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Open thread May 7, 2019

Dan Crawford | May 7, 2019 7:08 am

Tags: open thread Comments (2) | Digg Facebook Twitter |
2 Comments
  • EMichael says:
    May 7, 2019 at 9:19 am

    Progressives across the country need to call their Congresspeople and pressure them to impeach trump right now. Go after barr with everything at their disposal. Go after Mnuchin with everything at their disposal.

    This waiting bs (especially from pelosi) is totally insane. Wait for what? An election that will include russian meddling? An election that will include the greatest voter suppression actions since jim crow? Keep waiting for an election that will be the second presidential election since the supreme court killed the voting rights act? Y’know, the same supreme court that unleashed vast amounts of hidden cash on our politics?

    Better move when you have some power. There is no guarantee of a win in 2020. Not to mention that even with a win, trump can do a lot of damage in the next 20 months.

    ” It’s easy to forget this, but it bears repeating: The reason former FBI Director James Comey didn’t take the Russian threat against the elections system seriously enough in 2016 is because he believed Hillary Clinton would win by large margins. The reason President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder and others who knew about the threats before we did failed to respond with utmost urgency and seriousness is because they too believed that Hillary Clinton would win. By large margins. Time and time again, people who had access to both information and power opted to take the less draconian path because they believed that there would still be a free and fair election and that Trump would not win it. We know how that turned out.

    We make the same mistake of not acting on the ongoing threats to congressional oversight, to free and fair voting, and to foreign cyberattacks because an election might solve it at our peril. An election may well become the problem. Doing less than absolutely everything possible to reinstate the rule of law in America today in the hopes that there will be less election interference next time, or more benign election interference, or less purposive election interference, is insane.

    This isn’t a joke. This is a full-fledged crisis of constitutional democracy and the checking function of Congress. It’s heartening to think that in a year and a half we can vote our way out of our predicament, but it’s a bit like suggesting that we have a good long national think about how things are currently going and tend to it all in 2020, when all the systems that were already broken in 2016 are more broken. If Democrats in the House seriously believe that the attorney general has covered up illegal activity and is refusing to accept congressional oversight, they should model seriousness. Which means that they should do something about it, beyond waiting for the problem to be voted away by large margins.

    As Jennifer Rubin noted two weeks ago, Democrats have more than one possible response to Donald Trump’s illegal conduct at their disposal. There is no reason why they need to take any single one of them off the table, and there is certainly no reason why they should announce the plan to do so to the New York Times. Banking on an elections system that is being warped before our eyes is a recipe for disaster, and it’s a lesson that should have been learned by now.

    The challenge Pelosi faces is the same challenge faced by Mueller, and by Eric Holder. Elections matter, and getting out the vote in 2020 matters. But the Rule of Law still matters, and we shouldn’t abandon it because this small problem of Donald Trump might go away in 2020. The fact is that this problem might not go away in 2020, though by then, the argument that obstruction itself is an impeachable offense will have been lost to us. That’s all the more reason to fight for the rule of law today, as if it were sliding away. Because it is sliding away. That isn’t something the country should wait to vote on. The country already knows it is true.”

    https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/05/2020-election-approach-shouldnt-end-impeachment.html

  • Denis Drew says:
    May 8, 2019 at 5:52 pm

    I’ve been told that I have this wrong — that price is not the perfect measure of value:

    Chained inflation rate’s inherent flaw.

    If raising the price of one good causes consumers to switch to a cheaper substitute — that usually means they are buying something of lower value with the same money. If it were of equal value to them they might have bought more of it in the first place. To a true free marketeer, the ultimate value of anything is decided by consumer preference.

    Anybody?

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