Month: November 2019

Cognitive Dissonance Much?

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NYT poll finds that majorities of Iowa voters want a moderate, common-ground candidate who will use those traits to bring fundamental, systemic change to American society pic.twitter.com/hDY9f87IwK

— dan solomon (@dansolomon) November 1, 2019

So the poll, which appears to be VERY poorly worded, says that people want fundamental systemic change to America, but they want it from a moderate who crosses party lines.

BTW, this response to the Tweet is prize too:

"Look we want someone that will change things but never talk about changing things. Someone who is different but appears to be the same.

Basically we need a Trojan Horse that we can sneak by The Boomers."

— Travis DeCoster (@MyStupidTown) November 1, 2019

Also, speaking as a Boomer (just barely), let me also say F%$# Boomers.

I Missed This Yesterday

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One of the problems with Congressional hearings is that each committee member gets 5 minutes to ask questions, which leads to grand-standing on their part, and filibustering on the part of the witnesses.

It’s one of the reasons that Mueller’s report, which clearly showed obstruction of justice, landed with a wet splat on the public consciousness.

Yesterday’s impeachment investigation resolution makes a serious attempt to fix this:

The House of Representatives voted 232-196 Thursday morning to approve a resolution laying out how public impeachment hearings will be conducted on “whether sufficient grounds exist for the House of Representatives to exercise its Constitutional power to impeach Donald John Trump, President of the United States of America.”

………

The most significant provision in the resolution exempts the Intelligence Committee’s impeachment hearings from a rule that ordinarily limits questioning of witnesses to five minutes per committee member. Though the resolution leaves the five-minute rule in place for most members, it allows Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff to extend his own question time to as much as 45 minutes, so long as he gives equal time to Republican ranking committee member Devin Nunes.

These are important changes because they will allow Schiff and the team of lawyers working for him to focus their time on the impeachment hearings and to spend significant amounts of time asking probing questions during those hearings. The new rules help ensure that the hearing will not be a disjointed process, constantly jumping from one questioner to the next, without giving anyone time to build a coherent narrative.

The resolution provides that “the chair may confer recognition for multiple periods of such questioning,” so Schiff could potentially spend an indefinite amount of time questioning witnesses if circumstances warrant such an extension.

And, in what could prove to be an especially consequential aspect of this provision, Schiff and Nunes may also delegate their questioning time to “a Permanent Select Committee employee.” That means that professional counsel, who have both the skill set to conduct an effective interrogation and the ability to devote all their time to preparing for hearings, will be able to question witnesses.

These inquiry-specific rules appear to be an acknowledgment that the House’s ordinary rules for committee hearings, which often turn hearings into feasts of grandstanding, are inadequate to the awesome task of impeaching a president.

If only this could be done on a more regular basis.

Is Anyone Surprised by This?

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Because I see the news that the Keystone Pipeline just had an oil spill of almost ½ million gallons to be profoundly unsurprising.

Trans Canada (or whatever the f%$# they are called these days) has a long history of spills and poor safety practices:

Approximately 383,000 gallons of crude oil have spilled into a North Dakota wetland this week in the latest leak from the Keystone Pipeline, further fueling long-standing opposition to plans for the pipeline network’s extension.

With about half an Olympic swimming pool’s worth of oil covering roughly half an acre, the leak is among the largest in the state, said Karl Rockeman, who directs the North Dakota Department of Environmental Quality’s division of water quality. But the spill does not appear to pose an immediate threat to public health, he added, as people do not live nearby and the wetland is not a source of drinking water.

For environmental groups, though, the leak was further evidence that Canada-based pipeline owner TC Energy should not be allowed to build the controversial Keystone XL addition, which would stretch more than 1,000 miles from Alberta into the United States. The Trump administration approved the plan in 2017 after years of protests, but the project was blocked by a federal judge who called for further study on environmental impacts.

“With each one of these major spills that happens on the Keystone pipeline system, it becomes clearer and clearer that this is not safe,” said Doug Hayes, an attorney leading the Sierra Club’s work on Keystone XL. Critics worry about a similar mishap contaminating one of the hundreds of waterways along Keystone XL’s expected path, he said.