I think it's partially a question of ought vs. is.

I mostly agree about the ought's: about what congress does and should do. The legislative should have, in my opinion, very wide latitude when it comes to investigating the executive branch or quasi-executive branch entities (e.g., Fed Reserve, FTC, etc.). In that sense, it's ridiculous to say the House must have a full vote on whether to begin an impeachment proceeding before doing an impeachment investigation.

The difficulty comes with how well congress can do it if the executive challenges its (congress's) every move in court. A related, but milder, difficulty comes when congress has to make its case to the public.

A fun piece; inspired me to list my own favorites by era:

Silent: huh?
Classic Monsters: Bride of Frankenstein. Special mention: Dracula (1931 Spanish Version)
Giant Monsters and Aliens: None. Special mention: Curse of the Demon (1957, for giant monster)
Gothic Horror: The Haunting (1963). Special mention: The Innocents (1961); Wicker Man (1975)
Slasher Era: Nightmare on Elm Street. Special mention: The Evil Dead (1981)
Torture Porn: None.
Current: Get Out. Special Mention: The Witch; Annihilation

I think Pelosi is going with the strategy of "when you grab them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow".

That is build public support for impeachment to the point where Trump's reelection is doomed and the downdraft takes out one or two vulnerable Senators.

For example, Amy McGrath is just about tied in the race for McConnell's seat. Its entirely conceivable that come next summer he could find it in his best interest to throw Trump to the wolves to squeak out a win.

No need to if you don't wish. As far as I'm concerned, you're doing a public service by reviewing the movies. (If you're not into Family Guy, you might not like their spoofs anyway.)

By the way. there was, as I recall, a made-for-TV star wars movie that was different from the Holiday Special. It featured Ewoks. If memory serves (I was probably 11 or so at the time? maybe it was mid 1980s?), it involved a boy and his sister trying to make their way (to somewhere? back to their parents?) on Tatooine, and for some reason Ewoks were on the planet.

"Where are you getting this information from?"

EU-mining or straight-up fanwank. Alan Dean Foster wrote a lot of stuff into the novelizations that was seized on by readers hungry for Star Wars content; same with West End Games. And then you had the resurgence of the property in the 1990s with Tim Zahn and all the other writers (of books and comics) who escalated things to the point that any old Star Destroyer was basically the Death Star all by itself.

Thank you for the information! I didn't find that when I looked.

It does sound like what I imagined--they gave you a margin for "just below the limit" with the idea that the inspectors know their business but didn't want to get into a court case over every fine with days of argument about how exactly you measure the length of a fish.

I think the the thing is, if they hadn't charged Yates under SarbOx then we wouldn't even be having this conversation, because he'd have taken his prosecution and shut up. (If anything, he seemed entirely willing to go on with paying a fine over the issue and getting on with his life.)

I've never seen them (or Family Guy) so it's not in the plan right now, but if there's popular demand for something I might do it. As of right now the plan is just all 10 films and maybe a "bonus" post or two (Holiday Special, Clone Wars film, Empire of Dreams documentary, etc.).

So today's reporting is that the dispatcher sent them on an open door check, which is another way of saying a suspicious burglary not a true welfare check. This is alleged to account for why the officers didn't go to the front door or identify themselves initially. It makes the case much more confused, and points to a systemic process problem in the Fort Worth PD that isn't being addressed.

Where are you getting this information from? The movies, the highest canon, are vague enough about where the Death Star came from and what it could do beyond somehow blowing Alderaan up. And Death Star II used its main beam to destroy individual ships in the Rebel fleet during the Battle of Endor at the climax of ROTJ.

I mean, this all makes a fair amount of sense, especially from a game design perspective. But if it were real war, there's no reason to build weaknesses or limitations into anything; you have an advantage and you press it and you don't accept vulnerabilities in exchange for capabilities unless you have no choice but to do that.

The dorm I lived in my freshman year in college was going to be completely made over the next year, so the college said "If you want to paint something on the outside of your dorm room door, go for it." So some people did Grateful Dead or Pink Floyd album covers and others did political stuff and others did the utterly predictable big marijuana leaves.

But the very best one, which attracted people from across the campus -- literally it became a tourist attraction -- was a faithful adaptation of a Cool Ranch Doritos bag, with the dorm room door right in the middle where the transparent plastic revealing the chips inside would have been. Hands down. There wasn't any argument and no one bothered to paint their exterior room walls after that one because it wasn't going to be bested. You'd walk past this one on your way back to your room, drunk, stoned, or both, and just get the munchies.

Something in the recesses of my mind says that I, too, once wrote about Yates and, I mean, how can a SCOTUS junkie not? It combines the sublime and the ridiculous. This was a fabulous writeup and a great explanation of the kinds of results that the very ugly cocktail of imprecise legislative drafting and rigid judicial textualism threaten to yield.

So who do those new wars involve, and how many divisions should we send for how many decades to make sure we have access to whatever they did out of the ground there? Will we still be allied with Turkish-backed Syrian jihadists in northwest Syria and communist revolutionaries in northeastern Syria?

I hope more leaders do that, then, because Trump could use a Nobel Peace Prize for ending a war that Obama said would be a "multi-generational conflict" for the US.

Ben Crenshaw co-sponsored a resolution condemning Trumps move in Syria, but to me that's like a hypothetical resolution condemning the sale of US fighter aircraft to Italy during WW-II, passed without realizing that Italy had changed sides three days before the vote. From his time in combat, Crenshaw must know that a soldier can't go back and re-fight last-week's ambush, just as we can't stick our 50 soldiers back in their base, roll Turkish troops back to their side of the border, make Syrian and Russian forces drive back to Damascus, and rip the understanding between the Kurdish and Syrian forces. (The US bases in Syria have already been occupied by Russians, who posted cool videos of our bases to show how our soldiers lived.)

There is no option by which US forces can go in and redraw the freshly redrawn map. If we're supposed to fight the Turks then we'll be fighting side-by-side with Assad's forces and Russian troops. We may even have to give Assad anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles. If we choose to bomb Turkish forces we'd fly our F-16's out of Incirlik airbase, where they could wave to the Turkish F-16 pilot's on the apron waiting to take off to bomb US positions. Then they could all fly back and laugh about bombing each side's ground pounders. Of course some might think that plan has a few flaws.

The 50 US troops were not stopping Turkey, which is moving on a stretch of border that stretches over 150 miles. That's about 3 miles of border per US soldier, and our guys do need to sleep some of the time. But hey, maybe Turkey wouldn't dare engage any US troops, but since we don't scatter them out, all Turkey would have to do is not attack the one or two spots in that vast stretch. We'd have two platoons worth of guys sitting outside some Syrian town while Turkey occupied the other 2,000 or so square miles of their Peace Corridor.

With Turkey holding the roads, the Syrian forces wouldn't be much support for our guys, and then one of those Turkish-sponsored jihadist militias would show up (who are our Free Syrian army allies), and things would probably get ugly because we'd be an impediment to their commander's material acquisitions.

Pundits are arguing that the US forces were somehow keeping Erdogan from acting, but how could 50 troops hold him in check when Trump's blatant threat to destroy his economy, Merkel's threats, Assad's threats, Russia's threats, and everybody else's threats didn't stop him from continuing on? In fact, Senators privy to the back and forth before Trump's pullout re-iterate that Trump was trying to get Erdogan to back down and Erdogan wouldn't, which is why Trump got our forces out of the area.

So this all gets back to some fundamental questions, some of which Trump is publicly asking. I'll number some of these.

1. Why are US troops defending Assad's border in an active conflict?
a) If you say that we're not defending Assad's border, but the Kurdish border, where is the US plan to divide Syria and create an independent Kurdish state?
i. If there is such a plan, is the US obligated to defend it for several decades against Syrian military forces, and under what resolution did this commitment occur?

2. Since the Kurds are allied with the Syrian government, whose troops are racing toward the border with Turkey, will Congress authorize a military alliance between the US and Assad to engage in an active war against a NATO member? If not, when such a resolution might be forthcoming?

3. What is the critical US national interest in preventing the end of the Syria civil war? What is the vital US interest in not letting Syria Kurds get along with the Syrian government? What is they US interest in having anybody in Syria, and what can those US forces do against ISIS remnants that the now united country's forces can't do for itself?

Rest assured, if W Bush or Trump was trying to move US forces in to Syria, the same people condemning his withdrawal would be screaming about mission creep, quagmires, unwinnable conflicts, untrustworthy allies, and lack of exit strategies.

Heh, so money doesn't matter except when right wingers have it. How'd that work for em in the midterms?
I wouldn't be so confident as to say that Trump will be easy to beat but I certainly think Reid is nuts if he's saying Trump is smart.

Trump won in 2016 with an opponent who was bedeviled by accusations of corruption both real and mostly imagined; who had the FBI come out and put their fingers on the scale mere weeks before the election and who ran a lackluster campaign and ill advisedly ignored the mid-western states.

Trump also won by running to the left of his own party and making a series of dramatic promises, all of which he has now broken. Trump can't hide behind being a cipher on policy now, he has accomplished virtually nothing of what he has promised. His only policy accomplishment is a tax cut massively tilted to the wealthy. He's failed to resurrect manufacturing or coal, has screwed farmers sideways with his trade wars and entirely failed to repeal and replace the ACA with something better nor did he build any significant quantity of wall or get Mexico to pay for it.

Dems aren't going to have Hillary running again. Trump is extremely unlikely to have the FBI intervene on his behalf again and he has a list of failed promises as long as my arm that hits mid-western constituencies especially hard (manufacturing and farmers). How exactly is he going to win those blue states again and if he doesn't then where's he going to pick up the slack?
Sure the "he torcs the liberals" crowd and the massively hypocritical social right will turn out for him but he's not going to carry an election with them. Trump basically won by fluke; so how's he gonna win again? Hope lightning strikes twice?

Don't have much to say either way about Ranch dressing, but I saw Billy Joel on his 52nd Street tour in '78 or '79. Kick-ass concert.

What is grimly funny about this letter is that Trump sent it before Ed started his offensive. So Ed get the letter, had a cabinet meeting where everybody said the Turkish equivalent of WATF then ordered his forces to attack and do some light massacring. Trump releases the letter today to look like he was being tough but it shows his 3rd grade bluster was ignored with actual extreme physical violence.