Wow, a twofer! It’s not often that I‘m able to give Trump credit for doing two good things on the same day. John Fingas, writing for Engadget:
President Trump has signed the TRACED Act, toughening the punishments for illegal robocalls and accelerating telecoms' efforts to block spam.
Let’s all appreciate this rare instance of bipartisanship that will truly benefit all Americans.
Apple’s updated maps are very nice, and you can tell they put a lot of time into really making them better. There’s a ton of detail in the landscaping and buildings that simply didn’t exist before.
After releasing a few services this year that were a bit less impressive than they were hyped up to be, I’m glad Apple was able to make good on their promise to roll out the new maps to the whole United States by the end of 2019, even if my region was the last to be added.
Here’s Pittsburgh as an example: check out the crazy level of detail, from all the buildings, to the public parks and and natural areas, to the fields at PNC Park and Heinz Field. It’s remarkable.
According to The Washington Post, the Trump administration has reversed course (again) on their decision regarding restricting access to flavored vaping products. After originally announcing an aggressive ban (which I personally supported), fear of the political ramifications the ban would have amongst their base led them to backpedal on that announcement (a move I harshly criticized). Now, they’re compromising a bit.
This ban seems to be only on flavored e-cigarette pods (excluding tobacco and menthol flavors), sparing the liquids sold in vape shops. In other words: they’re coming for you, Juul.
As I’ve mentioned before, I try to give Trump credit when he deserves it: this is certainly better than not doing anything, but I liked the sound of their original promise better.
Falih Hassan, Ben Hubbard, and Allish J. Rubin, reporting for The New York Times:
Protesters broke into the heavily guarded compound of the United States Embassy in Baghdad on Tuesday and set fires inside in anger over American airstrikes that killed [25] members of an Iranian-backed militia over the weekend.
The U.S. needs to respond to this attack swiftly and forcefully, but we also need to avoid another decade of war.
Ryan Browne and Caroline Kelly, reporting for CNN:
The United States will send approximately 750 soldiers to the Middle East immediately, Defense Secretary Mark Esper confirmed in a written statement Tuesday, after attacks broke out in Baghdad among hundreds of protesters in response to airstrikes in Iraq and Syria conducted by US forces on Sunday.
"At the direction of the Commander in Chief, I have authorized the deployment of an infantry battalion from the Immediate Response Force of the 82nd Airborne Division (in Fort Bragg, North Carolina) to the U.S. Central Command area of operations in response to recent events in Iraq," Esper said, adding that additional forces "are prepared to deploy over the next several days."
"This deployment is an appropriate and precautionary action taken in response to increased threat levels against U.S. personnel and facilities, such as we witnessed in Baghdad today.”
Obviously I hope for the safety for all of our troops, but as a North Carolina boy planning on joining the military, the deployment of troops from Fort Bragg hits close to home. Thoughts, prayers, good vibes, whatever you got: send ‘em to the boys heading to Iraq tonight. 🇺🇸 👏🏼🤙🏼✌🏼✊🏼🇺🇸
Jennifer Aniston, Woody Harrelson, Meryl Streep, Miley Cyrus, Jonathan Van Ness, Millie Bobbie Brown, Adam Sandler, Beyoncé Knowles, Ryan Reynolds; these are just a few of the icons featured in this ad. It’s only two minutes long, but at the end of it you feel like you’ve really seen something important. In addition to a star-studded cast, it boasts moving voiceover and music that couple beautifully with the dozens of rapid-fire scene snippets selected from Netflix’s original content, thereby doing an incredible job of showcasing their vast catalog. It uses humor and heart to inspire an impressive degree of cultural FOMO, and it really drives home the significance of storytelling in our society. Most importantly for Netflix, it genuinely excites you for what’s to come.
It’s a terrific ad.
Fantastic reporting from Stuart A. Thompson and Charlie Warzel for The New York Times:
Every minute of every day, everywhere on the planet, dozens of companies — largely unregulated, little scrutinized — are logging the movements of tens of millions of people with mobile phones and storing the information in gigantic data files. The Times Privacy Project obtained one such file, by far the largest and most sensitive ever to be reviewed by journalists. It holds more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million Americans.
It’s about time that publications with big audiences start pounding this drum. Read their whole article, and begin to understand why this matters.
Location data is also collected and shared alongside a mobile advertising ID, a supposedly anonymous identifier about 30 digits long that allows advertisers and other businesses to tie activity together across apps. The ID is also used to combine location trails with other information like your name, home address, email, phone number or even an identifier tied to your Wi-Fi network.
The data can change hands in almost real time, so fast that your location could be transferred from your smartphone to the app’s servers and exported to third parties in milliseconds. […]
That data can then be resold, copied, pirated and abused. There’s no way you can ever retrieve it.
Unfortunately, there’s very little you can do to limit how your location data is shared. It’s important to wrangle in your location sharing settings (check out the “Privacy” section of CopyrightBro’s Digital Health Checkup), but even that isn’t enough to truly protect you. One of the best ways to limit companies’ ability to track you is to route all of your internet traffic through a VPN service. My family and I use ExpressVPN. These are paid services, but at $99/year for 5 devices (ExpressVPN’s best offer), it works out to 5¢ per device per day, which I think is worth the expense.
Is all of this surveillance and risk worth it merely so that we can be served slightly more relevant ads? Or so that hedge fund managers can get richer?
The answer here is obviously “no”. Targeted advertising is a user-hostile practice, and it deserves to be heavily regulated, if not outlawed entirely.
Today, it’s perfectly legal to collect and sell all this information. […] The companies profiting from our every move can’t be expected to voluntarily limit their practices. Congress has to step in to protect Americans’ needs as consumers and rights as citizens.
We are living in the world’s most advanced surveillance system. […] It was built to make money. The greatest trick technology companies ever played was persuading society to surveil itself.
Merry Christmas from CopyrightBro!
Let’s get this out of the way: Starbucks’ coffee usually tastes a bit burnt and is generally not as good as local coffee shops. But, Starbucks is convenient because they have a ton of locations (and drive-thrus), and they’re at least consistent in that each location uses the same ingredients (even if their baristas never put the same amount of them in your cup).
While I have favorite local coffee shops which I prefer to patronize, sometimes it’s just easier to go by Starbucks in the morning. In these cases, I will usually try to remember to bring my own Yeti cup so I can take advantage of their bring-your-own-cup program. Sure, call me a hippy dippy, tree-hugging liberal, but the biggest appeal is that my drink will stay hot for a lot longer. And, you know, if you can save a disposable cup from a landfill, why not? On top of that, Starbucks actually incentivizes customers to use the program, offering a 10¢ discount on your drink. I don’t go to Starbucks nearly enough for that to add up to anything worthwhile, but nonetheless, it’s slightly better than nothing. Combining those three very mild incentives (a tiny discount, feeling good about saving a cup, and having my drink stay hot) is enough to get me to play along.
Participating is a fairly straightforward process: I’ll place my order and let the barista know I’ve brought my own cup, and they proceed to take my cup and then a few minutes later I find it at the end of the bar with my beverage inside it. For the past several months, though, I’ve been noticing an aggravating and confusing trend.
Occasionally I’ll find myself watching as the barista prepares my drink, and lately I’ve been seeing a paper or plastic cup (depending on whether I’ve ordered something hot or cold) accompany my reusable cup as it makes its way down the line of drinks waiting to be prepared. What’s happening is the baristas are preparing my drink in the paper cup (which bears a sticker denoting what I’ve ordered), and then they simply pour the beverage from the paper cup into my reusable one before giving it back to me.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to recognize that this completely defeats the purpose of Starbucks offering a reusable cup discount program. From a financial perspective, Starbucks doesn’t save any money this way because they still end up using a paper or plastic cup anyway. From an eco-friendly perspective, there’s no difference here than if they’d just delivered the drink in the disposable cup anyway. While there’s a slight chance they could be recycling the plastic cups, Starbucks’ paper cups (like most paper cups) are lined on the inside to prevent liquid from breaking down the paper, and lined paper products can’t be recycled at all by most cities in the country. Those cups are definitely landfill bound.
CopyrightBro correspondents interviewed multiple Starbucks baristas and store managers in stores across the southeast, and we’ve been able to learn a bit more about this program and how it’s implemented. One Charlotte-area barista, when asked why she initially prepared the drink in the disposable cup, simply respond with “this is just how we were trained.” When our correspondent followed up with “doesn’t using a paper cup sort of defeat the purpose of having a reusable cup program?” she replied, “yeah, it’s a little off.” These sentiments were echoed by other baristas from other areas of the country, indicating that this is a pervasive issue stemming from a corporate directive, rather than a case of one or two rogue employees in charge of training. When asked what the purpose was behind this policy, one Memphis-area barista said “It kind of makes sense with the drive-thru because we don’t get their cup until they get to the window, but for customers in the cafe, it doesn’t make any sense, it is really stupid and wasteful.” When asked if they couldn’t just prepare drive-thru customers’ drinks in reusable containers before transferring them to the personal cups, he replied “yeah, there’s really no reason that wouldn’t work”.
This barista estimated that while roughly 20% of regular customers might bring their own cups, the total percentage would be far lower, likely around 1%. This figure is consistent with Starbucks’ Global Social Impact Report from 2018, which reported that in the preceding year, 1.3% of customers had received the personal cup discount. The report goes on to presume that the program therefore saved 42 million disposable cups, but this figure ignores reality, because we know that not nearly all of those 42 million transactions actually resulted in a saved cup.
Getting more into the numbers, back in 2011, Starbucks was at 1.9% adoption with their personal cup program, and they set a goal of reaching 5% adoption by 2015; clearly, they missed. By a lot. Interestingly, their 2018 report actually amends their goal and uses grandiose language like “double the use of reusable cups”, which sounds great but ignores the fact that personal cup use has actually declined by 32% since 2011. Doubling an adoption rate of 1.3% still only gets you to 2.6%, and doesn’t account for the fact that many of the transactions represented by those figures still waste plenty of cups. They’ve given themselves several years to achieve what they want you to believe is a lofty goal, aiming to achieve this measly 2.6% program adoption by 2022.
If the point of the personal cup discount is to incentivize customers to use the program for the benefit of the environment, then 10¢ is hardly enough to move anyone to action; if the point of the discount is to simply pass the savings from the one saved paper cup onto the customer, that’s nice of them, but kind of pointless if they end up using a paper cup in the process of preparing the drinks anyway. The barista from Memphis also expressed concerns that “the 10¢ discount is pointless”, and that it doesn’t really incentivize anyone to use the program — it’s hard to imagine that he could be wrong — you could find more than ten cents in a Starbucks parking lot at any given moment. If Starbucks wants people to take this program seriously, they need to stop wasting disposable cups, and they need to offer an incentive greater than a dime; a 25¢ discount as a part of a program that a less than two percent of their customers use seems manageable for a company as successful as Starbucks.
CopyrightBro reached out to the Starbucks Global Communications team for more information on why there’s such a defined trend of employees being trained to waste cups, and a Starbucks Spokesperson provided the following comment: “Starbucks baristas are encouraged to craft beverages directly in customers’ reusable cups whenever possible. Building on our long standing commitment to sustainability and an elevated customer experience, we are currently reviewing guidance to our partners about personal cup use as we continue to be mindful of waste.” While this comment shifts blame to the individual baristas, the pattern observed across a large geographic regions is too pronounced to be so easily explained away. The operative phrase from the comment provided seems to be “whenever possible”. This phrase could provide a tremendous amount of leeway to those mid-level corporate employees issuing directives to train employees in a manner contrary to the official guidance while deflecting the responsibility to the individual baristas by retorting that the official guidance is for them to use their own discretion. Otherwise, it’s hard to explain why so many baristas would report having been trained in a manner inconsistent with the comment provided.
The problem here doesn’t seem to be a few poorly trained employees, but rather a culture that focuses more on looking like they want to help the environment, rather than actually putting effort into doing so: it seems like their commitment to protecting the environment is just a P.R. move for Starbucks. Even more embarrassingly for a Fortune 500 company, it’s losing money from a financial standpoint. What kind of lunacy would lead a company to introduce a program that could cut costs on materials and make a positive environmental impact, only to have employees waste the same amount of materials anyway? They’ve effectively disguised a pattern of material and financial waste as a program designed to benefit the environment.
CopyrightBro does not encourage anyone to take advantage of corporate good will, but if you notice that a barista prepares your beverage in a disposable cup and then throws it away after transferring your drink to your personal cup, you can submit a complaint about what happened on Starbuck’s contact page, and they’ll typically credit your Starbucks Card with five or six bucks to get another drink, as well as pass down the feedback to the store your visited. Customers are going to have to hold Starbucks’ feet to the fire on this one: make sure you let them know how you feel next time their employees are unnecessarily wasteful on your behalf.
In the midst of the recent J.K. Rowling controversy, a CopyrightBro correspondent stumbled across an interesting Twitter account, @AllianceLGB. After reading through some of their tweets and checking out their website, it’s clear that these folks are providing an important voice; they’re courageous enough to vocalize the feelings that cancel culture prohibits many in the LGB community from feeling free to express.
The LGB Alliance is a nonpartisan British nonprofit organization whose goal is to “advance the interests of lesbians, gay men and bisexuals at a time when we are under threat from concerted attempts to introduce confusion between biological sex and the notion of gender.“ This confusion sewn by aggressive trans rights advocates is to the direct detriment of people who experience same-sex attraction, who rightly believe that being associated and conflated with the transgender/transsexual/gender non-binary groups has a negative impact on the forward progress being made to advance LGB acceptance, particularly in less-progressive environments. The LGB Alliance is also working to “protect children and young people from being taught unscientific gender doctrines”, as well as asserting the scientific reality of the two biological sexes, while recognizing “that gender is a social construct which is used to impose often harmful and outdated stereotypes.”
The beliefs championed by the LGB Alliance are beliefs that CopyrightBro is proud to endorse, as we also believe that more dialogue is needed to establish a public understanding of the differences between folks who are same sex attracted and those with varying gender identities, and that increased awareness will be to the benefit of both groups. In fact, on CopyrightBro, you’ll notice that we rarely (if ever) use the “LGBT” acronym; instead, we opt for “LGB” when referring to issues that are specific to sexual orientation, and in rare cases where it does make sense to couple issues relating to sexual orientation with those that relate to gender identity, we use “LGB&T”, which invokes an ampersand to reiterate the important distinction between the two groups.
Everyone deserves equal rights and to be treated with dignity, but that doesn’t mean that unrelated groups need to be conflated, especially when such relationships aren’t always symbiotic. If you’d like to learn more about the LGB Alliance and the work they do to support equal rights through reason and common-sense solutions that are truly respectful of and fair to all groups, you can visit their website for more information or to make a donation in support of their mission.
Sarah El Sirgany and Lauren Said-Moorhouse, reporting for CNN:
Saudi Arabia has sentenced five people to death for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the kingdom's public prosecutor said Monday.
Sounds like they found a way to kill off five more people they don’t like. Can someone remind me why we’re supposed to pretend they’re a U.S. ally?
An interesting look at the past decade through the lens of language. Take a few minutes to read through the list, it’s worth your time. Some of the social and political events that inspired heightened use of these words seem like they took place eons ago, while others seem too fresh to have happened more than just a few months back.
Dress however you please.
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) December 19, 2019
Call yourself whatever you like.
Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you.
Live your best life in peace and security.
But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real? #IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill
J.K. Rowling has written some stupid things lately (see: “Cursed Child”), but this isn’t one of them; her sentiments in this tweet near-perfectly represent my take in this instance, as well as on the broader issue of trans rights: do what you want as long as it isn’t harming others or infringing on someone else’s rights. However, I’m not convinced that some of the rights and privileges sought by the trans community aren’t stepping on the toes of other groups.
The fact that people are lambasting her for merely agreeing with someone who basically just said that biological sex is still a thing, is absurd. If you’re offended by scientific facts, re-fucking-evaluate; it’s not the rest of the world’s prerogative to avoid the truth (note that I said THE truth, not your truth) because you find it inconvenient.
Donald Trump, implying his own allegedly-superb popularity among the American electorate during a rally in Michigan, just asked his audience “have you seen my polls for the last four weeks?”. Raucous applause ensued.
Obviously, those in the audience have not seen any recent polls. The latest poll from Fox News reports that 55% of Americans want Trump impeached and removed from office, compared to just 43% who don’t think he should be impeached.
Today is a historic day. President Donald Trump just became the third President in American History to have officially been impeached by the House of Representatives.
As of the moment this article was published, Donald Trump himself was still unaware of his impeachment, because he was in the middle of holding a rally to distract from the impeachment process.
If you’re not sure what this means or how the process continues from this point, check out CopyrightBro’s Impeachment Briefing.
There’s so much information about the impeachment of Donald Trump that it’s easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees given the constantly-bloated 24-hour news cycle that surrounds our President. There are a few important things that We The People need to understand at this point in the game: how the impeachment process works, what Trump is being accused of having done wrong, and how the political party machines will try to use the whole charade to their benefit. Once you understand those things in context, you can begin to form your own educated opinions about how our congressional leaders and executives are conducting themselves, and whether or not the President deserves to be impeached.
The most fundamental thing to understand is how the impeachment process works. I am no legal expert, but there’s a common misconception that impeachment IS the act of removing a President from office, when in reality, impeachment is a step in a process that can lead to the removal of the President. The first step in the impeachment process is for the House of Representatives to conduct an investigation into whether the President (or other public officer) may have done something wrong. If they find evidence that he or she has done something wrong, whether it be a criminal act or behaving in a manner inconsistent with their office, the House Judiciary Committee will draft articles of impeachment.* The articles of impeachment are the legal documents asserting that the President has done something wrong, and explaining what they are being charged with. After these articles are drafted, the House Judiciary Committee will hold a vote to determine whether they should be advanced to the full HOR for consideration. If they vote no, the process is over, but if they vote yes, then the whole House will vote on whether or not to “impeach” the President. If they vote no, again, the process ends. If they vote yes (a simple majority is sufficient), the president will have been officially “impeached”, but that doesn’t mean that he will be removed from office, necessarily. If he is impeached, then the Senate takes over the process, because they’re the chamber of Congress responsible for holding a trial of the President to determine whether he is guilty of what he is accused of in the articles of impeachment. After the trial, the full Senate will vote on whether or not the President is guilty and should be removed from office. A two-thirds majority is required to remove the President from office, at which point, the Vice President would become the President.
In the case of Donald Trump, the House Judiciary Committee has drafted two articles of impeachment, and this morning, the committee voted 23-17 to advance them to the full House of Representatives for consideration and a vote, which will likely take place next week. The two articles of impeachment against President Trump accuse him of “abuse of power” and “obstruction of congress”, which are both offenses that can be categorized as “other high crimes and misdemeanors”. The articles of impeachment are freely available on the internet, and anyone who wants to discuss this impeachment process should read them. Click here to download a PDF version. They’re only 9 pages long, and there’s really no excuse not to read them. Here is a summary of the contents and implications of each article, with necessary context:
Article One — The first article of impeachment brought against Trump charges him with with “abuse of power”. This is the article that defines the offense that kicked off this whole impeachment process. A lot of people probably assume that the impeachment has something to do with allegations of collusion by the Trump campaign with the Russian operatives who interfered in the 2016 election, but this is not the case. Article one is narrow in scope, focusing solely on the much more recent issue of Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. According to an anonymous whistleblower, Trump leveraged U.S. military aid to Ukraine (aid which we’ve been providing for years) on Zelensky’s willingness to open an investigation into the activities of Hunter Biden (the son of former Vice President and 2020 Presidential candidate, Joe Biden), whom Trump believed was guilty of corruption and a beneficiary of nepotism based on his position on the Board of Directors for a Ukrainian energy company called Burisma Holdings (Hunter Biden had no experience in the energy industry when he took the board seat). The concern here is that, even if Hunter Biden and Joe Biden were guilty of corruption, Presidents still aren’t allowed to seek help from foreign governments in elections, which is likely the reason Trump wanted dirt on Biden (who is one of the top polling candidates who may oppose Trump in the 2020 general election). The benefit of the doubt, in this case, is fairly weak. That argument is that perhaps Trump was only interested in fighting corruption, but starting with his biggest political opponent seems like a convenient choice when Trump hadn’t requested any other foreign governments to initiate investigations of any other potentially corrupt American citizens.
Article Two — The second article of impeachment charges Trump with “obstruction of Congress”, and relates to his conduct during the House’s investigation. The Constitution gives the House of Representatives the “sole power of impeachment”, and under this constitutional power, they have to authority to subpoena witness testimony, records, and any other evidence that would be useful in determining whether to impeach the President. The White House, under Trump’s authority, submitted a letter to the House leaders stating their unwillingness to cooperate with the investigation, saying that it was “illegitimate” because the full House of Representatives didn’t vote on whether or not to impeach the President before conducting their investigation. This seems (and is) ridiculous; it is the equivalent of asking for an indictment decision before the police officers/investigators are allowed to collect any evidence. Indeed, Trump did completely refuse to comply, handing over none of the requested documents and prohibiting those who work for him to testify, thereby infringing the HOR’s Constitutional right to collect such evidence to conduct their “sole power of impeachment”.
Given that America is so divided over President Trump, it’s important to look at this from both sides.
While a lot of angry, ill-informed Democrats have been shouting “impeachment” since Trump won the election, congressional Democrats were slow to actually initiate the impeachment process against President Trump. Of course, some will say this is because they had no concrete evidence, while others will say it was merely a strategic decision by Nancy Pelosi.
Of course, there is some degree of truth to both of those claims. Conclusive evidence that Trump colluded with the Russian operatives who influenced the 2016 election never surfaced. To many Trump supporters, in the wake of the long and unsuccessful campaign to oust him over the whole “Russian Collusion” fiasco, the whole issue of him having allegedly abused his power in the Ukraine case feels like it’s been a blitz attack by Democrats, carried out swiftly and recklessly with the sole hope of removing him from office, regardless of the facts. However, anyone smart enough to have ended up in Congress can see how this is likely to play out: the House of Representatives will impeach Donald Trump, and then he’ll be acquitted by the Senate. As far as the political fallout, it could really go either way. It could enrage Democrats and moderates who feel that the claims against Trump were unfairly dismissed, and drive them to vote in record numbers in 2020. It could also make Republicans and those who have always supported Donald Trump feel vindicated, and drive them to support him even more passionately.
However, the Democrats are rightly pointing out that even if you think you’ve been unfairly charged with something, you don’t get to just skip your court date and ignore subpoenas; I recently got a traffic ticket for making an illegal left turn in an intersection where there was no posted signage prohibiting my left turn. I think it’s extremely unfair, but I still have to go through the proper legal channels to prove my innocence, I can’t simply refuse to participate in the legal process altogether, because those are crimes of their own, and in Trump’s case, they directly impede the House’s “sole power of impeachment”. The biggest issue here is not what happened with Ukraine, though that is problematic, if true. The big issue here is that Trump, by refusing to cooperate with the legally conducted impeachment inquiry and instructing those beneath him to also refuse to cooperate, he is directly challenging the separation of powers and usurping power from the House of Representatives, regardless of whether the allegations from Article One were valid. This, if not punished, would set a dangerous precedent that gives the executive branch more power than the legislative branch, which is directly contrary to the form of government envisioned by the Founding Fathers. When our Constitution was drafted, the authors sought to separate power equally between three distinct branches with a system of checks and balances so that no branch could amass more power than the two, because when that happens, the entire republic is placed on a slippery slope that can lead to dictatorship. That may sound dramatic, but let us not forget that Adolf Hitler rose to power by being elected democratically, and then usurping power by delegitimizing and weakening the German legislative body.
Next week, the full House of Representatives will vote on whether or not Trump should be formally charged with the offenses listed in the articles of impeachment. You may be wondering why the evidence against Trump isn’t abundantly clear at this point, given that the HOR vote to impeach him is the next step in the process. To use the earlier analogy of a criminal trial, at this point in the process, evidence has been collected and we’re waiting on an indictment — evidence, in any legal case, impeachment or otherwise, wouldn’t necessarily become public until it is brought up in the actual trial — so despite the fact that there seems to be little evidence in support of Article One, in fact we just don’t know what that is, both because the Trump administration refused to provide any, and the small number of witnesses who testified to the House Judiciary Committee had no legal obligation to do so publicly. It is also worth noting that there is one piece of solid evidence which could immediately exonerate the President, though it has only been partially released. The White House, naturally, keeps records of all of Trump’s phone calls, but so far they have only provided a “rough transcript” of his call with the Ukrainian President during which the alleged abuse of power occurred. Now, “rough transcript” is little more than an oxymoron: either the transcript provided is exact or it is a summary, there is no such thing as a “rough transcript”.
If the full House of Representatives does vote to impeach, Donald Trump will become the third President in United States history to actually have been impeached.
A formal trial would then take place in the Senate. After both sides have had the opportunity to provide evidence and testimony, the Senate will vote on whether or not the President deserves to be removed from office based on the results of the trial they conduct. However, it’s very unlikely that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will conduct anything resembling a just trial. He has remarked that he wants the whole process to be very quick, allegedly for the sake of expediency, although it seems more likely that he hopes to prevent the President from digging himself into an even deeper hole during his testimony to the Senate. McConnell went so far as to state that allowing either side to call witnesses would be “mutually assured destruction”.
Given the deep partisan divide in Congress right now and the fact that the Republicans have the majority (with 53 seats; the Democrats have 45, and there are two independents), it is highly unlikely that 20 Republicans (the number needed to reach the two-thirds majority needed to remove Trump, assuming all of the Democrats and independents vote for removal) would break rank with the rest of their (usually) pro-Trump party. However, this could serve as an out for a silent faction of Republican Senators who think Trump is doing irreparable damage to their party, and in that case, a landslide could happen quite suddenly. The odds are extremely low, but the political situation in America is so volatile that we would be remiss not to consider all possibilities.
At the end of the day, it is most likely that Donald Trump will be impeached but not removed, though that doesn’t mean that the whole process will have been for naught. Donald Trump is a parasite to our nation, and historians will look back on this moment in history as a turning point, and they will place the blame at the feet of the Senators who refused to conduct a just trial and convict him for the offense(s) of which he is admittedly guilty, offenses which will lead to the destabilization of our federal government and the eventual collapse of our republic.
You don’t even have to be convicted of a crime to lose your job in this constitutional republic if this body determines that your conduct as a public official is clearly out of bounds in your role, because impeachment is not about punishment, impeachment is about cleansing the office. Impeachment is about restoring honor and integrity to the office.
— Lindsey Graham, 1998
Lindsey Graham explains that a president stonewalling Congressional oversight is an impeachable offense. pic.twitter.com/tv88AilKUJ
— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) April 26, 2019
Despite that rock solid position he took the last time a President was facing impeachment, Graham seems to have no issue with the fact that Trump refused to comply with congressional subpoenas, directly impeding their constitutional power of impeachment, saying that the whole process is “illegitimate”, and based on hearsay”.
This is unabashed hypocrisy; Lindsey Graham is an embarrassment to the people of South Carolina, and his electorate — Democrats, moderates, and Republicans, alike — all deserve better. Anyone who voted for him, even just a handful of years ago, certainly shouldn’t feel like they’re being well represented; the man is flimsier and more of a flip flop than those pretend shoes women wear out of the salon after getting pedicures.
I’m not even from South Carolina and this man makes my blood boil; it’s high time that he crawls into a hole in the ground. Speaking of which, the inside of a hole would at least be a nice change of scenery over the inside of the closet within which he has dug his heels. To be clear, I won’t ridicule him for his sexuality (which many presume is of the homosexual variety, despite his laughable insistence to the contrary), but I will ridicule him for being such a craven that flimsy political power granted by his homophobic base is enough for him to ignore the innate desire we all have to connect with other human beings on the most deeply personal level. What kind of unfeeling person would chose such a life? Not one I would chose to represent me, certainly, if he lacks the basic courage to lead an honest personal life. Lindsey, if you’re reading this: just go for it man, you’ll feel much better, and I’m sure there are plenty of conscience-lacking twinks out there who would jump at the chance to be your live-in boyfriend/sugar baby.
Further instances of Graham’s cowardice and hypocrisy are not hard to find: take, for example, his complete switch from boisterous critic to unshakable supporter of our Commander in Cheeto. What has Trump threatened him with to inspire such a drastic change of opinion since 2016?
If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed.......and we will deserve it.
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) May 3, 2016
He was, at one point, a staunch critic of Trump’s border wall and immigration plan, calling them “stupid”, “illegal”, and “not practical”. Fast forward two years, and he’s telling Trump to proceed in building the wall without congressional approval:
Mr. President, the Democrats are not working in good faith with you.
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) January 11, 2019
Declare emergency, build the wall now.
Examples of Graham’s hypocrisy regarding Donald Trump alone are plentiful, and while this certainly lends itself to the theory that Trump has him by the balls, the truth, most likely, isn't that Trump has dirt on Graham, but rather that Graham is just disgustingly committed to upholding the status quo. His short-lived run for President was a weak power grab, and evolved into a poor attempt to save the Republican establishment from Donald Trump. Now that Trump has entranced a large swath of Republican voters, Graham will say anything to remain in his good graces. He has no shame. He puts party above all else, no matter how the party shifts or how often it results in his foot in his mouth.
It must be nice at times, not having a spine; you could weasel your way into all sorts of dark, uncomfortable places. If you’ve got some extra cash laying around, throw it at Jaime Harrison, a South Carolinian running a strong campaign for Graham’s Senate seat in 2020.
I would all but guarantee that nobody reading this will ever need Apple’s newly released Mac Pro and its accompanying display. This is the type of science fiction-y stuff tech nerds drool over, and it’s a momentous moment in the history of technological advancements, so despite the fact that very, VERY few people actually need it, it’s just a really cool, mind numbingly powerful beast of a computer, and I want my readers to know that it exists and appreciate the marvel of computing that Apple has managed to pull off. It’s so crazy that I’ve opted to place this post under the “magical nonsense” category, in addition to the obviously applicable “technology” category.
This machine is truly groundbreaking. Just to put some things in perspective, most PCs these days have processors with two or four cores; in the Mac Pro, you can get up to twenty-eight. Most PCs shipping right now will have either two, four, eight, or sixteen gigabytes of RAM. The new Mac Pro? Up to 1,500 gigabytes of RAM. It’s hard to imagine anything this machine couldn’t handle with ease. The price is, of course, equally mind boggling: it starts at $5,999 and maxes out at $53,799.
The display that they’re selling alongside the new Mac Pro, the Pro Display XDR, is also extremely impressive. It blows pretty much all current displays out of the water when it comes to metrics like brightness, contrast, color accuracy, clarity, etc., including professional displays like those used by filmmakers that cost 8x the price.
Despite all the incredible things Apple has packed into these two products, they have gotten a lot of criticism for some of their decisions made in regards to the pricing of accessories, which I think are valid criticisms. The stand for the display is sold separately, and costs a whopping $999, which is inarguably nuts. The Mac Pro itself has the option of shipping with stainless steel feet or wheels, and if you opt for the wheels, it’ll cost you an additional $399, which is laughable. However, I don’t think it matters too much overall; this whole product is almost just an instance of Apple showing off, and very pricy accessories grab more attention; given the unbelievable machine they've created, I think we should let them show off a bit.
John Bowden, writing for The Hill:
President Trump's reelection campaign on Thursday tweeted an edited cover of Time magazine's "Person of the Year" issue that depicted the president's head on the shoulders of Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old climate change activist.
Is their whole reelection campaign plan to just keep poorly photoshopping Trump’s face onto images of other people? Play to your audience, I guess.
This one was weird, though:
House Democrats can push their sham impeachment all they want.
— Trump War Room (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TrumpWarRoom) December 10, 2019
President Trump's re-election is 𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘃𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲. pic.twitter.com/O7o02S26nS
I hope they realize that Thanos’s character arc was defined by dictatorship and mass murder, not to mention the fact that he died twice in that movie.
See also: Clearly jealous, Trump makes fun of Greta Thunberg (who is 16 years old) after TIME names her “Person of the Year”.
We can’t just continue living as if there was no tomorrow, because there is a tomorrow.
— Greta Thunberg
It’s been a long time since Taylor Swift put out a Christmas song, and none of them were terribly memorable. While “Christmas Tree Farm” is better than 65% of the songs on Lover, it may not have a ton of staying power either; only time will tell.
However, it is a really cute song and it could very well be the best original Christmas song of 2019. It certainly beats John Legend and Kelly Clarkson’s #metoo era rendition of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”.
