After a year of investigating the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, the House Select Committee will hold public hearings to shine a light on the attempt to subvert U.S. democracy and to draw the line of responsibility directly to the White House https://t.co/HK6URrGHVB pic.twitter.com/VSfCLfWv4n
— Reuters (@Reuters) June 8, 2022
Via commentor NotMax, a comprehensive guide on “How To Watch The Primetime January 6 Hearings Online & On TV, Plus Schedule & Who’ll Be Testifying”:
… The committee plans to unveil previously unseen footage from the attack on the Capitol, conduct interviews with Trump White House staffers and also play videos of its interviews with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, according to the Washington Post.
The hearing reportedly will also include testimony from Nick Quested, a documentary filmmaker who was following the right-wing group The Proud Boys as the Capitol was attacked, and Caroline Edwards, a Capitol police officer who was injured.
C-SPAN is serving as the pool for broadcast and cable media, and will cover the hearing with seven cameras. Each network — except Fox News, which is not covering the hearings in full — will add analysis and reporting.
With mounds of data, graphic presentations, thousands of hours of footage and hundreds of photos, the hearing reportedly will be much more media heavy than is typical. That’s likely part of why James Goldston, the former president of ABC News, has been advising on the presentation.
What follows are the coverage plans that each network has for the hearings, which can also be streamed at january6th.house.gov…
The public hearings will present both new and publicly known information in a compelling way.
Many have heard the story in drips and drabs.
But that only gives part of the picture.
We’ll demonstrate the multipronged effort to overturn a presidential election, how one strategy to subvert the election led to another, culminating in a violent attack on our democracy.
It’s an important story, and one that must be told to ensure it never happens again.
During tomorrow’s hearing and in the ones to follow, we’ll show how close we came to losing our democracy.
And why it’s still deeply at risk.
We’ll provide details of the effort to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power.
And what we must do to protect our democracy now.
Well worth reading:
Six questions the January 6 committee aims to answer about the U.S. Capitol attack during its hearings starting tonight https://t.co/BT3rD9vWaT
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) June 9, 2022
Counter-arguments:
Nice of them to just come out and admit it. https://t.co/e8JGAhNPMs
— Centrism Fan Acct ?? (@Wilson__Valdez) June 8, 2022
COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: Wednesday/Thursday, June 8-9
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
Baud
I hope the Committee puts up a makeshift gallows in the Committee room.
NotMax
Thanks for highlighting that. In case anyone just awakening is fuzzy on which link goes where, here’s the main one again:
How To Watch The Primetime January 6 Hearings Online & On TV, Plus Schedule & Who’ll Be Testifying
And now for a horse of a different color.
Anticipatorily declaring July 15 to be Trousers Conflagration Day.
Ken
I’m sure Fox will provide what they call analysis and reporting.
Geminid
Republicans considering even modest gun safety proposals are looking over their right shoulders at primary challengers. Nancy Pelosi wasn’t having that yesterday:
From No Lie With Brian Taylor Cohen, Twitter.
Mathguy
As the last two tweets imply, is FTFNYT ‘s political coverage really any better than watching the Murdoch fascism channel?
artem1s
remember to take a mental health break once in a while and look at random kittehs and puppy pictures
Kitty ambush
TriassicSands
…until 2024-25.
Fester Addams
No, that’s a lie too. They take their orders from above and manipulate their audience accordingly.
Dorothy A. Winsor
At first, I thought that tweet about the NYT opinion desk had to be a joke. Nope. It appears to be real. No less of a joke, I suppose.
Baud
@TriassicSands:
Can’t really happen when there’s a Dem president who is in charge of security. So we’re talking 2029 at the earliest.
RandomMonster
@artem1s: That video is pretty much how I want to die.
Baud
@artem1s:
That was on Reddit and someone said he took all of them to his farm.
Ken
@artem1s: Where was that taken? Ulthar?
Baud
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
There’s a reason DougJ is a Twitter star.
TriassicSands
@Baud:
Insurrection does not depend on who occupies the White House.
Baud
@TriassicSands:
It would be fruitless to try a violent insurrection with a Dem president though. (A GOP Congress could still play games.). It would be swatted down like a bug.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@artem1s: That is so cute
NotMax
Previous immutable plans preclude watching in real time. Shall eyeball the full rerun and hungrily skim the liveblogging threads upon return to the domicile.
TriassicSands
@Baud:
People would likely die. The system would be further weakened.
Insignificant, I guess. You’re talking about “bookkeeping.” I’m talking about violence and further assaults on the legitimacy of our system.
Baud
@TriassicSands:
People died in Sherman’s march through Georgia too. Are we going to wring our hands in worry whenever we have to fight?
TriassicSands
@Baud:
Argument for the sake of argument is a waste of time. Carry on.
Baud
@TriassicSands:
I disagree.
Immanentize
@TriassicSands: this sounds clever, until one realizes you are commenting at Balloon Juice.
Kay
BLM caused a certain group of elite pundits/influencers to go completely insane and it isn’t really ideological- a lot of them call themselves “Democrats” or “centrists”.
“Followed by a surge in murders of black Americans” means “police went on a hissy fit wildcat strike for two years because they were ‘disrespected’ and refused to enforce any laws”
Kay
Ugh. Just gross.
Cameron
I’m curious about what’s in the Jacob Bacharach piece – I’ve been a fan of his writing for a long time, but haven’t been to his website recently.
JWR
Biased or no, the poll mentioned in this story says that things don’t look so hot for Big Dick Cheney’s (mostly) evil spawn:
Immanentize
@Kay: i saw this via Michael Harriot. Unbelievable! The 1619 riots? WTF?
It’s that secret right wing speak that no normal person outside of historians and the twitterati even can begin to put together. Or is that fatuous ass just saying they were slave riots?
Baud
@Kay:
Yeah, I had no idea what that was referring to at first.
ETA:
#AllRiotsMatter
Immanentize
@Kay: Sullivan is dangerously obsessed with NH Jones. She is an actual journalist, won a Pulitzer, is black and to add insult to his injury is neither a man nor gay.
debbie
@Kay:
WTF is Andrew Sullivan to give it his own label?
Elizabelle
The 1619 riots?
Never heard that term. Jebus.
O. Felix Culpa
@Immanentize: And is melanin-positive, unlike Himself.
ETA: Oops, reading fail on my part. You already mentioned that, in fewer syllables. :)
Baud
@JWR:
Cheney is awful in many ways, but I’ll give her credit for standing up for what’s right on this one.
Cameron
@Kay: If he was feeling nostalgic, he could have written “the Bell Curve riots.” Wasn’t he a big Charles Murray fan? Or maybe still is, IDK.
Baud
Why haven’t we cancelled Sully yet?
Kay
@Immanentize:
The anti-cancel culture substack crowd (and I do mean crowd- they all write the same things) were so mortally offended that someone outside their “accepted” circles was permitted to collect a series of essays and publish them in the NYTimes they may never recover.
They are in charge of American culture. They are the gatekeepers and no alternate ideas may be published. They’ll tell us what’s “acceptable” in liberalism and what’s not. Oddly and perhaps not coincidentally, the only acceptable ideas are the ideas they, personally, came up on and are comfortable with.
Elizabelle
@JWR: How do you write a whole story about the Wyoming primary and never divulge its date? (It’s August 16.)
And yeah, Wyoming Republicans are horrible.
I will hope that Trump becomes radioactive (and indicted, even!) by mid-August. Props to Liz Cheney for doing the right thing.
Betty
My one hope is that the hearings shake the clueless mainstream media out of their horse race coverage. There is just too much at stake for this failure to continue.
Kay
@Immanentize:
They all hate her. I read her Twitter just to read the unhinged comments from her detractors. She can’r say anything without a hive of middle aged white people descending, screeching that she’s destroying their stodgy, conventional, romanticized view of US history.
I sort of love her :)
JWR
@Baud: Same here. I almost feel sorry for her. (And that’s as far as I’ll go.)
Kay
@JWR:
It’s bad though. The far Right anti-democratic insurrectionist wing is a real threat to the country. One more of them in the US House is not good. They’re already a majority on the Right.
Kay
@Baud:
He’s like a bad penny, though. In five years he’ll say something critical of conservatives and liberals will be falling all over themselves to declare him an ally.
Matt McIrvin
@Immanentize: Andrew Sullivan is going to end up willingly supporting people who are out to eliminate him from existence just to flatter his own racism.
UncleEbeneezer
@Kay: Also too, they are racist. And now they’ve been emboldened to show us who they really are.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: Pfft. I thought he was gross and delusional when he was going after Sarah Palin, one of the most loathsome people on our political scene.
Geminid
@Elizabelle: I’m not saying that Cheney will win, but I think the result will be much closer than that poll indicates. Despite efforts of trump allies in the Wyoming legislature to change election law, Independents and Democrats will still be able to get a Republican ballot for the primary. This involves reregistering on primary day but does not limit a voter’s choice in November.
Baud
@Kay:
Or he’ll criticize Biden “from the left.” Same result.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
The same unapologetically racist narcissistic asshole that he’s always been, now with even less filter?
Immanentize
@Kay: me too. She is really awesome. She has done very good work, has taken so much shit for it, had her planned future derailed by a white supremacist at NC, and then came out of it stronger.
Also, real NYTimes best seller list top author without right wing welfare buys. Drives the substackers crazy.
Kay
@Baud:
I think he’s less effective at that because he has no interest in “the Left” and does not actually know who they are or what they believe.
His “Leftists” are Freddie de Boer and Glenn Greenwald, both of whom do a lot of talking and writing but mysteriously none of it is ever about their (alleged) Leftist beliefs.
Freddie de Boers last big essay was a passionate defense of standardized testing, which is okay, but is also the official position of the US Department of Education and has been since George W and Jeb Bush put it in in 2000. These are just conventional Right wing opinions.
Kay
@Immanentize:
There’s something really inspiring to me about her dignity, her insistence they won’t drag her down.
She’s tough and somehow pulls that off without being as unkind or vicious as her detractors. She makes them look small. Since I think they are small and are hugely over-rated as “public intellectuals” I’m glad.
Geminid
@JWR: Two of the nine January 6 Commitee members- Adam Kinzinger and Stephanie Murphy- are retiring. Five- Chairman Benny Thompson, Zoe Lofgren, Adam Schiff, Pete Aguilar, and Jaime Raskin- have safely Democratic seats.
Besides Cheney, the one other panel member with a tough reelection is Elaine Luria (VA-2d). Cook’s Political Report rates Luria’s coastal district as R+1. Luria flipped that district in 2018. Redistricting made it a little tougher this year, and it’s a top Republican target.
zhena gogolia
@Matt McIrvin: Oh, right, remember his obsession with her pregnancy?
zhena gogolia
@Geminid: My Wyoming relatives make a habit of voting Republican so they can keep the worst crazies out.
danielx
@artem1s:
Yes, I could watch that over and over.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
But are they still today? Or, with the Neanderthal Right ascendant, are these poor scribes with their center-right policy proposals and polite dog-whistle racism being left behind by “both sides”?
Betty Cracker
@Immanentize: I saw Sullivan come after Jones on Twitter one time. It did not go well for him!
@Baud: I give Cheney unreserved kudos on her anti-insurrection work. She has shown enormous courage and integrity.
Baud
@Kay:
It’s trendy because it opposes Big Teacher.
zhena gogolia
@Betty Cracker: Yes, she has.
Kay
@Baud:
The “equity argument” for standardized tests goes like this- “an objective measure benefits minority students because any subjective measure will be compromised by the preexisting beliefs of the person or persons doing the measuring”.
It’s a fine argument. There’s another side but nothing wrong with this argument. It’s just 50 years old and IT IS the status quo. The idea that they somehow “can’t say” this extremely conventional view is just ridiculous. Of course they can say it. The whole federal government says it and so do all the states.
Elizabelle
@Geminid: Hell, I’d vote for Liz Cheney!! In the general, too.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Kay: I love that she makes them look small in comparison – because on the merits it is so clear.
Is there a future for the mediocre white male thinkers of today? Subscribe to my newsletter to find out!
Geminid
@zhena gogolia: I read that in Wyoming, polling shows that Republican self-identification is significantly lower than Republican registration. A lot of independents register Republican for the same reason as your relatives.
Baud
@Kay:
When they say they can’t say it, what they mean is
That you shouldn’t listen to. As long as they keep the focus on their oppressed state, they don’t have to engage in the substantive debate.
Kay
@Baud:
I actually lean their way on standardized tests! I would be an ally. But they’re horrible and self pitying and whiny so I won’t want to be with them.
During the public employee union fight in Ohio I learned this thing I had never encountered before- the AA organizers said that public positions where there was a civil service test benefitted AA employees, because the private sector was using subjective and opaque measures and not hiring them. The same with “step raises” and promotions. The union system had objective, posted benchmarks and the private sector did not. Hence, how so many AA people in Ohio ended up rising in public sector jobs but not private sector jobs. Amazing. But duh, right? Never occurred to me.
debbie
@Kay:
Also her father.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Baud: When you’re a rebellious punk man-child, leading a revolution against the teachers can seem so righteous!
“Take that, Mrs. Frickle!”
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Kay: I think that’s true of companies with federal contracts too. They have to meet some sort of equity goals.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Geminid: Kinzinger’s district was wiped out in this year’s Illinois redistricting. As with Cheney, I admire his integrity on Jan 6, but his other positions are straight up R, so I’m reluctantly glad to see him go
Baud
@Kay:
I used to have a job with subjective evaluations. Hated it. I make less now but there’s no subjectivity when it comes to pay or status. I actually feel much more valued.
Kay
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Right. But these same people would object to that. So on the one hand they support “objective measures” as a hedge against subjective bias, but in employment they want ONLY subjective meaures.
So where did the bias they were hedging against in high school go? It ends when the AA person turns 18 and graduates? That’s odd.
Shalimar
@JWR: Liz Cheney is a leader of the part of the Republican party that measures victory in number of foreigners killed, as opposed to the part of the party that might kill us all on a nuclear whim. She really isn’t any less evil than they are.
Geminid
@Elizabelle: I’ve spent time camping near Myrtle Beach in South Carolina’s 7th CD. It’s represented by another Republican Impeacher, Tom Rice. When I saw that Rice voted to impeach, I figured he was a goner. But it seeems like he has a decent chance against a trump-endorsed challenger. I would definitely come put for Rice, and it would be easy because like Virginia, South Carolina does not register voters by party and all primaries are open.
I drove across the district in October, 2020, and I saw a lot of Tom Rice’s signs. They were simple and did not mention his party; just a dark blue background, “Tom Rice” at the top, “Congress” at the bottom, and a silhouette of a palmeto tree in the center.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Kay: I agree with this perspective too. I also agree that standardized measures have their own biases and are not perfect or fair. But they’re still more fair than subjective measures.
Like many topics, the lines of argument seem to be dominated by binary thinking and fixed-mindset. One method is good and the other is bad. Both methods are the way they are today and won’t change.
I would argue:
So instead of advocates arguing that one method is good and the other bad, perhaps a more constructive approach would be to accept that both are imperfect and commit to working to make them both better.
But constructive arguments don’t get the clicks…
Enhanced Voting Techniques
At some point it’s going to come out that Trump gave secreat testimony against himself to the Jan6th Committee because Trump is such a compulsive braggart.
Leto
First she documented the alt-right. Now she’s coming for crypto. Molly White, a veteran Wikipedia editor, is fast becoming the cryptocurrency world’s biggest critic
germy shoemangler
@Leto:
Alison Rose
Rep Schiff is none too pleased with the DOJ. Can’t say I disagree.
Geminid
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Kinzinger announced his retirement before redistricting, but he knew that he would have a tough primary and a difficult reelection. Two of the other Midwestern Republican Impeachers, Upton of Michigan and Gonzales of Ohio also retired.
The fourth, Peter Meijer of Michigan, is running for reelection. It looks like Meijer will get past his primary, but his rematch with Democrat Hillary Scholten will be close. Some Republicans may leave that ballot line blank rather than support Meijer.
germy shoemangler
@Baud:
You have a job? I thought you were retired for some reason
SiubhanDuinne
@Elizabelle:
Fifth paragraph:
Kay
I confess I do not understand why the Biden Administration continues to follow this approach. If I could point to something in polling or substantive results of this approach I could at least explain it.
It just isn’t working if the intent is to attract Independents. They must see that by now. Why not shift course? It can’t hurt and it might help.
Steeplejack
@Cameron:
Jacob Bacharach, “The Anticlimax of the Jan. 6 Hearings.”
Dunno if it’s paywalled. Took the link from Twitter, so maybe it isn’t.
brantl
@Baud: I wish they’d kept the original, and re-assembled it, after dusting it for fingerprints, of course!
James E Powell
@TriassicSands:
No, it’s not.
Leto
@germy shoemangler: I didn’t need another reason to dislike Gillibrand, but what’cha going to do?
Baud
@germy shoemangler:
Well, if you can call being a paid subversive on a liberal blog working, yes, I have a job.
Kay
@Alison Rose :
I think it’s a mistake to blame it all on Garland. It’s timidity and conflict avoidance in the culture of the place as to white collar or well heeled defendants. One person didn’t create this in two years and one political appointee probably couldn’t have turned it around.
James E Powell
@Kay:
Agree with respect to Democrats & centrists. Sullivan, however, did not go insane. He is and always has been an a hole and a bigot.
Bill K
@Fester Addams: It goes both ways. A disturbingly large part of the populace want to be told it’s OK to discriminate and hate. Fox takes advantage of this to capture the audience and feed them Republican propaganda.
Baud
@germy shoemangler:
If I understand the proposal, it’s to regulate crypto like other investments are regulated. I don’t know the details of the bill, but “allowing” people to invest in crypto like they can invest in stocks is not “encouraging” it per se.
MisterDancer
It is a joy to read her! And the detractors are examples of a key point — it’s this mass of White Men (and Women) with Time on Hands that seems to drive so much of the non-bot discourse.
We really need to know more about these kinds of people, to start disrupting the networks that drive harassing people like Mz. Hannah-Jones. She — among many people — just get drowned in hate, and that’s not by accident.
Scout211
Brooks’ opinion piece in the NYT. I don’t have a subscription but the headline sure got my attention:
The January 6 Committee has already Blown It.
ETA: What? Pre-disappointment, check. Pre-criticism, check.
Maybe the opinion piece isn’t as awful as the headline, but seriously?
Kay
@James E Powell:
His “scientific” theories aside, my complaint was not that he is a bigot. It’s that he’s lazy and sloppy and doesn’t learn anything or prepare before he opines. His pretentious “blog” was hysterical to me because he would write something idiotic on health care- just pull it out of his ass- and his EXTREMELY educated readers would spend the next three days tutoring the dumb, lazy student.
A lot of work for them! Maybe that was the appeal. They would always know more than he did, because almost anyone does.
James E Powell
@Betty:
I’m hoping for the same or similar. Just get them to stop treating Republican insurrectionists as a legitimate party with legitimate policies and valid grievances.
Baud
@Scout211:
Republicans are circling the wagon.
sab
@Kay: I too learned a lot on the Ohio public sector union fight. I guess teachers just can’t help but teach, even when they are just out canvassing with a complete stranger.
Kay
@MisterDancer:
To say you are for free speech and unconventional views and then to SCREECH for two years that the 1619 project should be shut down is bullshit.
Why can’t we have the 1619 project and their Right wing 1776 project and maybe some others, too? Who told them they make the rules? This is about control. It’s a bunch of middle aged people who once fancied themselves as unconventional and now are freaking out that there are some GENUINELY unconventional ideas presented.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: “The wagon.” Ha!
Matt McIrvin
@zhena gogolia: He was going after Palin’s daughter, too. It was just misogynistic and creepy.
Kay
@sab:
It’s so funny that I ended up as a defender of teachers because I was always in trouble in school. Deservedly! I would attend..sporadically. It wasn’t mean spirited – I just genuinely did not get what they wanted from me. Couldn’t crack that code. It’s also one of the reasons I defend standardized tests. I would have been screwed without them. You could wave that number around and it forgave a lot of sins.
JWR
@Alison Rose : I saw that, and yeah, I don’t get the DOJ decision at all. What worries me is that it might just be Garland being Garland, an opinion I’ve avoided having thus far.
MisterDancer
…sort of? I’m going to go aside of your key point, but I’ve been chewing on this for a bit:
I actually think most people don’t directly hate that much, as people. What does happen, though, is that one asshole — or a network of assholes — can drive behaviors and beliefs. I think, as badly as it’s named, we really do misunderstand mob rule, much less how word-of-mouth drives worldviews.
That’s accelerated when you live in a culture that has a long history of promoting bigotry. It’s telling how quickly nearly every “conservative” alternative, like Rush Limbaugh, like Fox News, turned to mining prejudice for political and financial power.
The depressing part of this is that I’m too sure that people like DeSantis and Abbott could give a personal damn about Trans people, or Gay folx, or any of the groups they pour hate upon, in my opinion. That’s how that crooked asshole Texas AG Paxton could have dinner with a family with a Trans kid…and then turn around and sic his dogs on that family.
THE FUCKER.
The example of George Wallace is critical here. A lot of these people are driven to speak hate, in order to feel empowered. And that’s power over people like, well, me, as well as the power of being part of the In Group.
Again, that doesn’t excuse them for their horrific words and actions. And people who are threatened by their words and actions are not in a position to be expected to parse this shit. The above is not a call to make peace with these wankers!
Ok, I need to stop before I write what clearly needs to be a Front Page post, here, but y’all get the idea. Fox News isn’t training people to hate in a KKK sense (although they pick that up!) — they are training people to use hate as a tool to get a sugar rush, and to be part of a team that votes and advocates for other haters. As I said — mining hate.
And that’s a horrific, and oft-unspoken, side effect of how White Supremacy spreads so easily in cultures.
Cameron
@Steeplejack: Thanks. I’m advised that I’ve “run out of free articles.” I wasn’t aware that I ever had any. Oh, well.
Kay
More totally normal GOP candidates. I don’t know, if the public doesn’t get this by now I don’t think that is the fault of the production values for the 1/6 hearings.
There’s some deliberate, delusional ignoring going on. “Everything will be FINE” Okey doke.
MisterDancer
@Kay: Oh, no doubt it’s about control!
I’m reminded of how, post 9/11, asshole historians like Benard Lewis (may his grave be shat upon for a thousand years) were richly paid by Conservatives to generate Islamphobia in Western culture.
Those opinions, those many, many books — those were Acceptable. They furthered the goals of people like Dick Cheney, to find excuses to re-assert direct control over the regions we ended up running away from, tails between our legs. And they raised no concerns, caused no mainstream controversy, even as they helped make living in the West horrific for so many — even non-Moslems who got caught up in the bigotry.
As the horrendous reaction to the Afghanistan pullout shows, we’re still steeped deep in that mindset, that we “have to be in the ‘Middle East'”. And it’s a mindset that’s terrifying of a piece with how we have to reject any version of American history that doesn’t center White Male American governance and historical myth.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: Even apart from the white-people-flattering content, a lot of people just seem to come unhinged at any suggestion that what they were taught in school wasn’t right, or needs to be revised. Even when it’s an ostensibly neutral topic like mathematics. I think that’s partly because people take it as a challenge to parental authority over children.
Alison Rose
@Kay: He didn’t mention Garland or anyone by name, just pointed out why this was “disappoint[ing] and alarm[ing]”.
(Apologies for all caps, I CPed from the transcript)
germy shoemangler
@Kay:
Troy’s mayor calls on councilwoman to resign amid ballot fraud investigation
When I first saw it on TV I didn’t catch the political affiliation of the fraudster. But I assumed she’s a republican. Sure enough I was right. She ran for office on the “conservative” line. The news segment didn’t make a big thing about her politics, just her crime.
Steeplejack
@Cameron:
You can try opening it in a private tab/window.
Matt McIrvin
@MisterDancer:
We could think of it with a systems perspective, like the propagation of a virus, or a nuclear chain reaction. Over a period of many years the ground gets prepared, the critical mass, so that people may not be hating right now but will respond to a hateful message and propagate it. And then the identity of the actual spark is almost irrelevant–something is going to come along.
JWR
@Scout211:
I’m sure Brooksie will explain further on tomorrow’s PBS Snooze Hour, after which Jonathan Capehart will dutifully rolleyes before making a weak defense of the committee’s work.
Next week: Substituting for David Brooks will be the always happy-go-lucky Gary Abernathy. /prolly
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Matt McIrvin: People freak out over kids not learning cursive, much less something more substantive. Like they think schools just arbitrarily decide what kids need and where to spend class time
JWR
@Kay:
Hey! You must have been watching Chuck Todd this morning! He worried over the committee bringing in the documentary filmmaker, saying something like, I just hope they’re not trying to “jazz this up”.
Timill
@Cameron: You can clear the nyt cookies from your browser and get a new set of free articles.
Geminid
@Kay: Ryan Kelley was filmed encouraging the crowd to break Capitol barricades during on January 6. Maybe that is what the FBI arrested him for. Kelley cofounded the American Patriot Council during the early pandemic lockdowns. This group organized the armed invasion of the Michigan Capitol that was one one of the inspirations for the January 6 attack.
Kelley is a canny fellow; he did not follow the crowd into the U.S. Capitol and says he left for Michigan as soon as he heard that Ashley Babbit was killed.
A DeadlineDetroit article said that a poll taken after several governor candidates were disqualified recently showed Kelley leading the remaining field with 19%.
Reports are that Kelley and his wife have been popular “lifestyle vloggers” since 2015 and this following helped propel his political career.
Leto
@Baud: Not exactly sure how you regulate a pyramid scheme, but I’m sure we’ve learned the appropriate lessons from Enron.
Mike in NC
Good to know the fascist scum at FOX “News” call it January 6th ‘theatrics’ as they continue to promote white supremacy and police brutality. U-S-A!
germy shoemangler
sab
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I am thrilled to see cursive gone. It is very pretty, but rarely is it legible. I work in small business accounting, and for almost forty years I have been trying to decipher those ink bumps on a page that come from clients.
Ken
@Matt McIrvin: I was just explaining new math to my sister and brother-in-law last month. Actually I was explaining old math, since we’d all learned new math and they had no idea it wasn’t always done that way.
They almost refused to believe how subtraction used to be done (“3 minus 8 is 5 carry one”). I ended up showing them Tom Lehrer’s “New Math” to illustrate.
Baud
@germy shoemangler:
The first paragraph made me think it was going to be worse than it was. I didn’t click on the link, but I’m not sure what he thinks the Dems are doing wrong.
And, too, as a general matter, I am annoyed when people (a lot of people, not just Bernie) articulate their point by “telling the Dems what to say” instead of just making the point themselves. Really, not just Bernie — everyone does that. Stop being an observer and be a doer.
cain
@JWR:
Cheney does something that we wish our own politicians would do. Which just really makes me go blah. She’s committed political suicide but struck by principles. I still don’t like the Cheneys, but must admit that at least this spawn has done good.
cain
@Betty:
They’ve been doing this for 30 years. It’s a drug that will be hard to shake off. Especially for the older journalists who make some pretty big bucks.
Baud
@cain:
I don’t want our politicians to commit political suicide. But you are wrong that they won’t. See the Obamacare vote.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Alison Rose : If I were interviewing Schiff, I would’ve asked two questions:
1) in his time as a prosecutor, did he ever have what he thought was a clear-cut, air-tight case thrown out by a trial or appellate judge, or undone by a single crack-pot juror
and
2) if Garland indicted Meadow and/or Scavino today, how long would it take for the case/s to come to trial, then (assuming a conviction) get through the appellate process, and where he thinks that appellate process would stop (I have a notion on that last one myself).
I’m not an attorney, much less one who practiced at this level. Chuck Rosenberg is both, and he says the privilege case is not as inconceivable as Schiff suggests. Sometimes, as Mr Bumble observed, the law is a ass.
livewyre
@Matt McIrvin: That’s a hugely understated point IMO – systemic analysis of social movement, especially its maladies. On some level, the individual motivation for engaging in hate is irrelevant; it could be cynical manipulation for power, or it could be a visceral response towards a completely inappropriate target, but it pulls on the fabric the same way. I see our goal as not so much to stop isolated individuals from hating as to stop there from being a fence-less pool of hate for them to fall into.
Kay
I thought that was embarassing and humiliating for the US – that this ridiculous Trumpist was able to hold the transition hostage.
They need to fix that.
Give them no discretion and include a quick remedy to remove them if they refuse to do the job.
Baud
@Ken:
Is there an actual short video comparing old and new math? I’ve been hearing about it since forever but never looked into it.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@germy shoemangler:
Joe Biden, last October
Kathleen
@Betty Cracker: I agree Betty.
artem1s
@Scout211:
It’s Brooks. Of course it’s worse than the headline.
Soprano2
@Kay: Remember the Republican rules: a) You can’t tell me what to do b) I should tell you what to do. Once I read this Twitter thread, it became much clearer to me what they are doing. Thus, their positions that a) Free speech is extremely valuable in our society and b) the 1619 Project shouldn’t be allowed to exist. What they mean when they say “free speech” is “things people like me want to say”.
JWR
@sab:
I watch Thursday Night Noir on the Movies! channel, and whenever they zoom in on a secret note or other written clue, it’s usually sooo slanted it looks like something other than English. I learned cursive in grammar school, but never used it. I’m one of those all-block-caps print people.
James E Powell
@MisterDancer:
Or how social media accelerates & intensifies what used to require personal or at least phone contact.
I was shocked at how quickly people around me became experts on the Depp/Heard situation and adopted a “kill the witch” attitude toward Heard. I shouldn’t have been, but I was.
Full disclosure: I don’t know anything about it either.
Soprano2
@MisterDancer: People want a target to blame for their problems. Thus all the anger at Biden about gas prices and inflation, even though there’s little he can do about them. People like being encouraged to vent all their anger on a specific target, it makes them feel better and like none of this is their fault. They can say “the reason I didn’t get that job was they had to hire a black person/brown person/woman/other minority” rather than “who knows why I didn’t get that job, there could be a lot of reasons”.
Kay
@germy shoemangler:
This is hard but I think someone in the Democratic Party has to acknowlege what the Democratic base has lost. Because it really isn’t 2010. They have lost the voting rights act and they have lost Roe. In 2010 you could say you were “up, net” right? That’s how I thought of it. They were going to get creamed on the ACA but we hadn’t lost any rights or big federal laws and the ACA was a net positive.
But now they’re not. They’re down, net. Obama could say “we’re progressing”. True! That’s much, much more difficult for Biden in terms of our base and what they care about. I know most Americans don’t give a shit about the voting rights act and the reversal of Roe barely gets covered but our base cares.
I don’t know how one would even broach it but more and more I think the best approach is the bluntest.
Ken
@Baud: A youtube search for “old math new math” turns up a few, but you may want to approach with caution — I would expect many of them have opinions, given that they’re creating videos about a change that happened fifty years ago. Fluoride will probably sneak in there somewhere.
EDIT: I checked a couple, and they’re not complaining about the fifty-year-old changes. They’re complaining about (drum roll…) changes that have happened since they finished sixth grade. So when they say “old math”, they mean what was known as “new math” in the 1970s.
Baud
@Ken:
Right. That’s why I was relying on the Great Balloon Juice Internet Sifter to point me to something useful. But thanks.
Kay
@germy shoemangler:
Because you CAN rally people by bringing them into “we’re in a tough spot- it’s going backward- we need you” but not if you’re unwilling to admit you’re in a tough spot.
James E Powell
@germy shoemangler:
Completely agree that the message “We are trying to make everything better, but Republicans are preventing it” followed by a short, maybe three item list of the most popular things.
Disagree in targeting our two a hole senators because that will not help us win in states in which neither of them are on the ballot.
brantl
@cain: She’s done a lot of bad, too, being right once doesn’t excuse all the rest, including her defense of torture.
Soprano2
@James E Powell: Oh yeah, everyone I work with has that same opinion even though they can’t tell you the first thing about the actual facts in the case, and don’t even seem to know that Depp lost in the U.K. when a judge considered the exact same evidence. I expressed the opinion that in a trial with a judge only it’s decided based on the evidence, while a jury trial like this one is decided based on who the jury likes more. This was an unpopular belief, and got them to quit talking about it around me.
Ruckus
I went on twitter this morning.
I left twitter about 10 minutes later.
I am speechless, and anyone who sees my comments knows that rarely/never happens.
The attacks, the concept that 2 yrs later the people on the right still think SFB, or someone like him is what this country needs to turn back time over 200 yrs or anarchy, whichever is easier to get done, is what we need and how dare we question their motives, ideals or methods of an attempted overthrow of everything this country is supposed to be. I wonder if any of them actually have any idea what they are asking for because I can’t see that they do. Rupert Murdoch really, really can not have the slightest idea what he’s done to the world, or if he does, he makes every dictator since time began look like a 10 yr old play acting as a dictator. Also, if you get bitten by the white power spider beware that you brain will melt and you will become an utter monster. And a fucking idiot.
eclare
@Soprano2: I used to have a White, Xtian, cishet male friend who told me that once. He said the interviewer told him that.
I did not believe him for a minute. We are no longer friends, he got so angry and aggrieved over the period of time that I knew him.
Baud
@James E Powell:
I don’t mind if Bernie wants to target that message to the young cohorts that follow him. Maybe it’ll help with turnout.
StringOnAStick
@MisterDancer: Exactly so, FOX trains people to use hate to get their sugar rush, because anger is addictive.
I’ve mentioned my RW anger addicted father many times here; he was an anger addict long before FOX, but once he got cable and ready access to feed his addiction, he couldn’t watch anything else, and I mean anything. The TV is turned on at 5pm (cocktail hour) and stays on FOX until he goes to bed. I can no longer talk to him on the phone because he is so primed from his TV to be angry that he turns even the most anodyne conversation into a fight. So, I switched to emails, mostly with photos of landscapes I’ve taken or describing landscaping projects I am working on now; that had worked until recently, which I think reflects part of the ramping up that FOX is doing as the January 6 presentations get closer.
I am currently having to do some hard labor making a much bigger drywell because it is flat in front of our house and rain makes water back up to the front door. I told him my story and what I am doing to mitigate this, so now it has been days of him arguing by email that the rules forbidding gutter runoff from leaving your property are “tyranny”, I should leave it and fight the city over their rules, meaning I should ignore the damage letting runoff pool by the foundation will cause, and as an engineer he knows better but he would rather be angry. He’s 90 and about to have a heart valve procedure; I’d be lying if I said I would ever miss him when he’s gone, because I won’t.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@James E Powell:
It might help with turn out in places like FL and NC? and at least the shouty old fool is, for once and at least for the moment, yelling at the right people
JWR
@cain:
It’s pretty remarkable, actually. But what I find truly remarkable is that taking such a stand is remarkable at all.
It feels strange to say it, but I just don’t know about this country anymore.
artem1s
@MisterDancer:
It’s a mistake to think that white women are afraid that Blacks will treat Whites poorly if they take power. The reality is, they are afraid if they don’t act like the racist In Group leader, their white friends will treat them the way they treat Black people.
It all begins with high school dynamics. The ones who figure out how to use the power of divide and conquer never give it up and they never grow out of it. They are driven to create someone new to bully so they can maintain their position at the top of the pecking order.
Geminid
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: This argument may help turnout in contested Senate races; it certainly helps fundraising, and that can help turnout.
Sanders is making an obvious argument that many other Democrats have made and will make. The only difference where he advocates using the term “corporate Dems” to describe Manchin and Sinema. I have a problem with that because I see people in the Sanders wing use this language to stigmatize any and all Democratic politicians who do not toe their particular political line.
Gravenstone
@Kay: Andrew, has anyone invited you to fuck right the fuck off yet today? If not, please allow me to be the first ya poncy git.
Soprano2
@eclare: Because it’s easier to say that than to say “someone else was more qualified” or “the boss liked someone else better”. The truth is that a lot of times hiring comes down to attitude. I can teach skills; I can’t teach a good attitude.
Soprano2
My sympathies, this was my mother. She turned “You could be watching the Olympics” into a fight about the women’s soccer team! I didn’t even mention them! They are aggrieved about literally everything you can name under the sun now, and won’t hesitate to tell you all about it given the smallest opening.
Bobby Thomson
I’m setting my expectations low and hoping the Kelley arrest this morning is a sign of things to come on the criminal side.
Matt McIrvin
@Ken: Some of the more out-there stuff got pulled back from the curriculum–I don’t think they teach set theory in the primary grades at all any more. But some of the changes to arithmetic instruction were permanent; my daughter got a version of the same “regrouping” explanation of carrying that I got in the 1970s, which was definitely New Math-influenced.
Fundamentally, having been frightened by Sputnik, they were trying to transition from an approach designed to produce reliable low-level clerks (in a world without electronic calculators) to one in which kids were being taught to think about mathematics like mathematicians–and maybe that was too ambitious a goal, but there was at least a greater emphasis on the ideas.
UncleEbeneezer
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Not only do Meadows and Scavino have different (and more credible) claims of Executive Privilege, but there is also the fact that DOJ has a policy of not bringing indictments (in this case for Contempt) if there are other means to acquire what they want (Meadows’ texts). There is a Civil case pending to be resolved soon that will likely compel Meadows to comply and provide the requested documents. Meadows may also be a target for prosecution of much bigger crimes (like Conspiracy to Obstruct) which could be undercut by charging him with Contempt, at this time. Former US Attorney Barb McQuade has written about these possibilities. Schiff and DOJ are doing two related but different jobs and there’s probably a lot that even Schiff doesn’t know about what DOJ is/isn’t doing, and why. While it is on Congress’ best interest to have Meadows/Scavino indicted for contempt of Congress, it may not be in DOJ’s best interests.
rikyrah
@Kay:
Lips so pursed.
Matt McIrvin
(When my daughter was little, I introduced her to a little set theory myself. I remember explaining that sets could be finite or infinite; you could have a set of just about anything you could think of–the set of all even numbers, the set of all houses… and she immediately said “The set of all sets!” I was so proud that as a kid barely out of diapers she’d lunged instantly for the case so big that it actually breaks conventional set theory. Had to restrain myself from going for the Russell paradox.)
rikyrah
@Immanentize:
I think it also galls them that she wasn’t ‘cancelled’. That she told UNC to phuck itself, and then went on to be welcomed at Howard, where they have absolutely no say in the least.