#it's like watching someone become a trumper

[tshifty]

.

[emptymanuscript]

Laugh rule gets this one posted.

Mostly I am annoyed that anyone in this story is relevant to… well… anything.

In case you live in a saner world than me, what’s happened on the right is a tiny hissy fit over Kyle Rittenhouse (found legally not guilty of murder for the people he killed) saying he didn’t endorse Trump (found guilty of some of his ever rising tide of crimes) and was going to write in Ron Paul (who, as far as I am aware, is not running) for President. MAGA was not ok with this and proceeded to bully Rittenhouse until he announced he had been wildly misinformed about the only issue he cares about, second amendment rights, and both fully endorses and will vote for Trump.

I would say that Ron Paul is the most decent person in this story BUT (and before the but doesn’t count) that’s Paul’s schtick. Paul, back when he had political relevancy, had a real lock on the compassionate conservative libertarian space. Before MAGA coalesced into the cult of Trump, a lot of the people who would become Trumpers backed Paul.

Paul is actually the guy that let me figure out what dog whistle, not saying the quiet part out loud, love for the good is hate with a thin layer of varnish on it, etc. really meant.

I supported Paul back in the day before I got it. I don’t entirely remember why. Probably mostly because he claimed to be philosophically opposed to the regulation of individual choice, for education & “reasoned” operation of government, and for bipartisanship. I’m sure it didn’t hurt that he was a doctor and, while I am still generally pro-doctor (as in pro-science vs conspiracy theories), I had a significantly higher opinion of doctors back then. I hadn’t quite escaped putting them all on pedestals as a legacy of my father’s legendary status in my family.

But then I was watching a debate I believe and he was talking about deregulation of the medical and insurance fields. Essentially preaching what the wealthy and powerful call “self insurance” which really means no insurance, if you have the money you pay for care and if you don’t, you’re SOL.

He got challenged by the moderator about what should happen to a person with nothing at an emergency room. Should we just let them die?

And one of his supporters in the crowd stands up and shouts yeah, let them die. Like I said, MAGA before it became MAGA.

And it clicked for me.

Paul’s job was to promote that horrific point of view, LET THEM DIE, in a way that would sound like that murderous hatred of the other was sweet benevolent wisdom. That the LOVE he preached as his campaign slogan (revolution backwards with love highlighted in red) was the love of a jealous god hierarchy that existed to promote itself at the expense of the suffering and lives of others. All the OTHER. Submit to the boot or be stamped out and if you get stamped out, well, that’s your fault isn’t it. You should have submitted better. It’s the love of the abusive parent who complains that you made them do this to you. Or that you asked for it because of your lifestyle and clothing. Or some people races are just born bad and it’s the white man’s burden to guide (the good ones) and cull the herd. Not what I would call love at all.

The audience member had said the quiet part out loud. But the realization that hit me was that Paul was always saying the quiet part to those who knew how to listen. That was the real message. We were born with ours. Fuck everybody else. That’s the entire point. Take away the safety rails and it will all just sort itself out because that’s what the safety rails are really for: keeping the people without advantage from being crushed.

At which point I was done with Paul and pretty much all the compassionate bullshit.

There’s a reason Rittenhouse endorsed (someone like) Paul. It sounds nice. It sounds like not a cult. But it’s just the lipstick on the same pig. It’s the belief that might = right and we’ll make that sound ok by just talking about the “right” stuff and conveniently ignoring how that’s going to play out and the costs involved. It’s perfectly Rittenhouse. He had the might to pick up his AR and travel across state lines to violently “defend” what he thought was right and if he killed a few black people doing it… well… that was his right because he had the might to do it and the second amendment zealots got him off scott free to protect their own rights to exercise their might however they wanted. Because fuck you, you should have been born a better and more submissive person. But please don’t think I’m a bad person. I’m a good person. I’m right. It’s your job to suffer and your objections make me uncomfortable. They FEEL like you could be trying to take away my rights for your benefit.

So, I laugh at despondent Ron Paul losing the Rittenhouse endorsement but it’s like laughing at covfefe. It’s a moment of obvious weirdness in the midst of all the horror. Like, why would anyone care? No one should care. Ha ha. Weirdos. Which, in a saner world, is all any of these people would be able to do: make us laugh at them. It’s just not a particularly sane world because they have way too much power. And their might is going to keep on giving them the right until they are all as irrelevant as Ron Paul.

May it happen this coming year.

May they live next year in irrelevance. And dwell there forever more.

May we live next year in a saner world.

[speedygoateeconnoisseur]

Today on Twitter: A gross reality

Republicans that can have beliefs that aren't about a president but rather, policies, are the "correct" Republicans.

I mean, who the fuck acts like this and is okay with it? Why is Trump being elected so important? Why is it more important than America? Why is it so extreme that you must attack your own fellow Americans?

Slave? You're a 43-year old white cunt who's a slave to someone else, be it your man or a business. These aren't insults, it's just calling it as is it is.

All you "Trumpers" need to wake up. You need to question whether your allegiance is worth your terrorist tendencies or if you stand for America.

Americans aren't supposed to attack their fellow Americans like this. You're on display. Everyone in this world, on this planet is watching YOU.

All the lies you spew are seen. Own up to your lies, apologize to your family members, become human and live happy lives with them. Abstain from politics and focus more on gardening. Be happy.

[absolutepx]

So I've been playing Death Stranding lately. Wait, that's not what this post is about. Well, it kind of is. Hang on. What is Death Stranding about?

A: Norman Reedus getting bare ass naked B. Sneaking around ghosts with the help of your sidekick, an actual baby C: Carrying 50 Amazon packages up a hill while trying to not topple over D: Waking up in the morning and drinking 5 Monster Energy™ for breakfast

For those following along at home, the answer is actually none of the above. Despite the set dressing being bizarre to the point of near absurdity, what the game is actually about, like thematically, is actually really simple.

See, the development of Death Stranding was actually quite a trip. Hideo Kojima is the video game world's equivalent of an auteur director. He has a very recognizable personal style. It's thoroughly horny – he caught a bunch of shit for the design of Quiet in MGSV, but like, a lot of Kojima characters are just -like that-, including the dudes. Also, this is going to possibly be important later.

Anyway, so Kojima was going to do a rebootmakequel of Silent Hill, and the demo actually made it to the PS store and I could actually write a whole side essay about why P.T. (it was called P.T. for some reason btw) was brilliant game design for how it used the same hallway over and over and it was somehow beneficial to the overall feeling of horror. So Konami it turns out kinda sucks nowadays and they like, fired Kojima (they were huge dicks about it behind closed doors, too) and scrapped the project and kicked him out on the street and kept the Metal Gear series which was his baby (literally the baby in the sink in P.T., he snuck a bunch of messaging about the Konami situation into the demo like a breakup album) and Kojima would go on to form his own studio and poach some of the people who worked with him to boot. So the thing about Kojima is this: he's got a reputation for already putting some wild shit in his games, like a ladder that takes like 10 real time minutes to climb in MGS3 for dramatic effect, and a boss in MGS3 that summons the ghosts of all the people you were too lazy to stealth past and killed, or a sniper battle with a really old guy that he wanted to have last two weeks or some shit until he died of old age but he was "told that "this was impossible and not recommended." That is a real quote I just looked up. So he's coming off the heels of making this hugely successful game with MGSV and the hype of the P.T. Demo and he fucking, he like took all the people that were going to be working on P.T. Along like Guillermo Del Toro was going to co-write it and Norman Reedus was going to star in it, and he's like, I'm going to make this game called Death Stranding. And the first trailer comes out for it and it's completely nuts. Norman Reedus wakes up naked on a beach crying with a baby and there are floating people in the sky? So we're all like hooooooly shit, there's no one to tell him "this is impossible and not recommended" anymore. What's he going to make now!?

So the whole time the game is in development I keep seeing these tweets where it'll be like, Kojima and one of his homies smiling with some saccharine message about being spiritual warriors and changing the world. And not just Del Toro and Reedus, there was Mads Mikkelsen (another guy Kojima puts in the game just because he apparently loves him), and the band Chvches, and also like, Keanu Reeves at one point? You know how everyone has just kind of accepted that Keanu is a being of light? Here he was endorsing Kojima. The hype was pretty confused and frantic.

The game eventually comes out. A lot of game journos hate it because I think there was this expectation it was going to be, you know, less weird and have more of the conventional structure of a video game. That's not to say the average gamer wasn't also dismissive of it, but I think on the ground level there was more of an understanding that like, yeah, Kojima just be like that sometimes.

Because the game was a timed console exclusive and your homie don't play like that, I spent the first year or so cautiously viewing Death Stranding from a distance. I wasn't sure I was going to like it – except for being really impressed with P.T., I wasn't actually a big fan of Kojima's games as games – but I -was- sure that I was going to buy it, because of the way Konami fucked him over, just out of support. And the shit I was hearing was really out there. The primary mode of gameplay is just delivery packages. You collect Norman Reedus' bathwater and pee and use it as grenades. You get a motorcycle that looks like the one from AMC's The Ride with Norman Reedus, and when you sit on it, his character in the game says "Wow, this thing is like the one from AMC's The Ride with Norman Reedus!"

But I didn't really want to know that much about it. Something has that much fucking crazy person energy, you want to go in mostly blind, right? So maybe people just weren't talking about this, or maybe I wasn't seeing it, but then I watched Girlfriend Reviews' video about it and they came right out and said it (link provided if you want to hear Shelby say it more articulately than me):

Death Stranding is basically about the exact opposite of Twitter. It's about remembering how to be kind to each other, how to reconnect in a world where people are so often hostile to each other by default. Prophetically, it's about a world where people are afraid to go outside or touch other people and how damaging that is. It's not a game about carrying packages, it's a game about helping people by being brave enough to walk through a wasteland carrying their burdens because they can't. It's about rebuilding the lost connections between people, about restoring roads and giving people hope. I bet, for Kojima and the people close to him, it's about how to answer hostility with compassion. You can't kill people in Death Stranding. You can and are absolutely encouraged to fucking throw hands with people sometimes, but all the tools and weapons are nonlethal. So I think Kojima took all the Twitter heat he got over the Quiet nontroversy, and all the feelings of isolation he had from Konami separating him from his team during the end of the development of MGSV, and all the support and encouragement he got from his bros Del Toro and Mads and the rest, and decided to channel that into making a game that was a statement about all of it. And sure, it's a little heavy handed, and sure, it's a little saccharine, and sure, the gameplay sometimes borders on miserable in service of creating emotional payoffs. For me, especially in 2020, this message is a huge success. Social media should be an opportunity for all of us to feel more connected to each other, yet primarily it feels like one of the main forces driving people apart. Why is that? Why is the internet of today such a hostile place? I'm old enough to remember web 1.0: I can haz cheezburger memes; YTMND; the early wild west days of Youtube... What happened to us? I've thrown the blame at Twitter in the past, and I think the architecture of the user experience on Twitter is absolutely a big piece of the puzzle, because it fosters negative interactions. But in terms of the behavior, people have observed that 2018 Twitter was actually almost exactly like 2014 Tumblr. (For the record, Tumblr is now one of the chillest places left on the internet, because so few fucks are left to give.)

I think part of it is the anonymity. The dehumanizing disconnection of the separation of screens and miles. Louis CK, before he was cancelled, had a great point about cyberbullying, and why it's so much more savage than kids are IRL. When you pick on someone in person and you are confronted with seeing the pain you caused them, for most sane people it causes negative feedback and you become disgusted with your actions and eventually learn to stop being a shithead. Online, at best you can "break the wrist, walk away".

At worst, you can become addicted to "clout chasing" and the psychological thrill of being cheered on by your social ingroup. It's even worse if you feel like it's not bullying and your actions are justified because whoever you've targeted is a bad person so you don't have to feel bad about what you do to them. This is where reductive, unhelpful catchphrases like "punch a nazi" come in. For every argument, one or both sides have convinced themselves that the other side is subhuman because their beliefs are so disgusting. And sometimes it's even true! A lot of times, especially these days, people really are acting like animals or worse online. Entire disinformation engines are roaring day and night, churning out garbage and cluttering the social consciousness. (Kojima talked about this bit, too, way back in MGS2. As if I wasn't already in danger of losing my thread through this.)

The human brain was not built to live like this. You can't wake up every morning, roll over and open your phone, and be immediately faced with a tidal wave of anger and indignity. It wasn't built to be aware of fully how horrible the world is at any moment ALL AT ONCE, ALL THE TIME. And you will be. Because of another way that our brain works – the way we are more likely to share negative opinions. And because of the cottage industry built on farming outrage clicks, and because of constant performative activism.

It's not that I don't agree that being informed is important.

It's not that I don't agree that the causes people get riled up about are important.

They are. They absolutely are.

But we can't keep living like this. The constant, unending flood of tragedy, arguments, and hot takes. How much of the negativity we associate with online culture is the product of this feedback loop? What if the rise of doomer culture has been, if not entirely created by, has been nourished and exacerbated by our hostile attitudes toward each other?  Incels and TERFs, white supremacists, radfems, tankies and Trumpers – it seems like on every side of every issue, there are people simultaneously getting it wrong in multiple directions at once and there are more being radicalized every day. They are the toxic waste left behind by the state of discourse. And any hill is a hill worth dying on.

So what am I actually advocating? I don't know. There are a lot of fights going on right now that are important and we can't just climb into bunkers and ignore our problems hoping that Norman Reedus and his fine ass are going to leave the shit we need on our doorsteps. We need to find the strength to carry those hypothetical packages for ourselves sometimes - and hopefully, for others as well. Humans are social creatures. We need interaction and enrichment.

We need love.

So just try to remember the connections between humanity. Try to put more good stuff into the world when you can. Share more shitposts and memes. Tell your friends and family that you love them. Share good news when you hear it. Go on a weird fucking tangent about Death Stranding. Find a way to "be excellent to each other, and party on, dudes."

[gaiapaia]

Kermit and Friends: Jesse Heiman

Jesse Heiman is a popular extra/background actor in Hollywood. He’s a guy you’ve probably seen a dozen times without realizing it, having appearances in popular films and TV shows such as American Pie, Freaky Friday, Drake & Josh, How I Met Your Mother, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Social Network... the list honestly goes on and on and on. I guarantee everyone reading this has seen something he was a part of.

Jesse’s most popular role to date is most likely a Super Bowl commercial he starred in for Go Daddy. In the commercial, Jesse had the opportunity to make out with famous Israeli supermodel Bar Rafeli. This led to Jesse getting other roles where he was able to make out with famous beauties such as Maria Menounos and Jaime Pressly. What a lucky guy!

Now Jesse has added Kermit and Friends to his amazing career! He joined the show Sunday first from his vehicle, then later in his apartment. Elisa immediately dove in with questions about Jesse’s career and what it’s like to have been in so many awesome productions and make out with so many beautiful women. Jesse happily opened up and answered all of Elisa’s questions sincerely.

One person who wasn’t impressed with Jesse’s resumé was host of the Kermit and Friends Wrap-Up Show, Laurie. Jesse complimented Laurie, telling her she resembles his look, only for Laurie to take it as a personal insult. Laurie then started dragging Jesse and his accomplishments. Oh no! Laurie would later admit she’s been in a rotten mood due to a mental breakdown she’s currently going through. Elisa tried to get Laurie to open up about it after KAF’s dashing pilot Capt. Muttley donated and asked what Laurie’s deal was, but Laurie was uninterested in doing so unfortunately. Thank you Capt for donating and trying to help... hopefully Laurie feels better next week!

Another person who treated Jesse poorly was none other than Elisa’s fiancé, Andy Dick. Jesse was clearly an Andy Dick fan from the beginning, but Andy’s first question to him was if Jesse was a male or female. After Elisa told Andy to be more polite, Andy started ranting about how he’s currently in the process of transitioning from male to female himself. The conversation was too blue for Jesse, so he dipped out until things would become more sunny later on.

Andy had some friends with him in his apartment this week. The usual suspects Lucas and Jesse Grider were there, but he was also joined by two new friends named Andre and another gentleman whose name was never given. Elisa admitted one of the benefits to being engaged to Andy is that it leads to her meeting lots of new guys, especially black guys! 

Andre and Andy seemed really close. Like really, really close... if you catch my drift. They were basically all over each other. Andre was fun though because he would burst out laughing at pretty much every joke someone said, and it was a genuine laugh, not forced. The other guy only spoke later to give some insight on the depression he’s faced throughout his life. It was actually a deep little conversation where he opened up about still living at home with his mom at 38-years-old and how he views himself as the black sheep of his family. Hopefully this nice man can turn his life around very soon.... it’s never too late to make something special of yourself and of your life.

Lucas, rocking a Vanilla Ice haircut, was extremely intoxicated to the point where he could barely function. Andy claimed Lucas took THC and even poisoned Andy with it. Wow! It was a shocking sight seeing these two interact. After Andy’s aDICKted podcast I covered last week, I thought Lucas was the violent and controlling one in their romance. However, yesterday it was Andy being very hostile and demanding towards Lucas. What an odd and toxic relationship between these two... you seriously can’t make it up.

Jesse Grider was also out of his mind yesterday, running around tasing everyone in sight. Very dangerous stuff actually, as that could easily give someone Andy’s age a heart attack, or even Lucas while he’s in the state he was in yesterday. It was Lucas who would steal the show though with a cartwheel attempt. You have to see it to believe it.

Trumpster Bob made his valiant return to Kermit and Friends after his prison stint last week. Elisa tried to get Bob to open up and describe what exactly happened that landed him in jail, but Bob instead went on and on about this weird story involving the border police from a few years ago that made absolutely no sense.

Jesse Heiman would join the show again only to get bombarded by T-Bob. Jesse was trying to explain to Elisa that his ultimate dream is for World Peace, and Jesse believes that everyone should love each other and be welcomed with opened arms in the USA. This triggered Bob into a rant about children being trafficked from Mexico and how if anyone supports open boarders, that makes them a pedophile. To Jesse’s credit, he didn’t put up with Bob’s nonsense and fired back at him, putting the old Trumper in his place. Good for Jesse!

Miranda and Hud Isaacson both returned to perform some original songs this week. Miranda had a friend with her and they sung a very fun yet vulgar song about celebrities and their anatomies. Hud would perform the same raps he did last week, only in a cooler setting with a club like atmosphere. Hud actually passed on a trip to Miami in order to perform for Kermit and Friends this week... what a guy! Johnny B would also sing a karaoke version of Brandy by Looking Glass.

Lastly, Kermit was blessed to make some new friends in Wolf and Ireland’s Pacifist. Wolf is a writer/producer friend of Jesse Heiman’s, while Ireland’s Pacifist is one of Laurie’s friends who KAF chat legend TricepBrah claims used to be known as the biggest alcoholic on the internet. That’s really saying something considering some of the drunks we’ve had in the Kermit and Friends universe... it’s tough for me to believe anyone surpasses Trumpster Bob in the alcoholic department.

This week’s show was very wild, I’m not sure if this review is giving it justice. There have now been 27 episodes of Kermit and Friends 2.0, about 330 episodes if you count the original KAF. Out of all those episodes, yesterday’s episode was perhaps the wildest of all time. If you have yet to watch it, please stop reading this and just click play.

[random2908]

Seen on Twitter, https://twitter.com/alexandraerin/status/1035196520918863873?s=21

a transcript of the tweet thread (tweets quoted within are italicized including links) since I could only otherwise find difficult-to-read screenshots:

A while back, I tweeted that in case anyone isn't clear, we are well past the "first they came for" point.

This is a big story and I'm not sure it's possible for it to get enough attention.

In some cases, passport applicants with official U.S. birth certificates are being jailed in immigration detention centers and entered into deportation proceedings.” Article: http://wapo.st/2PNIf68

I'm sure the "no need to panic" brigade would want us to point out that this affecting "only" hundreds or thousands of Latinx Americans living in a narrow region along the border.

But.

First of all, that's too many people.

Because...

Because here is the thing about due process.

Everybody gets it, or no one really has it.

And from the moment the Trump regime decided it just doesn't apply to "illegal" immigrants, we were always heading here.

Some (white) people replied to suspension of due process for non-citizens by saying "Well, I could prove my citizenship easily." But how do you do that when you're not entitled to any process to prove anything?

If we passed an amendment to the Constitution saying that Constitutional protections don't apply to waterbed repair technicians named Sleven Trusbucket, all the government would have to do is say that's you and you would be out of options for proving them wrong.

And to the sort of person who is sure that life operates on formal logic and strict proof, the sort of person who is sure if they can present the right argument just the right way they can convince anyone of the truth of anything, it feels like there must be some way around that.

But that's part of the horror of a situation like this, part of why Kafka's The Trial is so viscerally uncomfortable to read. The proof does not matter if no one is bound to accept the proof. It feels like it should. It always feels like truth should matter, proof should matter.

Now I said long ago, and again at the head of this thread, that we're past the point of "first they came for". For most of the people reading this, they're still not up to "they came for me", and probably won't be for a while. They're working to expand the ranks of "non-American"

They redefined huge swathes of undocumented immigrants -- including ones working with the system to fix their status -- as "criminals" and "gangmembers" and "animals". They slammed the door in the face of immigrants with papers, finding pretexts to call them "illegal".

They started revoking the citizenship of naturalized citizens for whatever excuse they could find, and the next step is to strip citizenship of natural born citizens who don't fit their profile of a Real American.

Right now their excuse for doing so is restricting them to people born in a border region but the excuse will widen and so will the scope of the action.

And they aren't just moving in one direction here. They've been revoking the passports of trans people while all this is happening.

Now, the flipside of revoking citizenship and "deporting" someone is: the United States cannot bestow citizenship for another country. Just because the man in the low castle thinks someone looks "Mexican" doesn't mean they default to that when they lose US citizenship.

There's been a lot of talk on Twitter about the dangers of statelessness, in regard to Canada and ending birthright citizenship (something the Trumpers would love to do if they can swing it.)

People who lose their citizenship are thrown into a legal limbo, effectively becoming unpersoned for many purposes.”

Tweet/ https://twitter.com/bashirmoham…/status/1033585831544410112… “I am shocked and disturbed that the Conservative Party of Canada voted to end birth right citizenship in Canada.

I say this as someone who was born stateless - legally without a country. I'll tell you my story and why this is move is so reckless and dangerous.”

And while nationalists whip up fear of the foreign, they hate and despise the stateless even more. They're deliberately making the "immigration crisis" worse.

Nazi apologists will be happy to tell you that the great humanitarian Hitler tried so hard to get Jewish Germans settled happily and healthily elsewhere but that no one would take them in, thus leaving him with a problem in need of a final solution.

So what's going to happen when Trump has stripped citizenship from everyone who doesn't "look American", doesn't "look like they should be voting", but there's nowhere to deport all these people, no home country for them to return to?

And maybe you're thinking that we don't have the resources to actually disenfranchise and denaturalize *everybody* who doesn't "look American" buuuut the magic of not giving due process is they don't have to.

If you knew that people whose last names are in the same language as yours are getting rounded up, stripped of rights, and arrested when they go to apply for or renew a passport... how dire would it have to be, before you'd dare try?

And then what if it expands to, say, people showing up at polling places? DMVs? Hospitals?

What if it goes on to the point where "everyone knows" that people with certain names and/or skin tones aren't really citizens and don't have to be afforded any particular rights?

Before the SCOTUS struck down sodomy laws, in a lot of states being seen as gay could be used to justify just about any level of discrimination. Gay couple needs an apartment? "We can't make landlords rent to a criminal if they don't want to." Were the couple ever convicted? No.

But ~*everybody knew*~ what gay people got up into their bedrooms was illegal, doing illegal things made you a criminal, and being a criminal was grounds for termination, eviction, expulsion, exclusion.

Or if you want to see what the future of law enforcement looks like in a fascist state, look at the standards used to arrest and prosecute sex workers.

For years now, in the land of Innocent Until Proven Guilty, you could be arrested for "suspicion" of a victimless crime because of entirely legal materials in your purse and entirely legal conduct within a place you had every legal right to be.

The actual ideal is that the cops could know you're a sex worker, could know for a certain fact that you're engaged in sex work, but if they couldn't prove it then you are an innocent in the eyes of the law. That's how it's supposed to work and how it works for some crimes.

Everyone in town can know that J. Doe up on the hill beats his wife and kids but if the cops can't prove it they will tell you nothing can be done, and proof has to be more than the fear in their eyes or bruises on their arms. Or even him "allegedly" bragging about it.

Meanwhile they'll pick people up off the street for ~*suspicion*~ of sex work and "prove" it through entirely circumstantial means, none of which points to actual lawbreaking.

Now here's the crux of that: being able to claim that any woman carrying condoms (for instance) is a sex worker doesn't mean they detain everyone and make them turn out their pockets.

It just gives them a tool, a weapon, to use when they feel like it.

And that's the future of policing. Increasingly broad rules that could apply to increasingly wide swaths of the population, that can be deployed by the authorities when someone "looks" like they might be trouble, much less starts to actually make any.

They practice these techniques on populations they think they can get away with practicing them on, and when they do get away with it, they start looking to expand.

Cf. stop and frisk in New York City, where white kids were more likely to have marijuana but less likely to be stopped and ordered to turn out their pockets. It was a tool of control.

Obviously I'm talking about practices that go back years before when Trump came to power. He's part of a progression, not the source.

And if you want to know where the progression is heading, just look at how the law has treated people on the margins since the year seventeen seventy forever.

That's where we're heading.

And I don't think enough people are alarmed enough by this.

I saw somebody QTing the Washington Post story at the head of this thread with "And Democrats want to tell us to vote every two years like that's enough."

It's not enough. But we haven't been voting every two years, and that's part of how we got here. Just part. A crucial part.

I think we should add this (specifically: stripping people near the border of citizenship) to the things we call our representatives about, especially but not only if you're in Texas. And if we can vote in a Democratic majority we'll have more tractable reps to yell at about it.

Tweet/ https://twitter.com/herhandsmyh…/status/1035206932938801152… “Plus: we have to start somewhere. Voting every single time is an essential step.”

Essential. Necessary. Not sufficient, but necessary.

A scary thing in all of this: the wave of revocation of trans passports I alluded to upthread doesn't appear to have *originated* anywhere. Select federal employees just decided it's time to start doing it.

I can't tell you from the outside which escalations of "enforcement" (to abuse the term) against immigrants and what I guess are "accused immigrants" among citizens were also spontaneous decisions made at the level at which they occur but I'm sure some of them were.

What I'm saying is, there have always been people within the federal enforcement apparatus and bureaucracy who were waiting for favorable winds to launch their warships.

Tweet/ https://twitter.com/queer_i_am/status/1035207525363200001… “Anti-homeless laws are also a really good example, especially because they target actions _everyone_ does. Pull over after working a night shift to nap and avoid an accident? Illegal.

I stopped to watch a cop once and he got in my space and threatened to take me in on loitering.”

See also: anti-loitering laws. A law against existing in space. Used to run off white kids who aren't driving business, run in anyone the cops feel like making a criminal. Not enforced against anyone ~*respectable*~, who "belongs".

With so much of this enforcement being subjective and self-directed, it is also decentralized. Which makes it harder to block or even attack.

Bank involvement in forfeiture/seizure of assets. (h/t @herhandsmyhands) This should scare you.

Tweet/https://twitter.com/sacbee_news/status/1035172325463736320… “Bank of America freezing accounts of customers suspected of not being US citizens : https://www.sacbee.com/news/business/article217567300.html

I know people are waiting for a point where it feels real, where it really feels like Nazi Germany. That point is going to be too far along to have any practical chance of stopping it.

Instead it's going to keep happening piecmeal and every time it happens, those who sound the alarm will be met with "You're overreacting, this isn't like a law against Jewish business ownership, this is only affecting a specific group of people in specific circumstances."

Relax: The monster's not eating your whole body, it's just eating one bite at a time.

The piecemeal, self-directed, subjective nature of these actions makes them harder to fight. Bank of America, the State Department, and DHS are all saying the same thing when questioned on this: "This is the same policy we've always followed." It's just being applied differently.

"We've always exercised discretion..." but now it's being exercised in different directions, towards different ends.

Someone asked what to do, besides be scared:

Make a lot of noise. If we are silent, we are complicit. If the only voices heard are those who support what's happening, they can claim universal assent.

If you work in a workplace, try telling your coworkers, "You know, they're taking citizenship away from people who live near the borders. If they can do that to anyone, they could do that to us. I don't think it's right." You don't have to make it partisan or anti-Trump.

Yell at your elected representatives. Democratic politicians should be aware that the GOP is reshaping the electorate in their favor. It's cynical, but they have to care about that.

Tweet about it, share it on social media. These things are not sufficient but they are necessary.

Vote in November. Same.

I know it feels like making noise isn't doing anything except complaining and we're taught that talk is the opposite of action but I promise you: talk is an action. When there is enough of an outcry they back down. Not all the way always. But slowing and mitigating damage helps.

[mimelord1]

Bill Maher Says Americans are Now So Tribal Weve Lost Our Ability to Mingle

Bill Maher Says Americans are Now So Tribal We’ve Lost Our Ability to Mingle https://ift.tt/JzwCVmu Bill Maher cut to the chase Friday night … calling out intolerance Americans now have for those with whom they disagree … intolerance that has led us to stop mingling with anyone who is not like-minded. The “Real Time” host said what’s simply true … lots of Americans will only f**k with people whose views align with theirs, and they just can’t believe any right-thinking person could embrace opinions contrary to theirs. Bill goes down the road with an example — Arizona’s Republican Secretary of State candidate Mark Finchem, who not only believes Trump won the 2020 election, he “can’t find anyone who voted for Joe Biden.” In other words, dude’s living in a Trump bubble, and does not associate with anyone outside of it. He literally knows no one who voted for Biden. Of course, Maher then swings to the left, and says the same is true there. His example is hilarious, so we’ll spoil it. He invited someone to a party at his house and that person declined the invite because another guest supported Trump, saying he/she wouldn’t “breathe the same air” with a Trumper. Bill said there’s a word for such people — ASSHOLES!!! The point being … we have become so tribal … both sides have fundamentally different realities, and that paves the way for hatred and contempt. As he said earlier in the show, even watching the news — especially cable news — has become downright dangerous … the “realities” portrayed on both sides are so skewed, it’s impossible for viewers to believe any sane person can have an opposing belief. That is not to say people can’t draw a line — cutting out racists, homophobes, xenophobes from their lives, but contrarians often automatically get lumped into those buckets. The post Bill Maher Says Americans are Now So Tribal We’ve Lost Our Ability to Mingle first appeared on Suave Media. Tags and categories: Uncategorized via WordPress https://ift.tt/2jmDVzA October 08, 2022 at 02:14PM

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

Democrats are almost certainly good to lose the House in 2022. They have a razor thin majority as it stands, and with the new census data come new gerrymandered districts. Republicans control a majority of state legislatures, so they have the advantage is redrawing the map. Blue states stand to lose seats, red states stand to gain, and Biden is hardly a popular president (Republicans hate him, and half of all Democrats only tolerate him because he was better than Trump, but still too moderate).

The Senate is gonna be close, and that’s where all the marbles are held. The House has no power; they can issue subpoenas but Trump showed that the president and his underlings can ignore them with no consequences. The senate controls appointments, and if the Democrats lose control of it then they’re handing Republicans even more Supreme Court justices. Trump filled hundreds of lower court seats because McConnell refused to let Obama fill them. If the Republicans take control, they will bide their time and let more and more seats become vacant, holding them hostage until a Republican takes back the White House.

Democrats face an uphill climb in the 2022 midterms, but not necessarily insurmountable. They’re defending two very vulnerable seats.

Raphael Warnock of Georgia is likely to lose his seat like Doug Jones did in Alabama; I don’t think Georgia is suddenly gonna become a solid blue state, I think 2020 was a fluke, a perfect storm of conservative failure and black turnout because the stakes couldn’t be higher. In 2022 there will be less on the line, and the Republicans in charge are more desperate than ever to prevent Democrats from maintaining control. Watch the governor, the secretary of state, and the entire legislature as they fuck people over. New voter laws, new ID requirements, fewer polling places, textbook disenfranchisement

Mark Kelly of Arizona holds John McCain and Barry Goldwater’s old seat, Arizona is still a Republican bastion, though more moderate than Georgia, so it’s gonna depend entirely on who the Republicans pick to run against him. Their last nominee was appointed by the governor, so the voters didn’t like her, but if they get to choose someone themselves in the primaries they’re probably gonna like them much more.

That said, there are a few seats they could stand to pick up.

Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania is retiring, and Pennsylvania consistently votes Democratic (except 2016, but that was because turnout was low and a lot of people voted third party), so this is the Democrats’ best chance of holding the 50-50 majority when Warnock inevitably loses. Kelly could cling on, but Warnock is as good as gone. Toomey voted to convict Trump, so the Republican nominee is almost certainly going to be a hardcore Trump supporting nutjob, so it’ll be up to the Democrats to run somebody popular against them. It’ll be an ideological referendum.

Ron Johnson of Wisconsin may or may not run again; if he does, he has an advantage as an incumbent, but Wisconsin is closer to purple than red. It consistently votes Democratic in national elections (except 2016, same as Pennsylvania), but Republicans have a strangle hold on the state and local races. They control the legislature and the state Supreme Court, and are desperate not to lose any more ground. They’re gonna gerrymander the hell out of the House seats and try to disenfranchise as many Democrats are possible, so this one will be a tough egg to crack.

Richard Burr of North Carolina is retiring, and like Toomey he too voted to convict. The Republican nominee will be a trumper, and Democrats haven’t fared well in NC since 2008, so this will be more of a treat of it flipped; they shouldn’t expect it to happen, but it’d be nice if it did. There’s no Stacey Abrams-like figure in NC to help the Democrats though, so I’m not holding my breath.

Rob Portman of Ohio is retiring, and while Ohio has historically been a solid purple bellweather state, it is leaning more and more to the right as years go by. Because neither party is running an incumbent, I give Republicans 60-40 odds of holding this seat. I figure this is more likely than NC, but again it’ll depend on the Democrats running somebody popular.

And that’s pretty much it. Iowa is too red; I thought that moderate Biden would be enough to flip it blue in 2020, to no avail. Florida is even redder; like Ohio, it used to be a bellweather, but now it’s a conservative stronghold. I don’t see the Democrats winning Florida again for a very long time; 2018 was their best bet, and they came close, but Bill Nelson lost handily to Prick Scott, and Andrew Gillum came up short against Ron DeSantis (in no small part because black people were disenfranchised and Cubans are the only consistently conservative Hispanics in the countey). Gillum may very well have won, they stopped counting votes and mysteriously “found” a box of uncounted ballots after DeSantis was declared the winner, so we’ll never know. He’s lost all credibility though after he got depressed and went on a coke bender. There’s no other Democrat as popular as he was, so we don’t stand a chance against Marco Rubio.

I figure a trade between Georgia and Pennsylvania is the best bet Democrats have at holding the line. 50-50 is too close for comfort, but I can’t possibly see them increasing their majority. 2018 and 2020 saw increased turnout because Trump was historically unpopular, but now that he’s “gone,” I think Democrats are losing momentum.

They’ve been in the revenge business so long, now that it’s over, they don’t know what to do with the rest of their lives.

[itsfinancethings]

New story in Politics from Time: Revenge of the Never Trumpers: Meet the Republican Dissidents Fighting to Push Donald Trump Out of Office

Jack Spielman has been a Republican his whole life. But over the past four years, he has come to two realizations.

Increasingly upset by President Donald Trump’s “appalling” behavior, his cozy relationships with dictators and the ballooning national debt, Spielman says his first epiphany was that he couldn’t cast a ballot for Trump again. But for the retired Army cybersecurity engineer, the final straw was the President’s retaliation against impeachment witness Lieut. Colonel Alexander Vindman, who retired in July after Trump fired him from the National Security Council in February. Spielman decided he had to do more than just vote for presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden; he had to persuade others to do the same. So Spielman filmed a video for a group called Republican Voters Against Trump (RVAT), explaining his views. “I want to do some part,” Spielman tells TIME, “to try to correct the wrong that I did in voting for this man.”

RVAT, which launched in May, is among a growing number of Republicanled groups dedicated to making Trump a one-term President. Since December, longtime GOP operatives and officials have formed at least five political committees designed to urge disaffected conservatives to vote for Biden. The best known of these groups, the Lincoln Project, has since forming late last year gained national attention for its slick advertisements trolling the President. Right Side PAC, led by the former chair of the Ohio Republican Party, launched in late June; a few days after that, more than 200 alumni of George W. Bush’s Administration banded together to form an organization called 43 Alumni for Biden. There’s also the Bravery Project, led by former GOP Congressman and erstwhile Trump primary challenger Joe Walsh. And plans are in the works for a group of former national-security officials from Republican administrations to endorse Biden this summer.

Since 2015, pockets of the party have bemoaned Trump’s Twitter antics, his divisive rhetoric and key elements of his platform, from the Muslim travel ban to his trade tariffs to his family-separation policy at the U.S.-Mexico border. But with the President’s approval rating in the party consistently around 90%, and GOP lawmakers terrified to cross him, the so-called Never Trump faction has proven largely powerless, with a negligible impact on federal policy.

Now, in the final stretch of the President’s term, the Never Trumpers could finally have their revenge. Four years ago, Trump won the Electoral College by some 77,000 votes scattered across Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. If even a small slice of disillusioned Trump voters or right-leaning independents defect to Biden in November, it could be enough to kick Trump out of office. “They are the constituency that can swing this election,” says Sarah Longwell, a longtime Republican operative and founder of RVAT.

This constituency now appears more willing to vote for Biden than they were six months ago, in no small part because of Trump’s faltering response to the corona-virus, which has killed more than 140,000 Americans and ravaged the economy. Between March and June, according to a Pew Research poll, Trump’s approval rating among Republicans and Republican-leaning voters dropped seven percentage points, to 78%. A June 25 New York Times/Siena College survey found that Biden has a 35-point lead over Trump among voters in battleground states who supported a third-party candidate in 2016. “Any small percentage of voters who no longer support him could be critical in closely matched swing states,” says Republican pollster Whit Ayres.

It’s too early to gauge how effective the raft of Never Trump groups will be. They’re dismissed by many Republicans as self-serving opportunists profiting off the polarization Trump has exacerbated. Trump also remains hugely popular among Republicans. “President Trump is the leader of a united Republican Party where he has earned 94% of Republican votes during the primaries–something any former President of any party could only dream of,” says campaign spokes-woman Erin Perrine.

Even if the Never Trump activists are able to help oust the President, it’s unclear what will become of a party that’s vastly different from the one they came up in. Trump has transformed today’s GOP into a cult of personality rooted in economic nationalism and racial division. And while the small anti-Trump faction wants to return to the conservative ideology that reigned for decades before Trump, many Republicans believe Trump has changed the party forever.

Sitting in front of a packed book-case, Rick Wilson looked surprised as he peered over hornrimmed spectacles at an overflowing screen: “There’s 10,000 people on here,” the onetime Republican operative marveled of the Zoom audience assembled for the Lincoln Project’s first town hall on July 9.

Grant Lancaster—AM New YorkThe Lincoln Project’s ads criticizing the President’s performance have helped it raise nearly $20 million

Wilson formed the Lincoln Project in December, along with lawyer George Conway, the husband of Trump’s senior adviser Kellyanne Conway, and veteran political strategists Steve Schmidt and John Weaver, among others. The Republican stalwarts had grown disgusted with the President’s behavior and their party’s acquiescence to it. The launch met little fanfare, but in the months since, the group has demonstrated a knack for quickly producing memorable videos and advertisements that get under Trump’s skin. In early May, with the unemployment rate soaring toward 15%, the group released an ad dubbed “Mourning in America,” a play on the upbeat Ronald Reagan classic, which depicted the woes of sick and unemployed Americans under Trump’s leadership. “If we have another four years like this,” the ad’s narrator intones as dead patients are wheeled out of hospitals on stretchers, “will there even be an America?” The President took notice. “Their so-called Lincoln Project is a disgrace to Honest Abe!” Trump tweeted. “I don’t know what Kellyanne did to her deranged loser of a husband, Moonface, but it must have been really bad.”

Irritating the President is part of the point. “It’s not trolling if you get a fish in the line,” says Reed Galen, a veteran of George W. Bush’s presidential campaigns and one of the project’s co-founders. “We kept dropping a hook in the water, and eventually the President bit.” The attention has been a boon to the group’s finances. The Lincoln Project raised nearly $17 million between April 1 and June 30.

If the Lincoln Project tries to needle the President, other groups in the Never Trump ecosystem have found complementary roles. Instead of using polished editing and ominous music to make a splash online, RVAT has gathered more than 400 testimonials from disheartened Republicans like Spielman. “I did only vote for Donald Trump because I couldn’t believe someone who acted as goofy as he did on TV actually meant it,” Monica, a self-described evangelical Christian from Texas, says in one video. “Since that time, I have been riddled with guilt.”

Longwell, RVAT’s founder, believes hearing from people like Monica will show waffling conservatives that they’re not alone in their dislike of the President, and encourage them to break away. “The thing that people trusted wasn’t elites, it wasn’t Republican elites, it certainly wasn’t the media,” Longwell says of her focus-group research. “But they did trust people like them.” The group says it plans to showcase those voices in an eight-figure ad campaign in five swing states before Election Day.

RVAT identified recalcitrant Republicans through email lists Longwell had built at Defending Democracy Together, its parent organization. Founded in 2019, Defending Democracy Together created online petitions whose signatories often offered clues of their disillusionment with Trump. Petitions supporting Vindman and thanking Utah Senator Mitt Romney for voting to convict Trump of abuse of power during the impeachment trial proved especially fruitful in finding former Trump supporters, according to Tim Miller, RVAT’s political director and a veteran Republican communications strategist.

To test new video messages, Longwell held a Zoom focus group on July 15 with seven Florida voters and allowed TIME to watch. Each participant voted for Trump in 2016 but was now dissatisfied with his leadership. Several mentioned his handling of COVID-19 in the meeting, noting Florida’s dramatic spike in cases. Long-well showed the group a few of RVAT’s testimonials. “It resonates with me,” one woman who works in the travel industry in Orlando said. “It does make me feel less alone.” But while three people on the call said they’d likely vote for Biden, two said they were unsure and two said they would still vote for Trump again. “I don’t think there’s any hope for him,” the Orlando woman said. “But I don’t see Biden doing a good job either.”

Matt Borges of Right Side PAC recognizes that Republican voters’ uncertainty about Biden needs to be addressed. As the former chair of the Ohio Republican Party watched Never Trump groups roll out advertisements, he worried there was too much focus on why Trump was bad and not enough on why Biden was a good alternative. “We need these people who know they are not [going to] vote for Trump but are not sold on Joe Biden to hear some messaging from fellow Republicans that says, ‘No, it’s O.K. to vote for this guy,'” says Borges, a lifelong Republican who disavowed Trump three years ago. In an unrelated development, Borges was arrested on July 21 for allegedly participating in a $60 million bribery scheme involving top political officials that the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio decried as the biggest money-laundering effort in the state’s history.

In June, Borges teamed up with former Trump communications director Anthony Scaramucci to form Right Side PAC, which plans to spend up to $7 million targeting these voters through mailings, digital ads and phone banks. Their first focus is Michigan, where Borges commissioned a pollster to conduct research on Republican voters in swing districts. After spending more than a week in the field, the pollster delivered the results to Borges and Scaramucci on a Zoom call, which TIME observed. Support for Trump among Republican voters in Michigan’s Eighth Congressional District had dropped from 80% in January to 67%, the pollster said. The district had swung for Trump in 2016, then voted for a Democratic Congresswoman, Elissa Slotkin, two years later. Voters who ranked the coronavirus as their top concern were seen as more likely to break for Biden. While the group had planned to target all white Republican women over the age of 50 in Michigan, the pollster said the data suggested those over 65 were immovable in their support for Trump. These insights, Borges says, will form the basis of Right Side PAC’s “final sale” to voters on Biden’s behalf.

As the presidential race heads into its final months, another group of Republicans aims to help Biden in a different way. A group of more than 70 former national-security officials from GOP administrations, led by John Bellinger, the senior National Security Council and State Department lawyer under George W. Bush, and Ken Wainstein, Bush’s Homeland Security Adviser, plans to endorse Biden and publish a mission statement describing the damage they say Trump has done to America’s national security and global reputation. They will also fund-raise for the former Vice President and do media appearances in battleground states when the group launches later this summer. Some of the same people wrote an open letter denouncing Trump in 2016. But, says Wainstein, “our effort this time is going to have some staying power throughout the campaign.”

How much impact these groups will ultimately have on voters remains unclear. As they try to unseat an incumbent with a massive war chest, their first hurdle is money. Right Side PAC raised just over $124,000 in the first two weeks, disclosure filings show. The bulk of that haul came from one person, New York venture capitalist Peter Kellner, a long-time Republican donor who began giving to Democrats in 2018 and who has forked over the maximum amount to Biden’s campaign, according to Federal Election Commission filings. The group’s prospects were also clouded by Borges’ July 21 arrest. Borges did not respond to requests for comment.

43 Alumni for Biden, the group of former George W. Bush officials, announced its formation on July 1, which means it doesn’t have to file disclosure reports until October; had it announced a day earlier, it would have had to publicize its finances in mid-July. A member of the group declined to provide specific figures but said it had received contributions from more than 500 individuals. The Bravery Project officially launches July 23, and a representative declined to provide any fundraising figures.

Longwell tells TIME that RVAT has raised $13 million this year. As a 501(c)4, or political nonprofit, the group does not need to disclose its donors or exact figures. But the number she provides puts the group on par with the Lincoln Project, whose biggest donors are primarily prominent Democrats. While disclosure filings show that nearly half of the Lincoln Project’s donations were “unitemized” or under $200, it raked in $1 million from billionaire hedge-fund manager Stephen Mandel and $100,000 apiece from business mogul David Geffen and Joshua Bekenstein, the co-chairman of Bain Capital.

This influx of cash has enabled the Lincoln Project to ramp up advertisements against vulnerable Republican Senators like Susan Collins of Maine, Cory Gardner of Colorado and Steve Daines of Montana. “We made it very clear that this is not just about Trump but Trumpism and its enablers,” says Galen. “The Republican Senators we have held to account are the President’s greatest enablers.”

The strategy of going after Senators has provoked the ire of many Republicans, who say the group is prioritizing profit over party. “It’s purely grifting and making a name for themselves. It’s not based on principle at all,” says Matt Gorman, a Republican strategist who worked for Jeb Bush’s and Romney’s presidential campaigns. The Lincoln Project, he says, “is essentially meant for raising money off the resistance and lining their own pockets.”

The group’s finances have also raised some eyebrows among government watchdogs. Two consulting firms, one run by Galen and another by co-founder Ron Steslow, received nearly a quarter of the $8.6 million the group spent between January and July. While other committees use similar methods, it is “not at all standard,” says Sheila Krumholz, executive director at the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. “It raises red flags about whether the operation is taking advantage of a situation where donors are giving to what they think is supporting one effort, but there are other patterns at play.”

Krumholz notes that the Lincoln Project does not publicly disclose all of the vendors who have done work for them, which suggests they are funneling money to organizations that then hire subcontractors. This method is not unheard-of, but the lack of transparency makes it difficult to discern who is ultimately profiting. “The public doesn’t know the extent to which Lincoln Project operatives may be profiting, or if they’re profiting at all,” Krumholz says. When asked about the group’s finances, Galen says, “We abide by all reporting requirements laid down by the FEC. No one at the Lincoln Project is buying a Ferrari.”

For now, the Never Trump Republicans say they aren’t looking beyond November. “We’re all in a grand alliance to beat a very big threat,” says Miller of RVAT. “We’ll see how the chips fall after.” But regardless of the election’s outcome, Miller and his cohorts face challenges ahead. They will either be failed rebels, cast out by a party taken over by its two-term President, or facing down a Biden Administration, which would bring unwelcome liberal policies and perhaps Supreme Court vacancies.

If Biden wins, Trumpism won’t disappear with Trump. The President’s rapid rise revealed the extent to which many of the ideological pillars of modern conservatism–its zeal for unfettered free markets, its devotion to deficit reduction, its attachment to global alliances, its faith in a muscular foreign policy–were out of step with actual Republican voters. Many of the ambitious lawmakers rising in the party, like Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, have seen in Trump’s political success an example to emulate. The next generation of Republican leaders may try to replicate his policies without the self-defeating behavior.

It’s led many to wonder whether traditional conservatives will have a home in the GOP after Trump is gone. “There is a growing feeling that we need to burn the whole house down to purify the party of Trump enablers in the Congress,” says a former White House official in George W. Bush’s Administration. Some see the prospect of a rupture, with disaffected Republicans cleaving off and either forming a new party or making a tenuous peace with the moderate wing of the Democratic Party. “There’s a very real possibility … that the party will split,” says Richard Burt, former ambassador to Germany under President Reagan.

The modern Republican Party was always an uneasy alliance in some ways, with fiscal conservatives, religious conservatives and neoconservatives jostling for influence, and a white working-class base voting for policies that often favored the wealthy. Steven Teles, co-author of Never Trump: The Revolt of the Conservative Elites, envisions a Republican Party in which Trumpism dominates but the dissenters make up a vocal resistance faction. “I don’t think anyone is going to have control of the Republican Party the way we’ve seen in the past,” he says.

The irony of the Never Trumper activists is that while they are encouraging Republicans to vote Democratic for the first time in their lives, that is bringing some Republicans back into the party by creating a community of the disaffected. Spielman, the retired Army cybersecurity engineer, had become so disenchanted with Trump that he turned his back on the party altogether, voting for Democrats in Michigan’s 2020 primaries. But the Never Trump groups are “giving me hope that there are still some people out there with some decency that want to go back and save the party,” Spielman says. “It’s allowed me to come back and say, Yeah, I’m a Republican. I’m not leaving the party, but I want to fight for what’s right for the party.”

With reporting by Leslie Dickstein, Mariah Espada, and Josh Rosenberg

from Blogger https://ift.tt/39jUbqm via IFTTT

[toldnews-blog]

New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/politics/watch-trump-united-the-opposition-and-divided-gop-with-emergency-move-matthew-dowd/

WATCH: Trump 'united the opposition and divided' GOP with emergency move: Matthew Dowd

Transcript for Trump ‘united the opposition and divided’ GOP with emergency move: Matthew Dowd

And the round table is here ready to take on the week. ABC news political analyst Matthew dowd, Molly ball, national political correspondent for “Time” magazine, chief congressional correspondent for “The Washington examiner,” and the Washington bureau chief for “Vice” news. Welcome to all of you on this Sunday morning. Matthew, I’ll start with you. You heard the arguments from both sides on this national emergency. So what’s the political impact here? Who are the winners and losers? Well, as you listen to all this and you kept hearing, ignore all the facts and pay attention to what you might feel in this. Of course, that’s where the president is on this. I think the president, you normally — presidents if they do something in the country, they usually want to unite their party and divide the opposition. What the president just did was unite the opposition and divided his own party in the midst of it. There is a question of whether or not we should explore changing the way presidents do this, which I believe we need to do. There has been much too much movement to an imperial presidency in the country, including the war powers of the president and the decisions that have been made, and every president for the last 50 years has made more and more steps. It’s a big step, and it’s a political loser for the president because he hasn’t defined the problem in a way Americans understand and a majority of Americans one, are opposed to the wall and two, are opposed to executive action. Many are worried about the constitutionality of this, and many have not opposed the president on anything. We have a couple of names of people who will. Will this time be different in a bigger way? It’s a real question of whether it will. We have seen Republicans quietly begin to defy the president, particularly on foreign policy in the senate. There have been a number of votes taken that have gone against the president on the Saudis, on Syria and so, you know, but they haven’t wanted to defy him openly, and particularly not on his signature issue. So while you do hear Republican senators publicly and privately voicing their discomfort with this mood, whether they will actually do anything, number one is in question, and number two, it’s a really big moment for the party because if there is a point where president trump begins to lose his hold on the Republicans in the senate, there is really a lot of other things that could happen that could be damaging for him. The president says this isn’t about the 2020 race, but it sure seems to be about the 2020 race when you are talking about campaign promises. Yes. How will he fare with his base do you believe? That’s a great question. Where will we be on the wall by the time he’s out there running? Can he say, look we’re already building parts of the wall? $4.5 billion of the $8 billion is outside the sphere of the national emergency. It is less subjected to a rigorous court challenge that the drug interdiction money, that is harder to challenge in court. Not impossible. He can get going with some of that wall building with targeted areas along the border where there is drug smuggling happening, and he can say, look. We’re building the wall. We’re making progress. We’re doing what the border security professionals want us to do to stop some of the migration over the border and try to cut down on 50,000 illegal immigrants a month being intercepted at the border right now. That’s a pretty big number. So he can talk about that while he’s campaigning even though the national emergency money we’re talking about, the $3.6 billion, that will be held up in court a little more easily. And this was such a huge issue in 2016. The wall, the wall, the wall, the wall. So that does seem like it’s going to carry right into the 2020 race, and this is part of it. Well, this takes that entire argument out of congress and it puts it in the courts but also in the political realm of 2020, and I disagree. I don’t think this is totally a political loser for the president because while he is using some of that money you were talking about if he is able to use it, he can also say, look. The Democrats are challenging me in court. They are obstructing me. They aren’t allowing me to be able to finish the wall, and so then you have the same kind of thing that genned upped his base. He continues to be able to play on that. And the fear factor which worked for him very well. Exactly, but the 2020 Democrats also get to say, look. We are trying to stop the president. They both get to use this as a political target. The problem the president has and he has had since inauguration day is the president is not appealing to enough voters in the country to win a general election in 2020. Absent some crazy thing happening obvious parties and all that. He doesn’t appeal to them, and the problem with the wall is first of all, he broke the promise. He promised he was going to build the wall — Mexico. That, yeah. If he stated in 2016, I want to build a wall and you Americans are going to pay for it, and by the way, we’re going to take money from defense and put it in the wall, that wouldn’t have gone over well, and the other thing people keep saying is, all his voters voted for him because of the wall. That’s fundamentally not true. The reason why Donald Trump won the election in 2016 wasn’t because of the wall. It was because he was not Hillary Clinton, and his campaign was primarily about, don’t vote for her. Vote for me. Part of that was build the wall. When you go and talk to voters, part of that is true. There were a lot of voters out there who said, I don’t want to vote for Hillary Clintons but there is a lot of voters out there and his base who said they would vote for Donald Trump no matter who the opposition is. Of course. Every president has a political base. There is a segment of the country. The question is whether it’s a majority, and the wall is not a popular idea with the majority of the American public consistently in poll after poll. It gets about 40%. You can’t win a two-way presidential election with 40%, but the natimergency is even more unpopular. Only about 30% support that, and that tells you that there are — number one, there are — a lot of people who voted for Donald Trump who don’t think this national emergency is a good idea. There are even people out here who like the idea of the wall, who don’t think the president should be taking this step in order to achieve it. So it is a little bit befuddling to do in order to advance a popular goal. I want to go further on 2020, and the Republicans. You just heard bill weld and what he has in mind. Is he a serious contender or does he — is he really just trying to weaken him in the general election? Well, you made a very good point when you were doing the interview. You can weaken the general election candidate by primarying him. That’s what the republty wants to avoid. They don’t want him weakened by someone constantly attacking him from his own party. That’s a really good point, but, you know, I don’t think it’s necessarily realistic that bill weld has a chance to become the nominee even though you can say, well. There are a lot of never trumpers in the Republican party. The base of the party if you look at polls is behind him. He has got very high ratings. If you look at the poll, Republicans like him as a president. They are getting behind him, so I don’t see a primary challenger being very realistic right now. Let’s be even more realistic.resident of the united States. It is really, really hard to beat the incumbent president of the United States in a primary especially, and even in a general to a certain extent though this president has specific characteristics that might make it a little bit easier depending on which Democrat comes up. The only thing that it does really is it would weaken the presidency, and you have to remember this president has been running for re-election since 2017. Literally he filed I believe the day after the inauguration. They have been raising money. They have raised — last year, it was $100 million I believe, 2017 and 2018. He doesn’t have that much on hand. All bill weld can really do is try to make them spend that money on each other instead of said. ING it on Democrats and I think they will still be spending it on Democrats. I think bill weld is a smart political move. There is enough Democrats in the primary that he’ll get 22% of the vote. Very narrow path, but it’s actually a wider path than Howard Schultz winning the presidency at this time, bill weld beating Donald Trump in this, but the main thing is he presents an argument for a lot of Republicans that defines the Republican party in a certain way that’s not Donald Trump, and I think there is a lot of Republicans in the aftermath of Donald Trump that are worried about who is the Republican party. What do we fundamentally stand for and what are we going to do? I think bill weld will get in a position and have a high enough percentage of the vote that people will start pressuring Donald Trump to debate him. He’ll get a high enough percentage and that would be, to me, a fundamentally interesting to debate to watch bill weld and Donald Trump one-on-one on stage. We would all watch that. I want to move to the Democrats. We have got a large field, but we also have some who aren’t announced who are some pretty big names. Bernie Sanders, Joe N, Beto O’rourke. Can any of those take command of the race? It is wide open at this point, and that is what makes this unusual. Ten candidates already announced. As man0 candidates depending on the list you look at who are still deciding. That would — if even half of those get in, it will be the largest primary field in the history of primaries, and it’s the first time probably since 1988 that there has been no clear front runner. There isn’t — there isn’t a Clinton in the race, and, you know, the Clintons haven’t always won the democratic primaries they have entered, but not to have a perceived front runner is really extraordinary. It’s going to be a free for all. I have been out on the trail talking to democratic primary voters recently in Iowa and South Carolina and they’re really keeping their options open. They are kicking a lot of tires. They want to see these candidates perform and the most important thing they’re looking for is someone they believe can beat Donald Trump. That’s by far the most important. And the DNC, speaking of performance, the DNC announcer criteria for making it onto the stage for primary debates, it is an incredibly low bar, about if you get 1% of the vote in certain polls, certain reputable polls or some fund-raising abilities. How critical will these debates be, and especially if you have such a huge number of people in the debate? I think those first few debates, it will — you will be able to have a moment if you are one of these people. If you try to put yourself out there for the — for America basically, and if it gets divided into a couple of different debates, which I know the DNC was requiring, you have to do two nights for those couple of debates. Unless you’re going to do a four-hour debate, there is only so much you can do. Part of the thing that will be striking is that there will be so many women on stage. I think how people present themselves with their first couple of words is about — is about all they are going to get out of this. You take your moment and shot and see what happens. Ten seconds we have left here. The most interesting thing about this is the two front runners, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden haven’t announced yet and they’re leading in the polls by ten points. Once they get in, it’s going to be very interesting to see how the polls shake out. I think Biden will command the lead if he joins. Immediately. Also a great prism of America because you will have a lot of women on stage and more people of color running for president than ever before. I think America is going to see a very diverse number of candidates running for president. Okay. Thanks to all of you for joining us this morning.

This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.

[anexplanationofunfortunateevents]

Misinformation and Disinformation 101

To illustrate the distinction between misinformation and disinformation, we’ll use the late, great Roger Ebert’s opinion of The Hangover, Part II. In reality, Ebert gave this movie two stars and included the review in A Horrible Experience of Unbearable Length: More Movies That Suck. 

Misinformation: In passing conversation, your friend says, “Roger Ebert loved The Hangover, Part II.” This isn’t correct, so it’s misinformation. This doesn’t tell you anything about intention, though. Your friend could have confused one Ebert review with another, or be repeating something that they heard from what they thought was a reliable source.

Disinformation: Warner Brothers puts this out as a press statement:

Critics loved The Hangover, Part II! Here’s Roger Ebert:

“'The Hangover, Part II' plays like a challenge to the audience's capacity for raunchiness. It gets laughs …..There's a wedding toast that deserves some sort of award for deliberate social embarrassment….I wonder if there will be an unrated director's cut. The sequel repeats the...miracle of the first film...”

This is grossly disingenuous, even if there’s nothing you can point to as an outright “up is down” untruth. Did “critics” love The Hangover, Part II? Well, in the whole universe of critics who may or may not have seen the movie, you could probably find two or more of them who enjoyed it; in any event, you can’t prove a negative. It implies – but does not outright state – that Roger Ebert is representative of those hypothetical critics who loved the movie, even though he did not. And the quotes attributed to him do, in fact, appear in the review. Unlike your friend’s statement, there’s no question about the intent here: cherry-picking lines from the review requires reading the review, and the review is unambiguously critical of the movie. It’s a lie spun out of facts.

But the point of a press release isn’t to persuade you. It’s to communicate with the press. So now imagine that instead of your friend saying “Roger Ebert loved this movie,” it’s a writer in the arts section in your local paper, who saw the Warner Brothers press release but didn’t bother checking the original review. They didn’t consciously mean to deceive, but they were grossly negligent: someone who writes about the arts would be familiar enough with Ebert’s opinions that this claim should’ve smelled off, but they didn’t bother to check it out, despite how easy it is to find the original review. Their intentions wouldn’t matter to the impact they’d have on your decision if you picked this to watch on movie night. Now you’re annoyed and disappointed, because you spent time and money on something that was supposed to be more fun than it was.

Now imagine that Warner Brothers does this with every movie it puts out, and your local paper falls for it every time. Unless you’re a movie buff, you probably don’t care enough about who produces movies to notice a pattern in which reviews are credible. You just go to the movie that sounds best – and a movie that’s dishonestly but enthusiastically sold is going to sound more enticing than a good movie that a studio wanted to advertise accurately without giving away the plot. You’re going to be disappointed with the next few movies you see. You’re not going to bother with movie reviews generally, since the ones you’ve seen didn’t match your experience. You’re going to start thinking, quite unfairly, that Roger Ebert is overrated. You might like movies less overall, because you’re disproportionately seeing crappy ones, or you might just develop a taste for bad ones.

That is a disinformation campaign.

(To be clear: you’d also refer to classic double agent stuff as “disinformation,” and that kind of tactic, while sneaky, isn’t necessarily sinister. I’m going to focus on how a disinformation campaign against the public works because that’s what you need to know. If you’re someone who needs to know about spy-vs-spy disinformation tactics, you’re learning about them from people who are way above my pay grade.)

This is closely related to the phenomenon people were trying to define as “fake news” until the Trumpers did their Orwellian jujitsu and started defining “fake news” as “accurate reporting that makes Trump look especially bad.” Disinformation can include misinformation, but doesn’t necessarily depend on it. The more verifiable facts disinformation includes, the more effective it can be. If you try to fact-check one storyline of a disinformation campaign and parts of it are verified, this might get you to assume that the rest of it is true – or it might make you doubt the credibility of the resources which seem to corroborate some aspects of the overall fishy story. Some specific lies attempt to convince people of something favorable to the perpetrators’ interests, but that’s tactical and sometimes even incidental. The overall strategic objective of a disinformation campaign against the public is to make people give up on trying to know the truth. Basically, it’s mass-produced gaslighting.

A disinformation campaign is insidious for reasons that are obvious, and for reasons that are not. It’s relatively straightforward that someone might read an incorrect article and come away with an incorrect understanding of the facts. More elusive, though, is the way in which it can control the background noise until it distorts the way large groups of people understand the world around them. Background noise matters. Imagine if you went to a yoga class and there are a couple of people in the back row making obnoxious comments and snickering the whole time. You probably wouldn’t hear every judgy thing that they said. But you’d hear enough to know that they were being mean, and even when you don’t know exactly what they’re saying you wouldn’t be able to forget that they’re there.

You don’t have to purchase a copy of the National Enquirer and read it cover-to-cover in order to be affected by their pro-Trump bias. In fact, actually reading it might mess with your perception less in some ways, because it would be hard to miss how bonkers it is. They’re still sitting right in the corner of your eye whenever you’re standing in line at the grocery store, blaring “HILLARY [MISOGYNISTIC TROPE] SHOCKER!!!” headlines that prime your subconscious to absorb a certain narrative.

And that’s just about the paper, which has to be printed, shipped, and stocked. Now think about what can happen on your Facebook feed. The internet didn’t create this problem, but it did allow disinformation tactics to become exponentially more effective.

“Disinformation” is a relatively new word in the English language. It’s a 1980s Anglicization of a Russian word, transliterated as dezinformatsiya, which describes the Big Brother-style head trips perpetrated by the Soviet Union’s intelligence agency (the KGB, now called the FSB). If you see the Russian word, or “deza” for short, used in conversation about current events, it usually means that the person wants to emphasize specifically the Russian intervention into American politics and to contextualize it with the similar ongoing assaults on European democracies.  

That isn’t to say the Russians are the only perpetrators of disinformation campaigns. Climate change denialism is another example of a dangerously successful disinformation campaign.

There are people with a lot more expertise who are thinking about how to deal with this, but my personal approach has been to take another page from the Russians’ book: trust, but verify. It’s as important to think critically about every allegation you see online as it is to retain your ability to believe things that do hold up logically. Prepare yourself to accept things that are shocking, but don’t actually believe them until you see them in a couple of reliable sources. Be skeptical, but not denialist. Easier said than done, of course, but being conscientious enough to make the effort will put you ahead of a lot of pros.

That’s the basic concept, which understandably gets buried in the jumbled and still largely unknown narrative of the hacking of the 2016 election. Understanding the process that’s one of the major through-lines is helpful.

Further Reading

Deeper dive: a couple of articles which were written before 2016, so they’re not shaped by the specific conversation we’re having now.

Russia and the Menace of Unreality

The Kremlin’s Troll Army

Down the rabbit hole: Tons of books about this, but I do want to specifically recommend The Plot to Hack America by Malcolm Nance, which was written in early 2016 and turned out to be uncannily prescient. It’s written by a former spy for the general population, so it walks you through how all this was accomplished and clarifies a lot of the language and shorthand you’ll hear from people who are talking about the issue.

[top-tennis]

I saw someone ask tenniscourtship this and I'm really curious about yours now - if you had to name the tennis players you love, and the tennis players you don't love, who makes the list?

omg you’ve put me on the spot bb. by ‘don’t love’ do you mean just feel ‘meh’ about or ‘hate’? 

as for love:

rafa -  KING

venus - QUEEN

serena  - GOAT

svetlana kuznetsova - MY WIFE basically

dominika cibulkova - MY POCKET ROCKET

nick kyrgios - My problematic son

dasha gavrilova - My fellow aussie gal who never gives up and always plays dramatic 3 setters

angie kerber - THE GIRL WHO TRIED AND TRIED AND FINALLY MADE IT OUT OF SHEER WILL AND HARD WORK (last yr)

naomi osaka - my kid sister who was raised by the internet

both pliskovas - karolina is ice cold, kristyna is straight up fire, plus i have a weakness for lefties

andy murray - angst central, male feminist

daria kasatkina - i watched her live and she fought so hard. i rly hope her season picks up

elina svitolina - her game is sooo good. she hits everything down the line i stg - like a female rightie rafa down to the shitty second serve

Andrea petkovic - um. she’s cute and funny, and a great girlfriend to angie

All my australian children that i support unconditionally (except bernard tomic probably - but that is changing too!) - jordan thompson, alex de minaur, sam stosur, ajla, etc etc

Anastasija Sevastova - her game is… well, not that great.. but she’s very cute and i’m in love with her. and she can play exciting tennis! i can’t explain it!

Monica Puig - she’s all heart and a bag of nerves and sometimes she goes on a hot streak and wins olympic gold. and she’s beautiful

Gael Monfils - He’s hilarious and lovely and charismatic as fuck. I wish he could win a major

Tsonga - the game is amazing, he is beautiful, again, wish he would win a major

Grigor Dimitrov - he’s finding his way back to awesome form

i admire but don’t rly love:

roger federer - he’s too successful and perfect! i can’t support ppl like that- it’s not painful enough for my masochistic ass! also he’s close friends with trump supporters (e.g. tommy haas) and it’s suspect. whenever he is cute about rafa i love him really

coco vanderweghe - she’s a trumper shit but her game is rly entertaining to watch

vika - the owl, serena and her matches are a+ tho

stan wawrinka - asshole who wants to fight everybody and preyed on his gf since she was a child - but his game is fire

novak djokovic - he got anger issues and cannot pretend to sound magnanimous, but i do like his game. and the more troubled his season becomes the more i am endeared to him, because rafa has been there

kei nishikori - i hate his game but his fans are rly cute, and he has great reaction gifs

garbine muguruza -  her personality is blah but her game is great to watch

Frances Tiafoe - i want big things for him - he’s wonderful and his game is soo good - but he hasn’t done enough yet

Delpo - delpo is lovely but delpo is frustrating to watch

simona halep - rly cute but again, frustrating to watch

hate - 

all the american trump supporting men who are servebots with boring games 

sharapova - the way she’s handled herself in the last yr or so has left a rly bitter taste in my tongue

Stakovsky - homophobic, misogynistic cunt. how is the ATP calling itself standing for equality when this guy is still on the players council? LOL

the list goes on…..

[45news]

LOS ANGELES -- The crowd was buzzing with Hollywood types -- actress Patricia Arquette, producer Norman Lear -- at a private film screening on Sunset Boulevard one recent Sunday afternoon. But here in liberal America, the biggest celebrity in the room was not someone who makes a living in what people call "the industry."It was Rep. Adam Schiff, the straight-laced former federal prosecutor who was on the brink of prosecuting his biggest defendant yet: President Donald Trump.These are heady but perilous days for Schiff, the inscrutable and slightly nerdy chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who is leading the impeachment inquiry into Trump. Adored by the left, reviled by the right, he has become a Rorschach test for U.S. politics. Depending on one's point of view, he is either going to save the republic or destroy it.Here in his home district, at the screening of "The Great Hack," a film about misinformation in the 2016 election, Lear introduced Schiff as a "current American hero." As the audience leapt to its feet in a standing ovation, the congressman emerged from backstage in standard Washington uniform -- navy blazer, white shirt, light blue tie -- his manner as inoffensive as his attire."We thank them for their patriotism," Schiff said somberly, praising whistleblowers, including the anonymous one whose complaint against Trump prompted the impeachment inquiry, "and we hope others will follow their courageous example."Now Schiff, 59, is poised to take a much bigger stage as his inquiry moves from a secure office suite in a Capitol Hill basement into nationally televised public hearings. He will make the case against Trump to a divided nation, in what amounts to an epic courtroom drama meant to unveil evidence of the president's pressure campaign to enlist Ukraine to smear his political rivals -- a moment that is bound to be must-watch TV.At home in his district, which stretches from West Hollywood to Pasadena and north to the San Gabriel Mountains, Schiff is well acquainted with the celebrity lifestyle.He lives with his wife, Eve (yes, Adam and Eve), and their two children in suburban Maryland, but they also have an apartment in Burbank, home to Walt Disney Studios. He favors vegan Chinese food and drives an Audi whose license plate frame bears a line from the movie "The Big Lebowski" ("I don't roll on Shabbos"), from which he can quote at length. He has dabbled at screenwriting, once drafting a script that featured a prosecutor as the hero. He tried stand-up comedy, too, during a fundraiser at the Improv in Hollywood."He did a whole riff on being a nihilist," said one of his best friends, former congressman Steve Israel, who joined him onstage. "Basically, we got told to stick to our day jobs."But if Schiff has a sense of humor (his friends insist he does have a dry one), he rarely shows it in Washington, where he has carefully cultivated his image as the stylistic and substantive opposite of Trump: calm, measured, reserved and brainy.He makes no secret of his disdain for the president, who refers to him as "Little Pencil Neck" or "Shifty Schiff" when he is not replacing the congressman's surname with a similar-sounding expletive. In an interview, Schiff called Trump a "grave risk to our democracy" who is conducting an "amoral presidency" and has debased his office with "infantile" insults."What comes through in the president's comments and his tweets and his outrage and his anger toward me in particular is, this president feels he has a God-given right to abuse his office in any way he sees fit," Schiff said.Trump and his allies, sensing the threat posed by Schiff's inquiry and divided over how to defend the president against damning testimony, have united in trying to undermine the congressman's credibility. They sought unsuccessfully to have the House censure him and have accused him of running a "Soviet-style impeachment inquiry."On Saturday, Trump proclaimed him "a corrupt politician" on Twitter and claimed that if Schiff "is allowed to release transcripts of the Never Trumpers & others that are & were interviewed, he will change the words that were said to suit the Dems purposes."Republicans who work side by side with him on the Intelligence Committee contend that he has changed as his star has risen alongside Trump's. A figure they once saw as a serious and studious policy wonk they now describe in viscerally negative terms, as a liar and a hypocrite who will stop at nothing to oust a duly elected president.Schiff has an "absolute maniacal focus on Donald Trump" said one committee Republican, Rep. Michael Turner of Ohio, who accused Schiff of routinely lying to the press and the public about what happened in private interviews and conducting the inquiry's initial hearings out of public view so he and other Democrats could distort the findings.And Schiff has let the publicity go to his head, Turner said: "Schiff finds the media intoxicating. And he is pretty much willing to do whatever it takes to get to the top of the media cycle."Schiff has made some missteps. His dramatized description of the president's phone call with the leader of Ukraine drew attacks from the president and Republican lawmakers, who said he was fabricating evidence -- and surprised even a close friend, Alice Hill, who knows the congressman from their days as young prosecutors in Los Angeles."I was a bit surprised because he is reserved and not prone to overstatement, very careful with his words, very careful with the facts and keeping to the facts," she said, adding, "It felt out of character."And Schiff's assertion that he had not had any contact with the whistleblower who incited the inquiry drew a "false" rating from The Washington Post; the whistleblower had approached his panel for guidance before filing his complaint. Schiff conceded he "should have been much more clear" about that.Democrats, who are united behind Schiff, counter that the attacks are opportunistic; Republicans, they said, are attacking Schiff over process because they cannot defend the president on the merits of his behavior.There is little room for error as Schiff pushes the inquiry forward in the coming months. His performance could determine not only Trump's future but also his own. Schiff is a close ally of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and viewed by some as her possible successor. At a recent news conference, Pelosi -- not ordinarily one to cede control -- took the rare step of sitting with reporters to watch admiringly as the congressman spoke."He's a full package," Pelosi said in an interview, praising Schiff as "always gracious, always lovely." She added, "He knows his purpose, and his purpose is not to engage in that silliness that the president is engaged in."A lawyer educated at Stanford University and Harvard Law School, Schiff tried his first big case three decades ago when, as a young federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, he secured the conviction of an FBI agent who was seduced by a Soviet spy and traded secrets for gold and cash. In 1996, he won a seat in the California Senate; in 2000, he was elected to the House by beating a Republican who had been a manager in the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.In Washington, Schiff joined the Blue Dogs, a group of conservative Democrats, and made a name for himself as a national security expert. He joined the Intelligence Committee in 2008 -- drawn to it, Israel said, because he viewed it as "a quiet place for bipartisanship."His breakout moment came in 2014, when the Republican-led House established a committee to investigate attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. Schiff had argued that Democrats should not participate in what he viewed as a partisan exercise, but Pelosi put him on the committee.But it was the election of Trump that elevated Schiff's profile and made him a sought-after speaker and fundraiser in Democratic circles. As the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee last term, when Republicans still had the majority, he vigorously investigated Russian election interference and questions around whether the Trump campaign had conspired with hostile foreign actors, becoming the most recognizable public face explaining the biggest story in Washington on national TV. When Democrats won the majority in the House, he helped Pelosi draft an investigative strategy.Schiff was a late convert to the impeachment push; like Pelosi, he held back until revelations about Ukraine emerged. For the last five weeks, he has spent much of his time in a secure room four floors below the Capitol, overseeing the closed-door questioning of witnesses. He opens each witness interview and sometimes steps in to conduct questioning himself."The American people have a right to know -- they have a need to know -- how deep this misconduct goes," he said, adding, "There's no hiding the president's hand in any of this."These days, Schiff has tried to tightly control his public profile. He goes on television less than he used to and zips wordlessly through the Capitol, trailed by a phalanx of aides and a scrum of journalists, smiling wanly as they pepper him with questions.It has all given him "a new appreciation" of the struggles his celebrity constituents face in maintaining their privacy, he said. And he is well aware that, out there in the rest of the U.S., he has become a polarizing figure."I feel I've become kind of a human focus group," he said during a panel discussion after the screening here. "People will stop me in the airport in close succession. One will come up to me and say, 'Are you Adam Schiff? I just want to shake your hand -- you're my hero,' immediately to be followed by someone else who says, 'Why are you destroying our democracy?' "The congressman paused and concluded that both couldn't be right "because last time I checked, I'm the same person."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/34zFMD4

[usuallyleftnight]

LOS ANGELES -- The crowd was buzzing with Hollywood types -- actress Patricia Arquette, producer Norman Lear -- at a private film screening on Sunset Boulevard one recent Sunday afternoon. But here in liberal America, the biggest celebrity in the room was not someone who makes a living in what people call "the industry."It was Rep. Adam Schiff, the straight-laced former federal prosecutor who was on the brink of prosecuting his biggest defendant yet: President Donald Trump.These are heady but perilous days for Schiff, the inscrutable and slightly nerdy chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who is leading the impeachment inquiry into Trump. Adored by the left, reviled by the right, he has become a Rorschach test for U.S. politics. Depending on one's point of view, he is either going to save the republic or destroy it.Here in his home district, at the screening of "The Great Hack," a film about misinformation in the 2016 election, Lear introduced Schiff as a "current American hero." As the audience leapt to its feet in a standing ovation, the congressman emerged from backstage in standard Washington uniform -- navy blazer, white shirt, light blue tie -- his manner as inoffensive as his attire."We thank them for their patriotism," Schiff said somberly, praising whistleblowers, including the anonymous one whose complaint against Trump prompted the impeachment inquiry, "and we hope others will follow their courageous example."Now Schiff, 59, is poised to take a much bigger stage as his inquiry moves from a secure office suite in a Capitol Hill basement into nationally televised public hearings. He will make the case against Trump to a divided nation, in what amounts to an epic courtroom drama meant to unveil evidence of the president's pressure campaign to enlist Ukraine to smear his political rivals -- a moment that is bound to be must-watch TV.At home in his district, which stretches from West Hollywood to Pasadena and north to the San Gabriel Mountains, Schiff is well acquainted with the celebrity lifestyle.He lives with his wife, Eve (yes, Adam and Eve), and their two children in suburban Maryland, but they also have an apartment in Burbank, home to Walt Disney Studios. He favors vegan Chinese food and drives an Audi whose license plate frame bears a line from the movie "The Big Lebowski" ("I don't roll on Shabbos"), from which he can quote at length. He has dabbled at screenwriting, once drafting a script that featured a prosecutor as the hero. He tried stand-up comedy, too, during a fundraiser at the Improv in Hollywood."He did a whole riff on being a nihilist," said one of his best friends, former congressman Steve Israel, who joined him onstage. "Basically, we got told to stick to our day jobs."But if Schiff has a sense of humor (his friends insist he does have a dry one), he rarely shows it in Washington, where he has carefully cultivated his image as the stylistic and substantive opposite of Trump: calm, measured, reserved and brainy.He makes no secret of his disdain for the president, who refers to him as "Little Pencil Neck" or "Shifty Schiff" when he is not replacing the congressman's surname with a similar-sounding expletive. In an interview, Schiff called Trump a "grave risk to our democracy" who is conducting an "amoral presidency" and has debased his office with "infantile" insults."What comes through in the president's comments and his tweets and his outrage and his anger toward me in particular is, this president feels he has a God-given right to abuse his office in any way he sees fit," Schiff said.Trump and his allies, sensing the threat posed by Schiff's inquiry and divided over how to defend the president against damning testimony, have united in trying to undermine the congressman's credibility. They sought unsuccessfully to have the House censure him and have accused him of running a "Soviet-style impeachment inquiry."On Saturday, Trump proclaimed him "a corrupt politician" on Twitter and claimed that if Schiff "is allowed to release transcripts of the Never Trumpers & others that are & were interviewed, he will change the words that were said to suit the Dems purposes."Republicans who work side by side with him on the Intelligence Committee contend that he has changed as his star has risen alongside Trump's. A figure they once saw as a serious and studious policy wonk they now describe in viscerally negative terms, as a liar and a hypocrite who will stop at nothing to oust a duly elected president.Schiff has an "absolute maniacal focus on Donald Trump" said one committee Republican, Rep. Michael Turner of Ohio, who accused Schiff of routinely lying to the press and the public about what happened in private interviews and conducting the inquiry's initial hearings out of public view so he and other Democrats could distort the findings.And Schiff has let the publicity go to his head, Turner said: "Schiff finds the media intoxicating. And he is pretty much willing to do whatever it takes to get to the top of the media cycle."Schiff has made some missteps. His dramatized description of the president's phone call with the leader of Ukraine drew attacks from the president and Republican lawmakers, who said he was fabricating evidence -- and surprised even a close friend, Alice Hill, who knows the congressman from their days as young prosecutors in Los Angeles."I was a bit surprised because he is reserved and not prone to overstatement, very careful with his words, very careful with the facts and keeping to the facts," she said, adding, "It felt out of character."And Schiff's assertion that he had not had any contact with the whistleblower who incited the inquiry drew a "false" rating from The Washington Post; the whistleblower had approached his panel for guidance before filing his complaint. Schiff conceded he "should have been much more clear" about that.Democrats, who are united behind Schiff, counter that the attacks are opportunistic; Republicans, they said, are attacking Schiff over process because they cannot defend the president on the merits of his behavior.There is little room for error as Schiff pushes the inquiry forward in the coming months. His performance could determine not only Trump's future but also his own. Schiff is a close ally of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and viewed by some as her possible successor. At a recent news conference, Pelosi -- not ordinarily one to cede control -- took the rare step of sitting with reporters to watch admiringly as the congressman spoke."He's a full package," Pelosi said in an interview, praising Schiff as "always gracious, always lovely." She added, "He knows his purpose, and his purpose is not to engage in that silliness that the president is engaged in."A lawyer educated at Stanford University and Harvard Law School, Schiff tried his first big case three decades ago when, as a young federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, he secured the conviction of an FBI agent who was seduced by a Soviet spy and traded secrets for gold and cash. In 1996, he won a seat in the California Senate; in 2000, he was elected to the House by beating a Republican who had been a manager in the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.In Washington, Schiff joined the Blue Dogs, a group of conservative Democrats, and made a name for himself as a national security expert. He joined the Intelligence Committee in 2008 -- drawn to it, Israel said, because he viewed it as "a quiet place for bipartisanship."His breakout moment came in 2014, when the Republican-led House established a committee to investigate attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. Schiff had argued that Democrats should not participate in what he viewed as a partisan exercise, but Pelosi put him on the committee.But it was the election of Trump that elevated Schiff's profile and made him a sought-after speaker and fundraiser in Democratic circles. As the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee last term, when Republicans still had the majority, he vigorously investigated Russian election interference and questions around whether the Trump campaign had conspired with hostile foreign actors, becoming the most recognizable public face explaining the biggest story in Washington on national TV. When Democrats won the majority in the House, he helped Pelosi draft an investigative strategy.Schiff was a late convert to the impeachment push; like Pelosi, he held back until revelations about Ukraine emerged. For the last five weeks, he has spent much of his time in a secure room four floors below the Capitol, overseeing the closed-door questioning of witnesses. He opens each witness interview and sometimes steps in to conduct questioning himself."The American people have a right to know -- they have a need to know -- how deep this misconduct goes," he said, adding, "There's no hiding the president's hand in any of this."These days, Schiff has tried to tightly control his public profile. He goes on television less than he used to and zips wordlessly through the Capitol, trailed by a phalanx of aides and a scrum of journalists, smiling wanly as they pepper him with questions.It has all given him "a new appreciation" of the struggles his celebrity constituents face in maintaining their privacy, he said. And he is well aware that, out there in the rest of the U.S., he has become a polarizing figure."I feel I've become kind of a human focus group," he said during a panel discussion after the screening here. "People will stop me in the airport in close succession. One will come up to me and say, 'Are you Adam Schiff? I just want to shake your hand -- you're my hero,' immediately to be followed by someone else who says, 'Why are you destroying our democracy?' "The congressman paused and concluded that both couldn't be right "because last time I checked, I'm the same person."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company

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[bersiuniverse]

LOS ANGELES -- The crowd was buzzing with Hollywood types -- actress Patricia Arquette, producer Norman Lear -- at a private film screening on Sunset Boulevard one recent Sunday afternoon. But here in liberal America, the biggest celebrity in the room was not someone who makes a living in what people call "the industry."It was Rep. Adam Schiff, the straight-laced former federal prosecutor who was on the brink of prosecuting his biggest defendant yet: President Donald Trump.These are heady but perilous days for Schiff, the inscrutable and slightly nerdy chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who is leading the impeachment inquiry into Trump. Adored by the left, reviled by the right, he has become a Rorschach test for U.S. politics. Depending on one's point of view, he is either going to save the republic or destroy it.Here in his home district, at the screening of "The Great Hack," a film about misinformation in the 2016 election, Lear introduced Schiff as a "current American hero." As the audience leapt to its feet in a standing ovation, the congressman emerged from backstage in standard Washington uniform -- navy blazer, white shirt, light blue tie -- his manner as inoffensive as his attire."We thank them for their patriotism," Schiff said somberly, praising whistleblowers, including the anonymous one whose complaint against Trump prompted the impeachment inquiry, "and we hope others will follow their courageous example."Now Schiff, 59, is poised to take a much bigger stage as his inquiry moves from a secure office suite in a Capitol Hill basement into nationally televised public hearings. He will make the case against Trump to a divided nation, in what amounts to an epic courtroom drama meant to unveil evidence of the president's pressure campaign to enlist Ukraine to smear his political rivals -- a moment that is bound to be must-watch TV.At home in his district, which stretches from West Hollywood to Pasadena and north to the San Gabriel Mountains, Schiff is well acquainted with the celebrity lifestyle.He lives with his wife, Eve (yes, Adam and Eve), and their two children in suburban Maryland, but they also have an apartment in Burbank, home to Walt Disney Studios. He favors vegan Chinese food and drives an Audi whose license plate frame bears a line from the movie "The Big Lebowski" ("I don't roll on Shabbos"), from which he can quote at length. He has dabbled at screenwriting, once drafting a script that featured a prosecutor as the hero. He tried stand-up comedy, too, during a fundraiser at the Improv in Hollywood."He did a whole riff on being a nihilist," said one of his best friends, former congressman Steve Israel, who joined him onstage. "Basically, we got told to stick to our day jobs."But if Schiff has a sense of humor (his friends insist he does have a dry one), he rarely shows it in Washington, where he has carefully cultivated his image as the stylistic and substantive opposite of Trump: calm, measured, reserved and brainy.He makes no secret of his disdain for the president, who refers to him as "Little Pencil Neck" or "Shifty Schiff" when he is not replacing the congressman's surname with a similar-sounding expletive. In an interview, Schiff called Trump a "grave risk to our democracy" who is conducting an "amoral presidency" and has debased his office with "infantile" insults."What comes through in the president's comments and his tweets and his outrage and his anger toward me in particular is, this president feels he has a God-given right to abuse his office in any way he sees fit," Schiff said.Trump and his allies, sensing the threat posed by Schiff's inquiry and divided over how to defend the president against damning testimony, have united in trying to undermine the congressman's credibility. They sought unsuccessfully to have the House censure him and have accused him of running a "Soviet-style impeachment inquiry."On Saturday, Trump proclaimed him "a corrupt politician" on Twitter and claimed that if Schiff "is allowed to release transcripts of the Never Trumpers & others that are & were interviewed, he will change the words that were said to suit the Dems purposes."Republicans who work side by side with him on the Intelligence Committee contend that he has changed as his star has risen alongside Trump's. A figure they once saw as a serious and studious policy wonk they now describe in viscerally negative terms, as a liar and a hypocrite who will stop at nothing to oust a duly elected president.Schiff has an "absolute maniacal focus on Donald Trump" said one committee Republican, Rep. Michael Turner of Ohio, who accused Schiff of routinely lying to the press and the public about what happened in private interviews and conducting the inquiry's initial hearings out of public view so he and other Democrats could distort the findings.And Schiff has let the publicity go to his head, Turner said: "Schiff finds the media intoxicating. And he is pretty much willing to do whatever it takes to get to the top of the media cycle."Schiff has made some missteps. His dramatized description of the president's phone call with the leader of Ukraine drew attacks from the president and Republican lawmakers, who said he was fabricating evidence -- and surprised even a close friend, Alice Hill, who knows the congressman from their days as young prosecutors in Los Angeles."I was a bit surprised because he is reserved and not prone to overstatement, very careful with his words, very careful with the facts and keeping to the facts," she said, adding, "It felt out of character."And Schiff's assertion that he had not had any contact with the whistleblower who incited the inquiry drew a "false" rating from The Washington Post; the whistleblower had approached his panel for guidance before filing his complaint. Schiff conceded he "should have been much more clear" about that.Democrats, who are united behind Schiff, counter that the attacks are opportunistic; Republicans, they said, are attacking Schiff over process because they cannot defend the president on the merits of his behavior.There is little room for error as Schiff pushes the inquiry forward in the coming months. His performance could determine not only Trump's future but also his own. Schiff is a close ally of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and viewed by some as her possible successor. At a recent news conference, Pelosi -- not ordinarily one to cede control -- took the rare step of sitting with reporters to watch admiringly as the congressman spoke."He's a full package," Pelosi said in an interview, praising Schiff as "always gracious, always lovely." She added, "He knows his purpose, and his purpose is not to engage in that silliness that the president is engaged in."A lawyer educated at Stanford University and Harvard Law School, Schiff tried his first big case three decades ago when, as a young federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, he secured the conviction of an FBI agent who was seduced by a Soviet spy and traded secrets for gold and cash. In 1996, he won a seat in the California Senate; in 2000, he was elected to the House by beating a Republican who had been a manager in the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.In Washington, Schiff joined the Blue Dogs, a group of conservative Democrats, and made a name for himself as a national security expert. He joined the Intelligence Committee in 2008 -- drawn to it, Israel said, because he viewed it as "a quiet place for bipartisanship."His breakout moment came in 2014, when the Republican-led House established a committee to investigate attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. Schiff had argued that Democrats should not participate in what he viewed as a partisan exercise, but Pelosi put him on the committee.But it was the election of Trump that elevated Schiff's profile and made him a sought-after speaker and fundraiser in Democratic circles. As the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee last term, when Republicans still had the majority, he vigorously investigated Russian election interference and questions around whether the Trump campaign had conspired with hostile foreign actors, becoming the most recognizable public face explaining the biggest story in Washington on national TV. When Democrats won the majority in the House, he helped Pelosi draft an investigative strategy.Schiff was a late convert to the impeachment push; like Pelosi, he held back until revelations about Ukraine emerged. For the last five weeks, he has spent much of his time in a secure room four floors below the Capitol, overseeing the closed-door questioning of witnesses. He opens each witness interview and sometimes steps in to conduct questioning himself."The American people have a right to know -- they have a need to know -- how deep this misconduct goes," he said, adding, "There's no hiding the president's hand in any of this."These days, Schiff has tried to tightly control his public profile. He goes on television less than he used to and zips wordlessly through the Capitol, trailed by a phalanx of aides and a scrum of journalists, smiling wanly as they pepper him with questions.It has all given him "a new appreciation" of the struggles his celebrity constituents face in maintaining their privacy, he said. And he is well aware that, out there in the rest of the U.S., he has become a polarizing figure."I feel I've become kind of a human focus group," he said during a panel discussion after the screening here. "People will stop me in the airport in close succession. One will come up to me and say, 'Are you Adam Schiff? I just want to shake your hand -- you're my hero,' immediately to be followed by someone else who says, 'Why are you destroying our democracy?' "The congressman paused and concluded that both couldn't be right "because last time I checked, I'm the same person."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company

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[lovehardenemycollector]

LOS ANGELES -- The crowd was buzzing with Hollywood types -- actress Patricia Arquette, producer Norman Lear -- at a private film screening on Sunset Boulevard one recent Sunday afternoon. But here in liberal America, the biggest celebrity in the room was not someone who makes a living in what people call "the industry."It was Rep. Adam Schiff, the straight-laced former federal prosecutor who was on the brink of prosecuting his biggest defendant yet: President Donald Trump.These are heady but perilous days for Schiff, the inscrutable and slightly nerdy chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who is leading the impeachment inquiry into Trump. Adored by the left, reviled by the right, he has become a Rorschach test for U.S. politics. Depending on one's point of view, he is either going to save the republic or destroy it.Here in his home district, at the screening of "The Great Hack," a film about misinformation in the 2016 election, Lear introduced Schiff as a "current American hero." As the audience leapt to its feet in a standing ovation, the congressman emerged from backstage in standard Washington uniform -- navy blazer, white shirt, light blue tie -- his manner as inoffensive as his attire."We thank them for their patriotism," Schiff said somberly, praising whistleblowers, including the anonymous one whose complaint against Trump prompted the impeachment inquiry, "and we hope others will follow their courageous example."Now Schiff, 59, is poised to take a much bigger stage as his inquiry moves from a secure office suite in a Capitol Hill basement into nationally televised public hearings. He will make the case against Trump to a divided nation, in what amounts to an epic courtroom drama meant to unveil evidence of the president's pressure campaign to enlist Ukraine to smear his political rivals -- a moment that is bound to be must-watch TV.At home in his district, which stretches from West Hollywood to Pasadena and north to the San Gabriel Mountains, Schiff is well acquainted with the celebrity lifestyle.He lives with his wife, Eve (yes, Adam and Eve), and their two children in suburban Maryland, but they also have an apartment in Burbank, home to Walt Disney Studios. He favors vegan Chinese food and drives an Audi whose license plate frame bears a line from the movie "The Big Lebowski" ("I don't roll on Shabbos"), from which he can quote at length. He has dabbled at screenwriting, once drafting a script that featured a prosecutor as the hero. He tried stand-up comedy, too, during a fundraiser at the Improv in Hollywood."He did a whole riff on being a nihilist," said one of his best friends, former congressman Steve Israel, who joined him onstage. "Basically, we got told to stick to our day jobs."But if Schiff has a sense of humor (his friends insist he does have a dry one), he rarely shows it in Washington, where he has carefully cultivated his image as the stylistic and substantive opposite of Trump: calm, measured, reserved and brainy.He makes no secret of his disdain for the president, who refers to him as "Little Pencil Neck" or "Shifty Schiff" when he is not replacing the congressman's surname with a similar-sounding expletive. In an interview, Schiff called Trump a "grave risk to our democracy" who is conducting an "amoral presidency" and has debased his office with "infantile" insults."What comes through in the president's comments and his tweets and his outrage and his anger toward me in particular is, this president feels he has a God-given right to abuse his office in any way he sees fit," Schiff said.Trump and his allies, sensing the threat posed by Schiff's inquiry and divided over how to defend the president against damning testimony, have united in trying to undermine the congressman's credibility. They sought unsuccessfully to have the House censure him and have accused him of running a "Soviet-style impeachment inquiry."On Saturday, Trump proclaimed him "a corrupt politician" on Twitter and claimed that if Schiff "is allowed to release transcripts of the Never Trumpers & others that are & were interviewed, he will change the words that were said to suit the Dems purposes."Republicans who work side by side with him on the Intelligence Committee contend that he has changed as his star has risen alongside Trump's. A figure they once saw as a serious and studious policy wonk they now describe in viscerally negative terms, as a liar and a hypocrite who will stop at nothing to oust a duly elected president.Schiff has an "absolute maniacal focus on Donald Trump" said one committee Republican, Rep. Michael Turner of Ohio, who accused Schiff of routinely lying to the press and the public about what happened in private interviews and conducting the inquiry's initial hearings out of public view so he and other Democrats could distort the findings.And Schiff has let the publicity go to his head, Turner said: "Schiff finds the media intoxicating. And he is pretty much willing to do whatever it takes to get to the top of the media cycle."Schiff has made some missteps. His dramatized description of the president's phone call with the leader of Ukraine drew attacks from the president and Republican lawmakers, who said he was fabricating evidence -- and surprised even a close friend, Alice Hill, who knows the congressman from their days as young prosecutors in Los Angeles."I was a bit surprised because he is reserved and not prone to overstatement, very careful with his words, very careful with the facts and keeping to the facts," she said, adding, "It felt out of character."And Schiff's assertion that he had not had any contact with the whistleblower who incited the inquiry drew a "false" rating from The Washington Post; the whistleblower had approached his panel for guidance before filing his complaint. Schiff conceded he "should have been much more clear" about that.Democrats, who are united behind Schiff, counter that the attacks are opportunistic; Republicans, they said, are attacking Schiff over process because they cannot defend the president on the merits of his behavior.There is little room for error as Schiff pushes the inquiry forward in the coming months. His performance could determine not only Trump's future but also his own. Schiff is a close ally of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and viewed by some as her possible successor. At a recent news conference, Pelosi -- not ordinarily one to cede control -- took the rare step of sitting with reporters to watch admiringly as the congressman spoke."He's a full package," Pelosi said in an interview, praising Schiff as "always gracious, always lovely." She added, "He knows his purpose, and his purpose is not to engage in that silliness that the president is engaged in."A lawyer educated at Stanford University and Harvard Law School, Schiff tried his first big case three decades ago when, as a young federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, he secured the conviction of an FBI agent who was seduced by a Soviet spy and traded secrets for gold and cash. In 1996, he won a seat in the California Senate; in 2000, he was elected to the House by beating a Republican who had been a manager in the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.In Washington, Schiff joined the Blue Dogs, a group of conservative Democrats, and made a name for himself as a national security expert. He joined the Intelligence Committee in 2008 -- drawn to it, Israel said, because he viewed it as "a quiet place for bipartisanship."His breakout moment came in 2014, when the Republican-led House established a committee to investigate attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. Schiff had argued that Democrats should not participate in what he viewed as a partisan exercise, but Pelosi put him on the committee.But it was the election of Trump that elevated Schiff's profile and made him a sought-after speaker and fundraiser in Democratic circles. As the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee last term, when Republicans still had the majority, he vigorously investigated Russian election interference and questions around whether the Trump campaign had conspired with hostile foreign actors, becoming the most recognizable public face explaining the biggest story in Washington on national TV. When Democrats won the majority in the House, he helped Pelosi draft an investigative strategy.Schiff was a late convert to the impeachment push; like Pelosi, he held back until revelations about Ukraine emerged. For the last five weeks, he has spent much of his time in a secure room four floors below the Capitol, overseeing the closed-door questioning of witnesses. He opens each witness interview and sometimes steps in to conduct questioning himself."The American people have a right to know -- they have a need to know -- how deep this misconduct goes," he said, adding, "There's no hiding the president's hand in any of this."These days, Schiff has tried to tightly control his public profile. He goes on television less than he used to and zips wordlessly through the Capitol, trailed by a phalanx of aides and a scrum of journalists, smiling wanly as they pepper him with questions.It has all given him "a new appreciation" of the struggles his celebrity constituents face in maintaining their privacy, he said. And he is well aware that, out there in the rest of the U.S., he has become a polarizing figure."I feel I've become kind of a human focus group," he said during a panel discussion after the screening here. "People will stop me in the airport in close succession. One will come up to me and say, 'Are you Adam Schiff? I just want to shake your hand -- you're my hero,' immediately to be followed by someone else who says, 'Why are you destroying our democracy?' "The congressman paused and concluded that both couldn't be right "because last time I checked, I'm the same person."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company

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