Good morning to all and not only is impeachment on the table this morning but, with the beginning of the Senate trial of Donald Trump, it’s now the main course...so let’s get started with it.
Former U.S. Senator from Iowa, Tom Harkin, writing for the Washington Post, reminds everyone that U.S. Senators trying the impeachment case of the President are not jurors at all...they are the court composed of 100 judges.
As the Senate begins the impeachment trial of President Trump, there should be no misunderstanding on one fundamental point: Senators are not jurors. This critical point was ruled on by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist during the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton.
Early in that 1999 trial, I rose on the Senate floor to raise an objection to House members referring to me and my fellow senators as “jurors.” I felt it vital that the role of senators sitting in impeachment be fully understood and based on the Constitution, and not defined by labels being used by the press or by ill-informed House members. Rehnquist upheld my objection, saying, “The Senate is not simply a jury. It is a court in this case. Therefore, counsel should refrain from referring to the senators as jurors.”
Making that motion was not a step I took lightly. I believed it was vital to the matter at hand, as I believe it is vital to the matter at hand today. As I said at the time, “The repeated use of that word" — juror — "brought it home to me that the House managers meant to leave the impression with us and with the public that that solely is the role” of senators. “I felt at that point I had to object.”
Mike Littwin of the Colorado Independent asks a sensible and, under the circumstances, rather obvious question.
...What exactly would now constitute victory for anti-Trumpers and never-Trumpers and just-plain-sick-of-Trump-Trumpers?
It can’t be conviction and removal because that is not going to happen. Even the Houston Astros couldn’t make that happen. Everyone knows the score by now, just as everyone knew it during the Clinton impeachment trial. You’d need 20 Republican senators to abandon Trump for him to be convicted. There’s a better chance that 20 will invite Lev Parnas to lunch.
We can talk — or more likely laugh — about the oath the senators took to be impartial. A close look at the approval ratings of Trump by party — last Quinnipiac poll I saw had Trump’s approval at 3 percent among Democrats and 93% among Republicans — makes clear that impartiality will be the first casualty of this impeachment trial. Did you see the 9News clip of Cory Gardner at the airport being asked about impeachment witnesses and, of course, dodging the question? He cited the impartiality oath as if that were an answer.
Laurie Roberts at the Arizona Republic thinks that it’s a possiblity that one of Arizona’s U.S. Senators will vote to acquit Trump...and she’s not talking about the senator still looking for The Caravan amongst throngs of “liberal hacks.”
It's a foregone conclusion that Republicans will not remove from Donald Trump from office. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Thursday told FOX News he hoped no Republicans would vote to convict him.
Then he added, "it wouldn't surprise me if we got one or two Democrats" to vote for acquittal.
It wouldn't surprise me if Sinema was one of them.
She may be the first Democrat Arizona has sent to the Senate in 30 years, but she is not exactly a Democrat’s Democrat.
She broke broke with her party to confirm both Attorney General William Barr and Interior Secretary David Bernhardt and was one of three Democrats to vote against the Green New Deal. (The others: Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Alabama’s Doug Jones.)
She's voted to confirm many of Trump’s judicial nominees and was one of three Democrats to sign onto a bill to speed up immigration screening, allowing for the speedy removal of migrant families without valid legal claims for asylum.
Personally, I think that if Kyrsten Sinema did decide to vote to acquit Trump, she may as well not even run for reelection. She wouldn’t win the Democratic Primary.
and while we’re on the subject of Arizona...as far as a potential Democratic VP pick...why not?
Andrew Sullivan is...feeling the Bern?
...I have to say he’s grown on me as a potential Trump-beater. He seems more in command of facts than Biden, more commanding in general than Buttigieg or Klobuchar, and far warmer than Elizabeth Warren. He’s a broken clock, but the message he has already stuck with for decades might be finding its moment. There’s something clarifying about having someone with a consistent perspective on inequality take on a president who has only exacerbated it. He could expose, in a gruff Brooklyn accent, the phony populism, and naked elitism of Trump. He could appeal to the working-class voters the Democrats have lost. He could sincerely point out how Trump has given massive sums of public money to the banks, leaving crumbs for the middle class. And people might believe him.
Is he an American Corbyn? I worry about that a lot. Sanders has been on the far left all his life, and the oppo research the GOP throws at him could be brutal...(snip)
But Corbyn? The British Labour leader had a net favorability rating as low as negative 40. Bernie, with huge name recognition, is only at negative 6. After the GOP has nailed him as an ayatollah-supporting commie who’s going to take your health insurance away and crash the economy, his negatives will rise. But it’s worth noting that Trump’s favorable rating is negative 10. It was striking to me, too, that some leading conservatives rallied to Bernie in his spat with Warren this week. Some are actually quite fond of the old coot.
I really really could do without Andrew Sullivan on a Sunday morning (usually, there’s a few too many dollops of sexism and racism for my tastes) but this specific column, covering the reasons for American optimism, the Democratic primary, and a rather reasonable take on Megxit is good enough that I’m back to arguing back and forth with him...when I do that, those tend to be my favorite Sullivan columns (you will have to scroll to find the excerpt quoted here at SPR).
And...Sully is pretty explicit about it: he states that he will be voting for the winner of the Democratic Primary...so make of his column what you will...granted, I tend not to like Jeremy Corbyn/Bernie Sanders comparisons for a number of reasons, I kinda sorta agree with Sullivan’s particular take on it.
David Edward Burke of the Washington Monthly asks a question that comes up from time to time here at Daily Kos (even I have asked it): Exactly what is the “Democratic base?”
...if Democrats want to consistently win elections in 2020 and beyond, they need to think differently about who, exactly, the base is and what unites them. The foundation of the Democratic Party is not built on what we look like, but rather, on a set of ideas that reflect our shared values. As President Obama has said, we don’t need to embrace a false choice between appealing to minority voters or white working-class voters. A candidate who prioritizes and effectively speaks to the issues that most voters truly care about can do both.
McIntosch is right that black and brown voters are the most reliable Democratic voters—although Jewish voters are pretty consistent in their support of Democrats, too. In 2016, 91 percent of black voters supported Hillary Clinton, along with 66 percent of Hispanic voters A staggering 98 percent of black women backed her as well. By contrast, only 39 percent of white voters supported Clinton. So the math makes clear: the more voters of color who vote, the better chance Democrats have of winning.
That said, it would be wrong to determine the party’s base by relying solely on the tendencies of one voting bloc. Even in 2016, Democratic voters were approximately 60 percent white, 20 percent black, and 14 percent Hispanic., and 45 percent of all voters were whites without a college degree. By the time a coalition big enough to win in a general election is assembled—unmarried women, black voters, Hispanic voters, millennials—the concept of “the base” is no longer effectively measured by demographic makeup.
In a collaboration by the New York Times and ProPublica, T. Christian Miller, Megan Rose, and Robert Faturechi state that the military’s recent tendency to be accident-prone might be a better indicator for America’s military preparedness than The Damn Fool’s Twitter bombast.
Over the past 18 months, ProPublica has dug into military accidents in recent years that, all told, call into question just how prepared the American military is to fight America’s battles.
If forced to fight in the Persian Gulf or the Korean Peninsula, the Navy and Marine Corps are likely to play crucial roles in holding strategic command of the sea and defending against ballistic missiles.
Those branches, though, do not need billions of dollars of new weapons, our examination revealed. They need to focus on the basics: its service members, their training and their equipment.
The Government Accountability Office, Congress’ watchdog, has been sounding the alarm for years, to little effect. In 2016, the GAO found that years of warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan had taken their toll: “The military services have reported persistently low readiness levels.”
I’ve read similar takes about the downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 but it is The Independent’s Robert Fisk comparison of Iranian society with “Western” societies that caught my eye.
Iran made a mistake, but to compound a tragic mistake with a blatant – and then admitted — falsehood was close to Original Sin. The people are not about to overthrow the regime, as Trump’s acolytes and the usual US “experts” suggest. But Iran has been changed forever.
No longer can its religious leaders claim papal infallibility. If they can lie about killing innocents on a Ukrainian airliner – most of them Iranian — then surely their jurisprudence might prove equally flawed. Those who demand obedience from their loyal followers cannot expect their audience to accept their future pronouncements – on Trump or God – with the same sacred trust. For quite a while, the Revolutionary Guards who hitherto presented themselves as potential martyrs for Islam are going to be known as The Guys Who Fired the Missile.
Now let’s remember that we in the West have grown so used to our own dishonesty – and being caught out – that we scarcely flinch at the word “lie”. Let me ask a frank question: save for the flies around Trump, is there anyone who actually believes the “intelligence” information about Qassem Suleimani’s plans to attack or blow up four US embassies (or five, or six, or whatever)?
This excerpt below about the New Year’s addresses of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy isn’t Leonid Ragozin’s most recent column for AlJazeera (that would be this column) but it is a more intriguing one.
For many Ukrainians, Zelenskyy's address reflected their dream of normality after six years of conflict in which national unity is upheld and divisive and alienating ethnonationalist narratives set aside. Naturally, a substantial and vocal minority, which supports the previous president, Petro Poroshenko, lashed out at Zelenskyy for being insufficiently pro-Ukrainian and way too tolerant of multiple vestiges of Russian influence and culture in Ukraine.
But Zelenskyy's speech was watched and discussed way beyond the borders of his country. It was surprisingly well-received by many Russians - and not just by the supporters of the anti-Putin opposition. The address became an instant hit on social networks, with many people contrasting Zelenskyy's heartfelt style and unifying message with Putin's uninspired and somewhat menacing demeanour. It did not help that the Kremlin's video producers made Putin look like a wax figure with a dark Gothic sky over illuminated Kremlin towers in the background.
Writing on Facebook, a Kremlin-friendly pundit, Nikolay Zlobin, praised Zelenskyy's address as "extremely powerful" while advising Putin to change his speechwriter. Another prominent political strategist, Abbas Gallyamov, compared Zelenskyy's address with Nobel Literary Prize winner Joseph Brodsky's famous monologue on identity, in which the poet placed universal values above nationality and ethnicity.
Micah L. Sifry at The New Republic has a question for those that consider themselves in the resistance to this Administration: Are we all in this together?
Since Donald Trump’s election, grassroots participation in the most essential of actions—knocking on doors and making phone calls to voters on behalf of candidates—has been growing. MobilizeAmerica, a hub for creating and listing campaign actions like canvassing, says that more than 800,000 people have signed up for 1.73 million actions since 2017. Half of those sign-ups have occurred since the 2018 election that brought Democrats back to power in the House of Representatives. And the sheer number of Americans marching in protest of Trump administration policies has scarcely let up: Last winter, around 700,000 people marched in 319 U.S. locations to mark the second anniversary of the 2017 Women’s March, despite declining media interest. Between 300,000 and 500,000 came out for the Climate Strike rallies of September, and more than 100,000 people showed up across nearly 700 locales in July to protest Trump’s border detention practices.
By all these measures, the grassroots resistance among Democrats to Trump’s rise is clearly alive and well. But inside the impressive metrics of participation, there’s a worrisome hollowness to the Democratic revival. Grassroots Democrats are resisting a lot, but for the most part, they are not resisting together. Thanks to the affordances of tech and the preferences of big Democratic donors, they are, to borrow from Robert Putnam, resisting alone. This matters, because strong social ties are what keep people involved in the long term, through victories and defeats. The right has gun clubs and circles of home-schooling Christian moms; if the Left mainly builds systems for massing people just for the moments when they are most needed, it will miss a critical opportunity to revive a democracy centered on real people in relationships with one another.
Mark Engler writes at The Nation that it is time to celebrate the achievements civil rights activist Ella Baker alongside those Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
King was undeniably an inspirational leader who deserves to be honored. But this weekend also should allow us to appreciate other contributors to the civil rights movement. The life of Ella Baker highlights a different model of leadership and gives insight into the long and patient work of building a social movement. While King is justly remembered as a powerful preacher and rousing orator, a political strategist and practitioner of nonviolent direct action, Baker calls attention to a more specific role: that of the organizer.
Drawing from activist Bob Moses, the sociologist Charles Payne has argued that the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s actually contained two distinct traditions. One he labels “the community-mobilizing tradition,” which was “focused on large-scale, relatively short-term public events.” Payne sees this lineage as “best symbolized by the work of Martin Luther King,” and he includes in it such well-remembered events as the March on Washington and the famous campaigns in Birmingham and Selma, Alabama. The second is a tradition of community organizing. This is a lineage, Payne writes, “with a different sense of what freedom means and therefore a greater emphasis on the long-term development of leadership in ordinary men and women,” and it is a tradition best epitomized “by the teaching and example of Ella Baker.”
Finally, The New Statesman’s Anoosh Chakelian conducted a rather fascinating interview with Twitter’s outgoing European vice-president Bruce Daisley where Mr. Daisley acknowledges that...Twitter “blue ticks” might have been a mistake.
Daisley acknowledged that validating certain accounts (with a blue tick) was a mistake. “One of the things we felt we got wrong was verification. The intention was for a badge to say, ‘this is the real one’. What happened over time is that when these people sent things that were egregious and politically offensive, people would say to us, ‘Oh, so you’re endorsing that?’”
He also admitted that there was “most definitely” tension between the European and US sides of the Twitter operation over these questions. He diplomatically described Silicon Valley’s more libertarian instincts, compared to Europe, as an “optimistic take on life”. “We used to talk about ‘seeing both sides’, because our belief was that empathy leads to better understanding. The reality of the world is that the optimistic path is often not always the one people go down.”
Social media executives such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg have tried to avoid editorial responsibility for content by insisting their products are “platforms” not “publishers”. But for Daisley, “I think we’ve realised there’s a degree of publication… it definitely sits across curation or publication, or there’s an editorial function in whatever way you describe it, isn’t there?”
Everyone have a good morning!