[Meteor Blades will be back next week]
Susan Page/USA Today with this morning’s just released poll:
Perilous times for Trump: By 45%-38%, Americans support impeaching him over Ukraine, poll finds
By a similar margin, 44%-35%, those surveyed say the Senate, which would then be charged with holding a trial of the president, should convict Trump and remove him from office.
The survey of 1,006 adults, taken Tuesday and Wednesday, underscores the perilous situation the president finds himself in as House committees subpoena documents and prepare to hear testimony into accusations that he pressured the leader of Ukraine to investigate a political rival, then tried to hide the account of their phone conversation…
Few Americans, just 3%, predict that Trump will voluntarily resign before the end of his first term; 15% expect him to be removed through impeachment. One-third of those surveyed, 33%, say he will remain serve out his first term as president. Another 29% predict that he will not only do that but also win a second term.
Find all impeachment polls here.
George Conway/Atlantic:
Unfit for Office
Donald Trump’s narcissism makes it impossible for him to carry out the duties of the presidency in the way the Constitution requires.
And so it is, or ought to be, with Donald Trump. You don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, and you don’t need to be a mental-health professional to see that something’s very seriously off with Trump—particularly after nearly three years of watching his erratic and abnormal behavior in the White House. Questions about Trump’s psychological stability have mounted throughout his presidency. But those questions have been coming even more frequently amid a recent escalation in Trump’s bizarre behavior, as the pressures of his upcoming reelection campaign, a possibly deteriorating economy, and now a full-blown impeachment inquiry have mounted. And the questioners have included those who have worked most closely with him...
Trump’s erratic behavior has long been the subject of political criticism, late-night-television jokes, and even speculation about whether it’s part of some incomprehensible, multidimensional strategic game. But it’s relevant to whether he’s fit for the office he holds. Simply put, Trump’s ingrained and extreme behavioral characteristics make it impossible for him to carry out the duties of the presidency in the way the Constitution requires. To see why first requires a look at what the Constitution demands of a president, and then an examination of how Trump’s behavioral characteristics preclude his ability to fulfill those demands.
Yesterdays non-story (that the whistleblower went through usual protocol by talking to Congress) which the right wing is sure will be a game changer:
The claim is Schiff coordinated, or wrote or otherwise tainted the whistleblower’s complaint. Schiff apologized this a.m. for a lack of clarity in saying there was no contact, but the core charge is false:
Republicans will ask that impeachment therefore be canceled and Schiff be jailed for treason. Not happening.
Politico:
Trump’s impeachment defiance spooks key voting blocs
Many voters critical to Trump are breaking from the president on impeachment, posing a risk to his congressional firewall.
Nearly a half-dozen polls conducted since last Tuesday, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi directed her colleagues to proceed with pursuing Trump for potentially impeachable offenses, have shown women voters rallying behind her decision, exacerbating concerns among White House allies that white women who helped carry Trump to victory in 2016 can no longer be counted on next November.
The development comes as independent voters and college-educated whites — two more demographic groups that could make or break Trump’s reelection bid — have shown signs of softening their resistance to impeachment. Taken together, the latest polls paint an alarming picture for the president, whose base is sticking by him but cannot be counted on by themselves to deliver him a second term….
“From my point of view as a Republican pollster, the president’s base has been solid so far,” said Micah Roberts, a partner at Public Opinion Strategies, which oversaw an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll conducted last week. “But college-educated whites have electoral significance for us in the suburbs and can completely shift the dynamic and the conversation just by virtue of shifting the overall numbers.”
Hmmm. Cannot be counted on by themselves to deliver him a second term… where have I heard that?
Joshua Green/Bloomberg Businessweek:
Trump’s Impeachment Saga Stems From a Political Hit Job Gone Bad
The president's obsession with finding dirt on Biden goes back to Steve Bannon and Clinton Cash.
To understand how Trump wound up the target of a House impeachment inquiry, it’s first necessary to understand why he was so obsessed with finding dirt on Biden that he pressured Ukraine’s president in a July 25th phone call to “do us a favor” and investigate Biden and his son, Hunter. The notion that Hunter Biden and his father could be complicit in Ukrainian corruption was first aired in a 2018 book, Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, by conservative author Peter Schweizer. The book and its author had a purpose and a lineage.
Margaret Sullivan/WaPo:
With impeachment looming, the news media is growing a spine. It needs stiffening.
Scott Pelley of CBS pushed back hard Sunday when House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy tried to spin him on Sunday’s “60 Minutes.”
So did Chris Wallace of Fox News when Trump aide Stephen Miller refused to accept reality on the same subject: President Trump’s pressuring of the Ukraine president to provide dirt on his political opponent.
So did Jake Tapper of CNN with Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, and Chuck Todd of NBC with Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.).
The Tapper interview “centered on Jordan misrepresenting the allegations focused on Joe and Hunter Biden — allegations that have been broadly debunked,” my Post colleague Philip Bump wrote in a piece that gives a telling blow-by-blow of several Sunday interviews.
In every case, the interviewers were admirably well-prepared and assertive. Wallace even went so far as to call Miller’s responses “an exercise in obfuscation.” …
The second way that news organizations can meet the challenge of this moment is to stop booking those surrogates who are the worst of the inveterate liars. I’d put Trump shills Corey Lewandowski and Kellyanne Conway in this ever-growing category.
Read the whole thing about how to deal with administration lying.
Trump is now saying inflammatory thing to incite. These are deliberate lies, characterize them as such, like Jim Roberts does:
Ian Millhiser/Vox:
The Supreme Court showdown over LGBTQ discrimination, explained
On the surface, the stakes in this case seem enormous. In reality, they’re even larger.
Thus, if the Supreme Court holds that it is lawful to discriminate against gay or trans workers, it could upend the 30-year-old rule against gender stereotyping. All workers — straight or queer; trans, cis, or non-binary — could become less secure in their jobs. And even if the Court does not go that far, it would be difficult to rule against these plaintiffs without carving out a significant exception to the broad rule that sex stereotyping is not allowed.
As the National Women’s Law Center argues in an amicus brief filed on behalf of itself and a long list of women’s groups, “the arguments advanced by the employers, if accepted, would roll back protections against discrimination based on sex stereotyping that has long been understood by federal courts, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), employers, and employees in many parts of the nation as impermissible workplace discrimination.”
24% was Nixon’s job approval at resignation. In fact, some of those polled today are probably the same people. Imagine that.
Thomas B Edsall/NY Times:
Will Trump Ever Leave the White House?
It’s a loaded question — with no obvious answer.
When I asked David Leege, professor of political science emeritus at Notre Dame, about political developments in the near future, his response surprised me. After noting that I had not posed the most important question, he added:
We should not assume that either a 2020 election defeat or impeachment/conviction will remove Trump from the White House.
Leege elaborated:
Both before Trump was elected in 2016 and during his term, he has made frequent references to “my 2nd Amendment friends”’ and increasingly the “patriots” who constitute the military.
Before you decide that this is paranoia, let me point out that Leege is an eminently reasonable scholar, a former chair of the board of overseers of the American National Election Studies and one of the founders of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. He has been a valued source of mine for years.
“The country is armed to the hilt,” Leege wrote:
As president, Trump has resisted any effort to curb citizen access to guns and ammo. He puts on a modest show of concern when a particularly bad gun massacre occurs but, in the end, he sees armed citizens as a significant personal asset.
Michael D. Shear and Julie Hirschfeld Davis/NY Times (icymi):
Shoot Migrants’ Legs, Build Alligator Moat: Behind Trump’s Ideas for Border
Privately, the president had often talked about fortifying a border wall with a water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators, prompting aides to seek a cost estimate. He wanted the wall electrified, with spikes on top that could pierce human flesh. After publicly suggesting that soldiers shoot migrants if they threw rocks, the president backed off when his staff told him that was illegal. But later in a meeting, aides recalled, he suggested that they shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down. That’s not allowed either, they told him.
“The president was frustrated and I think he took that moment to hit the reset button,” said Thomas D. Homan, who had served as Mr. Trump’s acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, recalling that week in March. “The president wanted it to be fixed quickly.”
Charles Bethea/New Yorker:
Mark Meadows and the Undisclosed Dinosaur Property
It’s also possible that Meadows wanted to avoid drawing attention to the Colorado property and the complicated and perhaps unflattering story behind it. The property is not an ordinary piece of land but a rich site for finding dinosaur bones, and this appears to be the primary reason that Meadows bought it. Those bones then became the subject of a long-running fight among young-Earth creationists—and they are likely the reason that Meadows sold the land, ultimately, to Answers in Genesis. Meadows’s involvement with the land may have been, in part, a moneymaking venture, but it seems chiefly to reflect his commitment to, and entanglement with, the contentious and controversial world of creationist paleontology.
Oh, by the way...
The Intercept:
A THIRD OF VOTERS WHO OPPOSE IMPEACHMENT ARE WORRIED ABOUT BACKLASH FOR DEMOCRATS, NEW POLL SUGGESTS
LAST WEEK, after the revelation of a phone call with the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a formal impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump. But many of the details are yet to be sorted out: Which of the six investigations into Trump currently being conducted by House committees should impeachment include? And will impeachment proceedings, which are likely to pass the House but fail in the Republican-held Senate, end up backfiring on the Democrats?
A new YouGov Blue poll for the Progressive Change Institute, the nonprofit polling arm of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, lends insight into both of these crucial questions. The poll, released Wednesday morning, found that other polls undercount support for Democrats moving forward on an impeachment inquiry. It also revealed that a third of voters who oppose impeachment actually agree that Trump committed high crimes, but are concerned that it would hurt Democrats politically. And a majority of the voters who support an impeachment inquiry said Democrats should proceed “boldly and decisively,” with all members voting within the next month.
And further afield:
I am a city kid doing my best to pay attention to rural issues:
HuffPost:
Does America Want Walmart Milking Its Cows?
Small dairy farms are going under while more of America’s food comes from bigger and bigger operations.
i have discovered the next set of coordinated talking points which is *guaranteed* to derail impeachment: