Guy Chamberlin

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.

I remember when Dems were so smitten by Cuomo's daily briefings that many would have swapped him for Biden in a heartbeat. My wife for one. But then all my New York friends said no. No, no, no, no, no. You don't want Andrew Cuomo. No.

I originally thought the conference forced the rivalry on us, but maybe it's real after all. The football fan in me prefers that Nebraska knock off the highest rated team possible. And rivalry or no, I think I'd rather get the Wisconsin monkey off my back than the Iowa monkey.

If I didn't know better, I'd say Iowa has officially become our #1 rival.

I said I can't speak for the folks who gave specific dates for the apocalypse, but the fact that arctic sea ice is not "gone by now" hardly means it's not going alarmingly fast. That's like.....uhm....bringing a snowball to the Senate to dispute global warming. Here, I'll do the :10 Google search for you to ignore.: Arctic sea ice? https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/147746/the-long-decline-of-arctic-sea-ice Glacies? https://nsidc.org/glims/glaciermelt Underwater islands? https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/10/five-pacific-islands-lost-rising-seas-climate-change https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/may/16/one-day-disappear-tuvalu-sinking-islands-rising-seas-climate-change#:~:text=“Tuvalu is sinking” is the,midway between Hawaii and Australia. Famine? https://unfccc.int/news/un-warns-climate-change-is-driving-global-hunger#:~:text=12 September 2018%2C Bonn – Climate,Organization (FAO) this week.&text=Overall%2C the number of hungry,total of 821 million worldwide. Doesn't look like New York City is underwater yet, and Snake Pliskin hasn't escaped from there, either. I'll keep you posted.

See earlier post.

How do you know the Earth fluctuated like that over millions of years? I mean, where you there? Oh that's right. These estimates come from global climate scientists. The same people who unanimously agree that while the Earth has undergone huge fluctuations before man ever arrived on the planet, the release of billions of tons of carbon in the last 100 years of the industrial age has likely created its own climate fluctuation - severity TBD. Volcanoes and cow farts don't help things either. We know this because climate scientists go to the trouble of studying these things. I asked them about your chart and they said it's absolutely accurate, and has nothing to do with the validity of current global warming trends. Which they study as a profession. They also told me that anecdotal examples and conservative straw dog arguments make them sad.

The climate change standard is "all of the above" although the most undeniable --- even for the James Inhofe crowd -- is rising sea levels. Not to be an alarmist, but they are rising even faster than the alarmists predicted, with consequences even the Pentagon figured to be highly concerning for a quarter of the world's population in coming years. There's not a reputable scientist that denies the existence and potential severity of global climate change. I can't speak to the folks who gave wrong specific dates for the apocalypse, but the smart scientists understand that 50 - 100 years is the blink of an eye in geologic time, and because that means most of us will be dead when the consequences arrive we can afford to laugh about it and hand the s#!tshow to our children and grandchildren. Too bad conservatives are no longer conservative because this is a place where that longterm pragmatism and stewardship would actually come in handy. I think the word getting bandied about is "tipping point" -- meaning we may not see consequences for years, but given the massive scope of the challenge, courses need to be corrected soon. But perhaps climate change will merely join the long list of hoaxes like vaccines, the Moon landing, and 5G technology.