Category: Uncategorized

…kids are in danger when they go to school and their peers offer them a Juul hit in the bathroom, but they’re also in danger when their peers show up with semiautomatic rifles and shoot them. Yet while e-cigarettes constitute something people choose to put in their own body—that is, not an express violation of other citizens’ rights—they’re up for a ban. Insanely powerful weapons of war, which are regularly used to infringe on the rights of other citizens, must be freely available to all in perpetuity.

Mango Juuls don’t kill people, people smoking Mango Juuls kill people. Which is why we’re banning Mango Juuls.

Charlie Pierce writing for Esquire. Nothing else to say but: Yep.

Why Nancy Pelosi Won’t Impeach

Required reading from Elizabeth Spiers. Two particularly salient excerpts:

By implying that impeachment in the Senate is the point, Pelosi denies the importance of the process itself—without which impeachment in the Senate wouldn’t happen in any case. And others have argued better and more persuasively than I could that Senate impeachment isn’t the primary or best reason to do it. Referral to the Senate may be in fact be unnecessary and undesirable.

[…]

A slim minority—just 19 percent—of polled opinion supported Richard Nixon’s impeachment at the outset of the Watergate scandal, and by the end of the House Judiciary Committee’s televised impeachment hearings, a strong majority supported it. And that shift in opinion translated into a massive wave of Democratic gains in the 1974 midterm balloting.

Why Nancy Pelosi Won’t Impeach

Yesterday, Trump tried to attack me at his campaign rally by saying I abandoned Pennsylvania. I’ve never forgotten where I came from. My family did have to leave Pennsylvania when I was 10 — we moved to Delaware where my Dad found a job that could provide for our family. Trump doesn’t understand the struggles working folks go through. He doesn’t understand what it’s like to worry you will lose the roof over your head. He doesn’t understand what it’s like to wonder if you’ll be able to put food on the table. And he doesn’t understand that the longest walk a parent can make is up a short flight of stairs to their child’s bedroom to say, honey, I’m sorry. We have to move. You can’t go back to your school. You won’t see your friends because Daddy or Mommy lost their job. My dad had to make that walk in Scranton, Pennsylvania. It wasn’t until I was older that I realized how hard it must have been for him.
But he was not alone. This story isn’t unique to the Bidens. Too many people around this country have had to make that walk.That’s why I’ve spent my whole career fighting — and I will continue to fight — like hell so that no one ever has to make that walk again.
If you’re with me, I hope you’ll join my campaign and chip in what you can

Joe Biden, responding to Trump and showing that, even though I view his 2020 prospects as pretty dim, he can still bring it. The man understands the power of a simple, yet visceral appeal that is clearly drawn from experience and not some focus grouped amalgam of a “formative experience from my recent book.”

I won’t miss the Weekly Standard even a little bit, as I have never considered it an honest enterprise. I do understand the longing some people on the left have to find some decent interlocutors on the right [… and it would] be nice if someone would pay right-leaning journalists to do honest work, but I’ve seen no evidence that that ever occurs. And since it doesn’t, there is no such thing as an honest debate on the issues between the left and right. If the Standard dies, nothing of real value will be lost and we can be grateful that they won’t use an opposition to Trump as a cover to advocate for the things that Neo-conservatives really care about, like permawar in the Middle East.

Booman Tribune neatly sums up my thoughts on all the weeping and rending of clothes over the end of the God awful Weekly Standard. Good riddance to bad garbage.

Even if it’s all true, does it disqualify him?

Kevin Cramer, sitting House member and currently running to be the junior Senator from ND, very neatly sums up the postion of the entire GOP on Kavanaugh. And, while we’re at it, it’s also their position on Trump, whether it be his many personal issues or the straight up treason of conspiring with a foreign power to impact the outcome of an election. But, yeah, both sides.

I don’t have an attorney general. It’s very sad.

Donald Trump. I’m still waiting for a journalist, anyone with access really, to ask him “In the simplest terms, what do you think the job of the Attorney General of the United States is?” I think the answer would be quite illuminating.

You can’t plead Trump on this one, Republicans. You can’t say the base drank the Trump Kool Aid, and you had no choice but to submit. [With the indictment of  Maria Butina] we are staring at clear evidence that the Russians decided in or before March 2015, before Trump was remotely in the picture, that they were going to target your party, working through the NRA, and bank on your winning the 2016 election so that America would become more pro-Russian.You need to ask yourselves why they might have thought this.

Yes, yes; you opposed Putin on Crimea and Ukraine, and you attacked Barack Obama for not being tough enough with him. But even so, Republicans, the Kremlin felt it could play you. If I were you, I’d be asking myself: What was it they saw?

Maybe they saw what some of the rest of us here in America see. That you became, before the rise of Trump, a party devoid of any principle except the maintenance of power. Or that if they won over the NRA, they’d have you, because you’d never cross the NRA. Or maybe they saw that what really matters to you at the end of the day is that if Barack or Hillary was against it, you could be persuaded to be for it. And just maybe they peered a little deeper and saw the growth of the authoritarian turn of mind in your party’s base and liked what they saw.

That is what you became, even before Trump. And look what you’ve become now. Look what you’ve given us. Some of you howled in protest at what Trump did Monday in Helsinki (but it’s still worth noting that many did not). Well, it’s a little late now, isn’t it? You have placed an anti-patriot in the Oval Office. Exactly as the Russians bet you would. Never again browbeat us with your cheap shows of patriotism. You’re the un-Americans.

Michael Tomasky gets it exactly right and simultaneously explains why the vast majority of the GOP is was and forever will be in lock-step with Trump. All that “joking” between Ryan and McCarthy about being in the employ of Putin was not, in fact, joking. More like gallows humor. They knew. They know. They cannot change course. All they can do is hope that Trump goes away before the party burns to the ground in the inevitable blowback should the full truth ever emerge. I suspect that, come November, we’ll see some meaningful rank-breaking as individuals try to protect themselves and their careers. And then the dam will truly break. And then they all have to be tried and serve meaningful jail time. All of them.

Donald Trump is unequivocal proof that A’s hire B’s and B’s hire C’s, and Trump hires people without the judgment, qualifications, ethical foundations, and moral stature to run an underground bum-fighting operation. Scott Pruitt’s obvious money problems should have screamed out in any background check, to say nothing of a Senate confirmation hearing.

  Pruitt is a man, like so many of Trump’s claque of low-rent hoodlums, bus-station conmen, edge-case dead-enders, and caged-immigrant child porn aficionados, utterly unsuited to a role of public trust and responsibility.

Rick Wilson, the conservative who really gets Donald Trump. Just a perfect distillation of the current state of play.