http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign...ps-impeachment

47% of voters want Trump impeached. If all of us were in the street for a week or so he would be impeached.

https://twitter.com/nowthisnews/stat...92622562627588

Update: They arrested the protestors and they're now in jail. They've been there for several hours.
Edit: They've been there for over 24 hours apparently.


https://twitter.com/ACLUofColorado/s...62353046503424


https://twitter.com/adam_prizio/stat...77942716837888

Despite everything that's almost at the breaking point, I'm genuinely surprised at the lack of concern about Russia taking over the US while Trump just sits back and lets it happen.

I understand he's not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Even if he was completely unaware that people in his administration were colluding, and he was just "useful moron", that explanation doesn't hold. Once the election is done and the transition period is over, all decisions are owned by the president. And this FAKE POTUS lets Russia get away with not only skewering our 2016 election(s), but also is willfully ignoring the ongoing deception campaign, bot infiltration, fake news, future election threats, power grid vulnerability, buzzing of ships/planes, violating treaties, and nuclear power plant hacks.

Those are just examples of inactivity. He's also been aiding and abetting Putin in the Saudi/Qatar situation, destroying ties with EU allies, undermining NATO, defunding the State Department, barely leaving skeleton crews in other areas of the government, getting the House to impede the passing of new sanctions, trying to remove existing sanctions the first week or two in office, responding to threats over reopening the Russian spy compounds closed by Obama, hiring an unusually pro-Russian staff, weakening democracy and institutions in the US, going after people who make Putin jokes, and on and on...

AND ALL OF THIS FOR ABSOLUTELY NOTHING IN RETURN!

Note: Everything listed above is REAL and not fake news. Right, Trumpkins? Pay attention to all of this so you can explain to your Trumpkin buddies why Russia + Trump = ****ing horrible and dangerous for us, and everyone else in the world.

Oh remember, he's gotten one big win already. That stolen Supreme Court justice. The "victory" for the GOP here is tearing down democracy.

No u

ofc the guy who led this rabbit hole is dead.

just noticed old pal Peter Schiff on the youtubes with a new beard. Barely recognizable. Hoping some youtube fish forgot what he looks like, as he runs his cons... lolz.

So apparently Trump didn't know or was pretending not to know that there is a tax cut for rich people in the healthcare bill.

this guy is getting desperate for me to notice him. can we have him banned pls, i dont see the point of having him around.

I assure you that I read every word of that article. Sometimes multiple times. His argument makes no sense. He had no real idea who the guy was? He clearly spells out that he had an understanding that he was dealing with a GOP insider who was asking him to do some super shady ****. He had intimate knowledge of Trump's campaign dealings. He was asking him to collude with Russians and did not care one but if it was ethical/legal or not.

He should have been talking to the FBI the moment Flynn was kicked out of his NSA post, or better yet, when he was being nominated.

His story is super alarming.

What I got the most out of this story, is that Flynn knows a lot.

How has Trump not released a tweet or made a video making fun of these people yet?

What are they trying to hide?
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/...37079958241280

It's appealing that the living presidents, both democrat and republican, are silent. It destroys their legacies, one and all.

How many times did they each speak of the purity of American democracy and now as it's being actively destroyed from within they all sit quiet.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/...40479454310401

Not a chance. All the protesters would be demonized with various pejoratives and the deplorables would agree.

From that article:
There is literally (and I mean that in the strictest sense) nothing Trump could do to get to those kinds of numbers. Weekly protests won't get close to that, and might not even move the needle at all.

The rub, as we can all rightly guess, is that responding to a pollster indicating your desire to impeach Trump costs ~nothing but for a huge majority of people, week long street protests would get them fired or result in a week of lost income, or have other huge life consequences or challenges.

A better, more durable politics should involve organizing for the long term. Perhaps we can say times are so desperate we all need to be in the streets for a week, but that's a very reactive stance. One of the tenants of say community organizing is that the goal is to seek power, not just protest. What the left needs to rebuild is what trade unions built in the early 20th century; through organization and coordination, a small number of professionals and leaders were able to be hugely influential and powerful and enact change without having to disrupt or make huge demands on the individual members of the bodies. That the right set about on a huge, generations long project to destroy and dismantle unions is no accident. The unions did a lot for normal people, to keep the forces of capital at bay.

A politics that requires you to take to the streets for a week is not going to be successful for long and is asking for far too much, even if we think civic virtues are critical and Trump is terrible, and I do think those things.

Of course the early days of trade unions and organization made huge sacrifices, often deadly. So what I would say is this: if we're going to ask people to upend their lives, we do it in a way that builds to something long-term, durable, and can be replicated and repeated and then eventually sets to seize power rather than merely disrupt the system. Have a political project that says, we disrupt the system, and we take control, and here's what we do it with. Make the sacrifice count for more than just to install Mike ****ing Pence. Glibly: if we're gonna take to the streets for a week, how about we simply insist on single payer, or rolling back Right to Work laws, or demanding guaranteed minimum incomes? Treat the sacrifice we're asking from people seriously; offer them something, a goal to improve their lives measurably. Ironically, I have this gut feeling that if we took the streets and brought the system to a halt to demand single payer, of all the important players in Washington INCLUDING many Democratic elites, it might be Trump that caves first. He's a pliable moron with no principles. If only the GOP Congress were the same.

You and I are probably pretty close in mind, pretty similar in a lot of ways, and if I'm going to march in the streets for a week and risk getting ****canned from work and jail time and whatever else, I want a lot ****ing more than swapping out one crazy right-winger for a different flavor of right-winger. We need to give people more than that.

We want to emulate unscrupulous capitalists here who built stores of wealth and power, but don't work very hard to do it. Politics is the same thing. We want power but we can't ask reasonable, normal people to make life-altering sacrifices in such a reactive way. It's a harder job for normal people, for the working class than the people who have wealth and capital and like everything else, can buy their power with propaganda and co-option. But that's the challenge ahead of us. The challenge of the left going forward IS going to naturally involve a lot of sacrifice and work, and probably very pitched battles that are highly disruptive and not comfortable for all involved. But do it in a way that builds to aggrandizing our own power and can be perpetuated.

I think you know that, so I say this I suppose for no real purpose other than to remind all of us that these kinds of wishes won't really move the needle and remain more fantastical than practical.

What we need are reverse gofund me pages for politicians. We pledge to donate politicians/their PACs money, only if they get a certain thing done.

https://twitter.com/PreetBharara/sta...80504534695937

Mueller is beefing up his team again, this time adding New York prosecutor Andrew Goldstein.

Does this say anything extra special about his special counsel?

Just to wash my hands of awvall, who posted that self-segregating **** as he was nodding along to what I was saying, you are of course correct that it is no one's *fault* -- not black people who were redlined into certain urban areas, not the fault of talented young people and immigrants who moved into cities following jobs and money. Fault is a key word and assigning blame and making it a moral question is asinine.

Still, I remain defensive of the notion we have to acknowledge the circumstances as they are. All I want to get across is the electoral reform needs to broadly address much more than gerrymandering. Of course rolling back right-wing voter suppression tactics and protecting enfranchisement is critical. But the US has other, deeper systemic biases that undermine well-functioning democratic order and gives unnatural power to sparsely populated areas depending on arbitrary distinctions. It's obviously a long-term goal and the outcomes we might seek are probably quite difficult to enact. But my point remains, and I defend it still: simply solving gerrymandering may not forestall the Chris Hayes predicted future of the cosmopolitans and finance capitalists versus the ethno-nationalist backlash from the hinterlands. We need more than that.

Perhaps a strawman since in this case, as in this thread recently, we don't have a chorus of people saying we simply need to roll back gerrymandering and all our problems are solved. But I even question how much gerrymandering is holistically problematic.

My subsequent point to iron was that gerrymandering actually does (one) beneficial thing: it provides for a critical number of black representatives and elected leaders, gives them a seat at the table, and makes one of our mainstream parties truly diverse in ways it was not before we legally protected majority-minority districts.

In some sense, rolling back gerrymandering may be an entirely Pyrrhic victory -- the long term consequences could simply be two parties that agree on the core, subtle, unspoken tenant of white supremacy that governed the United States before the Voting Rights Act. That is, we may wind up with two parties that go hard to the rim over every last tipping point/50%+1 median voter in all these newly competitive districts, who is probably 1) white and 2) may in fact be kinda aggressively racist. I think people read that and are like, huh, what, no comprende. But that WAS the status quo before the VRA.

That's fine. Anger can be productive, and righteous, and perhaps we've arrived at the point where we're all Mookie and we pick up the brick or the trash can or whatever and fire it into the nearest window.

But I think what is triggering people in response to einbert is that his point is seemingly that everything the federal government has done post-Merrick Garland is illegal and invalid and the United States is a failed state and the jig is up. As Rococo pointed out: that's pretty clearly hottake territory, both statutorily and practically. Like, OK, einbert, I'm with you, it was a tragic injustice. If we grant the point though, what now? I'm not saying we assume the old norms are still valid and do our best to cherish them and protect them in the face of an aggressive assault from a revenge-fueled right-wing that seeks to undo all of it, but aren't we all kind of envisioning a future where we might put Humpty Dumpty back together in some form or another? I'm not sure where to go from here if just acknowledge the point the United States is a failed project. I'm not asking that all takes serve a purpose, but I don't know what einbert is really asking of me here if I grant him it.

The United States is a ****ed up, immoral, miserable place in many ways. Today but also actually going back to its origins a state committed to chattel slavery. I acknowledge we do ourselves no grand purpose denying that but I still feel compelled to make the best of it.

This just begs the question. Fight back how?

Most everyone on this board is mad, including me.

If there's anything, literally any commodity the US has tremendously huge stockpiles of -- it's rage and anger. We are awash and overstocked with rage.

I think what einbert is saying is that it's the wrong kind of rage or misdirected and largely inchoate, to which I agree. But if were a supply chain or a logistics team, I'm not confident the correct play here would be to fire up the machines to produce more of it in the hopes the consumer sorts it out and buys the right kind.

Rococo is correct ("Fight back how?"): What I think we're missing are the people further down the supply chain who organize distribution and marketing and sales and retailers. Not simply more rage production.

This is a good point. I'd say the other two of the top three are fear and anti-intellectualism. When those three commodities converge (and they do quite frequently), very bad ideas result.

Seems like it works, tho. The Deplorables didn't seize power by tone policing themselves.