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Open Thread: Today’s Impeachment Inquiry (Partial) Update

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Renato Mariotti, former federal prosecutor, whose opinion on such matters is not to be taken lightly:

… I’ve tried many federal criminal cases, and Wednesday’s hearing looked a lot like trials in which the prosecution has the defendant on tape admitting to a crime. When defense attorneys can’t mount a defense on the merits, they raise a lot of peripheral issues in the hope of convincing at least one juror that there is reasonable doubt.

So every time you heard the Republican’s designated counsel ask about Hunter Biden’s language skills or one of the Republican members of the Intelligence Committee ask whether the Obama administration sold Javelin missiles to Ukraine, what you were actually hearing was a defense attorney doing his level best to avoid talking about what his client said on tape. It was chaotic and often unfocused, though not always. In fact, there were moments when members actually executed their playbook with some skill.

But they simply can’t overcome the abundant evidence Democrats possess to prove their central point—that President Donald Trump conditioned military aid to Ukraine on a public announcement that his political rival, Joe Biden, was under investigation.
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Adam Silverman Professional Bio

Adam L. Silverman is a consulting national security subject matter expert specializing in low intensity warfare (asymmetric, irregular, and unconventional warfare, revolution, insurgency, terrorism), Civil Affairs, Psychological Operations, and cultural considerations for strategy and policy. Dr. Silverman was honored to deliver the keynote address at the US Army Psychological Operations Regiment’s 100th anniversary regimental dinner in November 2018. In May 2016 he assisted XVIII Airborne Corps in their strategic assessment of the Iraqi and Syrian Operating Environment for their deployment as the command element of Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve and provided the keynote briefing for their strategic assessment week. In 2015 he served as a Senior Fellow at SOCOM’s Center for Special Operations Studies and Research at Joint Special Operations University. Prior to that he served as a Subject Matter Expert with the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Security Dialogue and US Army Europe from June through August 2014 assigned (Operational Control) as the Cultural Advisor to US Army Europe. From July 2010 through June 2014, he was the Cultural Advisor and Professor of National Security and Strategy at the US Army War College. In June 2014 he was awarded the Outstanding Civilian Service Medal by MG Anthony A. Cucolo, III.

Dr. Silverman has advised and/or provided support to the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy, the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Security Dialogue, US Central Command, US European Command, US Special Operations Command, US Army Europe, the US Army Institute for NCO Professional Development, the US Army Sergeants Major Academy, US Army Special Operations Command, US Army Central, the US Army’s Office of the Provost Marshal General and US Army Corrections Command, US Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command, I Corps, III Corps, XVIII Airborne Corps, 1st Armored Division, the 101st Airborne Division, the Department of State’s Near East and South Asia Desk, and JIEDDO’s Science Directorate. From NOV 2013 to AUG 2014 he served as the Cultural Advisor to the Commanding General of US Army Europe on temporary assignment. From OCT 2012 to NOV 2013 Dr. Silverman served as the Cultural Advisor to the Civil Affairs Branch Chief on temporary assignment. During 2012 Dr. Silverman served as the Cultural Advisor to the Commanding General of III Corps on temporary assignment from JAN through AUG. In 2010 he was the external subject matter expert on temporary assignment to US Army Civil Affairs Branch’s Capability Based Assessment and then through JUN 2011 to the US Special Operations Command’s Joint Civil Information Management Test Development program. He previously served as the Cultural Advisor to the Commander, 2nd Brigade Combat Team/1st Armored Division from OCT 2007 through OCT 2008 and was deployed with the brigade in Iraq in 2008. Upon returning from Iraq he served as a social science advisor in US Army Training and Doctrine Command’s G2 (2009). He routinely provides operational support to a number of US Army, DOD, and other US Government elements. Dr. Silverman holds a doctorate in political science and criminology from the University of Florida, as well as masters’ degrees in comparative religion and international security.

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Open Thread Test: That New-Platform Smell

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(Warning: This is an *edited* version of the Disney commercial… do NOT play it if you’re squeamish, or while eating / drinking…)

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Welcome To the New 2019 Edition of Balloon Juice

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That’s right, we’re rolling in the new website with the soothing tones of Barry Manilow.

First off, I’d like to thank all of you for showing an alarming amount of patience during the never-ending rebuild and for your help testing, and especially the people who just shut the fuck up and didn’t do anything- you, people, are the true heroes.

I’d also like to thank the OG crew of folks who did the initial selection of the web developer.

And of course Watergirl, who carried this baby to completion.

I’d also like to thank Alain and crew, who literally performed miracles for the past two years keeping this puppy afloat. I don’t know the specifics, but I know we were like umpteen updates behind and Alain was constantly hotfixing stuff because the database was so wrecked we could not even recreate the website on a test server. We really would have been up shit’s creek without them. Thanks, man. I’m glad to have you onboard as a front page poster and super happy to take this burden off of you.

I would also like to ANNOUNCE SOMETHING VERY SPECIAL and something I am super excited about. Please welcome commenter Ruemara to the front page. I am so surprised I managed to not blab this before. WELCOME ABOARD RUE!

And that’s it. Obviously there are going to be some wrinkles, we are going to be doing some tweaking here and there, and we really need to make the site as ADA compliant and screen reader friendly as possible (AND ONCE AGAIN, FRONT PAGERS, PLEASE ADD ALT TEXT TO IMAGES FROM HERE ON OUT), but that is it.

I’m only mildly compelled to tell you all to go fuck yourselves, so I am going to call this a victory. I’m going to head out to get something to eat.

I really hope you enjoy the new website. We worked very hard to add as much of the things you guys wanted, while also keeping the “blog” feel to the joint. We’re also spending a LOT more on hosting to speed things up, and I hope it works out for you all. Have fun.

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Dogbum Alley (Afternoon Open Thread)

Yeah, I know it’s Tuesday, but I was watching the Patriots get clobbered Sunday night and only just got around to watching the latest Downtown Abbey episode. I’m not sure why I like this show so much, but I think part of the appeal is the furry bum of Sir Robert’s yellow lab in the opening sequence:

dogbum_abbey

Thanks to some jackass in one of John’s earlier Downtown Abbey threads, I know way more about the fate of some of the main characters than I would like (kindly feast on a bag of kipper-flavored dicks, spoilers!). But the program is still compelling, even if it is merely a soap opera with better production values, above-average acting and interesting period costumes.

I doubt writer / executive producer Julian Fellowes reads Balloon Juice, but just in case, here are some ideas: Lady Edith should run off with the tall ginger footman and found a publishing empire. Mrs. Hughes needs to sneak into Carson’s quarters and make him a Cheerful Charlie. Anna should send Bates a cake with a goddamned file in it already. O’Brien and Thomas the Valet should grapple on the tallest spire and fling one another off simultaneously.

Mary and Matthew should hiss recriminations at one another until both are transformed into a gooey puddles of self-righteousness and self-regard. Tom and Sybil should return to Dublin, open a pub and become patrons to James Joyce. Sir Robert and Lady Cora should accidentally get locked in the wine cellar, consume massive amounts of port and perpetrate drunken, scathing “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”-style verbal abuse on each other. The Dowager Countess should not change a bit.

Please consider this an open thread.

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Foreign Affairs Open Thread: Erdogan in DC, Again

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The value of avoiding no value care

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Yesterday, I took my daughter in for her annual well child check-up.

The nurse practitioner checked her heart and lungs. She talked about puberty and recommended a couple of good books about that before asking about the regular public health checks (tobacco, guns, seatbelts). Finally she did a quick physical exam. My daughter was given a clean bill of health and development. She was also happy; she had no vaccinations due, so we were within thirty seconds of getting out of the appointment without her getting poked by a needle. However the NP said that there was an optional lipid screen that was available if we wanted it. I asked if there were any results that would change her clinical decision making. She said that given all the other measurements she had on my daughter plus her age, there would be absolutely no actionable information from the screening. We declined. My daughter does not like needles, and for once, my dad and health policy geek hats both fit comfortably on my head.

The lipid panel for my daughter would have been no value care. It would have changed nothing in the clinician’s medical judgement. If we had elected to have the blood test, my daughter would have had the cost of dealing with needles and blood, I would have been paying for it, and the clinician would have one more task to acknowledge and manage on a brain that was already hitting cognitive overload.

The claim payment part of low or no value care is easy to measure when there is a moment of low or no value care. Clinician cognitive management costs are harder to measure but they are measurable or at least reasonably estimated. Patient-centric costs of receiving no value care are harder to measure. Speaking as a dad, my daughter’s morning was much better in a no blood draw universe than a universe that had a single, no value blood draw. She would have been stressed out and slightly anxious for at least the entire drive from the doctor’s office back to school.

I wonder if there is an analysis of the non-monetary costs of receiving low or no value care?

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Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Friday the 13th Falls on A Wednesday This Month!

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On what may be the last post of the old blogsite: Ave atque vale!

In case anyone missed it, Watergirl posted yesterday evening:

… As John mentioned, the transition to the new site will start somewhere around 6 am tomorrow. It may not start right on the dot at 6, and you are welcome to stay on Balloon Juice until the moment the old site is taken down. Who will be the last person to comment on the last thread on the current site?

So what can you expect for tomorrow? When you see a message come up on balloon-juice.com instead of the website, that’s how you will know that the process has started.

It takes awhile to count each of the 5.5 million comments as we move them to the new site. Okay, we’re not actually counting them, but you knew that. It still takes a long time to move everything over!

We are unlikely to have anything to report until at least 10 am, but John will provide updates on his twitter account whenever there is something to say. Anyone can view John’s twitter account at this link: https://twitter.com/johngcole…

Since I’m the backstage Unofficial Official Stress Tester, I’m planning to schedule a late-morning post on Erdogan’s visit, just to see when (if) it shows up on the new site. So you’ll have something fresh to look for, Murphy the Trickster God willing…

***********

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Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread: Don Jr. Staggers Along In His Old Man’s Footsteps

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Sure, it’s perfect as an easy punch line: Don the Lesser, his girlfriend/handler, and Charlie ‘Diaper Boy’ Kirk fall victim to the narcissism of small differences, but from rightwingers this time! However, when you pay attention to the ‘activists’, it’s uglier and potentially far more dangerous… as always, when it comes to the Trump “brand”…

… At first, Trump and Guilfoyle tried to ignore the discontent, which originated with a fringe group of America Firsters who believe the Trump administration has been taken captive by a cabal of internationalists, free-traders, and apologists for mass immigration.

When the shouting would not subside, Trump Jr tried – and failed – to argue that taking questions from the floor risked creating soundbites that leftwing social media posters would abuse and distort. Nobody was buying that.

In minutes, the entire argument put forward by the president’s son – that he was willing to engage in dialogue but that it was the left that refused to tolerate free speech – crumbled…

The fiasco pointed to a factional rift on the Trump-supporting conservative right that has been growing rapidly in recent weeks, particularly among “zoomers” – student-age activists. On one side are one of the sponsors of Trump Jr’s book tour, Turning Point USA, a campus conservative group with a track record of bringing provocative rightwing speakers to liberal universities.

On the other side are far-right activists – often referred to as white supremacists and neo-Nazis, although many of them reject such labels – who believe in slamming the door on all immigrants, not just those who cross the border without documents, and who want an end to America’s military and diplomatic engagement with the wider world.
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T-12: The House Impeachment Hearings Begin Tomorrow AM, Here’s What to Expect

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We are just under 24 hours out from the first of the publicly facing House impeachment hearings. The first hearing begins tomorrow at 10:00 AM EST and if we have a functional blog, I’ll have a live feed up for you all.

Tomorrow’s hearings are Ambassador William Taylor, the Acting US Ambassador to Ukraine, at 10:00 AM and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs in the afternoon. The next day of public hearings will be Friday when Ambassador Yovanavitch, the former US Ambassador to Ukraine will be testifying.

Next week’s schedule was released earlier today.

The procedure for these hearings will be that the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), Congressman Schiff, and the ranking member, Congressman Nunes, will each make an opening statement. Each session’s witness will then be given a chance to make an opening statement if they so desire. Questioning will begin with a forty-five minute round of questioning for the committee chair and ranking member, rather than the 5 minute rounds we’ve become accustomed to over the past several years. It has already announced that Congressman Schiff’s time will be taken by the majority (Committee) counsel, Dan Goldman, a former Federal prosecutor and former NBC/MSNBC legal analyst who was specifically hired by Congressman Schiff back in February to oversee this investigation. It is not clear yet whether Congressman Nunes will do the questioning himself, have his counsel conduct the questioning, or some combination thereof. It is important to remember that Congressman Schiff is, himself, a former Federal prosecutor and one of the few who has successfully prosecuted a case involving a US official engaged in spying for a hostile foreign power. Goldman was involved in very high profile prosecutions of Genovese crime organization members. Congressman Nunes has a degree in agriculture, states his occupation as farmer, but his family farm is now in Iowa, not in his congressional district in California. So expect more of the conspiracy theory laundering that Congressman Nunes has been doing throughout the closed door depositions when he could be bothered to actually show up to them.

After that, the questioning will devolve back to the alternating five minute blocks of questioning for each of the remaining Democratic and Republican members of the committee. I fully expect that the Republican members, like they do for every hearing, will have a coordinated a list of questions intended to derail and sidetrack the hearings into conspiracy theory territory so they can launder their misinformation, disinformation, and agitprop through the hearings. And since Congressman Jordan (R-Men’s Showers) has been temporarily placed on the committee so he can do his jacket off, sleeves rolled up, rapid fire, staccato badgering of witnesses, I fully expect a lot of the Republican questioning time will be yielded back to him so he can badger at will as we’ve seen in House Oversight Committee hearings earlier this year. The Democratic members of the committee, unlike their Republican counterparts, are largely former Federal and state prosecutors, law enforcement officers, and staff judge advocates in the US military so their questions will at least be on topic and germane even if they’re not coordinated. And they really should be coordinated, but I’m not counting on that type of message discipline in strategic communication.

Congressman Schiff has established the rules so that all of the various points of order and personal privilege and parliamentary procedure will be dealt with at the end of each hearing day to avoid the Republican members of the committee from grinding the hearing to a halt for up to an hour as soon as it begins as they’ve done with other high profile televised hearings over the past 10 months.

I have no idea what time the ritual bodily ejection of Congressman Gaetz (R-DUI) from the committee chambers is scheduled for. You’ll just have to watch the whole thing. Personally, I’m hoping Congressman Schiff has a Gaetz sized trebuchet installed so they can really go for distance! (that was sarcasm, lest anyone think I’m advocating for violence against Congressman Gaetz).

Expect a lot of what we already know from the now released deposition transcripts to be publicly confirmed. Expect the committee Republicans, their staff, and Congressman Gaetz to be disruptive and try to turn the hearings into a circus. And, provided the blog is actually up, running, and functioning with the change over to the new site, expect that I’ll have a live stream of the proceedings up as soon as I can get access.

Open thread.

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What to Expect When You’re Expecting

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I can now attest to the fact that John Cole is a secret optimist, because I told John that we can expect the new site to be back up by 6pm, hopefully sooner.  John turned that into “early afternoon”!!!  I suppose early afternoon is possible, but it is highly unlikely.

As John mentioned, the transition to the new site will start somewhere around 6 am tomorrow.  It may not start right on the dot at 6, and you are welcome to stay on Balloon Juice until the moment the old site is taken down. Who will be the last person to comment on the last thread on the current site?

So what can you expect for tomorrow?  When you see a message come up on balloon-juice.com instead of the website, that’s how you will know that the process has started.

It takes awhile to count each of the 5.5 million comments as we move them to the new site.  Okay, we’re not actually counting them, but you knew that.  It still takes a long time to move everything over!

We are unlikely to have anything to report until at least 10 am, but John will provide updates on his twitter account whenever there is something to say.  Anyone can view John’s twitter account at this link: https://twitter.com/johngcole

John has quite graciously decided to LET THE NEW SITE RUN AD-FREE FOR ONE WEEK as everyone gets acquainted with the new site.  After one week, ads will be added, and you can all judge for yourselves whether the new ads are well behaved and unobtrusive enough that you can live with them or decide that you are going to use an ad blocker.

If you’re happy with the new site, or you just want to show your appreciation for a week of ad-free Balloon Juice, and you are in a position to throw something in the coffers, I’m sure John would greatly appreciate that.

John believes that it’s the people who read the individual threads and the comments who are most likely to want to support Balloon Juice, so look for the Support Our Site links on individual posts rather than on the front page.  John wanted the front page to be warm and welcoming and not say “hey, give us money!”

Thanks again to all the testers who took the time to go through the forms and test the site and share their feedback.

Tomorrow should be an interesting day for any number of reasons!

*All times are Eastern.

What to Expect When You’re ExpectingPost + Comments