Guy Chamberlin

A predictable heat wave in Chicago killed more than 700 people in 1996. Most of them poor and POC. What could have be done? Well it turns out the poorest people in Chicago lived in large complexes equipped with the absolute cheapest air conditioners money could by. They were so inefficient that they shut down the grid on hot days, causing blackouts and deaths and overwhelming the healthcare system. The Clinton administration set a new regulatory standard for air conditioners so that low efficiency ACs would no longer put entire grids at risk. The air conditioner industry didn't really fight it. When George W. Bush took office, they basically rescinded every regulation Clinton passed, just because, and that included minimum efficiency standards for air conditioners. I wish there was an island where everyone who believes unregulated free enterprise lifts all ships could live. Curious to see the government they would form.

I think we've already been through this. Yeah, there were some alarmist predictions that didn't come through....yet. As you are keen to cite earth science evidence dating back millions of years, you surely know that an estimate being off by decades -- or a century -- doesn't negate the prediction. In the case of melting polar ice, it's been happening considerably faster than most previous prediction models. Look into those, rather than the most alarmist thing a single individual said years ago. The irony for conservatives is that moving to a green economy supports the supposed bedrock of conservative thinking: more efficient, long term solutions that conserve limited resources and spur new economic development through American innovation. Big Oil may whine, but like Big Auto and General Electric, and 3M and other blueblood American Capitalists, they are moving into renewable energy because it makes business sense. Always did, regardless of climate change. It's an incredible opportunity. Instead: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants to outlaw cows.

It's hypocritical to call out hypocrisy if you're a hypocrite yourself. Did I just blow your mind?

I have Year One expectations. That's both good and bad. It's almost like Scott Frost had a three season false start. The part you can blame on Riley is gone. Expectations have hit bottom. Let's start over. We have a good recruiting class. I think the team will look and play young, but if that means deserving young talent is stepping up and playing well, a lot of mistakes will be forgiven. My only demand is forward motion. And excitement. Ears pinned back, nothing-to-lose-everything-to-gain excitement. I can't attach a win total to that. We just need to look better than last season. Even with young talent. Especially with young talent. That's not asking too much.

Do me a favor and replace "rioting" with "protesting" since you know it makes a difference.

Again, no one is prosecuting a crime here. Donald Trump would never go to jail for this. The reasonable question was whether his grotesque and un-American actions to over-turn the election warrant condemnation, rescinding some of his federal government perks, and prevent him from seeking the office again. As many have already observed: if you don't punish Donald Trump for this, when would you ever punish anyone?

Who knew that the "I could shoot someone on 5th Avenue" quote would get even creepier over time.

Yep. The folks in the basement coming up with false equivalency rationalizations found a keeper. We're going to be hearing about impeaching Kamala for the rest of her term. If you wonder what Republicans would have done if roles had been reversed the past four years, just know that they would never, ever have gotten past Hillary Clinton losing the popular vote but winning the election.

My standard is that if you believe Donald Trump lied about election fraud and leaned on minor state officials to betray their duties in order to keep him office -- as apparently you do -- then you should support his impeachment. You don't even need January 6 for that.

Refresh me.

Well the can of worms is whether we can ever trust our election system again, or if it can be strong-armed into undermining the will of the American people. So there's that.

Apparently 67% of Republicans believe Donald Trump should not have conceded the Presidency, based on utterly baseless lies told repeatedly by Donald Trump. Let's not undercount the number of people who either can't discern reality or have no problem moving America towards dictatorship. Archy: do you believe the 2020 election was a landslide victory for Donald Trump, but it was unfairly stolen from him?

If you lead a horse to water, the horse has the choice to drink or not drink. But the fact remains that you led him to the water. And thirsty horses like to drink.

fify

I don't necessarily disagree with you. As mentioned, I think the Democrats probably screwed up both impeachments. You could always cast reasonable doubt about whether Donald Trump intended for his followers to violently attack the Capitol building (though he clearly loved the gesture). But it's unquestionable that Trump refused to accept the results of a well-validated democratic election and used a variety of highly unethical means to undermine America's faith in its institutions order to remain in power as an unelected dictator. The latter is all you need to impeach the President, and I'd say it comes closer to treason than anything a U.S. President has done in our once proud history. But Nancy tearing up a speech? That's barely a ripple in the Trump cosmos.

Agree that no prediction holds any water at this point. But are you going to tell me the proper gentlemen of the GOP would never harass, bully, or dig up ancient and feeble charges to undermine a Democrat adversary? Please. Hillary Clinton never held the office, and she woke up to this level of witch hunt every day for 30 years. Also, Donald Trump asked for it. I mean he literally asked for it. Every attack that has come his way can be traced to an over-wrought, self-serving, thin-skinned attack or misdeed Trump initiated himself in his very public 40 years of being a notorious a$$h@!e.

Many folks use "Dear Leader" to refer to Trump because his fondness for the dictatorial stylings of North Korea's dictator is pretty darn unusual for an American President. Trump gloats about the half-dozen or so letters Kim has written him as if he were a smitten teenager in possession of valentines from a crush. White House officials refer to the diplomatic correspondence jokingly as “love letters.” Kim addresses Trump as “Your Excellency” and employs flowery language to describe the president’s energy and political smarts, according to people who have read them. Trump has shown the documents to dozens of Oval Office visitors and bragged about them in public. “He wrote me beautiful letters, and they’re great letters,” Trump said at a September rally in West Virginia. “We fell in love.”

Yes, Evan ran on principle and integrity. So I guess you're right: Republicans wouldn't care about him at this point.

Why do I imagine "rebuilding the Republican Party" to exist entirely of ferreting out the members who weren't loyal enough to Trump? I can't think of a single policy issue where these people substantially disagree. It's a cult of personality at this point.

This was meant as a snarky retort equating the Republican response to Hillary Clinton and Benghazi to how they -- and NDJ -- want Dems to back off Trump and move on with their lives.

Maybe we should let tempers cool, slow down and reappraise Donald Trump from an evidentiary and constitutional perspective. And from there we can decide if it's a waste of time and energy to pursue someone no longer in office, or if like Benghazi we should continue to bring constant heat and redundant Congressional hearings on the human she-beast who inflamed a fatal riot, knowing s/he intended to run for President again.

Getting hard to tell anymore. Just read about the violent threats against Arizona Republican lawmakers and their families by angry Trump loyalists who think they caved by following the law, No doubt plenty of Republicans will use whatever numbers they need to thwart whatever Dems propose, but there's no doubt some of our elected Republicans are physically afraid of their own voters. Yeah, there's angry internet chatter and public outbursts on both sides of the spectrum, but only one side prides itself on its well-armed un-regulated militia, and its unapologetic white supremacism.

Sideways? I think you missed the part where Donald Trump was gleeful that the mob had attacked the Capitol and disrupted the Electoral certification. The mob was loyal to him in a way his own vice-president wasn't. They accomplished exactly what he asked them to accomplish, and his exact words after they had literally s#!t on the floor of the United States Capitol, beaten a policeman with an American flag, and threatened to kill Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi was "you're very special. We love you."

No, the problem was Donald Trump saying repeatedly since 2016 that any election he didn't win would be fraudulent, then trying to dismantle the U.S Post Office to undermine mail-in voting, then overtly telling the Proud Boys to "stand by" should he lose in 2020, then doubling down when he lost, insisting his "landslide" election had been stolen, then filing 62 lawsuits against the U.S. election process and producing zero evidence resulting in every case being thrown out, then leaning heavily on state election officials in swing states to find him votes by any means necessary, then threatening his own vice-president to take action that was unprecedented, unwarranted, and unconstitutional, then calling for his loyalists to show up in force at the typically ceremonial Electoral College certification on January 6 to demand that his insane demands be met. He would have been impeachable if January 6 had never happened. It's just sad his most violent followers and cowardly enablers can't admit the man was horribly wrong from the very beginning.

The recall is moving along. I just passed a petition station at the mall last weekend. It will probably qualify but go nowhere from there. Newsom has always been a bit of an eye-roller. He's been pretty good at each office he's held, but Gavin Newsom came out of the womb wanting to be President and it leaks into everything he does. I honestly think the recall sparked from the much publicized incident where Newsom attended a rich folks birthday party at a five-star restaurant while urging all other Californians not to gather. That was enough traction to start a recall, but make no mistake, the recall is simply driven by Republicans who want to undermine Democrats. Newsom totally earned the heat, but If hypocrisy alone was enough to recall politicians I mean....c'mon. California's COVID response is trickier. Clearly the numbers have gone in the wrong direction, and the vaccine response has lagged. The latter appears to have been addressed in the last couple weeks. Newsom actually took a lot of heat for reopening California too much and too early -- bending to political pressure that comes with trying to please everyone. Then when the numbers surged -- predictably -- he tried to shut things back down again. So that spirit of politically driven compromise has made him look feckless. And he kinda is. If the alternative is Kevin McCarthy or equivalent, I'll stick with Newsom. Keep in mind that the state of California has wildly different geographies and populations. So some counties have no idea why state mandates apply to them, and in practice they really don't. Compliance varies all over the place. And when you see those big California numbers, remember that they largely skew to Southern California: LA County alone generates about 30 - 40% of infections and deaths. I'm in Marin County, where mask compliance is extremely high and almost no one b!^@hes about it. Our numbers have remained really good.