Here we go again…
After abandoning a floor vote on an inquiry, holding a single clown show hearing that went kersplat!, and an inability to define an impeachable offense, let alone provide any evidence whatsoever, they are now close to a "point of decision"??
— Chris, plant person (@cgillespie62) November 2, 2023
But you didn't ask what that impeachment would even be about?
— Queerhawk 🏳️🌈 | 🇺🇦| 🛡 (@alwaysadorecats) November 2, 2023
I mean, people posing as journalists are certainly entitled to feign abject stupidity in the service of cultivating powerful Republican sources.
Free speech and all.
But that behavior it itself far more newsworthy than the evidence-free impeachment.
— emptywheel (@emptywheel) November 2, 2023
bbleh
Now, this wouldn’t be anything like one of TIFG’s “stay tuned” teasers, would it? Like, somehow, the show never manages actually to start?
If they’re “soon” going to be “reaching a point of decision” (very shortly we will be moving toward starting a process to determine when and how to decide about whether to proceed with what may very well turn out to be impeachment!!!), I’d guess what they’re deciding is whether continuing even to pretend there’s a there there is going to lose them more ground than it gains them.
Steeplejack
Dropping this here for Layer8Problem, who asked me yesterday about battery life on my Lenovo ThinkPad T480.
Okay, I did a somewhat casual battery test on my ThinkPad T480 (running Windows 11 Pro). Charged the battery to 99%, then unplugged the computer from power. Ran on battery for 2 hours 20 minutes, doing usual stuff—reading and ranting on blogs, checking news and email, playing a few videos and doing some sheet-spreading in Excel. Battery down to 55%. Put computer in sleep mode for 90 minutes while I went out to do errands. (Firefox and Word sleeping, not closed.) Battery at 48% when computer reawakened. Worked as above for about 90 minutes until I hit “battery saver” mode at 20%. Plugged in power to recharge battery.
So I got a little under four hours of active use out of 80% battery life. So maybe another hour if I ran the battery down to zero?
P.S. The battery is the standard one that came with the computer when I bought it in May 2020. I know that one with higher capacity is available, but I haven’t felt the need.
And the battery “readings” were taken from the little notification gizmo in the taskbar, degree of accuracy unknown.
Dorothy A. Winsor
The last few minutes the NY fraud trial seem to have gone off the rails. Via Kos:
JPL
@Dorothy A. Winsor: From Nicole’s show, it wasn’t going well for Eric and the attorneys for trump did what they could to stop the questioning. I’m paraprasing, though.
Steeplejack
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Lisa Rubin (who had been in the courtroom) told Nicolle Wallace on MSNBC (paraphrasing) that it looked like Kise was intentionally derailing things because they were about to get into some really damaging (to the Trumps) evidence. And that, absent a camera in the courtroom putting the lie to Kise’s histrionics, he was adding to the narrative of “deep state kangaroo court persecution” that could be spread through the right-wing media. (More paraphrasing, not a quote from Rubin.)
@JPL: Agreed.
bbleh
@Steeplejack: One assumes Kise understands that tomorrow is another day, they pick up right where they left off, and in the meantime Engoron has a chance to cool down and not be provoked into something that could support an appeal. One assumes he’s also at least aware that Engoron used to drive a cab in NY and no doubt has plenty of experience dealing with smarmy over-tanned lawyers.
Could be this is mostly for the benefit of TIFG, maybe to keep him from ordering his flying monkeys to assassinate his entire legal team when it’s all over and a receiver is picking apart bits of his companies.
Steeplejack
@bbleh:
Yes, stoking the right-wing narrative may be more important than the (temporary) derailing. But that was the hook that was used.
We can but hope!
coin operated
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Yeah…bet Kise isn’t racist because he has a black friend, too.
oldgold
Kise will come to rue attacking the Clerk. This is going to end up costing Kise and, more importantly, his client bigly. Attacking the Judge’s Clerk or any Court personnel is the the stupidest and most counterproductive damn thing a litigator can do.
I am sure his law firm is incensed this happened. Not only Kise, but the law firm will pay a steep price for this for a long time.
HumboldtBlue
Hunter Biden:
smith
I can’t decide which is more misogynistic about TFG’s lawyers — the fact that they feel entitled to police her facial expressions or that they are apparently offended that a mere woman might give advice to judge. The audience is clearly not the judge, and there is no jury, so that leaves either the Don himself or his Goober acolytes.
One additional point that has been made by Meidas Touch comentators — the head law clerk in NY courts traditionally plays a much more active role than clerks in courts of other states do, and these lawyers have little or no experience in NY. Their ignorance is no excuse, however.
HumboldtBlue
And I am of a mind that all the “impeachment” talk is just campaign fodder for the GOP, but the base is getting restless, they’ve been promised the moon and the stars and so far all they’ve gotten are some bags of shit wrapped up in bullshit and nonsense.
Also, anything, ANYTHING, they can manufacture to try and paint Biden as corrupt as Trump — they’ve given up on the angle Trump isn’t corrupt, he’s just allowed to be because magic — is worth doing from their point of view because they’re even losing the media’s normal “play both sides as the same in faux fairness” narrative, hell, CNN ran a long clip of Trump mumbling and stumbling and putting on full display his mental disintegration.
They also need to distract from the dumpster fire that is the current house GOP, so there’s that too.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
@oldgold:
yeah, but think of the ratings!
With this kind of kaos the season finale of “celebrity apprentice” will be yoge
Tony Jay
Regarding the Impeachment farce, it’s just more of the degradation of language that a total lack of concern for truth permits. So of course Biden just ‘faces impeachment’, like it’s a thing that just always happens to Presidents if and when the other Party in the House has the votes for it.
Not ‘faces impeachment for’, because that would mean questioning the constitutional principle behind the drama and fuck if they want to do that. Too much work and too rife with dangerous possibilities. If you have to be impeached for something then the lack of any evidence, institutional authority or basis in the Constitution for impeaching Biden might mean it doesn’t happen, and think of all the lost page views, clicks and insider books never written right there. Shudder.
Even worse. If you have to be impeached for something, then they’d have to talk about what Trump was impeached for, like trying to strongarm a foreign state into producing fake evidence of corruption to use against a political opponent, or for formenting a big old treasonous insurrection to overturn a democratic vote. And again, fuck if they want to do that.
Swear to Dog, if you really pressed them over a few bottles of cheap wine and a line or two of go-go powder they’d tell you, all sneering distain for your lack of savvy, that ‘everyone knows’ the Clinton impeachment changed the rules of the game and these days all the grown-ups understand that impeachment has ‘evolved’ into a partisan slap-slap-kiss thing that doesn’t require any real crime anymore.
Get the absinthe and poppers out and they’d swear blind that that was why they downplayed the Trump impeachments, because whatever crime there may have been behind the political manoeuvring was less important than the partisan determination on behalf of Democrats to punish Trump for humiliating Hillary.
There’s just no upside for them in asking why Biden is being fake-impeached. They just want the DRAMA.
smith
@HumboldtBlue: Rs in the Senate are starting to throw lighted matches into the dumpster, too, publicly taking on Tuberville’s kneecapping of the military. I guess that news of his stunt has started to filter through to their constituents.
The next couple of weeks are going be non-stop thrills and chills for political junkies — various important elections, TFG will have to testify in NY, and then, the coup de grace, the government shuts down just in time for the holidays unless the GQP can pull itself together in time.
Layer8Problem
@Steeplejack: Thanks for that. By comparison my slightly over one year older ThinkPad E580 battery gets maybe an hour less from topped off to drained, assuming my arithmetic’s good, with a different operating system and leaving the thing hibernating and plugged in overnight.
bbleh
@HumboldtBlue: @David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch: @Tony Jay: It might be just wishful thinking, but per #1 above I’m starting to think they may be in a real bind — sorta like HB mentions in #12, but with respect to the media (which in turn drives a lot of what Teh Base “thinks”). Eg even The Newly Righter-Wing CNN is running headlines about “stunt politics” and a “show” about X Y and Z in the House.
It does not bode well if the drama critics are panning the show.
@smith: also, too, Schumer has just tweeted that the Senate won’t even take up the silly House Israel-IRS bill and instead will prepare and vote on their own Ukraine-Israel bill and send it over. (Can we call this “Johnson-jamming?” Or is that unacceptable on a family blog?)
HumboldtBlue
@Tony Jay:
If you have a minute to spare, we could use some of your Old Time Albion wisdom upstairs about Rebecca Welch being the first woman named to a PL referee’s crew.
Roberto el oso
So, is the assumption that Kise et al. were attempting to derail today’s session so they could get Eric off the stand and spend the night rewiring his brain so he stops screwing up?
bbleh
@Roberto el oso: assuming, of course, he does not suffer a most unfortunate and unforeseeable accident this evening, perhaps involving a Florida alligator lunging out of a NY sewer or something.
“Look, Don, you got another one you like better, plus Ivanka for crying out loud. You wanna save the company, right? Plus think of the sympathy vote! Okay then.”
Steeplejack
@Layer8Problem:
Sounds pretty good. I turn my computer off overnight because I don’t have anything that needs to be instantly accessible, and with the SSD the computer cold-boots in 25 seconds anyway. Barely enough time to set down my coffee and plant my ass in the chair.
Tony Jay
@HumboldtBlue:
I’m there.
Layer8Problem
@Steeplejack: I’ve got a habit of leaving Emacs up all the time with an open buffer (all you normies out there can think of it as a non-saved text file) and filling it with random technical notes, reminders, thoughts, interesting links to follow up, and like that, all kinda sorta nice to have but fundamentally ephemeral and no heartbreak if something crashes or the battery gives up and it all goes pfft. I slam down the lid, it all comes back when I open it again. I reboot when I decide I’ve let the operating system updates go too long without a reload.
I also have fifty-three tabs currently in my Firefox. I’m a cluttered desk person.
And SSDs were the last big boost to laptop quality of life. I got one and I thought “flying cars any day now.”
sdhays
@Tony Jay: Republicans consider Nixon’s resignation as the rule changing event. Clinton’s impeachment was simply the first application of those “new rules”.
Tony Jay
@sdhays:
I’ll allow that, but have they explained it to the Infotainment community?
Steeplejack
@Layer8Problem:
Amen on SSDs!
People’s work/computer habits and practices are interesting. I, too, have a catch-all file for notes, links, lists, ephemera, etc., but for me it’s a Word doc—currently 507 pages, almost 60,000 words, 776 KB. Loads in five seconds (just timed it), so closing it (and thus saving it) doesn’t cost anything. And the software and hardware have gotten so powerful that searching the whole thing is virtually instantaneous. I spent years as a database programmer, and this functions as a very good free-form database. Everything is a keyword!
I never close the lid on my ThinkPad unless I’m taking it out somewhere. I just turn it off and on with the power button.
Firefox tabs—Lord, I’d have to do a lot of housekeeping to get down to only 53. I’m currently well into three figures. I’ve been sort of resisting the news lately; I load tabs and then think “Eh, I’ll read it later.” And then I don’t. I need to go through and just jettison a lot of them.
RevRick
How often will it be impeachment week?
Steeplejack
@RevRick:
Just until next week. Yeah, that’s the ticket!