UPDATE: Thursday, Dec 7, 2023 · 10:18:41 PM +00:00
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Dem
I am finally reading the Indictments all the way through (I completed the federal January sixth Indictment!) and I am doing it electronically. You can mark them up electronically too although I find it easier to mark up books I own instead of electronically. I want to start a discuss the Indictments groups where one member discusses the first five pages of Indictment 1 and then a second member discusses the next five pages of Indictment 1 a few days later and so on until all four Indictments have been exposited . As you probably remember I used to be a fundamentalist and I used to teach word by word, verse by verse, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter, through a book and it's how the pastor taught and how all bible studies were taught at the church. And while I left that long ago, perhaps the method might be "profitable" as a way of working through the four Indictments. And there is a lot of helpful material out there. Mary McCord and Andrew Weissman have a podcast 'Prosecuting Donald Trump' and they are not the only ones and the New York Times has an annotated version of the four Indictments.
UPDATE: Thursday, Dec 7, 2023 · 10:08:32 PM +00:00
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Dem
It's encouraging that friends can recognize validity in the argument that their friend makes and respect each other and the other's good point. I try to do that with my recommendations. I may have a different point of view, but if someone makes a contrary good argument and point then I try to recommend it and think about what they wrote.
I listened to AB Stoddard (the original quote was from The Bulwark, Charlie Sykes's shows, when he interviewed Liz Cheney) [and randym is right that she committed to not playing a spoiler role in the 2024 presidential election - so maybe I got too upset about it - ] on the Bulwark and she said that we were handing the Republicans an easy win on crime and the border.
Absurd. Crime also increased under Donald Trump. Violent crime is higher per capital in red states. Is AB saying that a new federal law on crime should be put in place? Republicans are going to say something about crime? When their nominee has four Indictments with 91 felonies charged? When they are pushing for defunding the FBI ? Huh? No sale.
The border is their bogeyman. Internal political acts are not going to solve this issue. They always say that there are hordes of invaders and they are alwaysosing these elections. They tried that in 2020. When Donald Trump was in office. You can't keep yelling the same thing without losing credibility. The real long term solution is not electronic fences and technology; it's stability and peace and democracy in South America. Cages didn't dissuade the desperate from immigration. We are all immigrants here except Native Americans with perhaps rare exceptions based upon a dialogue i read here recently. If we improve the situation people live in in South America, that would be the way to create a lasting solution. We can do all the fencing and increase people at the border and use technology, but life is or would be far better here than for many people in South America. It gives the lie to how awful the Republicans claim America is under President Biden. In any event, after their fuhrer's children in cages policy and the refusal of the Republican Party to do anything on immigration reform for decades, they have less than zero credibility on the border as an issue. And people who are not yet documented commit far fewer crimes per person than those who live here for obvious reasons.
Despite the fact that I like almost everybody at Daily Kos have sharp disagreements with Liz Cheney in almost every policy area with only a few exceptions, I have strongly supported her because she has been one of the strongest and few republican opponents of Donald Trump. She has not wavered or shown weakness in prosecuting the case against Donald Trump in the public arena. I greatly appreciate her work on the January sixth Committee and that committee is the reason why Attorney General Merrick Garland chose a special prosecutor. She has not held anything back in her vitriol and in her truth telling against Donald Trump. She has been one of the strongest allies against him in either party. She has been profoundly helpful in this role.
Until her declaration that she won't rule out a run against Donald Trump. She has said that she will do nothing to help Donald Trump. Yet she attacked his opponent. She tried to get ahead of the obvious question, "You say that you will do anything to help defeat Donald Trump. Why haven't you endorsed his Democratic Party opponent?" (paraphrased accurately). And she said that it is because she is not at all sure that his Democratic Party opponent can defeat Donald Trump and she is not sure who will emerge from the Democratic Party primary as the nominee of the party and that, therefore, it would be irresponsible to endorse the incumbent president, a member of the Democratic Party.
The stupidity and ignorance in this line of "thought" is profound. From whom does she think she will pull votes? She lost to Harriet Hageman in the Republican Party's primary by a 2 to 1 margin. We can look at Chris Christie's polling to see how well a vocal and real opponent of Donald Trump will be received by Republican Party voters. The Republican Party voters are not going to support somebody who actually attacks Donald Trump forthrightly. That would mean that she would have to get votes from democrats and those crucial Never Trump republican voters. While we appreciate her principles opposition to Donald Trump, she can't believe that she would supported by anything close to a majority of the Democratic Party, can she? She can't be that self-deluded. Whatever problems young liberal voters might have with President Biden, are tripled with her.
President Biden will be the nominee of the Democratic Party. When is the last time an incumbent president of the Democratic Party who ran for reelection failed to win the primary of the Democratic Party in the very next election, failed to be the party's nominee despite running to do so? It's not in my lifetime. If the party had coalesced around a different democrat or there was one and only one obvious successor whom the whole party supported and it was a year ago, then the discussion would be different than it is now. However, there was no one such person. President Biden has announced that he is running to be the Democratic Party's nominee for president. It's very unclear at best if there is any one figure who could defeat Donald Trump and who is the first choice of the many disparate groups within the Democratic Party.
He has an excellent record to run on. If he had a terrible record, then that would be something else. The main criticisms are overheated rhetoric based upon understandable wishes that are inconsistent with reality. The economy is, as judges by the normal metrics we use to assess it, good and better than in recent times and better than when he inherited it. Wages are growing. Nearly a million good manufacturing jobs coming from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Legislation and The CHIPS and Science Act passed have materialized under this president. The unemployment rate for women and Hispanics and African Americans are near historic lows. More than fourteen million new jobs have been created. Inflation is not the monster it once was. In July of 2020, the inflation rate was 9%. It decreased every month for twelve straight months. CORE inflation is about 3.1%, only one percent greater than is normal. The GDP growth in the third quarter was 4.9%. If you compare our GDP growth and our inflation rate to the economies of other nations in the G7, the United States is performing far better. The unemployment rate is 3.9%. This is the longest continuous period of below four percent unemployment rate in FIFTY years.
During his administration, many pieces of bipartisan legislation have been passed despite so much mockery by his opponents in the previous Democratic Party primary for president. As the leader of the party, he was the essential driver of the legislation. He was willing to go it with only Democratic Party support in Congress when the party was united enough on an issue or on a piece of legislation to make that a realistic way to pass the legislation. The first gun safety legislation in thirty years was passed with a bipartisan majority, the Respect for Marriage Act was passed with a bipartisan majority, the CHIPS and Science Act was passed with a bipartisan majority, the PACT ACT was passed with a bipartisan majority, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Legislation was passed with a bipartisan majority, and a new update to the Electoral Count Act was passed with a bipartisan majority. The American Rescue Plan and The Inflation Reduction Act were passed without republican Congressional support.
What did President Biden know? He strongly suspected that Joe Manchin wasn't going to vote to modify the filibuster. He knew that without reform to the filibuster, if you rule out bipartisan majorities passing legislation, then you are stuck with executive orders with limited scope and potential and that will be undone by the very next administration of the other major political party. That would mean not getting much done on the domestic front for the American people and President Biden was unwilling to accept that. His experience didn't hurt his understanding of present day reality like his critics charges; it helped inform him and gave him better vision than his critics had. President Biden was right and his critics on the left were simply wrong.
On foreign policy, we have seen him fight for democracy and the right while discontinuing our military adventurism and gunpoint diplomacy. He was committed to ending the war in Afghanistan. However, Donald Trump had already committed to a timeline in his agreement with the Taliban. Completely withdrawing from a hostile country in which the inhabitants of the land don't want you there is difficult. The president can't simply declare a past agreement with a group or country invalid because he disagreed with it or no country would ever make an agreement or sign a treaty with us as there would be no point to it. The military had the task of drawing up the plans, the how, and executing those plans, not the current president. Criticism of the plans and their execution must necessarily be limited to the military since Joe Biden did not draw up the military plans nor was in the field running the thing. I'm not convinced that the military was given proper credit for a difficult task with numbers that were rare or unprecedented. But the media that beat the war drum could not admit that they were wrong so they had to bring in hawks whose real point was that we should have stayed there forever.
President Biden again wasn't held back by the demons of the past including the Iraq debacle and trusted the US intelligence community and was rewarded for it. He laid out ahead of time what Russian President Vladimir Putin would say, what he would do, and how he would justify it. Due to this strong hand, President Biden developed, retained, and strengthened a coalition to help back Ukraine against a Russian war of aggression. He added members to NATO in the process, the very opposite of what Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump wanted.
Israel suffered a vicious attack on October 7th by a terrorist organization whose charter doesn't recognize Israel's right to exist and whose purpose is to wipe Israel from the map. By their own admission, they don't care how many young Palestinian lives they kill to achieve their political goals. Children were slaughtered and women were raped and a country whose people have endured a millennium of anti-semitism were victimized once again by a terrorist organization who were championed by students across American universities, some of the very same people who won't vote for President Biden in 2024 because of this belief that either Joe Biden is the prime minister of Israel or that Israel lacks sovereignty and Prime Minister Netanyahu lacks free agency. President Biden offered a strong message of support for the only democracy and strongest US ally in the region, a nation placed by there by the United Nations after six million Jewish people were tortured and killed in the Holocaust. Yet, he cautioned Prime Minister Netanyahu again and again against taking actions that would lead to mass Palestinian civilian casualties, starting in his first speech. He advocated for humanitarian aid and got it and fought against a ground offensive and sent military advisors to explain to Netanyahu what a mistake this would be. He warned against widening the conflict and argued to follow the Geneva Conventions and the law of war and the rule of law. His bear hug diplomacy made him popular with Israel and he created pressure within Israel on Prime Minister Netanyahu, who was facing serious internal political pressure already, to not cross him when he warned against taking actions that would lead to a massive amount of civilian deaths. It was already suspected that Prime Minister Netanyahu missed the signals of the upcoming terrorist attack because he was so focused on conducting an end run around being held legally accountable for his own actions. It was possible and even likely that Prime Minister Netanyahu saw in this terrorist attack an opportunity to consolidate power during a sentiment of rally around the leader because of fear and anger after the massacre. Waiting until the heat from Islamic Jihad's blunder that brought down a hospital would have given Prime Minister Netanyahu time to engage in this ground offensive in order to pressure Israeli citizens into supporting him. It likely would have led to widening the war. Thus, the choice to go to Israel even after many Arabs in many countries were protesting Israel because the Islamic Jihad accidentally bombed a hospital was the correct one. And when there he did get humanitarian aid to start flowing to Gaza.
And there were moral limits too. While rightly warning again and again not to engage in reckless actions that would result in massive casualties, President Biden knew he could not tell Israel, the victim of a millennium of anti-semitism including the Holocaust, not to destroy the military capability of Hamas to launch violent attacks from Gaza after Hamas committed an atrocious act of terrorism, an act without much modern precedent in as much as the raping of women and the violent butchering of children individually on camera is, thankfully, uncommon. Doing so would have limited the good that he could accomplish and would be to discard the little bit of leverage that he held by his support with the Israeli public. He successfully pushed for temporary ceasefires for the exchange of hostages and the ceasefires could only help the civilian population in Gaza. Calling for Israel to commit to a permanent truce with a terrorist organization whose charter doesn't recognize the right of Israel to exist and who have stated explicitly their plan to repeat such attacks until Israel no longer exists is as sil . Israel has to prevent such attacks and a limited goal of eliminating the military capability of Hamas to launch violent terrorist attacks from Gaza must be recognized to be a reasonable one. Anything beyond this that results in the loss of life of Palestinian civilians is not and cannot be justified. The interest in limiting harm done to Palestinian civilians is a righteous principle and must apply to Israel ... and Hamas.
A lasting peace in the Middle East is a necessity and not just a goal, but many, many great humans have tried to achieve this in modern times over many decades and without success. We must still pursue it. A two state solution and true equality for those who live in Gaza as well as those who reside in Israel is an imperative and the only lasting solution that can bring lasting peace. Israel will not experience a lasting peace until true equality and the reality of two states are achieved.
In the end, Joe Biden is only president of the United States and not the Prime Minister of Israel. After a vicious terrorist attack involving the murder of individual children and the rape of women, Israel will and should pursue preventing such an attack from happening again. Yet maturity and realism must inject themselves so that reasonable and rational people recognize that Hamas will not stop such attacks until Israel is wiped from the face of the Earth. They will not be satisfied by an equal two state solution. They are a terrorist organization and trying to reason with terrorists is folly. Hamas has said that they will continue such attacks until Israel is wiped off the map. President Biden has done the best that could be done as an American president in this situation. Forfeiting our democracy and putting Donald Trump in office because the impossible was not be done because it could not be done won't help the young Palestinian civilians and it won't help Arab Americans or young people here.
President Biden has a strong argument and case for reelection, especially among those who support democracy, freedom, and who champion progressive causes. We already saw that a Trump term doesn't immediately or eventually result in a progressive utopia being achieved here.
President Biden has more support from Democrats than any other candidate or any other candidates combined. The likelihood that President Biden will be the nominee for president of the Democratic Party is near 100%. Liz Cheney would only draw Never Trump Republicans and some minority of Democratic Party voters, voters who are essential to President Biden defeating Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. The idea that she could run as a third party candidate and Donald Trump would not win the 2024 presidential election is absurd. She will have defeated the only good thing that she has ever done in politics if she runs in the 2024 presidential election.