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Florida woman, boxer wrangler and football hooligan currently deep-fat frying something in a humid swamp somewhere.

Betty Cracker has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2012.

Wisdom of the Elders (Open Thread)

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Joe Biden’s campaign dropped a new vid yesterday:

It’s pretty good. The screen cap is only an orange hue away from complete perfection, portraying Trump (accurately) as a bloated, braying ignoramus. It seems calculated to wound Trump’s vanity. Good.

The ad also highlights Trump’s shameless sucking up to autocrats and stiff-arming of allies. That’s messaging that is surprisingly effective across party lines, according to the battleground state focus groups the Obama Bros of Pod Save America have been conducting. Again, good.

And finally, the message underscores Biden’s experience and relationships with leaders and institutions around the world, which is a genuine advantage he has over competitors. It lifts Biden up without shitting on Democratic opponents. Also, good.

So far, I’ve regarded the Biden candidacy as a heaping tureen of unseasoned lima beans, i.e., something I did not order, do not want and will not enjoy, but also as a menu item that is infinitely preferable to other options, such as the platter of unwashed, e. coli-infused pig rectums that is the Trump presidency.

So, my expectations of Biden aren’t super high. But this ad clears that bar with room to spare. And Biden does seem to be adjusting to new realities. In interviews over the last couple of days, he moved off an earlier vow not to mention Trump’s (corrupt AF) adult children, citing nepotism in the current administration as the reason he’s proposing a ban on family members making money overseas.

At times, Biden has come across as not fully aware of the shit-tsunami barreling toward him, not only from the corrupt POTUS and DOJ but also from his old Senate colleagues like Lindsey Graham, who once blubbered about what a good person Biden is and now hurls his old friend under the bus to appease Trump. The impeachment trial in the Senate is going to make the GOP House Benghazi shit-show look like a “Won’t You Be My Neighbor” singalong. Maybe Biden realizes that now.

Regarding the impeachment timeline: my theory is that Pelosi’s decision to keep the scope of the inquiry narrow and push it over to the Senate soon is based in part on the fact that Trump and the GOP are running a Biden-focused projection defense, falsely accusing Biden of the crimes Trump, his cronies and his hell-spawn have committed.

There are decent arguments for decelerating the impeachment process and drafting more articles, but it makes sense to factor the larger political landscape into it. Maybe Pelosi figures it’s best to find out how well Trump’s preposterous corruption attacks work against Biden now. It’s not fair, but she’s probably right.

Open thread.

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Speaker Pelosi’s Statement

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Speaker Pelosi is scheduled to deliver an impeachment status update at 9 AM:

Will Pelosi fast-track impeachment as expected according to the “urgent new argument” CNN reports on below, or is all this talk of an expedited impeachment a briar patch gambit?

Democrats are injecting an urgent new argument into their already fast-moving impeachment drive: President Donald Trump poses such a flagrant threat to the republic that there is no time to waste.

Their emerging gambit is prompting Trump’s GOP defenders — who have long struggled to coalesce around a coherent strategy of their own — to launch a fresh counterattack, warning that that a rush to condemn the President proves the Democratic case is shallow and politically motivated. The President himself appeared to contradict that defense Thursday morning, tweeting, “if you are going to impeach me, do it now, fast, so we can have a fair trial in the Senate, and so that our Country can get back to business.”

I have no idea, but maybe this statement will clear that up. On Twitter, Trump is babbling about calling Schiff and Joe Biden in to testify in the senate trial. Giuliani is running around Europe right now doing the dirty work that Ukrainian President Zelensky did not have to do thanks to the whistleblower, i.e., manufacture dirt on the Bidens.

Interesting times. Open thread.

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Birb! (Open Thread)

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A little birb told me we’ll be treated to some spectacular bird photos later this week, featuring a photographer who produces images far superior to mine. But in the meantime, I’m sharing this Belted Kingfisher I saw a while ago:

I love these bad-ass little birds for their punk ‘dos, pugnacious attitudes and ratcheting calls. If they think you’re getting too near their young, they’ll swoop on your ass with the fury of 10,000 valkyries.

Let this photo also dispel the notion that Florida doesn’t experience seasonal foliage changes. It’s not as dramatic as it is up north, but there are subtle changes everywhere, and trees in the central to northern part of the state display beautiful fall colors.

Anyhoo, open thread — impeachment hearing thread is downstairs, though that’s up for discussion here too if you like.

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Charlie Brown Traders

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Stocks are getting hammered today in part because the idiot POTUS, who understands economics even less than I do, said maybe there will be no trade deal with China until after the 2020 election. Trump has lied several times about progress in talks with China, causing markets to soar temporarily every time he tells a big fat whopper.

He implied an agreement was all but a done deal a couple of months ago, which caused the Charlie Brown traders to go nuts. As usual, the Chinese delegates proved the more reliable narrators, throwing cold water on those expectations, but not until after Trump made maximum hay of stock market gains.

In light of these developments today, CNBC Washington correspondent Eamon Javers revealed a bizarre conversation he had with Kellyanne Conway yesterday:

Given Trump’s new comment that he may want to wait until after ‘20 for a China trade deal, here’s an exchange I had with Kellyanne Conway at the WH yesterday. I asked her if the president was wrong to announce the trade deal in October, before it was actually done.

Conway said: “No.”

I said: “Now here we are in December and we don’t have a deal.”

KC: “why do you think we don’t have a deal? Because you haven’t seen it?”

EJ: “Is there a deal we haven’t seen?”

KC: “Are you saying the president lied that we don’t have a phase one deal?”

EJ: “We haven’t seen the deal.”

KC “So?”

EJ: “Well that’s significant.”

KC: “So you’re saying was the president wrong to say there was a deal and there isn’t a deal. Is there a deal or not?”

EJ: “Did he put himself in a bad negotiating position by announcing there was all but a deal?”

KC: “No, of course not.”

EJ: “Did he put himself in a position where the Chinese could embarrass him?”

KC: “The Chinese have not embarrassed President Trump, that’s for sure.”

Conway is a lying ass-weevil. Generally, my opinion is that the straight news networks shouldn’t give her air time because she actively makes viewers dumber. But this exchange with Javers is revealing, in a sense. Conway’s prickly evasions strongly suggest what most of us here have suspected all along: there is no strategy, at least not on the US side, to manage trade relations with China, at least not in a way that advances US interests (as opposed to Trump’s personal interests).

Probably the only thing that’s saving Trump’s ass right now is that the Chinese want an idiot in charge of American trade policy. I would, if I were them. I’d want someone stupid and needy like Trump, someone easily manipulated so I could run circles around him and improve my country’s bilateral bargaining position while expanding its global influence.

The Chinese want access to our markets, and the trade war is undoubtedly hurting them. But they don’t have to worry about elections, so they can wait Trump out. I don’t know what their strategy is. But the Charlie Brown traders should figure out which Lucy is really holding the football. It sure as hell ain’t Trump.

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Lisa Page is done being quiet

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I understand the argument when people say Trump isn’t the worst president ever — or even the worst this century. In terms of body count through pointless military actions and the number of lives ruined through financial malfeasance and mismanagement, Trump doesn’t come close to George W. Bush (yet).

But Trump is in a class by himself in his willingness to recklessly gin up rage against entire groups of people and tell outrageous lies that endanger individuals. He eagerly and often does both for political gain, to get himself off the hook or to paint himself as less sleazy by comparison to others. It’s grotesque and repellent, and, as far as I know, it’s unmatched in US history. In this way, Trump has exposed countless people to crackpots and mobs and has caused death and mayhem, though not at scale…so far.

Two of his favorite targets are former FBI lawyer Lisa Page and agent Peter Strzok. Trump defames them not because they engaged in official misconduct (investigations turned up indiscreet behavior but nothing illegal) but rather because they were critical of Trump in text exchanges, which Trump latched onto as evidence of a “deep state” conspiracy. Trump has relentlessly mocked the two and called for their jailing, just like the tinpot authoritarian he aspires to be.

Trump’s behavior toward Page and Strzok is particularly disgusting to me because they aren’t public figures. The way he leers about “lovely Lisa” and lingers over the word “lovers” when talking about Page and Strzok at his hate rallies is grotesque because no one deserves to have their private business publicly mocked by a foul, degenerate hypocrite like Trump. (It’s also jarring to me because I once found it impossible to imagine Trump using the word “lovers” outside the context of a food order in which it immediately follows the word “meat.”)

Anyway, after remaining silent and hoping in vain that Trump would move on, Page has had enough of the shitgibbon’s shit, as she says in an interview with Molly Jong-Fast in The Daily Beast. Here’s an excerpt where Jong-Fast describes why Page decided to speak out:

I asked her why she was willing to talk now. “Honestly, his demeaning fake orgasm was really the straw that broke the camel’s back,” she says. The president called out her name as he acted out an orgasm in front of thousands of people at a Minneapolis rally on Oct. 11, 2019.

Ugh. That’s just so many shades of fucking cringe.

I hope Ms. Page gets some measure of relief from breaking her silence and highlighting the many ways Trump and his nasty sycophants have subverted our federal law enforcement institutions. The whole interview is worth a read.

Open thread.

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Things Fall Apart (Open Thread)

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Iowa is a foreign country to me, and I don’t really understand the Democratic primary electorate very well, so I’m asking, can this sort of thing work? Are there boiling pools of resentment against hogwash that can be tapped to motivate pro-Biden caucus-goers?

Here’s a person who understands the Democratic electorate even less than I do:

Auto Draft

Excerpt:

The state of the Democratic field reflects the weaknesses of the individual candidates, but it also reflects the heterogenous nature of the Democratic coalition, whose electorate has many more demographic divisions than the mostly white and middle-class and aging G.O.P., and therefore occasionally resembles the 19th-century Hapsburg empire in the challenge it poses to aspiring leaders.

Douthat’s take is wrong in that he attributes all divisions within the Democratic Party to identity politics while glossing over the male-dominated, enthno-nationalist bent of Republicans, who are the current champions of the most salient example of identity politics in America since forever. But he’s correct to describe Democrats as “heterogenous,” just not entirely for the reasons he thinks.

In comments in a recent morning thread, I argued that the GOP’s open embrace of demagoguery in service of oligarchy (mirroring Putin’s strategy) has resulted in an untenable situation. Only one of the two parties in a two-party system is interested in civil rights or sound governance. Good-faith policy debates about the size of government, taxation, human rights, etc., only take place in one party.

There’s your heterogeneity. And yes, it may pose a “branding” challenge when only one party feels an obligation to represent all Americans. I don’t know how we address that, but my feeling is either the Republican Party gets utterly obliterated and rises from the ashes (perhaps with some milquetoast nonentity like Marco Rubio bleating platitudes at its head) or everything simply falls apart.

Douthat again:

But for the kind of American who is mostly with the Democrats on economics but wary of progressivism’s zest for culture war, Sanders’s socialism might be strangely reassuring — as a signal of what he actually cares about, and what battles he might eschew for the sake of his anti-plutocratic goals. (At the very least he’s no more radical on an issue like abortion than a studied moderate like Mayor Pete.)

This is why, despite technically preferring a moderate like Biden or Amy Klobuchar, I keep coming back to the conservative’s case for Bernie — which rests on the perhaps-wrong but still attractive supposition that he’s the liberal most likely to spend all his time trying to tax the rich and leave cultural conservatives alone.

Douthat isn’t the only person who suspects Sanders doesn’t really give a shit about anything but economics, which has been and remains a huge obstacle to Sanders winning the Democratic Party nomination. Douthat either underestimates the opposition to Sanders’ democratic socialist approach from moderate Dems and/or — even more stupidly — believes a Sanders candidacy would peel off enough Rust Belt whites who voted for Trump to make up for the loss of those moderate Dems and other constituencies within the party (women, people of color) that would recoil from a Sanders candidacy. With the nuances shaded another way, the same might be true of Biden or anyone else.

IMO, the bottom line is this: Republicans broke the two-party system. We can’t fix it for them. Indeed, we’re struggling to keep the country afloat long enough for the Republican fever dream to break and the GOP or some other organization to rise, fill the vacuum and restore the two-party system. I’m not optimistic that will happen. The course of least resistance is this: things fall apart.

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Wednesday Afternoon Open Thread

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Here’s a juvenile ibis hunting along the waterline (with bonus glossy ibis ass right behind its head):

Wednesday Afternoon Open Thread

I’m scrambling around to get last-minute work stuff done before overnight guests arrive this evening and we’re completely overrun with family on Thanksgiving itself, which we are hosting. I don’t think we have enough wine (there will be Trumpers!), but we will remedy that.

How is your Thanksgiving prep coming along, if applicable? I feel much calmer than I usually do when I have to host a bunch of people. One of the upsides to getting older (for me, anyway) is that the prospect of public humiliation isn’t as frightening as it used to be.

This benefit first occurred to me shortly after my 40th birthday when I was at a fancy restaurant in South Florida, waiting alone at a table for a friend to arrive. I was in town for a business trip, and we were meeting in the elegant dining room of the hoity-toitiest hotel my then-corporate overlord would accept as expensable lodging.

I had a real paper newspaper with me because this was before there was reliable WiFi on planes, so you couldn’t just stare at your phone to deter strangers who might want to talk for the entire flight. I was reading the paper at the restaurant table, and when my friend arrived, I lowered it while waving — lowered it right onto a candle in the center of the table.

The newspaper burst into flames! Everyone in the restaurant turned as one to gape at the spectacle! I laughed and extinguished the flames with my water glass and smothered it with my linen napkin, then ordered another cocktail when the waiter came to clean up the mess.

If that had happened 20 years before, I would have definitely perished on the spot of humiliation. Anyhoo. Open thread.

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Here It Is (Open Thread)

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I get tired of saying it, so I assume y’all get tired of hearing it, but the presence of the leering misogynist Donald Trump in the Oval Office is a daily, incarnate insult to women, a constant orange beacon that illuminates our second-class citizenship. And it is made all the more unbearable by the complicity of the (overwhelmingly white) women who helped put him there.

This is a truth we confront daily. But sometimes, the base materials that created this hideous aspect of Trumpism come together under pressure to yield a perfect diamond of ignorant, braying sexist bullshit. And here it is:

For those disinclined to watch the clip, Trump is celebrating himself signing the Woman’s Suffrage Centennial Coin Act, which commemorates the passage of the 19th Amendment that gave women the right to vote. (The 19th Amendment passed the House in 1919 and was ratified in 1920.)

Trump signed the Woman’s Suffrage Centennial Coin Act next to a woman dressed as a beauty pageant contestant in a tight “suffragette white” sheath dress and sash. Trump wonders aloud why it took so long to get this particular act signed into law — wholly ignorant of the meaning of the word “centennial,” it appears — and credits himself with finally getting it done.

Then Trump asks the Platonic Ideal of the anti-woman Trump woman, Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), to give remarks. This clip mercifully spares us Blackburn’s remarks, but we can assume they were embarrassingly obsequious. She may even have credited Trump with giving women the right to vote rather than signing an act creating a commemorative coin 100 years later, who knows.

So, if you see women in your life who are not Marsha Blackburn rage-drinking or punching through plaster walls, this sort of thing might explain it. Open thread!

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Bad Man Meets Good Boy (Open Thread)

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Conan the heroic dog visited the White House today. He could hardly refuse, seeing how he’s in the military…and a dog. Notice how the doggie doesn’t get anywhere near Trump and vice-versa.

It’s incredibly awkward. Trump tries to get Pence to say something about the dog, but all Pence does is pet the critter while Trump babbles inanities about a muzzle and the dog getting violent. Melania stretches her lips over her teeth when he says that, a facial tic that conveys about as much mirth as an angry spider monkey baring its fangs.

Trump can’t do any part of his job competently. That’s no surprise since he has no relevant experience or qualifications. But you’d think pretty much any random sap could do the easy shit like handing out Halloween candy or saying nice and not weird things about a well-trained service animal. But nope.

As for the dog, I bet he’ll breath a sigh of relief when the White House is in the rear view mirror. Lots of terrible people have loyal animal companions, of course. Pence has his bunny, and Conan actually seems fine with Pence, so we can’t credit Conan’s political judgment. But he stays well clear of both Trumps. Animals know.

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You hate to see it…

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In several ways, this clip of former NSC official Fiona Hill being questioned by House GOP Counsel Stephen Castor is the perfect microcosm of our national political moment:

Castor opens by trying to get Hill to deny that she was upset with Bolton and “the way things were going.” Hill gives a forthright account of her anger at Sondland, owns up to being “a bit rude” to him and talks about how commonly women’s anger is misunderstood in professional situations.

Hill then throws the flaming bag of shit right back at Castor, noting that Sondland’s testimony convinced her she was angry at Sondland for the wrong reason. Sondland was following Trump’s orders on a “domestic political errand,” which put his actions at odds with those of Hill and the rest of the State Department’s Ukraine team, who were executing “national security foreign policy” at the moment its objectives diverged from Trump’s political goals.

It was a remarkable moment, but it won’t matter. As I’ve complained in this space before, having a leering misogynist like Trump in the White House is a daily insult to women, a constant reminder of our second-class citizenship that is made even more painful by the complicity of so many (mostly white) women who elevated that buffoon to the office. But it’s not just Trump.

It’s the brisk, no-nonsense, intelligent competence of Fiona Hill vs. the smirking and mugging of large check-writer Gordon Sondland. It’s the bravery of Christine Blasey Ford’s Senate testimony contrasted with the angry public tantrum thrown by Brett Kavanaugh. It’s Nancy Pelosi’s resolve to follow the Constitution juxtaposed with Mitch McConnell’s bottomless cynicism.

And the worthy, competent, intelligent women might win the battle, but they lose the war because that’s the way the game is rigged. I’m pretty goddamned sick of it. That is all.

Open thread.

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Oh God, a Debate Too!

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Anyone watching? I am, dog help me.

Steve Schmidt on MSNBC, last seen following Sarah Palin around with a bucket and mop on behalf of John McCain in 2008, just intoned: “A sociopath will beat a socialist.”

Kill me now.

Anyhoo. Open thread.

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Impeachment Hearings Open Thread

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Lt. Colonel Vindman and Jennifer Williams (Pence aide and alleged “Never Trumper”) are scheduled to testify starting in a few minutes, with Vindman up first. Here’s an embedded video from C-SPAN via YouTube:

So, how will Republicans attempt to smear these witnesses? How much of the Crackpot Dome scandal (conspiracy theory that Ukraine/Soros/DNC framed Russia/Putin/Trump in 2016) will be revealed? We shall see!

Open thread!

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Impeachment Probe Expands?

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Breaking news from CNN:

Washington (CNN) The House of Representatives is now investigating whether President Donald Trump lied to special counsel Robert Mueller in written answers he provided in the Russia investigation, the House’s general counsel said in federal court Monday.

“Did the President lie? Was the President not truthful in his responses to the Mueller investigation?” House general counsel Douglas Letter told the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit about why the House now needs access to grand jury material Mueller collected in his investigation.

As we know, it’s all the same story, really. The Ukraine scandal is an outgrowth of the earlier Russia scandal. It had three goals: 1) soothe Trump’s ego for needing a Putin booster seat to win in 2016, 2) justify rolling back sanctions on Trump’s benefactor, and 3) tee up interference in the 2020 election.

There will be anxious speculation on whether bringing any question from the Mueller probe into the current impeachment inquiry risks “complicating the narrative.” I think any risks are outweighed by the benefit of establishing that Trump’s eagerness to accept foreign help, lies and obstruction are an ongoing danger.

Another possible implication: What if the impeachment inquiry and subsequent trial in the Senate are protracted enough to start affecting Democratic primary campaigns? Pelosi said yesterday that the inquiry might stretch into next year. McConnell will use every perverse trick in the book to keep the several senators who are running off the campaign trail, if he thinks that would help Republicans.

If it looks like we’re heading that way, what should Democrats do? Folks without senate jobs would have Iowa all to themselves, which isn’t a level playing field. Maybe Tom Perez could make it clear the party frowns on non-senatorial Democrats taking advantage of their primary opponents’ absence? (Yeah, that’s gonna happen.)

What say you?

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Saturday Afternoon Open Thread

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This is a rerun of a tweet from yesterday, when the incident happened, but I think it bears repeating. This 14-pound dog, appearing blurry in the photograph because he can’t hold still unless he’s asleep…

…utterly destroyed the tennis ball-like dog toy pictured at right inside of five minutes:

I think I’ll make a gift of the surviving toy balls to a dog who isn’t part gator.

On a related note, can you recommend any dog toy products that can withstand the assault of a beast with such pointy teeth and impressive jaw strength? If so, please share in comments.

Open thread!

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