Pence makes Nancy Pelosi look charismatic, he is has no chance of being elected nationally. No one in this administration will ever be elected again. Remember when we were worried about Rice/Powell and others running ~12 years ago? It will be interesting to see if the next GOP candidate is even more deplorable and like a Q/pizzagate person or someone more in the Romney mold, but President Pence is laughable.

booked

You lost 1 cent. The Senate doesn't impeach, the house does and the senate holds a trial and convicts or aquits.

You are right about Pence specifically but wrong about why.

Obviously centrist dems and the media will be aching to allow redemption stories for various cabinet members, most notably Rick Perry, and we don't need to speculate at how that would look:

These ****ers let Bill Kristol and David Frum into the resistance. No one besides Trump and those people found criminally liable will suffer for this, and we all already know that in the best case scenario of actual prosecutions of Trump and his children and Kusher and **** there will be a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to decide:

1) Nobody needs to "go to prison" like a common thief

2) We should just close the book on the whole messy business of which prominent lobbyists have been taking money from dictators and not paying taxes on that

3) I think the dip**** media has internalized "don't prosecute political opponents" as a newly create norm and will screech that we are a banana republic if Cory Booker's DOJ lifts one finger against a Republican guilty of corruption.

How many Nixon cronies became fixtures of the political punditry sphere? John McLaughlin, Pat Buchanan, Ben Stein, G. G. Liddy, etc. Some of these people might stick around to AIDS up our politics.

I bet the "it's time to move on" articles are already written.

Yeah, the sad fact is that no matter how Trump saga ends, it is clear that nothing matters to most Americans other than their team identity. And the powers that be on both sides have too much to lose to burn it down.

Even post-Nixon, post-Vietnam, Americans elected GOP three of next four elections, losing 1976 by 297-240, then an average win 480-58 over next three. The folks wearing "I'd rather be Russian than a Democrat" t-shirts aren't going anywhere, and they have 24/7 steady drip of alternative facts feeding their heads.

I really don't know what to make of it. Truth is that most American idealism has been bull**** forever. Now it is plain as day for all to see. And it still doesn't matter to most. Almost need a Sherman's March or Berlin overrun with reds to shake up a society gone off the rails. Or I guess just wait them out and hope they haven't rigged the game beyond hope as they die off.

I've beat this horse dead but what you're seeing is the result of the re-segregation of society. Social integration will often fail so long as physical integration and social contact devolve.

Longer summary:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_hypothesis

tl;dr: one big-picture reaction to the Civil Rights movement was for white people to re-segregate society. Our political chaos is a predictable result. Poor whites fled to suburbs, exurbs and rural areas. Rich people created a whole ideology and accompanying policy advocacy (low taxes, school choice, land use laws, etc.) around removing themselves from any public obligations and keeping the poor and minorities away from them and their kids.

A coalition of angry people with furious reaction to any demands to reintegrate because they hate black people and hate paying for things they don't immediately benefit produces this form of reactionary politics.

Sure, but physical contact is only part of the story. In the digital age, segregation of ideas and values is as easy as where to get your news and share your views. A fifty year old white guy in a mixed community can spend his evenings commiserating with other disgruntled white dudes all over the country. Don't know how to fix it, but step one is recognizing that alt media is tearing the country apart. Pressuring its financial backers seems a good start. Pisses me off that I am posting this on a forum owned (in part?) by Trump apologists, but to their credit, they created a forum for good discussion.

holy crap at the statue thread there. they are advocating spraying protesters with machine gun fire.

I’m too scared to even look in the thread about the girl murdered by an illegal immigrant. Sometimes these guys are too horrifying for me.

Does a pardon actually change anything? My understanding is that if Manafort is pardoned then he can be compelled to testify as he no longer needs 5th amendment protection.

Why can’t he just refuse to testify and get pardoned for that as well?

If he's pardoned, he's free to not remember stuff.

If he refuses to testify and then gets pardoned, that could lead to a cycle of pardons for contempt charges... Even in this climate, that could be politically catastrophic. That's the type of thing that could potentially take Trump from 35% down to 25-30%.

You can only pardon a guy for not testifying so many times before people realize that his testimony is damaging to you. For most of us, that number is one. For at least some Trumpkins, it can be too much more than 3 or 4.

Hey, there’s a chance the constitution could be amended to give the senate the power to impeach.

I’m saying there’s a chance.

That thread is pretty tame and boring. But man for some reason they really are triggered by that statue coming down and esp at the white ppl aka race traitors that participated

that ****in judge cost us like 90 sklansky years of federal prison time

i'm gonna have to insist the infinity million dollars be moved to escrow until we figure this thing out

The juror who was interviewed, who seemed annoyed that the other juror wouldn't convict, said she thinks Mueller's probe is a witch hunt, and she drove to the courthouse every day with her MAGA hat in the back seat and plans to vote for Trump again in 2020... and yet she was mad the other woman wouldn't convict on the remaining 10 counts.

That's how air tight the prosecution's case was.

How did the prosection let her get on the jury in the first place. I can understand a stealth deplorable getting in, but someone like this? I guess I watch too much TV and assumed that they really research the jurors prior to jury selection.

And apparently there was one juror even worse? Maybe they ran out of challenges or something.

everything the lawmakers say on the floor of the senate is written down and archived. if enough of these so-called "lawmakers" say on the record that they are voting "to impeach" i'll be forced to take you to court to extract my infinity million

Supposedly the Honorable Judge Ellis fast-tracked jury selection.