NEW: Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Cleta Mitchell, Kenneth Chesbro and Jenna Ellis have now been subpoenaed by the Fulton County special grand jury. https://t.co/PXzGzwkHf7
— Katie S. Phang (@KatiePhang) July 5, 2022
So much going on, it’s hard to keep track of everything:
… The grand jury also subpoenaed U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), one of Trump’s top allies, along with attorney and podcast host Jacki Pick Deason.
The subpoenas were filed July 5 and signed by Fulton Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney, who is overseeing the special grand jury. They noted that all seven people were “a necessary and material witness” to the investigation.
Unlike subpoenas issued to Georgians, the summons required McBurney’s blessing since they are for people who reside outside the state.
The 23-person special grand jury has heard testimony in recent weeks from a parade of witnesses, including some who had direct contact with Trump and his associates in late 2020 and early 2021. But Tuesday’s subpoenas are the closest jurors have gotten to the Trump campaign or inner circle of the former president…
Eastman, a former law professor, was a key architect of the plan to press Vice President Mike Pence to reject the official Democratic electors in Georgia and other swing states and opt for an alternative slate of GOP electors. A federal judge in March argued that “it is more likely than not that President Trump and Dr. Eastman dishonestly conspired to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021.”…
Chesebro worked with the leadership of the Georgia GOP to coordinate a slate of alternate Republican electors, according to his subpoena. The DA’s office said Chesebro drafted at least two memos in support of the plan and provided a template of documents to the party for its sham ceremony at the Georgia Capitol on Dec. 14, 2020.
Mitchell, a conservative lawyer based in Washington, D.C., advised Trump on the infamous Jan. 2, 2021, call that the Republican placed to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. During that conversation, in which Trump asked Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes, Mitchell aided Trump as he made unsubstantiated claims about Georgia’s elections.
Graham separately called Raffensperger and his staff twice in the weeks following the November 2020 elections “about reexamining certain absentee ballots cast in Georgia in order to explore the possibility of a more favorable outcome for former President Donald Trump,” his subpoena alleges. Graham previously denied wrongdoing…
Fulton County DA Fani Willis launched the criminal probe into Georgia’s elections in February 2021, weeks after a recording of the Trump-Raffensperger phone call leaked. She’s since expanded the investigation to include the fake GOP electors, Giuliani’s testimony to state legislators and other efforts to pressure Georgia officials to act in Trump’s favor.
The special grand jury has permission to meet until May 2023, though Willis said she’s expecting the group’s work to wrap up long before then. Jurors are expected to draft a report at the end of their service recommending whether Willis should press charges against Trump or his allies, though the final decision ultimately rests with the DA, a Democrat elected in 2020…
A sitting US Senator was subpoenaed in a criminal racketeering investigation today and were all just kind of “what’s for dinner” about it.
Hope @LindseyGrahamSC has an action-packed 2022!
— Mueller, She Wrote (@MuellerSheWrote) July 6, 2022
Baud
I mean, it’s bad , but it’s not email best practices bad.
Suzanne
@Baud: It’s not tan-suit bad, either.
Imagine if it had been arugula-bad.
dmsilev
Pat Cipollone, TFG’s WH Counsel, is going to testify in front of the 1/6 Committee on Friday. Not in public, sadly (per the Post):
How long until we get excerpts from the video, or at least summaries?
cain
Not as bad as Michelle advocating healthy meals for kids! How dare she!
schrodingers_cat
Q. Does MSNBC criticize Biden from the left 24/7?
Asking because I don’t get cable
The Moar You Know
awww shits getting real now
Delk
Graham’s lawyers say he won’t comply.
Sure Lurkalot
Lindsay challenging the subpoena
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwj3wMut0-T4AhXxIn0KHax9ARAQvOMEKAB6BAgDEAE&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nbcnews.com%2Fpolitics%2Fdonald-trump%2Fsen-lindsey-graham-says-challenge-subpoena-georgia-trump-probe-rcna36897&usg=AOvVaw0QHdrgsKJZJDesHoLLaXuu
Delk, ya beat me to it!
The Moar You Know
@schrodingers_cat: I don’t have cable either. I also would not call MSNBC in any way, shape or form “left”, not from what I’ve seen of it. I feel confident in saying that they assuredly do criticize Biden from any angle they can, because goddamn near everyone does.
A no-drama, no-bullshit president who does the best he can with nothing and all everyone does is bitch about him.
Alison Rose
Yeah well, none of them ever fell off their bike on camera, so obviously this is all bullshit.
Betty Cracker
@schrodingers_cat: I don’t watch MSNBC all that much these days, but from what I’ve seen, they aren’t hyper-critical, or at least not consistently so.
mrmoshpotato
Your shitass gets a subpoena! Your shitass gets a subpoena! Your shitass gets a subpoena! All of you shitasses get a subpoena!
scav
I kept reading Cheesebro until about the very last paragraph. I kept incredulously reading Cheesebro until about the very last paragraph. I think my eyes are trying to protect my brain by making it giggle once in a very long while.
schrodingers_cat
@The Moar You Know: MSNBC is cosplay left. Much like a lot of “progressive” twitter.
Leftie Karens and Kens want the manager (Biden, Pelosi and D leadership) to fix things that their cohort has messed up by either voting for Rs or staying at home because BS or bust.
This thread has compiled the many attacks on Biden and the Dem leadership from our supposed friends.
Old School
@Sure Lurkalot:
Who rules on a subpoena from a special grand jury? I’ll assume it isn’t the judge who already approved the subpoena in the first place.
FNWA
There is a lawyer I read who believes Graham’s protest is procedurally legit.
https://statuskuo.substack.com/p/a-grand-jury-in-georgia-just-upped
Mike in NC
I hope when Rudy and Lindsey are convicted of treason they’ll be allowed to share a cell, a motheaten blanket, and a used toothbrush.
raven
Georgia Guidestones damaged by explosive device, GBI says
“The Georgia Guidestones are inscribed with ten guiding principles, each etched in stone using languages from around the world.”
Another Scott
@Old School:
RollCall:
(Emphasis added.)
Last I heard, a witness doesn’t get to decide what s/he’s asked about by a grand jury. They go and answer the questions.
If Graham didn’t do anything wrong, he’s got nothing to worry about in appearing and answering questions under oath at the grand jury, amirite??
Grr…,
Scott.
raven
Trump White House Counsel Pat Cipollone has reached a deal with the January 6 committee to participate in a transcribed interview behind closed doors on Friday, multiple sources told CNN.
Cipollone will be appearing under subpoena. A source familiar with his thinking says Cipollone intended to comply with the subpoena issued on June 29 for a July 6 interview, and it was extended until July 8. The interview will be on video, two of the sources told CNN.
mistermix
@FNWA: I approved this comment but I’m not convinced that LG will be able to weasel out of this with the Speech and Debate clause, since that is mainly for actual, formal work of a Senator, not phone calls pressuring election officials. Of course, we’ll see.
MisterForkbeard
@Another Scott: Graham’s position is that just getting asked about whether his unprecedented and deeply weird calls on behalf of Trump at a time when Trump was pressuring Georgia to overturn its own election results would… prevent him from ever working on election legislation ever again.
Which would be great, if we thought he would stick to it.
MisterForkbeard
@mistermix: My feeling is that FNWA is sorta right (IANAL), in that this clearly wasn’t Graham doing the actual work of a Senator – but that he’ll claim that it is, and it’ll eat up a lot of time because he’ll get to litigate it.
Also, that this is how Graham is going to spin it to a very credulous media. “All I did was ASK about election security and now they’re coming after me. The Biden Administration is jailing its political enemies!” and so on.
Burnspbesq
@dmsilev:
Limits on Cipollone’s testimony? Fuck no. The only privilege he can properly assert is his own privilege against self-incrimination. Executive, deliberative-process, and attorney-client privileges belong to Biden as the current president, and he should inform the committee immediately that he is waiving them.
Alison Rose
@raven: Was it Kandiss Taylor trying to make good on Executive Order #10?
(It’s a long segment but OMG is it worth it.)
Burnspbesq
@mistermix:
The risk Graham is taking if he doesn’t show up is that the grand jury will make its decision whether to indict based on Raffensperger’s uncontradicted testimony, and I would bet the grand jury found him to be highly credible.
kindness
I’m baffled by what should be my peeps. The WaPo ran an opinion piece (Greg S & Paul W) re Gavin Newsome’s ad on Fox in Florida. It was upbeat, pointed and showed Democrats can learn how to play this game. My baffled part was the comments. Fully half the comments were (suposubly) liberals shredding Biden & Pelosi. Now, I get it…a portion of those comments were trolls or bots, those are easily ignored. But the others….reminded me so much of Rose Twitter where Democrats can’t win no matter what they do. I just have to pull away and go do something like run the pups to clear my head and be positive again. Why is it our side (and the MSM) demands our leaders are always Johnny Unbeatable and whine about it when they have to keep working to achieve their goals? Hell it took Republicans 30 years to kill Roe v Wade. Why does out side always expect instant gratification? Grow up people. Work is hard. Get used to it.
scav
The sharks are circling BoJo @ N° 10 while smaller rats are practicing synchronized diving off the ship. Guardian liveblog
MisterForkbeard
@kindness: I see a lot of this online. “Name ONE thing that the Democrats have done!”
You can name a lot. But they always claim it’s not enough, or not about the right things, and so on. Lots of “Why do I even vote Democrat, if Democrats couldn’t immediately un-overturn Roe” and so on.
raven
@Alison Rose : How did you know about that???? It’s not 30 miles from here (we’ve never been” but it was a big attraction for the eclipse!
Dangerman
March through Georgia? Sure, Man, sounds like a fine idea.
Alison Rose
@raven: The link is to a Last Week Tonight web segment. I’d never heard of the guidestones before that!
schrodingers_cat
@Betty Cracker: We had our local Dem meeting yesterday. One of the people who is usually quite pragmatic was going on and on about Biden needs to be primaried in our meeting yesterday. So I was wondering where that was coming from.
Their reason: Biden is too nice to the Rs.
Baud
@kindness:
Why do you not think most of the comments were trolls and bots?
raven
@Alison Rose : Her latest
Old School
@mistermix: I don’t know anything about Fulton Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney, but my guess would be that he is well aware of the Speech and Debate clause and signed off on the subpoena anyway. Not sure if whatever evidence convinced him to do so will leak to the public though.
raven
@Alison Rose : Yea, I watched it, I was just surprised you knew about it/them!
raven
@Old School: You KNOW who lives in Fulton County?
geg6
@Suzanne:
Or, dawg forbid, Dijon mustard bad.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@MisterForkbeard: And of course the answer is, ‘All we did was ask him to testify given he may have witnessed illegal activity by Trump officials. Why is he afraid to tell the truth under oath? If he would just testify, we could get all of this cleared up.’
West of the Rockies
I just fundamentally do not get why some of these fools and tools so desperately cling and aspire to power and fame and cash.
A lot of the players are well into their 70’s, but their greed may well lead to their final years being spent in prison and going down in history as idiots and villains.
I absolutely get wanting to remain creative, productive, and secure, but the corruption and arrogance and heinousness is remarkable.
Joe Falco
@raven: Goody Taylor can slink back under her rock or abide by her brand of religion’s prohibition on women being seen or heard outside the kitchen.
Burnspbesq
I fully expect the Fulton County grand jury to indict Trump. There is no dispute about the content of the 01/03/21 phone call with Raffensperger, and it clearly violates the applicable statute.
I just hope it happens in October. I’m looking forward to watching DeSantis’ agony over whether to extradite during the final stages of a campaign. If that makes me a bad person, so be it.
Alison Rose
@raven: I’m sure God is relieved he has her permission.
Joe Falco
@Burnspbesq: Are you mixing up your state governors? Kemp is GA governor.
Old School
@raven:
Not since the Braves moved.
All I know is the Brandi Carlile song.
The Moar You Know
@raven: funny how God’s M.O. is always stolen construction-site dynamite. You’d think He could spring for some C4 at least.
Felanius Kootea
@Joe Falco: Trump lives in Florida.
AWOL
@schrodingers_cat: Everyone on MSNBC before prime time seems to be a Republicans in Democtratic Party clothing.
Baud
@The Moar You Know:
God prefers the Holy Hand Grenade.
Betty Cracker
@schrodingers_cat: There are at least four headlines in The Washington Post and Politico that have a “Dems in Disarray” theme. Haven’t read them, so I don’t know how far they explore the primary narrative. IMO, it’s not all manufactured by trolls or non-Democrats. It may or may not be rational or fair, but lots of people are genuinely afraid and pissed off, and that doesn’t usually redound to the credit of the person in charge, even if he’s blameless. I think the Biden admin gets that and is trying to be more responsive. Good for them.
West of the Rockies
@schrodingers_cat:
I guess it’s irksome human nature, SC. The Right does it, too, on their own side, with the nutters squealing about RINO’s…
schrodingers_cat
What does it mean when people say they want Biden to fight? Do they want him to walk down to the Supreme court and tackle Alito? WTF do they want him to do shit post on Twitter and call Thomas names?
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
My hopes are pretty simple. I want justice. I want every person who committed a crime to keep Trump in office to get convicted of that crime. I want indictments, arrests, and convictions to convince all the new Trumpy election officials to follow the law to the letter or risk going to jail. In fact, I want everyone watching the Jan 6th investigations to think, ‘Wow. They were guilty. If I commit that crime, I go to jail.
If that gets DeSantis elected, so be it. At least he’ll be worried that if he does what Trump did, he’ll be convicted for it.
schrodingers_cat
@Betty Cracker: White people voting for Rs since the Civil Rights Legislation became law did this. Biden can’t undo decades of damage in a little over a year.
schrodingers_cat
@West of the Rockies: Yeah but they don’t make fun of voting for Rs or fundraising.
Burnspbesq
@Joe Falco:
Nope. Trump lives in Florida.
Soprano2
@MisterForkbeard: Kind of makes you wonder if those are liberals, or conservatives pretending to be liberals.
Soprano2
@schrodingers_cat: I think they want a left-wing TFG who would try to reverse the SCOTUS decision with an illegal executive order, or something. Or maybe they want Biden to say bad things about all the Republicans all the time. The one thing I can think of would be to brainstorm things that could be done, and then try them. Republicans do that, and sometimes it works for them. *shrug
Geminid
@raven: The Guidestones sound like a New Age project. I hope they catch the guy(s) that did it. It seemed like they knew what they were doing.
The Guidestones are not far from Elberton, the “Granite Capital of Georgia.” It has a store that sells stone-working tools- power tools, carbide chisels and the like. The catalog is pretty cool.
Betty Cracker
@schrodingers_cat: Lots of white people suck, as we all know all too well. But Biden is broadly unpopular and has lost ground with just about every group, including black voters if the polling is correct. I’m not saying it’s fair, but the discontent appears to be real, and I’m glad the White House seems to realize it and is trying to address it.
Honus
@schrodingers_cat: and right on time I get this email article:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/05/biden-democrats-newsom-pritzker/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F374c4a7%2F62c5b06ecfe8a21601d898b6%2F59732188ade4e21a848b7538%2F8%2F70%2F62c5b06ecfe8a21601d898b6&wp_cu=20aeba7b0464b4e7c5734a3bf0571bbc%7C6304B0A4C2883D67E0530100007F92DC
raven
@Burnspbesq: Uh,
catclub
@Betty Cracker:
Once 100% of the Right wingers decide they will respond to any polling on Biden that he is terrible and worse than anybody before him, and that these times are the worst times ever (3.6% unemployment, economy demanding lots of gas so the price goes up, personal and corporate savings high, etc) it only takes a few Democrats not fully supporting him for the polls to be terrible.
Burnspbesq
@raven:
Fully aware of that, thanks.
raven
@Burnspbesq: It wasn’t directed at you, just following the thread.
raven
@Geminid: I live 30 miles from there. My buddy, who died almost 20 years ago, sold for Lawson Products. They carry high end hardware, blades and bits that they use in the quarries. All of our countertops came from there.
Felanius Kootea
@schrodingers_cat: Honestly I think there’s a small group of Dems that do. Meaningless posturing is their idea of “doing something.”
Betty Cracker
@catclub: I’m no expert, but I think that understates the problem. 100% of Democrats despised Trump, and unlike Biden, he never got over the 50% mark during his entire presidency, IIRC. But right now, Biden’s approval rating is about what Trump’s was AFTER he lost the election and AFTER the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
It’s possible all the polls are wrong. Maybe all the people polled are lying. Maybe Beltway pundits are making shit up to hurt Biden. Some or all of that could be true.
But maybe there’s a high level of free-floating angst and anger in the country that is being blamed on the person in charge, unfairly or not. I think that’s more likely. I certainly sense a lot of rage and discontent in my community, but I live in a fascist state, so possibly it’s not representative.
Felanius Kootea
@Betty Cracker: Since many Americans don’t actually understand how their government works, it’s easy for Republicans to gum up the works and for regular people to lash out at Dems, because they “hold the House, the Senate, and the presidency but aren’t doing anything.” I’ve seen so many variations on that – it’s become conventional wisdom.
Republicans know that regular people don’t understand the filibuster or that it takes 60+ senators to act on many issues, or super secret appointment holds, or that the House has passed so many great bills that have died in the Senate. Democrats either need to educate people on what the problems are or make a show of trying to reform Senate and other rules to at least get it into people’s consciousness.
Mai Naem mobile
I saw somebody call Pat Cippolone Pasquale and I thought they were making a mob joke about TFG. But,no, his real name is Pasquale. And he attended Covington Catholic School….the same one as the pro life rally douchebag. Also one of his ten kids is the producer of Laura Ingraham’s show. Apparently Laura Ingraham is good friends with the Cippolone family(she’s godmother to one of his kids.) I mean I am sure Laura never asked Pat or his daughter anything about what went on in the WH during 1/6 right? Anyhow Cippolone is supposedly testifying by transcript behind doors. Why? Screw that. He needs to testify in front of the committee in public.
Mai Naem mobile
@Felanius Kootea: maybe if the Dems would put similar holds and obstruct in similar ways the Republicans and the public would understand better.
Betty Cracker
@Felanius Kootea: I agree, which is why I’m for a midterm strategy similar to what Josh Marshall described, i.e., “help us hold the House and get two more Dem senators, and we’ll codify Roe.” I don’t know if it would work, but it lays out the problem and offers an answer to “what’s in it for me.”
Ultimately, I’d like to see the filibuster abolished completely. It shields Republicans and hurts Democrats.
ksmiami
@schrodingers_cat: We need Biden to come out swinging hard at the extremist GOP that got us here. And to tell every elected Dem that their only mission is to articulate that we are the good guys and must save Democracy from the right wing. AS FDR said, welcome their hatred. If he constantly refrains to bipartisanship, he’s enabling fascism. He was my first choice in 2020, but his communications team is Weak AF
Geminid
@catclub: Biden’s “approval” numbers are not so great. Last time I saw though, he still did well against potential opponents. This makes me think the approval question tends to elicit a more abstract judgement about people’s view of the state of the nation as well as their own lives. If that is the case, the pundits wringing their hands about his unpopularity are missing larger points, and applying “horse race” analysis when there is no other horse.
And from from the little I see about these stories, pundits are using anecdotal evidence from a range of people who do not support Biden, and not talking to the many people who do and are not as hypercritical as some other members of Biden’s party.
Even the “Democratic professionals” they interview have uncritically bought into the truism that Biden is really unpopular. This tends to produce “a massive fu*king feedback loop,” as Ruben Gallego would say.
schrodingers_cat
@Betty Cracker: With attacks 24/7 from the left and the right. What else is going to happen?
Judy Woodruff has to work in inflation in the first 5 minutes of her news summary. Its a global phenomena, and fact is that the US is doing better than most major economies.
schrodingers_cat
@ksmiami: What does swinging hard exactly mean?
schrodingers_cat
@Betty Cracker: The same Josh Marshall who employs the xenophobic bigot John Judis? How many elections has he won?
Geminid
@Mai Naem mobile: Anthony Pasquale “Pat” Cippolone was born in the Bronx. Then his family moved moved to the Cincinnati area. After he graduated from now-notorious Covinton High, Cippolone went to Fordam for an undergraduate degree and then earned a law degree from the University of Chicago law school.
Ramalama
@Mai Naem mobile: Is Laura Ingraham a Catholic? What’s with all of these cafeteria Catholics?
JoyceH
@Felanius Kootea:
But he summers every year in Bedminster, so a subpoena or (dare I dream?) a warrant and extradition order, would go to Democratic governor Phil Murphy if you time it right.
And BTW, for some reason, it irks me that television pundits can’t seem to grasp the simple fact that Trump is never at Mar a Lago in the summer. Some item of bad news for Trump and the pundits will chuckle about the reaction probably occurring in Mar a Lago. It’s a simple concept and has been constant for five years, so why is it so hard for them to grasp? Mar a Lago is CLOSED in the summer.
Betty Cracker
@Geminid: You make a good point about approval numbers indicating general levels of dissatisfaction with the state of the country, plus maybe respondents’ individual lives, but does that mean Biden isn’t really all that unpopular? I wouldn’t go that far. High 30s approval is terrible, and it’s not just one poll. It sucks, but it seems to be reality, at least for the moment. Beating expectations in the midterms might turn things around. Lower inflation and fuel prices too.
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat: I’m with you. I am mystified by the negativity toward Biden, after what we endured in the past presidential term.
Betty Cracker
@schrodingers_cat: As far as I know, Marshall has won zero elections since he has run in zero races. I find his analysis valuable. Judis, not so much — I don’t bother with his articles.
JoyceH
@Geminid: But the good news is that for this election cycle, the polls for Congress have essentially uncoupled from Presidential approval ratings. So Biden could remain quite unpopular (unfair though I think that is), and yet Democrats could still retain both houses and even gain seats.
And it seems to me that the conditions that created that decoupling and the swing to Democrats are only going to continue. Republican state legislatures are going to continue codifying anti-abortion bans with horrific outcomes, stories about the victims of those bans will continue to outrage, mass shootings will certainly continue and with them the public sentiment for an outright assault weapons ban will increase, while Republicans in power continue to do nothing about it or even move to loosen gun restrictions, climate-related weather catastrophies will continue to occur, and it’s going to become clearer and clearer to every voter that taking any action at all to enact wildly popular solutions to serious problems will require a vote for the Democrat and against the Republican.
Matt McIrvin
When Americans feel bad they blame the President. Americans feel bad. They are blaming the President.
Most people did feel better for the first three years of the Trump Administration. Hell, I did. Why? The COVID-19 pandemic hadn’t happened yet. Of course, Trump fucked that up and made it as bad as it was. But it doesn’t matter. Voters’ memories are short. I’m sure many remember it starting under Biden by now. (For many of them, it did in a practical sense, because it didn’t hit the region where they live until Biden was in–under Trump, it was a far-off thing killing New York liberals, which they were fine with.)
Many want Trump back because they want things to be back the way they were before Trump had enough time to fuck them up. A moment’s thought will reveal that bringing Trump back won’t give them that, but these are feelings, not thoughts.
JoyceH
@Mai Naem mobile:
Public testimony would be ideal, but any testimony is better than none.
There was one remark in Hutchinson’s testimony that really intrigued me and I’ve see little or no comment on it. Cippolone and Meadows returned from Trump’s office and they spoke in Meadows outer office with Hutchinson there. A lot of commentary keyed in on Meadows saying that ‘he’s not going to do anything’, which is certainly interesting – but then he said, ‘you heard him, Pat, he doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong’. I would sure love to get Patsy Baloney on record under oath that with his own ears he heard Trump say that the insurrectionists weren’t doing anything wrong.
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: On the practical side, Biden’s unpopularity does not seem to be hurting Democratic Congressional candidates, much as Republicans try to make it so. Also, numbers for Democratic Governors seem to be good. Apparently the Democratic brand has not suffered from Biden’s low approval.
I’m interested in the composition of the “disapprove” number, in particular, how many are Democrats and Democrat-leaning Independents. Maybe there are “crosstabs” available.
Those can be interesting. I want to check out the Florida Politics polls that were publicised this weekend. I was struck by how a matchup between VP Harris and DeSantis showed her on top by a couple points, but in another matchup she was down 7 to trump. That made me curious: who was it that preferred Trump but not DeSantis? The questions were asked of the same pool of people I think. If there are crosstabs bgiving a breakdown of which group voted how this might help answer my question.
Matt McIrvin
@Matt McIrvin:
…though, on the down side, my knee was increasingly unusable, I had trouble walking and that’s actually fixed now.
UncleEbeneezer
I suspect that the moment Trump announces his candidacy, Biden’s polling numbers will drastically improve. Trump has been out of the public eye. When he gets back into it, voters will show again how much they hate Trump. The general trend of the Trump years was that the more the public sees of him, the less they like him.
Shit isn’t real yet and 2024 is a LONG WAY off. But constant chatter about how everyone hates Biden only helps the GOP. We should avoid contributing to that.
sab
@schrodingers_cat: They don’t criticize him all that much, but the ones who do are mostly the daytime ones, who are more right wing (Andrea Mitchell) or typical reporter conventional wisdom types.
NotMax
‘@JoyceH
The committee is not about to (and shouldn’t) give an open mic on live TV to any witness before knowing what he or she is going to say. Closed testimony in no way precludes live testimony at a later date.
UncleEbeneezer
NY AG James: A judge has ruled that Cushman & Wakefield is in contempt for failing to comply with our investigation into Donald Trump and the Trump Organization’s financial dealings. The company must pay $10,000 every day until it complies with our subpoenas.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Thanks, Biden!
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: In hindsight I probably should have boycotted the hospital where I got it done, which was part of the Vatican health-care-theocracy syndicate. But the alternatives are increasingly scarce.
Ksmiami
@schrodingers_cat: weekly updates, a plan and acknowledgment that recent setbacks demand a coordinated response and hardwork for all of us to correct- tell the truth; our fucked up democracy can’t unfuck itself- it will take all of us pushing back
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
At least you can be confident that your new knee isn’t composed of aborted fetuses.
Betty Cracker
@Matt McIrvin: I think the persistence of COVID despite the vaccine rollout really damaged confidence in Biden. It’s not his fault — he was doing what he said he’d do, which is follow the science. We all knew (or should have known) there were no guarantees with a mutating virus. But it was still a gut punch (to me, anyway) when breakthrough cases started going through the roof and the CDC recommended masks for vaccinated people again. I don’t blame Biden for it, but my guess is lots of people did. That’s especially galling because Republicans actively made the situation worse and don’t get blamed for that even though they caused untold needless death for political gain.
MomSense
@schrodingers_cat:
Its the same crap that I’m hearing from the Dems are messaging wrong crowd. Everyone thinks they’re a pundit and everyone thinks they are representative of the Democratic voter.
We’ve got anDemocratic incumbent running for the House in our 2nd congressional district. This district voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020. He cannot run saying he hates Republicans and talking tough about them. That would not work at all.
We have a lot of candidates running in swing and R+ districts. We are a coalition party. One message does not fit all!
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@schrodingers_cat: Gavin Newsome got some positive press by filming an ad that highlights Dem successes and going after Republicans. They said he was “fighting”.
So fighting = playing the media game well. Got it.
Ksmiami
@MomSense: he can say that Republican leadership offers nothing – they’re just in it for fancy DC dinners and power, but the party solves nothing and does nothing for the average American- we deserve safe outdoor activities and our freedom to live our lives as we desire
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
But our national media and online political discourse demands it!
Baud
@JoyceH:
Macron polled in the 30s but beat the fascist. His party lost ground in parliament to a left wing party, but it is still the largest party in parliament.
Who knows?
zhena gogolia
@UncleEbeneezer: Right.
Baud
@UncleEbeneezer:
I don’t like Biden. I’m just anti-anti-Biden.
Ken
Cynical me says it doesn’t matter if you play well, as long as you’re buying ads.
Soprano2
@schrodingers_cat: NPR does this too; it seems that every day on there I’m hearing stories about how inflation has made living unaffordable and/or high gas prices are making people’s lives miserable. It’s a constant drumbeat from them, with only glancing acknowledgement that this is a worldwide problem. They do mention things other than Biden that are causing the problem, though.
Soprano2
@Betty Cracker: I saw a graph on Twitter showing that Biden’s approval rating started going underwater when we with drew from Afghanistan, and has never recovered. That’s why other presidents were reluctant to pull the trigger on the withdrawl, I think. I’m sure Biden knew he would pay a price for it, but he probably didn’t think it would last this long.
Soprano2
Yep, I literally had a TFG supporter tell me that EVERYTHING was better when TFG was president. I think he completely forgot about the clusterfuck that was 2020. I think many of his supporters would gladly live under a dictatorship if only they could have $2/gal gas.
raven
@Baud: I don’t like Hillary but I’m anti-anti-Hillary.
Matt McIrvin
@Soprano2: And it’s weird because at this point, the vast majority of Americans could not give two shits about Afghanistan. (This is, in fact, a direct consequence of the withdrawal.) But that was when the media saw blood in the water.
Baud
@raven:
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
One does not simply deny the media its war.
Matt McIrvin
@Soprano2: I keep harping on this, but I’m still incensed that Republicans bashed Obama for making gasoline more expensive than it was immediately after the entire global economy collapsed.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: My dental implant procedure several years ago involved ground cadaver bones and pig tissue, which was weird.
Old School
@Matt McIrvin: I saw an article this morning worrying that the price of oil was falling too low.
Matt McIrvin
@Old School: My wife found an op-ed by some call-center mogul gloating that a new recession would knock some sense into the entitled youngsters who won’t gladly work for his starvation wages.
stinger
@Mai Naem mobile: All of the people who have testified in the public hearings thus far began by providing testimony behind closed doors. The committee needs to hear what he has to say first, in order to figure out how to “tell the story” in the public hearings, as they have so superbly been doing.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Yeah, my fear is that workers are going to let a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity slip away because of temporary inflation problems.
Soprano2
@Matt McIrvin: Yep, that’s when the coverage turned unrelentingly negative. To this day when they talk about Afghanistan they say it was a total cockup, even though that was mostly just the first day! They’re obsessed with the idiot who thought he could climb onto the outside of the plane and fly out with it.
stinger
@JoyceH: I don’t know, they refer to “the White House” when Biden is physically elsewhere. It’s just shorthand — everybody knows the reference is to TFG. I’ve only learned in the past few days that his other place is… Bedminster? in NJ??
Soprano2
@Old School: Now that’s just insane to 99% of the U.S. population, but I’m sure it’ll shortly be blamed on Democrats.
Soprano2
The price of gas here has dropped over $0.20 in the past week, but I haven’t seen one person on FB thank Biden for the lower gas prices. The price of a barrel of oil is under $99 today.
Old School
@Matt McIrvin: Mitch McConnell?
raven
@Baud: I’m still watching the Georgia Guidstones video! I’m not taking anything seriously (except that these motherfuckers have explosives)
Geminid
@Soprano2: Prices have gone from over $5/gallon to $4.50 and less in two weeks, here in Central Virginia.
MomSense
@Ksmiami:
Yes he could say that but his constituents VOTED for Trump and they liked him and all his corrupt ways. How about we let people who know their districts decide what works best in those districts. It’s not fun for the national pundits who have turned democratic messaging into the new Dems in disarray. For most of these pundits, their only contribution to the discourse is their stupid hot takes about messaging.
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: The numbers suggesting Biden’s unpopularity are real. I just remember question how consequential they are at this point. They are certainly worth reporting, but I don’t think they are worth all the analysis and debate. There is plenty more going on that is ignored, and much of it is favorable to Biden and Democrats. I don’t expect media outlets to be cheerleaders, but they can at least report on developments like infrastructure investments and postive news on federal deficits, to name just two of many. People are not being given a broad enough base of knowledge to make more accurate judgements.
Ksmiami
@MomSense: like it or not Biden is the de facto head of the Democratic Party and his messaging and his focus have just been disappointing
Citizen Alan
@Soprano2:
I’ve told leftist acquaintances of mine to their faces that the only difference between them and the MAGA crowd lies in what they expect the benevolent dictator to do for them once he takes control of the country.
Betty Cracker
@Soprano2: The conventional wisdom is the Afghanistan withdrawal marked the beginning of Biden’s polling woes, but I’m not convinced that’s true. It certainly didn’t help, but Kabul fell in August 2021, which was shortly after breakthrough cases started seriously shaking confidence in vaccine efficacy. My theory is Biden’s polling hasn’t recovered from that one-two punch.
Geminid
@Ksmiami: They are disappointing to some.
Citizen Alan
@Geminid: Biden’s disapproval rating consists of both people on the right who think he’s a senile Communist and people on the left who think he’s at best slightly better than the average Republican. I doubt there was ever a significant number of people on the right who expressed extreme disapproval of Shitgibbon because he was not conservative enough. But we have to deal with people who slag on Biden and on every other Democrat because they are not planning to destroy capitalism.
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: I think the withdrawal from Afghanistan coincided with other dynamics including as you say the course of the pandemic.
I remember some McAlulliffe associate attributing the candidate’s loss to the decline in Biden’s popularity consequent to the Afghanistan withdrawal. He was trying to distract from his guy’s crappy campaign, I thought.
The administration’s standing did suffer from a long summer when Democrats in Congress struggled to put runs on the board. That was why, soon after the dismal Virginia result, House leadership decoupled the Infrastructure bill from the stalled BBB package. Unfortunately, because of the intraparty debate over the two bills, when it passed the Infrastructure bill became a sort of red-headed stepchild that many Democrats downrated. I noticed though, that practical politicians like Val Demings, Tim Ryan, and many others were quick to incorporate this bill into their campaign messaging.
Geminid
@Citizen Alan: I think some of Biden’s critics on the left side of his party see him as much better than trump but are frustrated that he doesn’t pursue a hardnosed governing style more to their liking.
To be sure, there are critics on the left who claim there is not much difference between Democrats and Republicans, but I wonder if they really believe this. They’re not actually Democrats, and they want this administration to fail so they have a better chance to take the party over.
These critics are not great in numbers, though, and more responsible people on the left, Denise Oliver-Velez and Michael Paulauski to name just two, provide fierce pushback to these Copperheads.
J R in WV
@Burnspbesq:
Actually, right now, mid summer heat, I think he’s in NJ at his golf resort up there just across the river from Manhattan. Bedminster, or somefing like dat. (sic)
No one vacations in FLA during the summer, even with A/C…
UncleEbeneezer
@Citizen Alan: Yeah, since we are talking Afghanistan, sure woulda been nice if the Anti-War Left who told us that this was what they wanted from Obama/Dems/Biden would have loudly celebrated finally getting their wish. For such an objectively good/Progressive move, Biden got almost zero credit/thanks. Therein lies one of the big disadvantages our side faces: good deeds aren’t rewarded by the people who shape narratives (both the media and the Very Online). Republican voters are much better about cheering their Parties actions, even when there is absolutely nothing to cheer. We’d rather put our energy towards finding justifications to primary our incumbents and spreading anti-Dem propaganda under the guise of Progressive Purity. Sigh…
Kropacetic
Leftist zealot here and I give Biden all the credit. Huge Biden skeptic during the primaries, have fallen in love since his election, despite some minor quibbles.
Personally, I blame the stalling of BBB for the Virginia result. The mileage of some may vary.
J R in WV
You know who agreed to leave Afghanistan and when don’t you? TFG, SFB and his diplomats set a date and everything. Biden actually violated the agreement by waiting past the agreed date to start the withdrawal.
I was amazed at how well organized the withdrawal was, and how few US troops were hurt during it. They could have brought more people who worked for the US out as pre-approved refugees, but other than that, it went really well. I guess most of America don’t recall the fall of Saigon? That was a real clusterfuck, run by Richard M Nixon and his jailbird henchmen.
Kropacetic
That would be nice, but we need an implementation plan and need to be sure to keep people’s livelihoods in place. I’m a fairly conservative socialist. Conservative in the sense of “I don’t like disruptive policy,” not to be confused with the right wing radicals who have been abusing the term conservative for decades.
I just checked my ballot for the upcoming election aaaaaaaannnnnddd… no Biden.
Baud
@Kropacetic:
Splitter.
Geminid
@UncleEbeneezer: I think a lot of the people on the “anti war left” that you describe are not in fact Democrats, and they cannot be satisfied because they will not be satisfied. Plenty of people on the anti-war left welcomed Biden’s withdrawal, but they do not make as much noise. When election time comes they’ll make more noise because there are many more of them than there are lefty soreheads.
Kropacetic
Echoes of the Obama administration. Problem is the private sector is led by sociopaths.
Tom Q.
@Citizen Alan: I feel like Biden’s disapproval numbers are not unlike those for the Affordable Care Act: the baseline for them were GOP resisters, but they were inflated by “not liberal enough for me” folk. As it turned out, the ACA WAS popular when the Republicans tried to repeal it, but it never read that way in opinion polls because “hate it because it’s Communism” and “hate it because it’s not MforA” were never divided properly.
To me, Biden disapprovals that will hurt in the midterms are solely based on people who think inflation and the virus ongoing are Biden’s fault and deserve punishment. People who wish BBB had passed or that Dems had “codified Roe” (a term I bet many couldn’t define) will register as disapprovers but likely vote Dem in Senate/House/governors’ races. If this were a normal, sleepy midterm, I think the former group would dominate and give the Dems a ’94/’10-like result. But the lethal combo of the mass shootings (especially Uvalde and Highland Park — though, before them, Buffalo was enough, and there might well be more), the egregiously right-wing turn of the Court (Roe, of course, top priority) and the evidence emerging from the 1/6 Committee have the potential to create an existential framework that will make it an election that turns not strictly on economic metrics, but on fundamentals of survival. This latter would be the optimal situation for Democrats.
Just one slight tweak to Betty’s take on why Biden’s popularity started to slip: yes, it’s the fact that COVID turned out not to be over, but that’s another case where right-wing misbehavior has somehow redounded to their credit…scientists say what we needed for herd immunity was for 85-90% of the citizenry to vaccinate. The refusal of 1/3 of our nation to get the vaccine, on pure tribalism, has prevented science from eradicating COVID, allowing all these variants to keep emerging. We’d still have polio, if these idiots had had their way 70 years ago.
Geminid
@Kropacetic: I don’t know if you mess with Twitter, but if you do you might like Michael Paulauski. In his profile, Paulauski self-describes as “democratic socialist, leans libertarian.” The latter descriptor doesn’t mean he favors private highways, the gold standard and the like, but rather that he sees consumer cooperatives and worker cooperatives like unions as a much more promising path to social progress than a big socialist government.
I may not be as “left” as Paulauski, but I definitely get the part about cooperatives. I get my electricity from the Rappahanock Electrical Cooperative, and I bank with the [Big Chemical] Community Credit Union. I’m really happy with both. I’ve dealt with their private counterparts before and boy did they ever suck by comparison.
Kropacetic
@Geminid: I’m not on Twitter. Balloon Juice and Youtube are my only social media engagement.
This is the best pitch I ever got to join Twitter, though. I’m half considering it now.
Geminid
@Kropacetic: The process is fairly painless. I provided my email address and a birth date that wasn’t my own.
You probably have more going in your life than me, though. I want to see a greater community than this one here, and now I even participate. My tweets have already gotten six “likes”! And there are a lot of cites of and links to solid reporting from “old media.”
The sarcastic Ragnarok Lobster (@eclecticbrotha) retweets a lot of people, and he introduced me to voices like Mangy Jay, Kenneth House of Pfizer, Susan Vermazen, Buffalo Meg, and Becky Queer and Lithuanian. I should have known about former Black Panther and long time human rights activist Denise Oliver-Velez, but I only became aware of this wise woman through Mr. Lobster’s retweets.
Kropacetic
@Geminid: If I subscribe, I will adopt your reading list. It would literally be as simple as linking my Google account.
Geminid
@Kropacetic: Mangy Jay and Denise Oliver-Velez are probably the best, and that may not be a coincidence. One thing I’ve noticed about Twitter is all the strong female voices. I believe that women are more mentally advanced than my cohort of men, and I think I see this on Twitter.
Cheryl Rofer and Betty Cracker also have interesting and informative Twitter accounts.
Kropacetic
@Geminid: Good to know and not surprising re: women.
satby
@Geminid: @Kropacetic: Lots of us jackals on Twitter (I’m @sbarrt) and I can recommend a few more, or you can pick a few I follow. One of my tweets today got a few hundred likes and a few replies and retweets. It’s a broader platform, and lots of good stuff; you just have to curate your feed. Sadly, in spite of my best snarky efforts, Gym Jordon has not blocked me yet.