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US election 2020 thread

spitfire said:
I was wondering in sort of the opposite direction and if the ban from twitter came at just the right time to take the wind out of the impeachment sails. Once his Twitter is shut off there is less opportunity for him to make it even worse for himself with "intemperate remarks" giving the whole scenario some time to cool down and more room for the GOP wankers to wriggle off voting for impeachment. The few that were anyway.

(Please note I do not believe in any way that the above is engineered and is just down to "events dear boy, events".)

I was thinking that after his, almost normal, video last night. All seemed a bit civilised and have they (him and whoever is still in the bunker) seen a potential route out of it all?

eta: I'm talking about the second impeachment
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Yeah I look at everything Trump does from now on through a single lens: Trump and his people working out how to keep him out of jail and save his 'empire'.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
Yeah I look at everything Trump does from now on through a single lens: Trump and his people working out how to keep him out of jail and save his 'empire'.
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I don't think there's much of an empire left to save, he's utterly toxic (as is the name Trump). The people left supporting him are not those who matter in multi-billion dollar circles - the establishment have abandoned him en masse. There's no more loans, and everything he has is mortgaged to the hilt.

Trump is going to see out his days in a way far, far worse than prison to him. He's going to be poor.

(He may also be poor in prison, which would be fucking hilarious)
 
I just wish people would stop the obsession with Twitter. It's the greatest ever example of the medium being the message and it's far from fucking healthy to have political debate reduced to a certain amount, a limited amount, of characters. It's reached an importance way beyond it's actual value.

Old man shouts at clouds? Yeah, maybe. But it's influence is creeping up and up and not least on here where every current event is being discussed via pages and pages of 'tweets'.

Urgh.
 
planetgeli said:
I just wish people would stop the obsession with Twitter. It's the greatest ever example of the medium being the message and it's far from fucking healthy to have political debate reduced to a certain amount, a limited amount, of characters. It's reached an importance way beyond it's actual value.

Old man shouts at clouds? Yeah, maybe. But it's influence is creeping up and up and not least on here where every current event is being discussed via pages and pages of 'tweets'.

Urgh.
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A little while back, I asked a friend who is a producer of a daily current affairs show how he got his stories, and every morning, the first thing he does is comb through Twitter. It's now their primary source for news gathering.
 
planetgeli said:
I just wish people would stop the obsession with Twitter. It's the greatest ever example of the medium being the message and it's far from fucking healthy to have political debate reduced to a certain amount, a limited amount, of characters. It's reached an importance way beyond it's actual value.

Old man shouts at clouds? Yeah, maybe. But it's influence is creeping up and up and not least on here where every current event is being discussed via pages and pages of 'tweets'.

Urgh.
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Absolutely. I refuse to click on twitter links or read twitter threads so just end up scrolling past post after post on here full of quotes from randoms.
 
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littlebabyjesus said:
A little while back, I asked a friend who is a producer of a daily current affairs show how he got his stories, and every morning, the first thing he does is comb through Twitter. It's now their primary source for news gathering.
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I don't doubt it, I noticed it's initial creep years ago. It's the Bitcoin of news communication systems with about the same amount of inflated false value.
 
planetgeli said:
I don't doubt it, I noticed it's initial creep years ago. It's the Bitcoin of news communication systems with about the same amount of inflated false value.
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How many times on alleged news programmes just reel pages of tweets off and a presenter just reads them out. Passed off as reported news. No depth, no discussion, no thought. Mostly opinion, not fact.
 
Sprocket. said:
How many times on alleged news programmes just reel pages of tweets off and a presenter just reads them out. Passed off as reported news. No depth, no discussion, no thought. Mostly opinion, not fact.
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More than that, though, it sets the agenda. The topics chosen are those trending on Twitter. That dictates what gets discussed, who gets invited on the show, everything. Not just political stuff, either. Reports of terrorist incidents, fires, accidents, etc, get gathered initially from Twitter. That's the bit that surprised me.

I guess the danger is that producers get lazy and just rely on Twitter. Bit like researching an article and just relying on information from wikipedia.
 
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littlebabyjesus said:
Yeah I look at everything Trump does from now on through a single lens: Trump and his people working out how to keep him out of jail and save his 'empire'.
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Venal, self interested shit that he is, I'm sure you are right. However I'm not sure what the route to a criminal prosecution is, out of the events of the last week at least. Don't get me wrong, there's clear and very obvious evidence he sent the invaders to congress, so some version of incitement. But I just don't see biden/any federal agency/DC police force or whoever putting him in the dock or even the other side of an interview table. There's more chance of stuff around his taxes or even his rapey ways putting him in court (unless the statute of limitations rules out the latter). These are strange days, but when you start putting a US President in the dock the institution starts to look a bit less 'sacred'. Also, biden wants a divided and defeated GOP, not a united right wing feeling it has to line up behind the 'martyr'.
 
Raheem said:
OTOH, if this one gets of the hook, the institution might struggle to ever look even minimally respectable.
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Yeah, they can't even use the excuse they had for not prosecuting Nixon ('he'd suffered enough by losing the presidency', iirc). I also get a sense Pelosi would push for prosecution, not surprisingly given he'd unleashed people who were at least sounding off about kidnapping her). But ultimately, my guess is biden would prefer to be seen as the magnanimous leader who gets back to neoliberal normality. Trump then gets left to froth and fume while his empire gets taken apart by various government agencies.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
More than that, though, it sets the agenda. The topics chosen are those trending on Twitter. That dictates what gets discussed, who gets invited on the show, everything. Not just political stuff, either. Reports of terrorist incidents, fires, accidents, etc, get gathered initially from Twitter. That's the bit that surprised me.

I guess the danger is that producers get lazy and just rely on Twitter. Bit like researching an article and just relying on information from wikipedia.
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I suppose there is a bit of a natural link between Twitter and modern news (especially 24 hour news networks), in that the news is all about SOMETHING IS GOING ON and twitter is a great source of HEY SOMETHING IS GOING ON type information. Neither actually tells you what has happened, never mind why it happened, and both are frequently completely wrong anyway - but they are both quick and cheap to make.
 
Cid said:
As far as the legal issues go, LegalEagle is worth watching, as I think I've mentioned on here before. E.g recent video on incitement:

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Thanks for that - he is remarkably good and clear - the last one posted up too was very interesting. So criminal incitement extremely unlikely, but from 17:00 gives good summary of possibility of impeachment. Sounds like he thinks it is possible and that Trump should indeed be impeached.

(Republican Congress votes permitting of course, highly unlikely I'd have thought)
 
Cid said:
As far as the legal issues go, LegalEagle is worth watching, as I think I've mentioned on here before. E.g recent video on incitement:

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I watched most of that. Doesn't look the chances of there being a successful criminal prosecution are that high, even if there was the political will to do so.
 
Wilf said:
Yeah, they can't even use the excuse they had for not prosecuting Nixon ('he'd suffered enough by losing the presidency', iirc). I also get a sense Pelosi would push for prosecution, not surprisingly given he'd unleashed people who were at least sounding off about kidnapping her). But ultimately, my guess is biden would prefer to be seen as the magnanimous leader who gets back to neoliberal normality. Trump then gets left to froth and fume while his empire gets taken apart by various government agencies.
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Nixon was persuaded to resign and accept a pardon, which was taken as an admission of guilt and ended his public life, so there's a big difference between that and Trump's situation now. Even now, Trump is still talking about his 'movement'. And Nixon's crime (the one he was done for - he did a lot worse things) wasn't really on the same level as Trump's denial of the election, which isn't so much an attempt to subvert the system as an attempt to overthrow it. I think you could make a good case for saying that a conviction in the Senate would be the best way to reaffirm the supremacy of the system. After all, that mechanism is part of the system, there to guard against rogue presidents.
 
Wilf said:
I watched most of that. Doesn't look the chances of there being a successful criminal prosecution are that high, even if there was the political will to do so.
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From 17:00 gets more interesting though :)

If you're paying someone $20,000 a day he's the one you'd choose not the twat Giuliani (assuming he'd work for Trump).
 
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two sheds said:
From 17:00 gets more interesting though :)

If you're paying someone $20,000 a day he's the one you'd choose not the twat Giuliani (assuming he'd work for Trump).
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Last line:

If this is not impeachable conduct, nothing is.

And he makes good points that it's not just about his speech on the day, but also what he tweeted after the speech, his calls to Republicans during the siege, and his refusal to send in the National Guard. That last bit seems the most damning of all to me, given that the Republican senators he'll be relying on in any trial were all at that moment inside the Capitol and I can't imagine any of them were happy with the fact Trump had refused to call in armed help.
 
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