Want to check in. How's everyone feeling about this at this point?
I'm probably missing people.
Schiff's account was chilling. I watched most of it live, and found myself clinching my fists and furrowing my brow. I noticed that he only occasionally looked down at his notes, and his summary was largely formulated on-the-fly. This kept him from looking weak or inept, like almost everyone else (both sides) reading word-for-word off of a document in front of them, slipping in and out of the "reading mode" monotone so many people revert to. He imbued his statements with passion, when he felt it. There's at least one audible reaction from the audience (@8:14). Schiff laid waste to the GOP defense. He peeled back their ever-evolving layers of defense, with little embellishment, using indisputable evidence acquired solely during the public hearings within the last 8 days. My favorite part was him pointing out that the GOP would prefer we rely solely on what the president claims (somewhere around @13:20-ish). I wish he would have lingered a little longer here, and reminded everyone that this president has amassed an unprecedented amount of false claims during his tenure. I also enjoyed when he compared this Congress to the Congress during Nixon, a Congress that when presented with irrefutable evidence, found its spine and made a bipartisan decision to oust him. And he's right, Trump's is far and beyond Nixon's criminality. But despite his incredibly damning condensation of relevant materials, like I've said, it doesn't really seem to matter. The GOP's impeachment strategy is largely a referendum on the attitudes of their constituents, and the needle still hasn't moved (granted, the poll was probably taken prior to any measurable reaction from these public hearings). They won't turn on Trump. They seem intent on following him to either the death of the GOP, or the elevation of the executive to heights of power never imagined by anyone sympathetic to systems of checks and balances. Speaking of, I've even read some recent pieces by pro-Trump fuckers claiming that Congressional oversight has gone much too far, and we need to rescind executive oversight functions. These people are dangerous to the American experiment. Sometimes, their intellectual bankruptcy is evident in their poor prose alone. Seriously, one paragraph in an (Sheryl Atkisson? can't remember) opinion piece at The Hill (LOL, and their "opinion section" may be under investigation for providing John Solomon a vehicle on which to propagate conspiracies) began, "It is exactly what it is.", after the previous paragraph ended with something like "Schiff asks, 'How can this inquiry be a witch hunt?' ", or something like that. It's like, phew, that last sentence I just constructed was pretty bad, sure, but I'm a pseudonymous physicist on a lightly-trafficked forum. I don't identify as a democrat, but it's pretty fuckin' obvious which side is going to be shit on in the annals of history. I won't be voting for that side, and if the Senate acquits, I'll see you in the streets. Maybe kingmudsy could sling a little mud here too? :) Edit: As the inquiry and investigation phase of impeachment appear to have been completed (but see edit 2), the Senate GOP has probably assured Trump today that they intend to acquit him, clearing the way for the White House to "endorse" a Senate trial. I don't think the senate GOP members are lying to him, but it's possible. Either way, I'm sure 'bl00 is right, they'll use this to attempt inhibiting the campaigns of Sanders, Harris, Warren, and Booker. :( Edit 2: What if Schiff drops the mic (re: today), the Dems keep their ears to the ground for a couple of weeks, and say nothing of their future plans? All the while, they listen to polls, do press interviews/PR, etc. If the polls don't move, Pelosi makes an announcement, basically: "The beatings will continue until morale improves", and they bring forth any additional witnesses willing to testify, or even those we've seen already once again (if there's any willing), along with issuing another round of subpoenas to everyone obstructing (can you get hit with two counts of defying Congressional subpoenas?). If I'm the Dems, I'm asking myself "Did we go too fast once we made it to the public hearings?". Hah! Look at me, hoping beyond all hope that something, anything, can help pierce the right wing megabubble.
Regarding dropping the mic! You see the news about an associate coming forward willing to testify about Nunes? Man oh man do I want to see the ranking minority member under oath. Moo moo, motherfucker.
It's one thing for Nunes to investigate the Russia probe's origins, but it just came out, after your comment, Parnas is willing to testify that Nunes was involved in efforts to investigate the Bidens in Ukraine. My jaw has been on the floor. You're done, Devin! How fucking nuts do you have to be to go conduct completely unaccountable foreign policy on secret missions involving investigations of the Bidens, private U.S. citizens, circumventing the proper diplomatic and legal channels? Welp, not as fucking nuts as you'd have to be to then think you could properly serve as the second-ranking member on the congressional committee conducting the impeachment hearings into improper secret missions involving foreign investigations of the Bidens! This is crazier than even what I thought possible. I'm seriously floored right now, reeling. Watch Nunes's face when Swalwell reads the DailyBeast article, which had yet to include the information that it was an investigation into the Bidens that Nunes was chasing: edit: mk, found a funny bugski. I can embed this twitter link, but then if I go to edit the text, the page loads, and the paragraph order of all text in the comment has been inverted. i.e. for this post, if I were to simply press "edit", and then "update", without having edited anything, the embedded tweet would be at the top, and my opening statement at the bottom, with all the other paragraphs inverted as well. But listen, nothing involving twitter embeds should ever be considered urgent to any dev. :)
Agree, there's every reason to keep the inquiry rolling. Today, we had: 1. This Parnas-Nunes testimony thing. I suspect it may be that Parnas's illegal RNC/GOP re-election slush fund donations were used to fund Nunes's frivolous "defamation" lawsuits (moo moo!). Now that's hearsay, just my theory. EDIT: the biggest bombshell in weeks just went off. According to Parnas, in 2018, Nunes was involved, with Parnas, in secret attempts to persuade Ukraine to open investigations into the Bidens. omfg. This isn't proven, yet, but... wow. Just wow. 2. The NYTimes article I posted earlier today, revealing that the intelligence community briefed the Senate (presumably the Senate Intelligence Committee?) that Trump's Ukrainian conspiracy theories originate from a GRU (Putin) disinformation operation. 3. An early leak of the Dec. 9 DOJ IG report, which Trump supporters and even Trump himself have said will put Obama, Brennan, Clapper, Comey, Hillary, etc. behind bars, revealed a clerical error made by a lower-level lawyer on some paperwork, and no improper conduct surrounding the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation. Still, we should wait for the entire report. I hope Parnas has documentation and corroborating testimony from others. It's not going to be easy for me to trust him. He's either a Russian operative, or has been led around by Russian operatives for a very, very long time.
Lev Parnas seems like the kind of guy who leaves a paper trail. Dude I just watched that video again and Lev Parnas' instagram feed consists of (A) a dog (B-ZZ) Compramat on Rudi Giuliani and Donald Trump. It is completely fucking empty of everything else.
"Tell me more about that dog, though. We need to investigate the dog." - the GOP
Chance of impeachment at this point is 1 in 10. Pompeo is going to be in for a rough ride in his Senate bid. It will be interesting to see how Jim Jordan's presence on the committee and his alleged protection of a serial sex assaulter mix in his reelection bid. I think the real game is for who wins the Senate and Presidency in the next election. I think there will be some damaging revelations in Trumps financial documents in the case currently going to the SCOTUS or he wouldn't have worked so hard to keep the information private. Will we see that information? I hope so but we might have to wait for a leak.
Not technically correct. Impeachment (voted on by the House) is guaranteed. The odds of conviction in the Senate (and removal from office) are probably 1 in 10, yeah.Chance of impeachment at this point is 1 in 10.
Perhaps I'm more sanguine about the hearings than everyone else because I'm more jaded about their purpose. Team Trump sent out a nasty-gram yesterday entitled "It’s official: Americans are tuning out the Swamp—and the ratings prove it". Their proof: Even more telling is what’s happened to viewership as the hearings pressed on. Once it became clear that no real evidence was forthcoming—only more opinions about President Trump from the Swamp—Americans tuned out. Tuesday’s morning session this week averaged 11.4 million viewers. By noon Wednesday, “the local ABC affiliate had ditched impeachment coverage and was airing its regular newscast instead. The Fox station had a daytime talk show,” The Washington Times reported. For perspective, "11.4 million viewers" is Monday Night Football numbers. That's "American Idol Live Eliminations in 2007" numbers. For a Tuesday fuckin' morning of talking heads preening slowly and deliberately about procedure and phone calls. 3.6 million people watch Good Morning America. Fox & Friends? About a million and a half. Drawing anything during the day is a major accomplishment and here's Team trump's spin: Team Trump recognizes that this is a battle of public opinion. The Democrats have finally done the same. The fact that Jeffrey Katzenberg produced The Apprentice while at NBC and then went over to CNN while Trump was running says a lot: news is spectacle. And for the past four years, Trump has been able to say whatever the fuck he wants while the news media "tells both sides of the story". The whole purpose of these hearings has been to give the public some pithy soundbites that demonstrate it's a pretty one-sided story. It's going to go to the Senate and the Senate will acquit. We all know this. I think the difference is that the Democrats aren't playing to win, they're playing to cost the Republicans as much credibility as possible. The Republicans hitched their wagon to Trump and the Democrats appear to have found a strategy that makes that expensive. It's not going to be quick but it's already causing some serious attrition: if Trump is contentious in your district, and if you have been backing Trump, then your re-election campaign is going to be expensive and draining. Perhaps it's time to find yourself a corporate board or two? Meanwhile the paradigm adopted by the Democrats is AOC - young, mad, media-savvy and hungry. Mr. McNamara, you were never going to win. You were fighting for your ideals. We were fighting for our homes. - unnamed Viet Cong general, The Fog of War (paraphrased) The goal has never been to eliminate Trump. The goal has been to make Trumpism expensive. It's fair to characterize the 2016 election as a battle of competing apathy and while the Democratic electorate is waking up to patriotism, the Republican electorate is facing a schism between "base" and "humans" that the Democrats wish to make as hard to bridge as possible. I find the hearings ruthlessly effective at this. Really, it's the Democrats learning how to TV. 'cuz the thing is? Yeah the kidz are all tictocin' and snapchattin' and retweetin' but the people you want to stay home in shame in November? They watch daytime TV.The ratings prove it. Simply put, they’re stunning. Despite wall-to-wall media coverage and attention, the first televised impeachment hearing last week drew an estimated 13.8 million viewers—nearly 6 million fewer than when former FBI Director James Comey testified before the Senate two years ago. And this is for impeachment.
Or think of it this way: “There are about 330 million Americans. According to the ratings, nearly 320 million of them aren’t watching the House impeachment proceedings.”
According to 538 the gap between those who support impeachment and those who don’t has actually closed, unfavorably for impeachment over the course of these proceedings. Sure, you can make Trumpism expensive. And we see that in some of these Governor elections and the House elections next year. But how do you fix gerrymandering? How do you fix voter education and political literacy? How do you fix our epistemically crisis (god that article hit he nail on the head)? Trump and his cult, to me, are symptomatic of those issues. We can get rid of Trump, but have we cured the underlying issues?
I lost a lot of faith in polling in general and 538 in particular when they said Clinton had a 91% chance of winning. I think there's a lot of emphasis given to numbers that nobody has that good a bead on. Have we cured the underlying issues? Hell nah. But I watched the Republican Party burn the press down with Iraq. That whole Nigerian rods thing they pushed in the NYT obliterated American trust of the press forever and Facebook rushed in to fill the void. Most big cons you can pull once and "rogue populist" has been played. The next dumbshit Republican ploy is going to be something else; they're not going to let a Trump happen again it's been too personally corrosive for them. There are now more Millennials in America than there are Boomers and every year, that ratio gets worse. I'ma guess you missed this: Go check pages 9 and 10.
Totally missed that. Going to read it, venture off to some rock walls near Yakima (how timely considering this conversation), and respond back in a couple of days!
I think this speech will be remembered as a Historical Moment, and will one day be looked back upon as one of the best and most significant of this era. What's less clear is how much it will matter. The simple truth is that, for all the well-deserved criticism of Republicans, we as a nation get the country we deserve.
Historic is exactly how I would describe it. The right amount of passion, totally factual, brimming with disgust for corruption and attacks on character. Schiff has, sooner or later, left his mark.
I would say that at the level of "foreigner attempting to keep abreast" there isn't too much minutiae and inside baseball you need to be on top of. Here's the basix: - Democrats win the House - Trump makes an extremely ill-advised phone call informing the President of Ukraine that Ukraine needs to announce investigations of Hunter Biden in order to get Javelin missiles Congress already released to them - President of Ukraine agrees to go on CNN - Whistleblower goes through channels, lawyers up, and informs the House about the phone call - Ukraine doesn't go on CNN, missiles are released, House calls closed-door hearings, Republicans throw a temper tantrum insisting on public hearings, get exactly what they asked for, everything turns out worse than expected I mean, you knew about all that. Everything else has been witness after witness confirming that what we knew happened happened and Republicans attempting to make things as boring as possible. There have been highlights - Schiff reading Trump's intimidating tweets into the record so they can try him on witness tampering, Democratic representatives questioning Thumbhead so that they can try Trump on bribery, Schiff entering documents that directly implicate Sean Hannity, Giuliani's Russian thugs directly implicating Devin Nunes - but mile-high view, we knew months ago that the entire Trump administration was illegally pressuring Ukraine for political purposes and we now have congressional testimony that the entire Trump administration was illegally pressuring Ukraine for political purposes. None of this is controversial. That's basically Adam Schiff's point in the testimony above. None of this shit surprises anyone, all of it had been previously disclosed in closed hearings (so why the fuck did the Republicans demand that it be public?). The Republican argument basically boils down to "Who cares?"
Feel free to ask hubski’s resident crackpot impeachmentboi (me) if you need clarification.
I hope that Romney leads a revolt within the party. History would forever see him as a great American patriot. Unlikely though