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Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? Bernie Sanders wants to know who owns America?

#19901 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2022-June-07, 19:46

View PostGilithin, on 2022-June-07, 19:05, said:

Feral hogs are a nice attempt at a distraction. Some conservatives will obviously try anything to distract. The simple reality is that a lot of Americans are being shot. A lot of American children are being shot. In around half the states it is easier to buy a gun than a car or even a Bible. And it is much easier to buy a gun and shoot someone than to get an abortion, a divorce or even to vote. Let's not lose sight of the farm for the pigs. Any politician who thinks that fighting <0.1% voter fraud is more important than taking simple and easy steps to save lives does not deserve your vote. If enough Americans are consequential on this, eventually it will result in something changing.


I understand there have been many lousy choices elected US president, and I hate to be pessimistic but I do believe that only a country that is irreparably broken could have elected a Donald Trump.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Black Lives Matter. / "I need ammunition, not a ride." Zelensky
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#19902 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2022-June-08, 07:40

Amanda Carpenter at The Bulwark said:

https://www.thebulwa...y-6th-hearings/

What should we expect?

On paper, the committee was tasked with investigating the events that led up to Jan. 6th and caused the violence to unfold that day, and with proposing legislative solutions to mitigate future threats.

Practically, that means delving into the story of the current state of the Republican party and how far its various actors—from its most powerful leader to his boots on the ground—were willing to go in order to overturn the election and keep Donald Trump in power.

Here’s just a sample platter of the stories the committee has to nail down:

Trump’s lies.

How the GOP and its many aligned advocacy organizations fundraised off Trump’s meritless legal challenges to cancel Democratic votes.

The efforts to squeeze state officials to “find the votes” in swing states Trump lost.

The schemes inside the Department of Justice to launch sham investigations into voter fraud.

The wild ideas entertained inside the White House to seize voting machines in order to “rerun” the election.

The pressure campaign on Republican members of Congress and Vice President Mike Pence to deny Electoral College votes for Biden.

How Trump summoned a real-life mob, bearing tactical gear and weapons, that resorted to physical violence to stop Congress from certifying Biden as president.

It’s a lot. Give it time to sink in. And do not let the political junkies rush the process with their relentless questions about whether or not the hearings will “work” in changing public opinion.

Give the facts a chance to speak for themselves.

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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#19903 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2022-June-08, 09:39

Bill Kristol said:

If the House GOP really believed no one cared about Jan 6 they’d ignore the hearings. This kind of leadership prebuttal suggests their polling shows swing voters and some Republicans are discomfited by January 6th, Trump’s election subversion attempt, and Republicans’ complicity.

Melanie Zanona t CNN said:

NEW from me & @AnnieGrayerCNN: The House GOP is holding a press conference tmrw morning to offer their prebuttal to the Jan 6 select committee hearings.

Among the GOP lawmakers expected to attend: Elise Stefanik, Steve Scalise, Jim Banks, Jim Jordan & Richard Hudson.

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#19904 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2022-June-08, 21:34

Bill Kristol said:

Republican members of Congress said today that school shootings are a) a mental health problem (Cornyn), b) a school prayer problem (Gohmert), and c) not a problem since we didn’t ban planes after 9/11 (Scalise). Also, January 6th wasn’t and isn’t a problem. But the caravan…��

…oops, missed d) Rep. Fallon saying the school shootings are an “overuse of these dang smartphones” problem.

Quote

The refusal to make anything resembling a serious argument is not a bug but a feature of the new MAGA Republican establishment. Contempt for the very enterprise of reasonable argumentation is central to Trumpism. It’s one of the key ways Trumpism is adjacent to fascism.

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#19905 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2022-June-09, 11:49

Bill Kristol said:

I’m old enough to remember when conservatives believed in, or at least claimed to believe in, agency, responsibility, and accountability. And liberal democracy. But that was then and that is not now.

The Republican Accountability Project said:

When asked about his previous statement that Trump bears responsibility for Jan. 6, @GOPLeader [Kevin McCarthy] now says, “I think everyone in the country was responsible.”

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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#19906 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2022-June-09, 19:06

Bill Kristol said:

Liz Cheney's presentation will, in my judgment, go down in the history books: Congress at its best, truth-telling at its best, American democracy at its best.

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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#19907 User is offline   PeterAlan 

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Posted 2022-June-09, 21:30

Liz Cheney said:

“Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible. There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”

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#19908 User is offline   thepossum 

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Posted 2022-June-10, 06:49

Any investigation by the Committee into the role of media in the long run up to the events of Jan 6 and the ongoing circus

EDIT Apologies if I seem disrespectful to Congress but I am trying to respect the US Constitution and Democracy
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#19909 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2022-June-10, 07:24

Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg said:

https://www.bloomber...author_18529680

At long last, the House Jan. 6 committee held its first hearing, and made it a pretty good one. Right at the top, Chairman Bennie Thompson gave us the right wording: Former President Donald Trump’s actions and those of his associates were an effort to “overthrow the government.” That’s what this is all about. That’s why the investigation is so important; it’s why the public side of the committee’s responsibilities are so critical. If the committee is correct, then this was among the most heinous and disloyal actions by a president in the history of the US.

In the two-hour, prime-time session, the committee members only outlined the case that they’re making — what Representative Liz Cheney, one of two Republicans on the panel, called a “sophisticated seven-part plan” by Trump to overturn the election. Thompson and Cheney were clear: While the violence of Jan. 6 was part of the plan, no one should think that the attack by itself was the central story line.

The committee emphasized two further points.

One was that everyone inside Trump’s White House and his campaign knew that he had lost; that there was nothing to any of the wild stories of fraud; and that they all told Trump exactly that. This may be important for any legal case against the former president or his allies, since it shows that they knew what they were peddling was false. It’s also useful in understanding the bigger picture. The truth is, there was nothing extraordinary about the 2020 election. It was close, but not especially so. If anything, it was unusually clean. The professionals on the campaign and Trump’s legal team knew it, and told him so. Claims to the contrary not only amounted to a lie, but a lie in service of overturning the government.

The second point was that Jan. 6 wasn’t just the spontaneous action of a mob. It was an organized attack by extremist groups that had been egged on by Trump. It’s still not clear whether Trump and his allies actively coordinated the mayhem, or just recklessly invited it. But Trump in particular certainly did invite it, and once the violence began he refused multiple entreaties to use either his official position or his influence with the mob to put an end to it.

As for the presentation: Video of the attacks, live testimony from a Capitol police officer who had been brutally injured, and snippets from the depositions the committee has conducted made for compelling television. Of course, most voters weren’t watching. But it was never a realistic goal to entice a large audience to watch gavel-to-gavel coverage. What the committee members needed to do was to convince key elites — the non-aligned media, high-visibility Republicans who aren’t entirely comfortable defending Trump, and any skittish Democrats — that this is all extremely important. The more successful they are in doing so, the more the hearings will become a continuing event, with people being exposed to it in news coverage and social media and everywhere else. It’s likely that the committee took a big step toward achieving that on Thursday.

These hearings are unusual in that the minority party is represented only by two members (out of nine) who are defying their own party’s boycott. That means the whole thing can be as scripted as the committee chooses, without interruptions from the minority or attempts to debunk or reframe what’s happening. In that sense, the boycott has been a tremendous gift to the committee. There was no squabbling over rules or procedures, no objections, no complaints about etiquette — nothing that would make it easy to bash the whole thing as partisanship. Helping things further? Seven committee members, everyone but Thompson and Cheney, were willing to sit quietly throughout the session. Presumably everyone will get a turn to shine over the five remaining hearings, but very few politicians are willing to sacrifice an opportunity to be seen by a prime-time audience. And that in turn helped to emphasize the seriousness of the occasion.

I hope that the committee plans quite a bit of live testimony in the daytime sessions; the clips from taped depositions can be effective, but they’re not nearly as gripping as watching full answers, especially by people who once appeared to be loyal to the former president but now are telling the truth about him. We’ll see what they have soon, with three daytime sessions next week beginning on Monday morning. And yes, I do think this would all have been more effective months ago, and with more time. We had several short clips Thursday night from rioters; I could easily imagine two weeks of testimony walking them through the entire thing.

Perhaps the most effective moment of the hearing came from Cheney, who talked about the portrait in the Capitol rotunda of George Washington resigning his commission at the end of the revolution. Washington’s action made him world famous; he could have been king of the new nation, but he rushed, as the painting shows, to give up power as soon as it was safe to do so. Even more astonishingly, he managed to repeat the act by retiring from the presidency after two terms, setting an example that lasted for more than a century and was so powerful that when Franklin Roosevelt shattered the precedent the response was eventually to put the two-term limit into the Constitution. The contrast with Trump, who refused — still refuses — to accept the verdict of the people in a free and fair election, could not be stronger.

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#19910 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2022-June-10, 10:42

Adam Schiff said:

It’s actually a pretty simple story of a president who lost, who couldn’t stand losing, who cared nothing about the constitution and was determined to hold on to power and who incited a mob when everything else failed.

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#19911 User is offline   kenberg 

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Posted 2022-June-10, 11:54

From PeterAlan

Quote

Liz Cheney said:

"Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible. There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain."


There is, and will be, plenty to choose from but for me this might well be the best summary. Those who wish the whole thing to just go away can pick at some minor point, they can distort a point, they can refute a point that no one has put forth, but at the end of the day, when the chips are down, they will defend the indefensible or they will not.

The choices that they make will have major consequences.
Ken
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#19912 User is offline   johnu 

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Posted 2022-June-10, 15:32

Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg said:

These hearings are unusual in that the minority party is represented only by two members (out of nine) who are defying their own party’s boycott. That means the whole thing can be as scripted as the committee chooses, without interruptions from the minority or attempts to debunk or reframe what’s happening. In that sense, the boycott has been a tremendous gift to the committee. There was no squabbling over rules or procedures, no objections, no complaints about etiquette — nothing that would make it easy to bash the whole thing as partisanship. Helping things further? Seven committee members, everyone but Thompson and Cheney, were willing to sit quietly throughout the session. Presumably everyone will get a turn to shine over the five remaining hearings, but very few politicians are willing to sacrifice an opportunity to be seen by a prime-time audience. And that in turn helped to emphasize the seriousness of the occasion.

Can you imagine the clown show that somebody like "Gym" Jordan would have put on if they were allowed to be on the committee? Jordan was front and center in the committee's investigation for his traitorous actions in the events leading up to January 6. Only the QOP thinks that having a subject of the investigation be part of the investigation team is in any way a good idea.
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#19913 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2022-June-10, 15:53

The telling indictment from day 1 to me was how many Republican lawmakers thought themselves lawbreakers and asked for preemptive pardons.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Black Lives Matter. / "I need ammunition, not a ride." Zelensky
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#19914 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2022-June-11, 10:41

From The Moral Desolation of the GOP:

Peter Wehner at The Atlantic said:

The sheer scale of Donald Trump’s depravity is unmatched in the history of the American presidency, and the Republican Party—the self-described party of law and order and “constitutional conservatives,” of morality and traditional values, of patriotism and Lee Greenwood songs—made it possible. It gave Trump cover when he needed it. It attacked his critics when he demanded it. It embraced his nihilistic ethic. It amplified his lies. When House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy—a man who for a few fleeting hours after the January 6 insurrection dared to speak critically of Donald Trump—traveled to Mar-a-Lago a few days later to kiss his ring, it was an act of self-abasement that was representative of his party, his morally desolate party.

Make no mistake: Republicans are the co-creators of Trump’s corrupt and unconstitutional enterprise. The great majority of them are still afraid to break fully with him. They consider those who have, like Liz Cheney, to be traitors to the party. They hate Cheney because she continues to hold up a mirror to them. They want to look away. She won’t let them.

Perhaps the most withering sentences of Cheney’s extraordinary presentation last night were these: “Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”

Those in the Republican Party and on the American right who defended Trump and continue to do so—who went silent in the face of his transgressions, who rationalized their weakness, who went along for the ride for the sake of power—must know, deep in their hearts, that what she said is true. And it will always be true.

Their dishonor is indelible.

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#19915 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2022-June-11, 12:51

Charlie Sykes, Editor-at-large at The Bulwark said:

Cornyn’s rejection of the 21-year age limit is craven, nauseating, insane on the merits, and more evidence that the GOP’s negotiations are in bad faith.

https://www.thebulwa...trol-cowardice/

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#19916 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2022-June-14, 07:01

Seth Meyers said:

The House committee investigating the Capitol attack today held its second public hearing. They weren’t going to, but then Rudy Giuliani said, ‘Make it a double!’


James Corden said:

So we’re just going to blame this entire thing on the alcohol?

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#19917 User is offline   kenberg 

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Posted 2022-June-14, 07:39

Alcohol can sometimes be part of an explanation but of course not the whole thing. For example, the excessive use of alcohol needs an explanation. I guess it could be interesting, in a morbid sort of way, to try and understand some of the choices.

A woman with three growing children, limited job prospects and a lousy husband is in a tight spot. She has few options. But it is completely different for those who were around Trump. They had options, plenty of options. As Jan 6 approached some effectively said "If you are going down that path, it will be without me" and they got out of there. Others stuck with him. As I understand it, those who stuck with him did not really think the election was fraudulent, but Trump said it was so they said it was fraudulent. When someone has options, sticking with a scumbag like Trump is difficult to understand.

Maybe doing so created a need for a lot of booze.
Ken
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#19918 User is offline   kenberg 

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Posted 2022-June-14, 14:44

This is just a "Maybe others will also find this interesting" post.

WaPo writer John Kelly posted the WaPo front page from June 18, 1972.

https://www.washingt...e-post-stories/

Kelly wrote mostly about the other stories of the day, just for interest.

The full WaPo story on the arrest of five men in Watergate is here:

https://www.washingt...gate/part1.html

It struck me as interesting history.
Ken
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#19919 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2022-June-14, 16:40

I was thinking today the best chance the NRA offers to save kids is to hand out Colt 45s to all grade school students and instead of history show them the movie Tombstone.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Black Lives Matter. / "I need ammunition, not a ride." Zelensky
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#19920 User is online   Chas_P 

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Posted 2022-June-15, 19:17

View PostWinstonm, on 2022-June-14, 16:40, said:

I was thinking today the best chance the NRA offers to save kids is to hand out Colt 45s to all grade school students and instead of history show them the movie Tombstone.

Did the NRA produce Tombstone? https://www.youtube....bg2YnBj9II&t=2s
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