IMHO opinion, many smart people miss the point of the 1/6 hearings. I keep hearing people talk about this “convincing” people. I keep hearing people talk about how disappointing it is that FOX News isn’t airing it. I keep hearing people say that the very people who need to be watching that aren’t.
But here is what I think: the people who listen to Tucker Carlson would not be convinced even if they watched the hearings 24/7 for a month. They have drunk so much Kool-Aid and are so psychologically and emotionally invested in their reality adjacent narrative that nothing we showed them would make a difference. Trump was right about those folks. He could shoot someone on 5th avenue and they would still believe. Heck, they would believe it even more.
The hearings are not about convincing Tucker Carlson viewers. The hearings are about presenting the truth in a clear and compelling manner, because it is the right things to do — it is perhaps the most important thing in the world. By all accounts, the former guy tried to overthrow a democratically elected government. He attempted a violent coup. The committee doesn’t need to convince Fox News heads about that. They need to present the story so it is out there for all of us. It is the right, decent, moral, and necessary thing to do.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I found it useful and informative. I found that, over the past 1.5 years, I had forgotten details of it. Like most things, it had mellowed a bit in my memory. I suspect that many other people found that the fragility of memory, and the omnipresence of some new horror in the news, meant that at least some important aspect of 1/6 had faded. For me, it wasn’t the violence that had mellowed or the coup like nature, but the true malevolence of Trump. I’d forgotten how pivotal he and his henchmen were in all this. Maybe forgotten is the wrong word — if I would have thought about it I could have told you that they were. But because I hadn’t thought about it for so long, the memory was not as powerful and shocking as it should be.
The hearings gave that shocked feeling back to me and I am glad that they did. I bet they reawakened it in many of us. And that is good and useful.
I suspect that the hearings will, over the course of this month, bring the awfulness of that day and the culpability of trump and his associated back into focus. That is good. We overuse the word “unprecedented” in these times when so many unprecedented things happen. But the events of that day truly were unprecedented and they were damning and traitorous and dangerous and important.
The hearings are good news. It is awful news that this happened, but it is great news that these hearings are happening. it isn’t great news because it will change the minds of the Fox Heads. It is great news because here we are with a functional democracy that is holding people accountable and telling the truth. That outcome was not certain.
Here are some other takes on the first hearing that I found useful.
first, a ton of people watched it. This is just on the traditional TV networks. Doesn’t include online or those of us who watched it on PBS
There is widespread agreement that this was done well and was shattering to trump
The stunning televised event made the clearest, most comprehensive case yet that ex-President Donald Trump concocted a sprawling conspiracy to defy voters’ will and steal power based on claims about a stolen election he knew were false.
Making good on its word to produce compelling new evidence, the committee built a clear narrative that Trump’s incitement and example directly inspired extremist groups to breach the US Capitol to stage an insurrection.
“President Trump summoned the mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack,” said Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, the panel’s vice chair, who spelled out Trump’s “sophisticated seven-point plan” to overturn the 2020 election.
Previously unseen footage showing the harrowing battles waged by Capitol Police officers to keep the rioters at bay left viewers with a sickening vision of American society’s extremist underbelly, which Trump cultivated and unleashed.
and this
and this
and this
and this
one important point is that there are more hearings to come, and those hearings will present evidence that the extremist groups (e.g the proud boys and oath keepers) were working with the trump folks
The Democratic chairman of the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol said Thursday that the panel will present witnesses describing conversations between extremist groups and members of former President Donald Trump's orbit.
Asked by CNN's Jake Tapper whether there was "going to be witnesses that describe actual conversations between these extremist groups and anyone in Trump's orbit?" Rep. Bennie Thompson responded: "Yes.
"Obviously, you'll have to go through the hearings, but we have a number of witnesses who have come forward that people have not talked to before, that will document a lot was going on in the Trump orbit while all of this was occurring," the Mississippi Democrat said.
another thing that stuck me that they have the damn receipts on trump. The receipts. They would not be bringing him in this hard if they could not back it up. Not under Pelosi’s watch. And this was confirmed to me when I saw that a committee source provided CNN the following description of the “sophisticated seven-part plan”:
“President Trump oversaw a sophisticated seven-part plan to overturn the 2020 election and prevent the transition of presidential power.
- President Trump engaged in a massive effort to spread false and fraudulent information to the American public claiming the 2020 election was stolen from him.
- President Trump corruptly planned to replace the Acting Attorney General, so that the Department of Justice would support his fake election claims.
- President Trump corruptly pressured Vice President Pence to refuse to count certified electoral votes in violation of the US Constitution and the law.
- President Trump corruptly pressured state election officials, and state legislators, to change election results.
- President Trump’s legal team and other Trump associates instructed Republicans in multiple states to create false electoral slates and transmit those slates to Congress and the National Archives.
- President Trump summoned and assembled a violent mob in Washington and directed them to march on the US Capitol.
- As the violence was underway, President Trump ignored multiple pleas for assistance and failed to take immediate action to stop the violence and instruct his supporters to leave the Capitol.
These are initial findings and the Select Committee’s investigation is still ongoing. In addition, the Department of Justice is currently working with cooperating witnesses, and has disclosed to date only certain of the information it has identified from encrypted communications and other sources.”
This is what they HAVE. These are things they have evidence for. Look at how often they use the word corrupt. This is huge. Huge.
And the last thing: they mention the DOJ having cooperating witnesses on this. That is huge. The DOJ is on this. A criminal investigation is active and getting lots and lots of evidence.
and this
and this will reach well beyond trump
And some republicans must be sweating
love this guy:
and once again for the people in the back, this is NOT about winning over Fox News viewers
and not that this is WHY we do this, but it does make me feel good
and don’t forget: this is only the start:
Let’s move onto some other good news.
Democrats are doing great things
How Democrats plan to win big in Georgia again
Grassroots groups have helped turn the once reliably red Georgia into a battleground over the course of the last two election cycles. Now, Democrats are hoping that they — and the multiracial coalition they assembled — can deliver another miracle in 2022.
Groups like the voter registration group New Georgia Project and Black Voters Matter have worked for years, some for more than a decade, to mobilize the political power of Black voters and other voters of color in the state. Those minority voters make up 40 percent of the electorate, but have historically been neglected by both parties. Grassroots groups have long struggled to draw investment from funders and campaigns, many of whom believed their efforts to be in vain.
In 2018, their years of work paid off when Democrat Stacey Abrams ran for governor, rewriting Democrats’ playbook in a narrow loss powered largely by nonwhite voters. Organizing modeled on Abrams’s run helped Joe Biden flip the state by a less than 12,000 vote margin in 2020, a critical win in his path to the presidency. And it assisted long-shot Democratic candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in surprise victories in their US Senate races, handing the party narrow control of Congress.
With Abrams’s second campaign for governor against incumbent Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, as well as Warnock’s reelection — and Democrats’ prospects of maintaining control of the Senate — in the balance, Democrats and their grassroots allies are hoping to once again organize their way to victory.
Inspired by the critical role that grassroots groups have played in turning Georgia purple, national Democrats launched what party officials say is their largest ever statewide coordinated campaign for a midterm election last month.
The “Georgia Votes” campaign — a joint initiative by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Democratic National Committee, and Georgia Democrats — is aimed at re-energizing the multiracial coalition that grassroots groups helped turn out in 2020, though it doesn’t directly support or coordinate with those groups, in accordance with campaign laws.
White House takes steps to spur solar industry
The White House will try to calm the turmoil in America’s solar industry by exempting it for two years from crushing tariffs on certain panels manufactured abroad, a move the administration hopes will get hundreds of stalled projects back on track.
“Diversifying our energy sources and responding to the climate crisis have never been more urgent, and solar energy is an essential component of meeting those needs,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said in a statement Monday. “The President’s emergency declaration ensures America’s families have access to reliable and clean electricity while also ensuring we have the ability to hold our trading partners accountable to their commitments.”
Biden signs 9 bipartisan bills into law to improve veterans' health care
US President Joe Biden on Tuesday signed a bill to provide better access to mammograms for veterans exposed to burn pits as part of nine bills signed into law aimed to improve veterans' health care.
He also signed eight other pieces of legislation Tuesday focused on veteran health care, including a bill to improve breast imaging services for veterans regardless of if they're exposed to burn pits or not and to compensate veterans who developed cancer and medical conditions from the World War II-era nuclear programs, The Hill reported.
"Less than one per cent of the population risk everything to defend our nation and our values and everything we hold dear. And you know, the 99 per cent of us who don't, we owe them, we owe them big," Biden said at the bill signing. "And that's what today is all about, is paying a debt in my view," he said adding.
Joe Biden is invoking a war power to build heat pumps and solar panels
It looks like President Joe Biden is done waiting for Congress to do something about the country’s dependence on foreign energy. Through a series of executive actions announced on Monday, the president plans to use the Defense Production Act to boost clean energy in the United States by putting a two-year freeze on tariffs for solar panels coming to the country from Southeast Asia and simultaneously scaling up the domestic production of clean energy technologies.
This is the latest in a series of moves that show the White House is beginning to treat climate change and clean energy as national security issues. It’s also the kind of thing climate activists have been asking the Biden administration to do for months. The executive actions could bring thousands of manufacturing jobs to the country while also making the US less dependent on foreign oil and gas, particularly as the war in Ukraine continues.
Other Good News
Effort to thwart Medicaid expansion fails in S.D.
In South Dakota, an attempted workaround to thwart Medicaid expansion failed badly. Opponents of the expansion, which will be on the ballot in November, tried to get the state to adjust the threshold for it and similar ballot measures to 60 percent, rather than a simple majority. The practical impact of this proposed rule, which was on the primary ballot Tuesday, would’ve been a majority of voters deciding to prevent another majority from expanding Medicaid later this year.
In the end, it came nowhere close to a majority: constitutional Amendment C was defeated 67-33 early Wednesday. The thrust of the effort was clear: Proponents of Medicaid expansion have succeeded in the face of GOP opposition even in red states by using ballot measures, but the measures only once exceeded 60 percent approval — in Idaho, in 2018.
If a majority votes in favor of expanding Medicaid in November, South Dakota will the 39th state to do so.
Stop telling kids that climate change will destroy their world
As I’ve written about before, climate change is going to be bad, and it will hold back humanity from thriving as much as we should this century. It will likely cause mass migration and displacement and extinctions of many species.
What it won’t do, however, is make the Earth unlivable, or even mean that our children live in a world poorer than the one we grew up in. As many climate scientists have been telling us, the world is a better place to live in — especially for people in lower-income countries — than it has ever been, and climate change isn’t going to make it as bad as it was even in 1950.
“I unequivocally reject, scientifically and personally, the notion that children are somehow doomed to an unhappy life,” Kate Marvel, a climate scientist at Columbia, told Ezra Klein in his column this week about overcoming climate despair.
“You see children saying things like ‘The world’s going to burn up, we’re all going to be dead in 20 years,’ and that’s pretty unlikely,” Susan Clayton, a conservation psychologist who studies how climate change affects mental health, told National Geographic in an article about kids and climate anxiety.
On the Lighter Side
What can you do to save democracy?
I set up a place where we can donate and the funds will be distributed evenly between the tossup House and Senate races. Think of it as a one stop shop for using your $$$ to save democracy. Here is the link:
Here are some other things you can do:
And don’t lose hope. Together, we can do this!
I am so lucky and so proud to be in this with all of you ✊🏼✊🏾✊🏽🧡💚💛💜✊🏾✊🏽✊🏻