Enough With The Cutesy Titles, People Are Dead: US Politics January 2021 pt 2

More annoyed by the blue check sharing it than the suburban mom.

POLI
TICS
GIRL

harbl -- of course. I was reacting to that suburban mom video plus a thread I stumbled over on twitter that was full of men calling Boebert stupid and being like, "Shouldn't have dropped out of high school maybe!" Lil too quick for like 40 men to line up to insult a woman's intelligence. Say that she's a fascist white supremacist who committed treason, and let's figure out how to stop her.

oh yeah i was responding to aimless, sry

Meanwhile!

News — With a little more than a week before his impeachment trial is set to begin, President Trump's legal team is up in the air. Butch Bowers and Deborah Barbier, who were expected to be two of the lead attorneys, are no longer on the team, @GloriaBorger & I are told. Story TK.

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) January 31, 2021

A third attorney, Josh Howard, who was also recently added to Trump's defense team, has also left, I'm told. Trump wanted the attorneys to argue there was mass election fraud and it was stolen from him rather than focus on proposed arguments about constitutionality.

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) January 31, 2021

like getting arrested for murder and wanting to spend the entire trial arguing that you are pretty sure the neighbors stole your lawnmower

but her emails

Can we not do "suburban mom" as an insult?

Like, she could just be a person who's wrong about something

There are lots of those and they live lots of places

Some of them have or don't have kids

thx

Isn't life a blast
It's like living in the past

i wanna be stereotyped
I wanna be classified

I know impeachment is the right thing to do but if it gives Asshole a televised platform to keep bleating about election fraud I'm ambivalent...

Asshole could be represented by Lionel Hutz and the Senate would nod sagely before acquitting him.

“Butch Bowers”

Why does Trump even need attorneys, or a defense at all?

i am sure he agrees w u

can't we just stop give him attention? fuck him and the whores he rode in on.

Who?

Come, sweet February thread! Come and wash us clean!

Trump wanted the attorneys to argue there was mass election fraud and it was stolen from him rather than focus on proposed arguments about constitutionality.

he won't be convicted, but if anything could make it happen it's this defense. a constitutional/procedural argument allows the more priggish senators to ignore what happened (which is obviously good for the GOP and what they want to do).

trump's defense plan heightens the contradictions inside the GOP, guarantees even more media attention for the trial, and makes clear he's never going to stop. can easily imagine this being worth at least a couple of guilty votes.

this is the defense republicans actually want, so they can acquit on procedural grounds

Honestly that might be the most likely outcome. https://t.co/2KNCRZSE0g

— Max Kennerly (@MaxKennerly) January 31, 2021

Butch Bowers is the name of the abusive dad of bully Henry Bowers in Stephen King’s It.

Ok so looks like it was a singularity that there would be no talk on a given day. Maybe these threads will self perpetuate thanks to that t disease which will do the same. I take it he can't make himself odious enough that he will just be dropped. & at the moment he is causing enough chaos and misleading enough people that he remains a 'useful idiot' for foreign powers to abuse.

Roll on the day that he breaks the last straw and even Putin finds him no longer useful.
Oh well roll on Feb hope it's quieter. Normally a pretty dead time of year apart from Valentine's day so peace and love and wow Easter eggs already in the shops but no lovey dover tat is there no love or commercial version left in this world.

xpost That's what I was saying, I wasn't joking. Why would he even bother showing up or participating in any way? Why even bother with lawyers? He's not president anymore, what are the repercussions? Let the democrats say bad things about him for a week, don't say a word in response, and then he'll be acquitted anyway. If there is anything the previous impeachment/four years showed it's that there is no amount of evidence that can be presented that would get a conviction.

"don't say a word in response" - like that's going to happen. I bet he's going to represent himself, bigly.

"Ok so looks like it was a singularity that there would be no talk on a given day. Maybe these threads will self perpetuate thanks to that t disease which will do the same." I read this four times and still do not understand a word of it.

late period Rush sometimes got a little left-brained

people were saying up thread that it seemed like this thread might not continue to be busy as it had done at the start of the month.
Something like 2 days after the inauguration there were something like 3 posts all day.
But it seems like just because that t disease taht has been epidemic for the last 4 years despite having had his media access blocked will actually continue to be a pain and looks like his BS has infected several others in the party he adopted.

An update on immigration/family reunification:

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/31/biden-migrant-family-reunification-463999

The “you said $2000 checks” thing is a fairly bad faith thing. I mean I think we all knew the argument was $2000 instead of the $600 not “in addition to” but whatever make it $2000 or more at this point. Money is real.

O IS IT

but like reallly isn't t a disease? I mean he ain't my idea of a comforter.
& he seems to spread like a virus so the last year of his incumbency seems so significant dunnit.
Maybe its rabies or something.

xpost Oh, I know Asshole won't stay mum. I'm just asking what the risks or repurcussions are if he did. As far as I can tell, the answer is "none." It's not a legal proceeding, per se, in that there's no threat of jail or fines or anything, right?

At this point, I am weighing the efficacy of a second impeachment (particularly since no one really expects him to face any repercussions) against just letting the schmuck fade further into obscurity.

is there a difference?

To me, the big question is whether the democrats can manage it enough to resemble an actual trial or will they immediately lose control of the proceedings and let it turn into a clown show?

If the other side, in whatever guise or under whatever representation, is allowed to say a single thing, then it will be a clown show.

This is pretty much a reality version of a Sideshow Bob episode of the Simpsons, kinda hard not to keep it turning into a clown show.

Like, there's no need for a defense because there *is* no defense. At best you'll get a bunch of variations on the ol' Susan Collins hand-wringing, at worst you'll get Rand Paul or John Cornyn or Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley saying, well, anything.

Hope this doesn't undermine the new administration from being able to get anything further done.
Would be so nice if current investigations lead to significant people being removed but assume that would be a longshot.

Oh right, heard teh Skullduggery episode with Al Franken earlier where several quotes about the popularity of Cruz appear so I assume must be the original source.
Hadn't realised Franken was doing his own podcast too

The defense will be purely a bullshit technical argument that you can't impeach a president who isn't in office anymore

Feeling much better about the mainstream/leadership democratic senate these days. Still not sure about manchin and sinema and one of the 50 could croak at any time but maybe they’ll get something done.

Regular people don’t care whether we pass something with 51 or 60 votes. It’s a pandemic and the largest economic contraction in 90 years. We must ignore those who call anything a Republican proposes a compromise, and anything a Democrat proposes partisan. We have to deliver.

— Brian Schatz (@brianschatz) January 31, 2021

President Biden should declare a national emergency on the climate crisis.

Donald Trump declared a fake emergency for his ineffective, wasteful wall. That was no emergency.

The climate crisis is an emergency.

— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) January 31, 2021

So one of the founders of the Lincoln Project is...a superpredator, basically.

21 Men Accuse Lincoln Project Co-Founder of Online Harassment

John Weaver, a longtime Republican strategist and co-founder of the prominent anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project, has for years sent unsolicited and sexually provocative messages online to young men, often while suggesting he could help them get work in politics, according to interviews with 21 men who received them.

His solicitations included sending messages to a 14-year-old, asking questions about his body while he was still in high school and then more pointed ones after he turned 18.

These messages from Mr. Weaver, 61, who helped run John McCain’s presidential campaigns in 2000 and 2008 and John Kasich’s in 2016, did not lead to physical encounters except in one consensual case, and none of the men accused Mr. Weaver of unlawful conduct. Rather, many of them described feeling preyed upon by an influential older man in the field in which they wanted to work, and believing they had to engage with his repeated messaging or lose a professional opportunity.

Mr. Weaver sent overt sexual solicitations to at least 10 of the men and, in the most explicit messages, offered professional and personal assistance in exchange for sex. He told one man he would “spoil you when we see each other,” according to a message reviewed by The New York Times. “Help you other times. Give advice, counsel, help with bills. You help me … sensually.”

Lincoln Project leaders, in their first extended comments about Mr. Weaver, said they had not been aware of such allegations until this month, when a magazine article and an open letter on Twitter from a data analyst named Garrett Herrin accused Mr. Weaver of grooming young men online.

Steve Schmidt, a co-founder of the group, said its leaders had learned last summer from social media posts that Mr. Weaver, who has a wife and two children, might be involved in relationships with men, but emphasized, “There was no awareness or insinuations of any type of inappropriate behavior when we became aware of the chatter at the time.” Mr. Weaver denied the claims, Mr. Schmidt said in an interview.

In mid-January, after the allegations gained public attention, Mr. Weaver issued a statement acknowledging he had sent “inappropriate” messages and apologizing “to the men I made uncomfortable,” while saying he had believed all of his interactions to be consensual. He said he would not return to the Lincoln Project from a medical leave that began in the summer.

The organization has issued a statement, which is creepy as fuck in its own way.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EtEzdQnXYAIiRQA.jpg

I don't know who's wearing the Chuck Schumer skin suit, but he or she is OK by me.

I mean I think we all knew the argument was $2000 instead of the $600 not “in addition to” but whatever

I think the context here is that the Democrats have a history of own goals like this, so what you're sensing is the collective eye-rolling of millions of Americans when they make a straightforward promise like "$2,000 checks for all!" and then immediately and predictably are like "asterisk - paragraph of technicalities"

I mean I think we all knew the argument was $2000 instead of the $600 not “in addition to” but whatever make it $2000 or more at this point.

You’d be incorrect. Even some of the people who dutifully read the politics thread here for two hours a day were confused by this - because the messaging focused on $2k even after $600 checks passed.

The Squad’s amendment was a ‘top up’ to $2000 before the $600 passed, yes, but expecting people to read the text of amendments instead of the tens of millions of dollars in advertising taken out is ridiculous.

Yeah that’s the bad faith meme bullshit I was talking about. I get the recreational aspect of that and wanting to be another guy who does that.

“You gotta understand the context of memes”

Xpost

Keep repeating "bad faith" and maybe it will become true.

Ok