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Tweets Nate Silver. I’m having trouble making a link to his tweet, but you can look at all the relevant polls here . Silver doesn’t offer any ideas about why Biden is holding strong. Maybe people aren’t paying so much attention to the Ukraine story. ADDED: In related news, there’s a poll of Republicans, reported at The Hill , showing very low awareness of what Trump’s Ukraine phone call had to do with Biden.

Writes David Remnick in “The Floodgates Open on Trump” (The New Yorker). The “collective nerve endings” that matter are the nerve endings of Trump haters, and they are “frayed and numbed” and insufficiently “alive” because they’ve received so many “ugly” messages that they can’t feel the ugliness anymore. And yet supposedly, the ugliness has been dammed up. I guess the “dammed-up” image is useful (metaphorically) because it suggests a vast quantity of ugliness that hasn’t got out yet and so there’s potential, if the “floodgates” open, to batter the near-dead nerve endings and finally, at long last, get the reaction against Trump that Remnick is so sure he deserves. The particular ugly message to which the collective nerve endings were insufficiently alive, was Trump’s reaction to Congressman Schiff’s satirical restatement of Trump’s Ukraine phone call: “Rep. Adam Schiff illegally made up a FAKE & terrible statement, pretended it to be mine as the most important part of my call to

I’m quoting “Washington at war: Dems aim for speedy impeachment push as Trump threatens whistleblower” (CNN). I see everything needs to be fast, fast, fast for this to work. If another week passes without the whole country getting the cue to go “frenetic,” maybe the Ukraine phone call will fade away like 100 other impeachable offenses attributed to Trump. I’m put off by the pressure for speed. All the time we devote to electing a President and all the work lavished thus far into the next election, and we’re supposed to suddenly stop everything and throw this bum out? Quick! Don’t think! That makes me want to slow down and think quite a bit. And I’m amused by the war metaphor, “Washington at war,” because I was just reading a diatribe in The Washington Post against Trump for quoting some preacher who used the words “civil war” to describe the impending discord over the impeachment. Real war is truly horrible, so what an outrage to use war as a metaphor! And then CNN tosses off the wa

Writes Andrew McCarthy (Fox News).

Writes Alexandria Petri , who seems to have ventured out of the elite cocoon to talk to some deplorables before condemning them for failing to match her opinion. This account of a perilous journey to the hinterlands appears in The Washington Post. She doesn't state where this truck stop is, so I'm not certain it isn't a satirical fantasy. I'm just reading the headline and glancing at the text, trying to find out exactly where this is, and I'm suspecting "cursed" is a clue that the place is her invention, the truck stop from hell. Now, I'm reading the text. I’ve been interviewing for what I figure is at least an hour — the clock on the wall is broken — and everyone I speak to still supports the president just as much as they did the day he was elected.... Who relies on a wall   clock to know what time it is? That's your first clue. The old man at the end of the counter shakes his head when I tell him the president is beleaguered by scandal. He’s no

Rep. Schiff re-writes the call transcript for added drama: "I’m going to say this only seven times, so you better listen good, I want you to make up dirt on my political opponent, understand, lots of it, on this and on that, I’m going to put you in touch with people" pic.twitter.com/1rV7BpEN6o — Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 26, 2019

Read it at Vox.

Read it here (at NBC). I haven't read it yet, but I see the line that NBC cherry-picked — presumably the most damning thing — is "I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down, which is really unfair." Here's the mention of Biden (click to enlarge and sharpen): Ah! So what Trump was talking about was the way Biden "stopped the prosecution" and "went around bragging about it." Trump wanted Ukraine to look into Biden's interference with an investigation into Biden’s son. [Correction made: I’d originally written “investigation into Ukraine.” Sorry for the confusion!]

I'm trying to understand the terminology, as reported in The Washington Post, in "House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announces formal impeachment inquiry of Trump, says his actions were a ‘betrayal of national security.'" What does "formal" mean? Pelosi made an announcement "after a closed-door meeting with her caucus." Shouldn't formality entail an open proceeding, with participation of all members of the House? It's funny, there's criticism of Trump for withholding things Congress that he did outside of the public ver and for acting for his own political benefit, but they're operating as a single party behind closed doors, and it certainly seems that what they talked about was their own political advantage.

"They failed with Russia, they failed with recession, they failed with everything, and now they're bringing this up. The one who's got the problem is Biden. Because if you look at what Biden did, Biden did what they would like to have me do — except with one problem. I didn't do it. What Biden did is a disgrace. What his son did is a disgrace. His son took money from Ukraine. The son took money from China. A lot of money from China. China would love to see he would —they could think of nothing they'd rather see then Biden get in because they will take this great deal that we are about to make and they would really have themselves a deal for themselves. So let me just tell you--let me just tell you, what Biden did was wrong." ["Mr. President, what did you tell the Ukrainian President about Joe Biden and his son during your phone call?"] "Well, you're going to see because what we are doing is we want honesty. And if we deal with the country, w

"... in which Trump is said to have pressured the Ukrainian president to investigate the son of former vice president Joe Biden, according to three senior administration officials. Officials at the Office of Management and Budget relayed Trump’s order to the State Department and the Pentagon during an interagency meeting in mid-July, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. They explained that the president had 'concerns' and wanted to analyze whether the money needed to be spent.... Trump’s order to withhold aid to Ukraine a week before his July 25 call with Volodymyr Zelensky is likely to raise questions about the motivation for his decision and fuel suspicions on Capitol Hill that Trump sought to leverage congressionally approved aid to damage a political rival." WaPo reports. Three senior administration officials. One reason I have difficulty taking the cue to feel suspicious that "Trump sought to lever

... here ... and now I'm seeing this: This is the real corruption that the Fake News Media refuses to even acknowledge! pic.twitter.com/FCvUtWA33j — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 23, 2019

An hour ago: This is the real and only story! pic.twitter.com/4z8eOcm6PA — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 21, 2019 And ( here and here ): The Fake News Media and their partner, the Democrat Party, want to stay as far away as possible from the Joe Biden demand that the Ukrainian Government fire a prosecutor who was investigating his son, or they won’t get a very large amount of U.S. money, so they fabricate a.........story about me and a perfectly fine and routine conversation I had with the new President of the Ukraine. Nothing was said that was in any way wrong, but Biden’s demand, on the other hand, was a complete and total disaster. The Fake News knows this but doesn’t want to report! Then, 18 minutes ago: Now that the Democrats and the Fake News Media have gone “bust” on every other of their Witch Hunt schemes, they are trying to start one just as ridiculous as the others, call it the Ukraine Witch Hunt, while at the same time trying to protect Sleepy Joe Biden. Will

"... on possible Trump 2020 challenger Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s business dealings in that country. Politics or law could have been part of Giuliani’s motive, and neither would be illegal. But there is a missing part of the story that the American public needs in order to assess what really happened: Giuliani’s contact with Zelensky adviser and attorney Andrei Yermak this summer was encouraged and facilitated by the U.S. State Department. Giuliani didn’t initiate it.... So, rather than just a political opposition research operation, Giuliani’s contacts were part of a diplomatic effort by the State Department to grow trust with the new Ukrainian president, Zelensky, a former television comic making his first foray into politics and diplomacy. Why would Ukraine want to talk to Giuliani, and why would the State Department be involved in facilitating it? According to interviews with more than a dozen Ukrainian and U.S. officials, Ukraine’s government under recently departed Presi

"... implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found. A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation. The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort’s resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump’s campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine’s foe to the east, Russia...." From a 2-and-a-half-year-old article in Politico — "Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire/Kiev officials are scrambling to make amends with the president-elect after quietly working to boost Clinton" — which was lin

"... it involves at least one instance of Mr. Trump making an unspecified commitment to a foreign leader and includes other actions.... At least part of the allegation deals with Ukraine, two people familiar with it said.... Though it is not clear how Ukraine fits into the allegation, questions have already emerged about Mr. Trump’s dealings with its government. In late July, he told the country’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, that Ukraine could improve its reputation and its 'interaction' with the United States by investigating corruption, according to a Ukrainian government summary of the call. Some of Mr. Trump’s close allies were also urging the Ukrainian government to investigate matters that could hurt the president’s political rivals, including former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his family...." I'm trying to read this very confusing shrouded-in-mystery report in the New York Times, "Whistle-Blower Complaint Sets Off a Battle Involving T