Author: Pogo

Live Democratic Debate Thread tonight. 8-11pm ET on ABC

So Joe was the front runner and likely nominee until the voting started. OK, it wasn’t voting, but what passes as voting in corn country. So now Bernie’s tied with Pete going into maple syrup country and Pete is rising as the first actual voting occurs next week, and Joe? He’s taking the day off.

We’re breathless over who is rising, who is fading, and who’s running out of money. And it’s all to see who gets to challenge Mike on Super Tuesday and beyond. And we won’t worry about him running out of money will we? And there in the distance is the real contest, against 3*, which seems to be getting lost in the primary contests. And who still polls best against him? The guy taking the day off in N.H.

Some system we’ve got, right?

Aaron Blake, Wapo, tries to review the arguments about why the Bidens matter to the impeachment trial fo Donald J. SFB Trump.

President Trump’s legal team set about making his impeachment trial about the Bidens on Monday, with former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi offering an extensive case for why Trump’s interest in the investigation was legitimate.

Trump’s Senate allies had in recent days been advising the defense team to hone in on the Bidens and Burisma Holdings, the company that employed Hunter Biden.

“I told them, look, nothing matters more than the facts on Burisma,” Sen. Cruz (R-Tex.) told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Friday, adding: “They built their entire case on this house of cards. Lay out substantive, factual reasons why investigating Burisma — the president had a responsibility to do so.”

Their argument would be that Trump’s concerns about the Bidens and Burisma were legitimate, and so would have been his efforts to secure an investigation into them.

***

The article continues and fails to answer the question IMHO. Maybe you can.

Or maybe that will be subject of the what, 8 hours of question for each side? God knows someone needs to tell me why the Bidens matter in this trial.

We all have our opinions and we are entitled to them. One of mine is that the two House committees did not issue subpoenas and force the administration to ignore or move to quash them. It is the pall over today’s obstruction presentation. I liken it to arguing to a judge that I need a continuance because I don’t have enough information to proceed to trial and have no answer about why I didn’t issue discovery requests to the other side.

In a totally predictable response to the killing of Iranian Gen. Soleimani Iran launches a dozen or so ballistic missiles against a couple of Iraqi military bases housing US military personnel in Western Iraq. Baghdad is between Iran and the Al Asad base, and Iran apparently threw in the attack on Irbil for good measure.

No need to link to articles on this – they are everywhere, so just open your eyes. For me the title of this comment says it all.

David von Drehle has a very poignant piece at WaPo Sunday.

We’ve never needed Remembrance Day poppies more than right now

One can still see red poppies pinned to lapels on Remembrance Sunday across Britain. The tradition, marked this year on Nov. 10, persists even though the creators of the holiday are gone, but I doubt that younger Britons wear the symbolic flowers with the same solemnity as their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. It’s hard to remember something that defies belief, and the further we go from the events in question, the more incredible they seem.

*****

Nationalism is ascendant across Europe, from Poland to Hungary to Turkey. The dormant pathologies of xenophobia and anti-Semitism are awakening throughout the West. Fascists have marched in Charlottesville and in Marseille and even, incredibly, in Berlin. Stalinism is countenanced in the outlaw state of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. China is building a 21st-century totalitarianism.

Bankrupt impulses and failed ideologies of the 1920s and 1930s are taking root again in another generation of disillusioned and demoralized leadership. But it’s not too late to remember the bitter, bloody fruit of those fields and change course. What better time to start remembering than on Remembrance Day?

Amen, bruddah.