced Hannah Williams to the world, and did it as part of his musical apology to Beyoncé, it was worth waiting for her own work.
Hannah Williams & The Affirmations are a British band with music described as retro-rock or retro-soul or rock or soul. I hear more than a touch of gospel, but maybe I’m just possessed.
I just like what I hear.
Want to see the words?
I can’t find them. We just have to listen, I guess.
Worth it, don’t ya think?
Wow. An openly racist man was teaching at Medgar Evers College…how did the poor fellow cope? Every day he walked through those doors he was rebuked by the name of a black civil rights activist, and in all of his classes he had to teach young black students. It must have been so hard for him. At least he could go home at night and vent his feelings on the internet, vomiting up all his hate and inadequacy for an adoring audience of fascists.
He’s losing that now. His allies are tearing down his videos, his website, TheDietzMethod, where he promoted his hypnosis and life-coaching business, is gone, and you can bet that no university is going to hire him, even for those awful little adjuncting positions, ever again. It turns out you can’t be trusted to teach if you think a lot of your students are inferior subhumans because of the color of their skin. Before you start bewailing the loss of free speech at modern universities, keep in mind that my dream of being a professor at Liberty University has also been crushed. Oh, woe.
One might wonder how he came to be this way, and sadly, he followed a common and predictable trajectory.
Don’t send me money directly for the books I write, actually go ahead and buy them from a bookstore.
For one thing, I get paid more than adequately that way. For another thing, my publisher is not my enemy — my publisher is my business partner, and my business partner does a lot of things for my book.
