At the moment, Elizabeth Warren has won more votes on her own in an election than anyone else running for the Democratic Party nomination. Here are some of the numbers:
Warren, US Senate, 2012: 1,696,346
Booker, US Senate, 2014: 1,043,866
Bloomberg, New York Mayor, 2005: 753,090
Biden, US Senate, 2008: 257,539
Sanders, US Senate, 2012: 207,848
Buttigieg, South Bend, Ind., Mayor, 2015: 8,515
Until she dropped out, Kamala Harris had won more votes than anyone else, with 7,542,753 voting for her in 2016 for US Senate.
And one shouldn't forget that Joe Biden won national election as Vice President with 69,498,516 votes in 2008—but he didn't do it on his own.
None of this means much, of course. It's interesting, though, who actually has experience winning millions of votes and who doesn't.
I had the misfortune of hearing the entirety of Rep. Doug Collins' (R-GA) opening statement to the House Judiciary Committee this morning, and I almost ran off the road because I was rolling my eyes too much.
Fortunately, Alexandra Petri neatly summed up the Republican positions he advanced:
You bet I would love to support impeachment! Nothing would delight me more — if it were just bipartisan, which unfortunately it’s not, because I have vowed to oppose it at all costs. This is sure an unfortunate coincidence. I keep asking: Why isn’t there bipartisan support for this? I could support it, if only I were not against it — which I am, vehemently, and will hear no reason to change my mind. A most ingenious paradox!
We must consider the facts. Alas, the facts are in dispute, coincidentally again by me. So, there we are. Who can say what’s true? I understand you to be saying that a certain set of things are demonstrably true, but to that I say, “What if they weren’t? Also, think about President Andrew Johnson.”
It is your fault that this impeachment process is not bipartisan, and you ought to feel bad. If I had not vowed that this process was illegitimate and I would oppose it, I would consider it legitimate, and support it. It is your fault that I won’t, for starting this process, instead of waiting for me to start it.
Which I would have! If the president were a Democrat.
As long as the Republican members of Congress do not care at all how President Trump executes his office, all the Democrats can do is point out how bad it is. And also their hypocrisy. Remember, when the Republicans impeached Bill Clinton for lying about an affair, they made all the arguments that Democrats are now making for far worse conduct.
The Post reported today that a simple review of phone logs shows how the president and his stooges left themselves open to Russian espionage by using insecure cell phones:
The disclosures provide fresh evidence suggesting that the president continues to defy the security guidance urged by his aides and followed by previous incumbents — a stance that is particularly remarkable given Trump’s attacks on Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential campaign for her use of a private email account while serving as secretary of state.
The connection to the Ukraine campaign is also troubling because of how Moscow could exploit knowledge that Trump was secretly engaged in efforts to extract political favors from the government in Kyiv.
Trump and Giuliani have effectively “given the Russians ammunition they can use in an overt fashion, a covert fashion or in the twisting of information,” said John Sipher, former deputy chief of Russia operations at the CIA. Sipher and others said that it is so likely that Russia tracked the calls of Giuliani and others that the Kremlin probably knows more now
“Congress and investigators have call records that suggest certain things but have no means whatsoever of getting the actual text” of what was said, Sipher said. “I guarantee the Russians have the actual information.”
Ordinarily I'd chalk this up to stupidity. But GOP strategist Rick Wilson sees something far darker:
The traitors deliberately ignore the reporting, counsel, and warnings of the intelligence community when it comes to Russia’s attacks and Vladimir Putin’s vast, continuing intelligence and propaganda warfare against the United States.
The traitors — be they United States senators like John Kennedy and Lindsey Graham or columnists from the Federalist, Breitbart, and a slurry of other formally conservative media outlets — repeat the Kremlin-approved propaganda messages and tropes of that warfare, word for word.
It’s not simply treason by making common cause with a murderous autocrat in Russia, or merrily wrecking the alliances around the world that kept America relatively secure for seven decades.
Their betrayal is also to our system of government, which as imperfect — and often downright fucked up — as it is, has been remarkably capable of surviving.
And if you can’t spot the treason yet, you will soon enough. That’s the thing about spies, traitors, and those who betray their country — they rarely stay hidden forever.
We need to get this administration out of office in 2021, and help the American people understand the danger their sympathizers represent. If only we still taught civics in schools.
After conversations with knowledgeable friends on both sides of center, I wonder which of these scenarios in all seriousness is most likely. Note that these scenarios are not mutually exclusive:
A. President Trump wins re-election.
B. President Trump leaves office before the 2021 inauguration.
C. President Trump loses re-election but refuses to concede.
D. One or more members of President Trump's immediate family flees to exile in Russia before the end of 2022.
E. A flag or general officer openly defies an order from President Trump...
1. and is acquitted at court-martial; or
2. is not sent to court-martial.
F. A senior officer (O-4 to O-6, i.e., Major through Colonel or Lt Commander through Captain) openly defies an order from President Trump...
1. and is acquitted at court-martial; or
2. is not sent to court-martial.
G. One or more members of President Trump's immediate family is convicted of state crimes related to Trump's companies.
All of these are troubling scenarios. All of them are possible.
Not to mention, Scenario F2 has already happened, but people outside the military may not understand the problem. Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman unambiguously violated a direct order from the president when he testified before Congress last month. But the order was unambiguously illegal. If the Army were to follow proper procedures, Vindman should go to court-marshal and he should be acquitted. He hasn't been because the Army has no way of starting those proceedings without looking like it's taking a political position. But what if...?
There are many other situations that could come up before Trump leaves office, but I think these are the most likely.
Thoughtful comments about these possibilities are encouraged.
I hate taking sick days, I really do. Fortunately, the Internet never takes one:
I'm now going to try to do a couple of hours of work, but really, I just want to go back to sleep.
Yesterday, the President of the United States mused aloud why we haven't celebrated the centennial of the 19th Amendment's passage in 1920 sooner:
After working his way through the prepared remarks, Trump interjected with his own riff. “They’ve been working on this for years and years,” he said, suddenly wondering, “And I’m curious, why wasn’t it done a long time ago, and also — well, I guess the answer to that is because now I’m president, and we get things done. We get a lot of things done that nobody else got done.”
The task of explaining to Trump that “centennial” means “100th anniversary” fell to Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn. Blackburn gently recounted that the bill worked its way through both chambers of Congress. ... She proceeded to note that “August 18th, 1920 is when the 19th Amendment was ratified.”
Mystery solved! They’re observing the women’s suffrage centennial now because next year is the centennial. That is how time works.
Even after this clear accounting, Trump nonetheless was still confused.
Dementia? Alzheimer's? The Omnibus Explanation? Probably the last one, as it would explain how he doesn't grasp that people who look at his financial disclosures easily spot the endemic fraud, such as what ProPublica reported today.
The election is in 342 days. Angels and ministers of grace, defend us.
As Gordon Sondland throws the president under the bus (probably because (a) he's under oath and (b) the president would do it to him soon enough), there are actually a lot of other things going on in the world:
More work to do now.
So far in this election cycle, I've given money to only one candidate: Elizabeth Warren. I believe she's best qualified of everyone running to become president in January 2021, and I also agree with most of her policy proposals. And I like that she's not afraid to show her anger.
That said, the adjective "angry" applied to a woman can signal something else. Joe Biden disappointed me greatly when he employed it to introduce a whiff of sexism, which I expect to become an absolute miasma before the Iowa Caucuses. And I'm bloody sick of it.
The Atlantic is too:
The profound irony of Biden’s “angry, unyielding” accusation is that Warren herself is the first to admit to her own anger. A foundation of her campaign is that there is nothing wrong with being angry—and that, to the contrary, if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention. In an email to supporters late last week, Warren rejected the premise of Biden’s accusation, writing, as she has before: “I’m angry and I own it.”
But what Biden and his advisers seem to know all too well is that once an idea builds—once it becomes the stuff of sound bites and headlines and Overton-sanctioned debate—it becomes extremely difficult to counter. To tell someone “Don’t think of an elephant,” the linguist and philosopher George Lakoff has suggested, is meaningfully identical to telling that person to think of an elephant. Biases are powerful things. So, in politics as in other fields, are emotions.
Anger may be an ethic of the moment. But anger, flung as an accusation at Warren, is not about economic disparity or racial injustice or environmental catastrophe. It is about the familiar standbys: “likability.” “Electability.” “Charisma.” Anger, rendered as a criticism, summons those ideas—without explicitly invoking them. It summons history, too. It is a targeted missile, seeking the spaces in the American mind that still assume there is something unseemly about an angry woman. It is attempting to tap into the dark and ugly history in which the anger displayed by a woman is assumed to compromise her—to render her unattractive precisely because the anger makes her uncontrollable.
Exactly. Maybe, as a Gen-X, cis-gendered, straight, educated, 40-something, white American man of some privilege, I have a piece missing that I actually couldn't care less about the sex of a politician when evaluating her policies or ambition. Or maybe other people in my demographic—specifically other people more than about 10 years older than I am—need to either get over themselves or just stop voting.
So yeah, apparently we have to deal with all this crap again, because people would rather get bent out of shape that a woman has the audacity to run for president than to get rid of the senile man-child currently holding that office.
And it's not even lunchtime yet:
- A storm has left Venice flooded under 187 cm of water, the second highest flood since records began in 1923. Four of the five largest floods in Venice history have occurred in the last 20 years; the record flood (193 cm) occurred in 1966.
- As our third impeachment inquiry in 50 years begins public hearings, Josh Marshall explains what the Democrats have to prove.
- Yoni Appelbaum wonders if the country can hold together. He's not optimistic.
- Via Bruce Schneier, the NTSB has released a report on the autonomous car accident in 2018 that killed Elaine Herzberg. A notable detail: "Police investigators later established that the driver had likely been streaming a television show on her personal smartphone."
- Chicago Tribune restaurant critic Phil Vettel lists his 50 favorite restaurants in the area. I have a mission.
And you should see Sir Rod Stewart's model railroad. Jaw-dropping.
I realized this morning that I've missed almost the entire season of The Good Place because I don't seem to have enough time to watch TV. I also don't have enough time until Friday to read all of these pieces that have crossed my desk only today:
And now, I must finish correlating two analyses of 1.48 million data points using similar but not identical algorithms. It's as much fun as it sounds.