Cold Dead Fingers

Speaking of felons, maybe the NRA will become a casualty of Trumpistan.  We know that Russia reached out to the NRA through Maria Butina, and Trump and the GOP have to make increasingly irrational moves to placate the gun humpers.

But it's unclear that the NRA has any real juice left beyond the GOP base.  Technically, I'm a gun owner (though I don't keep them in my primary residence), and the idea of background checks and limits on certain types of weapons is fine with super-majorities of Americans.

The NRA was the roster taking credit for the dawn in 1994.  Time to puncture the myth of their electoral power.

Felon Voting

At some point since the CNN Townhalls, giving felons the right to vote while in jail became the cause of all True Believers.  I don't know exactly how that happened, but I doubt it extends much beyond Woke Twitter.

The arguments for felon voting is actually to have fewer felons in jail.  I'm 100% behind this.  There needs to be fewer people incarcerated for non-violent crimes.  Felons voting while paroled?  I can see that.  Felons voting after there sentences are complete?  That is a critical civil rights issue.

There is, I suppose, an argument that giving incarcerated felons the right to vote is an issue of civil rights, but incarcerated felons lose all sorts of rights. The right to assembly, the right to privacy, the right to decide when they get out of bed in the morning.  They are in prison.  They have had due process. 

The counterargument, aside from the fact that they are felons who have had their rights stripped by due process, is mostly political.  Why should we worry about Jeffrey Dahmer or Dzokhar Tsarnaev or James Holmes getting the vote?  Why should you gift the GOP a bunch of attack ads that will woo back those moderate suburban women who drifted in the Democratic camp in 2018?  It's a great example of epistemological closure, where people of any political stripe can dive so far into their own world that they fail to see that politics isn't about convincing the people who already agree with you, but finding a way to convince people who don't live and breathe politics to give you a chance to wield real power.

What a moronic battle to pick.

Impeachment Theater

This is an interesting post suggesting that not rushing to impeachment creates drama behind the initial investigations.  The thing about the Mueller report is that it basically confirmed and added a little more information to things we already knew. If we investigate Trump's business dealings and - quelle surprise! - discover that Trump was corrupt as hell...what happens next?  Is it impeachment?  I don't know!

By dragging out the question of whether or not to impeach, you create a countervailing reality show dynamic to ride over Trump's own reality show schtick. 

Handy Guide

It was never JUST about Mueller.  There are many other avenues into the dark bowels of Trumpistan.

This is why I think it's a few months premature to start impeachment hearings.  Start rolling all of these threads into a massive ball.  THEN start the hearing to create one massive picture of Trump's corruption and make the Senate GOP defend him.

He's "Running"

Last night, Democratic candidates took part in a sequential Town Hall.  I caught a little bit of Elizabeth Warren's and gave her $20, because she is clearly an excellent communicator and has the best ideas of any one in the field.  My wife liked Klobuchar, which surprised her. She made me record Buttigieg, because it was after her bedtime.

It's an impressive field, full of thoughtful people with good ideas.

Why the hell do we need Joe Biden to join the race?  We already have a white guy over 75.

It's Coming

Not winter.

Impeachment.

Just not on Twitter's timeline.  I assigned a reading from Francis Fukuyama's book from 6 years ago, where he argued that while democracy might be the global default (even authoritarian regimes have "elections") the institutions of democracy are both fragile and often unworkable. Looking around the world, it is difficult to say that democracy is in a healthy place.  Above all, democracy requires the rule of law - that the law is sovereign over everyone even, especially, the powerful.  Trump's entire life is a frontal assault of the rule of law. 

It's time democracy fought back.

Happy Easter

And how horrible what happened in Sri Lanka. Religion so often is used to fuel the worst of us, when it should appeal to the best of us.

Impeachment

Impeachment is inherently a political process.  It is not a criminal proceeding, but rather an ability for the legislative branch to check rampant lawlessness in the executive.  There are arguments being made that impeachment isn't worth it, because you will never get the Senate to remove Trump from office.  "That's what 2020 is for" goes the argument.  There is not much of an argument that Trump doesn't deserve to be impeached, rather that it would be politically counterproductive.

I don't buy it.

But I do believe that starting impeachment now, over the Mueller report, wouldn't be helpful.  There are multiple avenues into the Trump Crime Family.  There is the obstruction of justice in the Russia probe. There is the rampant tax evasion and money laundering. They are ongoing violations of the emoluments clause. There is the rampant corruption involved with Mar-A-Lago.  There is the selling of access within the Cabinet.

Investigate it.  Investigate all of it.  Find all the dead bodies, Michael Cohen can help you find them.

Start impeachment hearings in November of this year.  Let them run all winter.  Take every sordid detail of Trump's plutocratic corruption and lay it out before the American people.  Make every Republican Senator and House member defend him. Turn the screws.

Yes, if Trump wins despite all this, we are screwed, but we are screwed anyway if he wins.  Every party that has impeached (or started to impeach in Nixon's case) won the White House in the next election.

Most Americans aren't really paying attention.  They won't be paying attention until the presidential race gets under way.

So, put it off a bit, wait until the political season is in full swing, then air it all out.  Every bit of it.

Lessons From The Mueller Report

It's long.  The broad outlines are in place, but there will be more information to glean from it, especially as the redacted parts are read by members of Congress.  As Josh Marshall explains, we know what Trump did, we know it was - at the very least - incredibly sketchy, we know he did almost everything in his power to obstruct the investigation.  Very little in the Mueller report is fresh information, if you've be diligently following this story.  Basically, the special prosecutor found that what we believed to be true was, in fact, true. Russia wanted Trump to win. Russia worked to help Trump win.  Trump desired Russian help to win.

Therefore to me, the real story is the complete failure of the media in reporting on this story.  Or more accurately, the failures in evaluating the importance of this story.  The investigative reporters did exceptional work and got most of the information correct. The problem remains that too many media figures extend to the Trump administration a benefit of the doubt when it comes to truthfulness that the Trump administration has completely unearned.

One "revelation" in the report is that Sarah Sanders lied when she said that FBI agents thanked her for the Comey firing.  Did anyone seriously believe this? Has Sarah Sanders EVER been completely forthright?  Much of the news coverage (as opposed to the investigative reporting) has fallen into the predictable "he said/she said" dynamic when it comes to initial reports.  At some point, the Times and the Post and CNN simply need to assume that a Trump spokesperson is lying until proven otherwise.  The disgraceful performance of William Barr should be the final nail in a coffin that should have been buried two years ago. 

Mueller decided to abide by the OLC decision that he couldn't indict a sitting president, therefore turning the matter over to Congress.  So far, House Democrats seem gun-shy about pursuing impeachment, preferring to let the election decide the matter.

But if the media have failed to learn the lessons of 2016 and every day since, we are screwed.  False balance and unearned credulity will destroy the republic.

Please Do Me A Favor

Don't believe anything about the Mueller Report until someone has actually read it that isn't AG Barr.

Also, this:

Windsor Mann

✔@WindsorMann

Replying to @RadioFreeTom

Imagine what Barr would have done if Republicans still controlled the House.

284

9:23 PM - Apr 17, 2019

The Future Liberals Don't Want

Martin Longman lays out the startling argument that Democrats are likely headed to a brokered convention. Ultimately, this is why Biden feels like he has to jump in, and might wind up consolidating his choice.  Few people within the party want Bernie Sanders to be the nominee.  But in a badly fractured field, no one would wind up winning the nomination.  That would lead to a brokered convention, and - as Longman notes - the Russians and GOP would turn the simmering embers left over from 2016 into a bonfire.

I'm sure all the lower tier candidates are hoping to catch fire the way people like Buttigieg have.  If your Corey Booker, you're hoping that "something happens" to catapult you into relevancy.  But at some point, you're not helping.  When do Gillibrand, Booker, Castro, Swalwell, Yang, Inslee and the others pack it in?  If it's after New Hampshire, it could be too late.

Helplessness

Watching Notre Dame burn yesterday was like so much of watching the news these days.  You watched something precious slowly being destroyed and there was nothing you could do about it.  You also know that at any moment, some nitwit on Twitter will start talking about "who started it" in a way designed to tear further at the increasingly fragile ties that tether us together as people.  Sometimes terrible things happen by accident. We aren't entirely equipped to handle that.  Many of us would prefer if there were some dark cabal behind every misfortune.  But sometimes terrible things happen for no reason.

On Ilhan Omar

I would argue that two things are simultaneously true:

1) Trump and the Republican attacks on her are Islamophobic and racist, designed to fire up their evangelical voters and pit one American against another.  It serves to buttress their long running argument that only Republicans are true Americans, because they are white people who live in the countryside.  These comments are going to get someone killed.

2) Representative Omar is not very good at message discipline beyond her base.  When you compare her to another high profile House freshwoman - Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - Omar simply hasn't found the right way to leverage her high profile to make a consistent and valuable attack on the GOP.  AOC has mastered the Twitter age message war; Omar has not.

Democratic leadership was called out by Leftist Twitter for not forcible defending Omar by name.  Most of that was bullshit.  But there is no doubt that if you are trying to keep your House majority, create a Senate majority and win the Presidency, you don't want to be dragged off message.  The Democrats' message seems to be about corruption, democracy and inequality, with a little climate and guns thrown in.  They don't want to be arguing about Ilhan Omar in 2020, because she steps on their message in ways AOC does not.

Game Of Thrones

Watching the beginning of the end - plus some of the marathon recap - it strikes me that one of the most pervasive themes in the show is how people are trapped by their history.

Cersei, Daneyrs, Jon, Sansa, Arya, Jamie, Tyrion...they are all prisoners of their past.  Even Bran, who can see everything, is trapped by the past.  Trapped IN the past.  Cersei is captured by the death of her children, the cruelty of her family, her hatred of her brother.  Danerys is a Targarean, ultimately relying on Fire and Blood. Jon finds that he, too, is trapped by his lineage. Sansa by the barbarism inflicted on her by others, Arya by her quest for revenge, Jamie by his past callousness, Tyrion by his lack of wisdom at critical moments.  Everyone is flawed, because everyone carries the tremendous weight of past cruelties that they both inflicted on others and had inflicted on them. 

That's why my king will always be Hotpie, First of His Name, Long May He Reign.

We Live In The Stupidest Universe

And SNL is here to catalog it.