It’s being reported that his wife is in labor. If so, that’s understandable. If that’s not true, it will be easy enough to fact check.
his wife is in labour, i hope all goes well with the stepien family.
Ah, she doesn’t need his help! 
Is he aware labor doesn’t last for months?
Will he do like Trump and get a hotel room with a porn starlet?
ivanka and jared teeing off.
Man, this guy from Fox News bragging about how good their polling was in calling Arizona for Biden really nails Trump. Fox was convinced Trump had lost before anyone else!
His testimony about how watching an election shape up is like filling in a jigsaw puzzle was an especially useful mental visual. It explains the process perfectly.
Yes, I thought that was a good analogy as well. But his pride in how well his team predicted Trump’s loss is just palpable!
To be honest, I found it rather creepy.
But then, I understand we don’t get to choose our witnesses. I also understand that as much as I detest them, Fox “News” does have very well-respected elections experts working to make accurate calls on election nights.
Yeah, the dichotomy between what Fox knew was the truth, and the crap they keep putting on the air is disturbing, and pretty much encapsulates everything that’s wrong with US politics these days. One would hope this testimony would get through to some people who really need to hear this, but it’s a faint hope.
“I don’t care if he’s married to Keir Starmer himself, he needs to testify!”
oooh, bill barr is quite the witness. 2000 mules movie?!?
So far they’re doing a really good job of putting down the raw, undeniable evidence that the Big Lie is a big ass lie (or, at the best, the work of crazy people being crazy).
And…they’re doing it on a Monday morning.
I imagine that their idea was to use the first hearing to introduce the various subjects that they were going to cover more fully, later.
I don’t know that we needed that. I mean, I don’t doubt that they’re going to be able to demonstrate most of what they claim but the first hearing was always going to be the one that the most people watched for real. Tiny clips, out of context, just aren’t as convincing as long, detailed presentations of people explaining how Trump decided to go with crazy people and make their claims, even when he knew that those claims were factually false.
I think they thought that they might get the watchers engaged by showing them a bunch of violence and heroism - Hollywood movie style - so that they would tune in again. But, realistically, a better hook would have been to show to people that they been conned. What they’re showing today has the power to have done that and I think it would have made people more interested in knowing the facts and more interested in properly paying attention than images of rioters - similar to ones that they’ve already seen a few dozen times over the last two years.
And it would have changed a lot more minds than a high-level summary of future presentations. Summaries are useful for a captive audience like a jury member or a person who has to read a document for their work. But the audience here was almost purely going to watch the first session and then skip the rest. That one episode was the start and end of the hearings.
I don’t know that they completely screwed the pooch or anything, here, but I do think that what they’re showing now would have been a better hook for the rest of the show and certainly would have been a more useful thing to have ingrained in the heads of the general public.
Knowingly, and with malicious aforethought, Donald Trump set up 800 American citizens to be arrested, all to salve his ego. He paid not a dime to their defense, he testified for none of them, and these men and women now have felonies on their records, all because he, like a 4yo, didn’t want to hear the truth.
… spreading the above message to my conservative circles…
I think that even people who don’t sit down to watch every minute or even big chunks of the later presentations (i.e., “skip the rest”) WILL read commentaries, summaries, pundit analyses, etc. They will see playback on news programs, read about the hearings in their favorite media outlets, and generally get the message summarized in some fashion.
Which will all be short, edited, out-of-context segments.
Unedited, long-form content where you can really get a sense for who the person is and how they’re framing the story matters.
Headlines saying that “Trump is a liar” isn’t something that just started on Thursday. If it hasn’t worked at any point in the last 6 years, I’m not finding it likely to start working today.
Both impeachment trials failed because they refused to put the work in to find and present real, full, unquestionable evidence. There was plenty of good-sounding soundbites that sounded plausibly supportable but that which still needed to be supported by real, hard evidence and witness testimony.
I don’t think that the idea that the cure for craziness in the modern TikTok world of five second clips of random stuff is that you need to create your own five second clips and sensationalist headlines.
Whether TikTok and Hollywood are entertaining or not, humans are still humans and the things that convince of something - not that entertain us - are the same today as it was hundreds of years ago and that is to put in the work, slow things down, and really go through every nut and bolt with a fine toothed comb, beating the truth into everyone’s heads through brute force of evidentiary weight. You have to break them and then pummel them with facts until they just get bored and resigned to their fate of agreeing with you.
It’s like the MAGA jurist who voted that Paul Manafort was guilty. She didn’t do it because the prosecution flashed her a newspaper headline that told her it was so, it’s because she sat through so much unquestionable expert testimony that she just helplessly gave in to facts.
The goal here is not to entertain nor to create partisan headlines. It’s to grab people by the neck and force them to drink from the well of truth. They’re doing that today, with the long-form witness testimony. They didn’t do it so much in the first hearing.
Yeah, I really do not understand the timing. These things need people to be watching as they happen, before the spin can be thought up to deflect from it. Already it’s going to be hard to get most Americans to watch a political hearing (since most Americans want to avoid politics except at voting time). You don’t need additional barriers, like the fact that the people who need to hear this most will be at work.
I’m genuinely quite concerned this won’t amount to anything nothing now. And I’m usually against being so pessimistic. But why wouldn’t you at least maximize your potential audience?
I hope second hand articles and clips can go viral, but I have my doubts.
The committee has done well to establish that Donald was both too delusional and narcissistic to accept defeat from well established Republican insiders but it’s not illegal to be delusional and narcissistic (it should disqualify a candidate in the minds of competent voters, however).
They really need to provide evidence that 45 used the power of office to pressure election officials in battleground states to overturn valid election results. I’m hoping that can be done.
Also, lol at Bill Barr, a Trump toady who would happily serve in a Christian theocracy, shit all over 2000 Mules.
Trump’s history is littered with cases of him making bald-faced lies with full conviction and passion like, “I was told that I could build that building on public land! They knew that I’d help to keep the park looking maintained. They begged Trump to extend his resort into that land!” And then, years later, when all the court cases around the issue have been resolved, he’ll go out and proclaim, “Nah, they never said that, I just lied so I could build a veranda without an impeded view of the pond in the park. I mean, once you chop down the trees, what are they gonna do? Aren’t I so clever?”
Trump is proud of his own devotion to lying and to the use of lying to get what you want.
With that history, it’s difficult to take it at face value that he is crazy. It’s very much within his repertoire and regular operating style to say whatever the hell he wants and force everyone else to deal with such unabashed lying as they see fit. For most of us, it’s so foreign that at some point it becomes difficult to keep insisting that the lies are lies. How could someone say something so wrong, so consistently and with such sincerity if they don’t know something?
In general, I think his sister or cousin or whoever it was - the psychiatrist relative of his - was correct in saying that the guy suffers from sufficiently deep narcissism to effectively be classed as a mental case. But I don’t know that that’s the same as saying that he’s delusional. Lying to yourself isn’t quite the same thing as being psychotic, it’s just part of method acting and professional level deceit.