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Where Things Stand: Today Isn’t Really About What Trump Did 
Democrats have plenty of compelling evidence against the former president — mostly because everything he’s being impeached for, he did out loud, very much in the open.
TPM Reader JL follows up on my post about the size the recovery package. This is the logical risk of too large a package. What I referenced yesterday was what seemed most salient from Summer’s column: even Summers, as the spokesman for traditional deficit concern and austerity, himself only seemed able to make a half-hearted argument about building up inflationary pressures in the economy. And that to me was the most telling thing about it.
If GA Pushes Through Voter Restrictions, A Legal Battle Will Follow
Where Things Stand: There’s A Lot We Don’t Know One Day Out
Ex-President Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial in the Senate is set to begin tomorrow and there’s very little we know definitively about how proceedings will work — aside from the fact that Trump himself has no plans to make an appearance.
It’s a Big Mistake
There is now a debate over whether to change the income caps for eligibility for those $2,000 checks. (Actually, it’s an additional $1,400 which combined with the $600 from December will equal $2,000.) Specifically, the discussion is whether to lower the income cap from $75,000 to $50,000.
This is a major, major mistake.
From TPM Reader CC …
One of the things it would be hard for you to grasp totally is the extent to which Trump’s omnipresence was not just limited to the U.S. It was felt around the world and here in Australia he was covered and became part of everyday conversation so much more than Obama (except for Obama’s “honeymoon” period). Now he is gone and the coverage of US politics has really dialed back because it is so much more normal than it was. I think if it was not for COVID19 and how bad it is in America (particularly relative to here) the coverage would be virtually non-existent. So our de-trumping story is like a withdrawal from more than just Trump. It will be interesting to see what coverage of the impeachment trial will be but for the moment I don’t think I am the only Australian grateful to be able to ignore you again for a while.
Where Things Stand: The Fox News We Know And Love
There might have been a brief period when the conservative, Rupert Murdoch-owned cable news network earned a sliver of respect from competitors over its coverage of Trump — most notably when it refused to retract its Arizona call for Biden, even after coming under pressure.
But it appears nature is healing. Fox News is back to its Obama-era fixations on tan suit-variety non scandals.
QAnon is Not a ‘Conspiracy Theory’
As the QAnon phenomenon becomes more central to critical political and public safety questions, I realize we need a new vocabulary to describe this and similar phenomena. Q is not a “conspiracy theory”. The faked moon landing was a conspiracy theory. Perhaps birtherism was a conspiracy theory, though one with similarities to QAnon because of its strong ideological valence. But Q is not a conspiracy theory. It’s a fascistic political movement which predicts and advocates mass violence against liberals (and everyone else outside its definition of true Americans) in an imminent apocalyptic political reckoning. What we call the ‘conspiracy theories’ are simply the storylines and claims that justify that outcome. They could easily be replaced by others which serve the same purpose.
In other words – and this is still a very basic confusion – the Q phenomenon is not a factual misunderstanding that more credible news sources or prevalent fact-check columns would deflate and tame. You can even see this play out in real time in what we might call Q ‘man on the street’ interviews in which a reporter dissects or debunks some claim the Q supporter believes. The response is invariably something like, “Well, there are a bunch of other bad things I heard they did.”
Where Things Stand: Mask Optics
Without naming the former President, the Biden administration has been intentional from the start about being everything the Trump White House was not. Especially on COVID-19.