That's Not the Best of Health, Y'all

I normally don't want to watch donald trump gaslighting / bloviating / spewing lies on national television, so I didn't watch this morning's Meet the Press to see this happen (via Laura Esposito at the Daily Beast):

The president, 79, furiously stormed off an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press after journalist Kristen Welker confronted him on his election conspiracies.

Trump began to sour on Welker after she pointed out in the interview that aired Sunday that there’s “no evidence” of rigged elections in the United States.

“Do you have evidence?” she asked after Trump slammed California’s elections as “rigged.”

The president then fired back: “All I have to do is look.”

When Welker replied: “That’s not evidence,” the interview took a turn.

“You’re crooked, and Meet the Press is crooked, and so is ABC and CBS and CNN one-sided crooked networks. Let’s call it quits, because I’ve had enough,” Trump raged. “Thank you, darling. Have a good time.”

Confronted with questions he can't answer, confronted with even the simplest requirement that he present evidence of voter fraud - something he's NEVER been able to do since 2016 or 2020 - trump would rather attack his interviewer - especially when it's a woman - and later claim he "won" the argument even though he fled like a coward.

But that's not the thing that should be troubling today.

If you watch that video clip, as trump tries to get up to flee the scene, he cannot stand upright on his own. he has to put a hand on Welker's shoulder to maintain any balance, and as he shuffles away he's bent over like he's got back pain.

Add to this the reality that trump's had his third "annual" medical checkup in 13 months, trump keeps falling asleep at Oval Office gatherings to where Congress members are questioning Cabinet members about it, and growing rumors about CHF (congestive heart failure) and we're dealing with a clear constitutional crisis that nobody among the Republican ranks wants to deal with.

The moment where IT HAPPENS is coming closer by the minute.

Yes, Rudy is Contemptible and It's His Own Damn Fault

While donald trump skates free of any real punishment for his 34 felony convictions - what the hell is "unconditional discharge?" Sounds like a bad infection - his would-be Roy Cohn just keeps digging himself deeper into the mudpits. Former NYC mayor, once-federal prosecutor, Noun-Verb-9/11 propagator Rudy Giuliani was found in contempt for the second time regarding his defamation verdicts when he lied about Georgia election officials (via Alex Galbraith at Salon):

U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell tore into Giuliani on Friday for violating a permanent injunction against bad-mouthing Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two women who successfully sued the former New York City mayor for defamation. Howell said that Giuliani continued to disparage the women on his online radio show, "America's Mayor Live," telling the conservative media figure that continuing to speak ill of Freeman and Moss after the court handed down a massive punishment takes "real chutzpah." 

Giuliani's attorneys argued that the Trump hanger-on genuinely believed that Freeman and Moss committed election fraud, a point that held no water with Howell.

“So, what? You’re saying this defamation is never going to stop?" she asked. "He’s never going to stop saying this because he thinks he’s right?”

To make sure that Giuliani is completely clear on the facts around the 2020 election in Georgia, Howell required him to sign a declaration that he's read all the evidence against his claims of fraud. She threatened Giuliani with a $200 fine and potential jail time if he failed to complete the declaration within 10 days.

Giuliani was found in contempt of court by another federal judge earlier in the week, who ruled that Giuliani was failing to turn over his assets to help pay off his nearly $150 million defamation judgment...

With regards to Giuliani's failure to stop repeating the falsehoods that the court trials revealed as lies, this is how damaged the entire Republican Party / Far Right is when it comes to the Real World. Having built up this huge (false) Narrative that Republicans are honest and true and the liberal Democrats are lying cheaters over the decades, when it comes time to prove that Narrative in places where lying isn't allowed - courtrooms - that Republican Narrative falls apart.

Only, the Far Right wingnuts can't ever admit they were wrong (even if they were genuinely misled by others). Admission of lying or deception in one part of that Narrative draws that whole Narrative into dispute and it would collapse on themselves.

And the Far Right profits from that Narrative. Their talk shows, their podcast, their political campaigning and fundraising all draw on the Narrative that "Republicans can never lose, Republicans are the TRUE Americans, Everyone on the side of the Liberals and Democrats are evil Communists looking to eat your babies." 

Look at Rudy. All those millions of dollars that he's supposed to turn over to his defamation victims: All of that earned by decades of Republican pandering, all of that earned by decades of demonizing others not of their tribe. Giuliani can't stop lying about the results of the 2020 election because doing so destroys his audience, and he loses even more money down the road.

As a side note, you'd think that after trump won re-election this 2024 that the "damage" done by his losing in 2020 would fade away. But no. Remember, trump (and the Far Right) can never admit they lost, so even now trump and his lackeys are gearing up further legal attacks against those they still claim "stole" trump's "rightful victory".

This is the pit in Hell that Giuliani made for himself, by the by. He volunteered to be trump's legal attack dog and now he's paying the price in ways that trump can't save him (unless trump and his corrupted DOJ decide to undo centuries of civil court jurisprudence).

If only 77 million voters understood the corruption they voted back into power this election cycle. If only our fellow Americans realized the contempt trump and his Far Right MAGA base have for the Real Truth: Truth based on Facts and Reality.

We're entering into a dark age of disinformation, constant lying and gaslighting, coming at us from all angles and entering every nook of our lives, even into a judicial system that's supposed to stop lying and deceptions as a means of upholding the Constitution and the laws that preserve our rights and our responsibilities.

Gods help us.

I doubt God will help Rudy. He's doomed to either admit his lies or keeping lying straight into a jail cell.

When My Library Closed Four Years Ago

If we're looking back to four years ago:

March 17th 2020 was a Tuesday night, and I work the evening shifts at my library those Tuesdays. That meant I have a desk turn at the Information desk, which also doubles as the checkout desk. There's often two of the part-time Library Assistants working the shift with me: one on desk and the other performing book processing, special project works, or reshelving.

The library itself was rather quiet. The COVID-19 pandemic had gone global back in January and by February we were seeing the signs in Florida. One interesting thing to note was how most our patrons (library users) are seniors from the surrounding retirement communities, and a lot of them had already begun sheltering at home well before March as the early reports had COVID being near-fatal to older people.

It may have been quiet but I had been busy all day, handling administrative duties as our Library Director position was vacant since 2018 (My previous experience as head of a library in another county did not go well, so I took it as a temp). I recall working on collection management of one of the non-fiction ranges, and then prepping for a One-On-One tutorial session (duties as the Reference Librarian) that ended up cancelling (they weren't sick, I remember that, they just didn't want to risk it).

When I started my desk shift at 5:00PM, I checked my work emails. I had two: Library and City. The Library email kept up with staff's last-minute schedule changes, any reports for what our Children's Librarian was lining up for that June's Summer Reading Program, notifications about patron complaints, in-house stuff. The City email was for the directorial duties to the city's operations, any notifications from the Manager, reports from the City Clerk, administrative stuff. The library system for the county used a different network than the city, hence the separate emails.

So it wasn't until 5:20PM when I got to the email from the City Manager's office sent at 4:00PM that everything was shutting down citywide due to the pandemic at 5:00PM.

/headdesk

<--- always the last to know

I told my part-timers as soon as I read that email. We roamed the library floors informing any remaining patrons - there were two on computers, a mother and child in Children's shelves, one reading in the Magazines area, nobody upstairs - that the library had to close early that night. One of the assistants checked the book drop while I worked on signage for the front doors, and then sent emails to all the staff about our work situation the next morning (library was closed to public, staff still had to work).

We had been expecting something about closing down. Other city libraries - we have a cooperative system, the cities manage their own library - had already closed a week or two prior. Those were the small libraries, with few staff - some of whom had caught COVID ergo the closings - on hand. They had every reason to close earlier in the month.

Thing about a library: we were... are a public facility, with hundreds of people going in and out all day, a pandemic hotspot, one of the worst places a virus could spread. As federal and state emergency agencies were begging elected officials to do the right thing, it was just a question of when, and that Tuesday afternoon was it for us.

By the time we finished locking up and shutting down, it was after 6:00PM. I remember standing in the parking lot, staring at the library and then circling around at everything else - a city lake behind the library, the little league ballpark across the street, the civic center just a ways over, one of those retirement communities to the far side of the ballpark, all part of a small quiet town in the middle of Florida - and just wondered what the hell was going to happen next. There was nobody else outside, even at sunset there were usually families in the surrounding neighborhood walking around the parks but not that night. Everyone was at home (or the grocery stores raiding whatever toilet paper was left), everyone was waiting for the next terrifying thing.

The day after we got instructions from our city's Emergency team - the firefighters did double-duty on that - about how we had to clean our workplaces, perform daily check-ins for fever and cough, required masking even as we were closed to the public. The plan - the hope - was to reopen to the public by late April, depending on how we could restructure the library to cut down on viral spreads.

We transferred everything we had on hold to Books-by-Mail as best we could. We started book pickups for drive-thru to the front door. We wiped everything down with cleaning solutions as much as possible. We dealt with co-workers calling in sick - some with COVID itself - though thankfully we never shared an outbreak amongst ourselves. We obeyed the recommendations and performed our duty to the library patrons.

That was four years ago. Everything changed, and some of it didn't get better.

Especially as trump - driven by ignorance, desperate to restart a shut-down economy to avoid making himself look bad, and unable to project any semblance of calm leadership - kept getting worse as COVID got worse.

But that's for another time.

Four years ago, everything for me shut down.

Better Off Now

It's a question that comes up every Presidential election cycle whenever there's an incumbent running for a second term: "Are you better off now than four years ago?"

The party in opposition tends to ask that question to highlight how "terrible" the current President is, while the incumbent party asks it while pointing to any signs of economic, social, or international standing improvements.

It's a question we're getting now, as it becomes official that Joe Biden is the Democratic candidate and donald trump - who was President Loser of the Popular Vote four years ago - is the challenger looking to unseat Biden by claiming we are worse off today.

It's not a smart move by trump or his Republican allies to ask, however: Exactly four years ago the entire planet was in a terrible crisis with a global COVID-19 pandemic crashing into everything - the economy, our society, our health care system, our schools, our families - and leaving us scrambling for basic necessities like toilet paper.

And it was exactly four years ago this March 13th when donald trump went before the national media and declared he "wasn't responsible for anything at all."

#FourYearsAgoToday https://t.co/zyP3iW6bNv

— Emily L. Hauser @emilylhauser.bsky.social 🟣 (@emilylhauser) March 14, 2024

What I wrote back in March 2020 right after that press conference:

So for this Friday, in order to present himself as in charge and in control, trump scheduled a big televised press conference, timed exactly just as the stock markets were closing... just so he could end up showing how little control he had and even worse openly admit he was in charge of nothing...

"I'm not taking any responsibility at all." Doesn't matter what he's avoiding responsibility for, the fact that he's AVOIDING responsibility ought to anger every American living and past...

So here comes trump, facing a global pandemic health care crisis that requires bold thinking, getting out ahead of the problem, staying in touch with all players to make sure things get done properly and to the good of all.

Unfortunately, trump's spent the last three years dismantling the government systems, understaffing agencies if not outright sabotaging them. Redirecting efforts towards projects that won't help in this crisis or any other. He oversaw the dismantling of a National Security panel tasked with coordinating pandemic responses, which left much of the federal and state agencies in the dark on who was in charge during the first months of this crisis (starting back in December 2019).

trump's response to all of this? Shifting blame on Obama instead of admitting his own involvement. Arguing that it's Obama's fault there's not enough test kits for this crisis when it should have been something trump's administration ordered done the minute it became clear - mid-January - that the coronavirus was going global. Like Obama would have known back in 2016 this particular virus was going to erupt three years after he left office.

"I'm not taking any responsibility at all."

THIS was where our nation was at four years ago. Four long stressful years ago, when the months of March and April felt like years themselves.

A President takes an oath of office "I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States;" and yet four years ago there was trump refusing to faithfully execute his duties, refusing to take charge of a national emergency requiring leadership. Not doing his best at all except shift the blame on everybody else.

And now here's trump back again, running again for a job he didn't do right the first time around, trying to gaslight and bully and steal his way back into the White House. Not because he wants the responsibility - he never wants that - but because he needs that office's legal immunity to keep his ass out of prison.

So are we better off now, four years later?

Four years later, we have a President in Joe Biden who's doing his best to oversee an ongoing struggle with COVID's continued presence, to where the pandemic shifted into a shamefully tolerable endemic to where most Americans try to keep up with vaccines and ignore the relatively high annual death count we've come to accept as normal.

Four years later, we have a President Joe Biden who undid most of the damage of trump's tariff wars with our global trading partners: A tariff fight that negatively affected our own economy and one that trump will insist on restarting should he regain the Presidency.

Four years later, we have a President Joe Biden who restored America's international standing with our allies, who is trying to support Ukraine's fight against an invading Russian force - something a majority of Americans support - while trying to manage the bloodshed of the Israeli/Hamas war that's disrupting the Middle East. All of which trump would undo in a reckless raging heartbeat.

Four years later, we have a President Joe Biden who's presiding over one of our nation's greatest financial recoveries; with a thriving economy where employment rates are at their best, wages for lower- and middle-income workers are going up, where inflation is currently at an ebb, and a lot of it tied into Biden's signature infrastructure bill.

Four years later, we have a President Joe Biden who will not avoid or ignore the responsibilities of the office the way donald trump did.

How's that answer, Republicans?

Vote four more years of Joe Biden, thank you.

Rats, Sinking Ship, SS Trumptanic

This morning we got word that Jenna Ellis, a lawyer on donald trump's payroll since 2019, made a plea agreement with the Fulton County DA's office. Via Gringlas at NPR: 

Ellis is the fourth defendant to plead guilty in the broad racketeering case focused on efforts to keep then-President Donald Trump in office after his 2020 loss to Joe Biden.

Lawyers Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell entered guilty pleas last week just before their trial was set to begin. Scott Hall, a bail bondsman, pleaded guilty in September.

In exchange for truthful testimony at future trials, Ellis pleaded guilty to one felony count of aiding and abetting false statements and writings. She had been charged with two counts, including racketeering...

Ellis' charge stems from a Dec. 3, 2020, subcommittee hearing of Georgia's Senate Judiciary Committee where Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Ray Smith made a litany of baseless claims of widespread election fraud.

Guliani and Smith, both co-defendants in the Georgia case, asserted that tens of thousands of minors, felons and dead people voted in Georgia's 2020 election. Ellis pleaded guilty to aiding this testimony, which prosecutors say was intended to convince the legislature to disregard Biden's victory in Georgia.

"The false statements were made with reckless disregard for the truth," prosecutor Daysha Young said at Tuesday's plea hearing.

DA Willis hadn't charged too much on Ellis, so there wasn't much for Ellis to plead out. She's still getting a sweetheart deal because - as any fan of Law & Order franchise will tell you - the ones who flip the earliest in a criminal conspiracy case are the ones who get the best deals.

What all these early plea deals do is put pressure on the remaining defendants - 15 to go - to make plea deals of their own before one of the others sets them up as the scapegoat. There are tiers to this racketeering case - the ones who made the plans, the ones who carried out the illegal acts, the ones who covered for the others - and it's clear prosecutors want the major players, giving the lesser members - the ones with more to lose - more incentive to flip now instead of later.

Ellis' plea deal is a serious blow to Ray Smith and Rudy Giuliani, so the expectation is that they might flip next. Smith could, since he's a state-level lawyer whose career - and life outside of prison - is at stake. But Giuliani might not: His reputation and livelihood are now so directly tied to trump's fortunes that he can't make a clean break. 

And trump of course - because his whole self-worth and ongoing grift is tied into the Big Lie of "stollen elections" - will never plead out. he will enter the court trial and try to bully and gaslight his way out of it.

Much like he's trying to bully and gaslight his way out of the January 6th indictments he's facing in Washington DC, except for the revelation tonight that Mark Meadows - trump's acting Chief of Staff during his final days in the White House - gave hours' worth of testimony to Jack Smith's grand jury and received full immunity as part of the deal. Via the Guardian: 

The testimony that Meadows provided to prosecutors included evidence that he repeatedly told Trump in the immediate aftermath of the election that the allegations about fraud were unsubstantiated, ABC reported.

Exactly when Meadows was granted immunity and when he testified before the grand jury in Washington remains unclear but he appeared at least three times, ABC reported. Trump was indicted in August for conspiring to defraud the United States among other charges stemming from the investigation.

The cooperation of Meadows in the criminal case against Trump would be a victory for the special counsel, Jack Smith, because Meadows was among the closest advisers to Trump in the post-2020 election period and had direct knowledge of virtually every aspect of the charges...

Meadows was literally in the room when it happened (yes, quoting from the Hamilton musical is unavoidable). There are multiple eyewitness accounts from other parties - Cassidy Hutchinson, Meadows' aide, already testified what Meadows knew and did to the Congressional hearings last year - that made it impossible for Meadows to testify otherwise. There'd been reports for months - especially when he wasn't named in the indictments Smith's grand jury issued against trump this past August - that Meadows had an immunity deal, but we're getting confirmation now.

That the Special Counsel team is willing to let this information out there hints to the likelihood they are ready to act on Meadows' testimony, increasing the likelihood that additional indictments over January 6th - and maybe even more indictments in the classified documents case - not only for trump but the other insurrection plotters are coming very soon.

Thing is for Meadows, while this deal grants immunity at the federal level, it doesn't cover state like the conspiracy charges he's facing in Georgia. Seeing how he's already made a deal with Smith, NOW would be the perfect time for Meadows to make a deal with Willis.

If donald trump's empire was a ship (not a luxury liner, but a garbage scow), it's already hit the iceberg, and the rats better get off it quick before they sink.

The trump Façade Krakens In Georgia

It's been awhile since I've checked in on donald trump's status as an alleged criminal racketeer. While there's been slow going in South Florida over the stolen documents case, and furious legal battles waged in Washington DC over his role in the January 6th Insurrection, in Georgia the Fulton County case is racing ahead on six cylinders as a number of the 19 indicted alleged co-conspirators are close to facing their courtroom dates with destiny.

In one such matter, a major player in trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election results decided to play ball with DA Fani Willis' team and took a plea. Via Kate Brumback at AP News:

Lawyer Sidney Powell pleaded guilty to reduced charges Thursday over efforts to overturn Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election in Georgia, becoming the second defendant in the sprawling case to reach a deal with prosecutors.

Powell, who was charged alongside Trump and 17 others with violating the state’s anti-racketeering law, entered the plea just a day before jury selection was set to start in her trial. She pleaded guilty to six misdemeanors accusing her of conspiring to intentionally interfere with the performance of election duties.

As part of the deal, she will serve six years of probation, will be fined $6,000 and will have to write an apology letter to Georgia and its residents. She also recorded a statement for prosecutors and agreed to testify truthfully against her co-defendants at future trials...

That last part is important, because Sidney Powell is one of the major actors in trump's planning and staging to disrupt the Electoral Count in Congress that January 6th 2021. As Jeremy Stahl notes over at Slate (paywalled):

...This is awful news for Donald Trump, as Powell also immediately becomes the highest-level known cooperating witness against him. Given what we know about Powell’s role in the days surrounding Jan. 6 and the very lenient terms of her plea deal, she appears poised to offer damning testimony against the former president...

Powell is only the second domino to fall among Trump’s alleged co-conspirators agreeing publicly to cooperate against Trump. So far, she is the most damaging for Trump, but she is likely to be joined by others who were targeted in the 19-person RICO conspiracy case filed in August by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, and her cooperation places further pressure on others to agree to testify against Trump...

Under the terms of Powell’s agreement, she will receive a small monetary fine and a six-year sentence of probation, and she will have to write an apology letter to the people of Georgia. This may seem like a slap on the wrist for one of the top figures implicated in the Jan. 6 cases, but it could mean she gave up a significant amount of evidence against even higher-level figures as part of her deal. Indeed, the agreement included a pledge to turn over all documents, testify against all of her co-defendants, and offer a recorded statement to prosecutors. She’s already done the last part.

That testimony against her co-defendants could start as soon as next month, when the trial of Chesebro is projected to begin. While Powell is not obligated by the agreement to testify against Trump as part of special counsel Jack Smith’s federal prosecution, scheduled for March, any testimony she gives in the Chesebro trial could potentially be used by Smith’s team. If Powell refuses to testify in the federal case, Judge Tanya Chutkan could decide to admit any Georgia testimony. “Her testimony will be on the record and potentially admissible,” in the federal case, said Eisen...

What’s more important, for the purposes of the prosecutions against Trump, though, is that the House Jan. 6 committee revealed that she was an active participant during a critical White House meeting in the weeks before Jan. 6, during which Trump allegedly sought to have her appointed as special counsel in order to seize voting machines. Eisen called that the “the Oval Office meeting that has been described as one of the craziest of the Trump administration,” and said testimony on it is likely to be critical to the overall conspiracy charge...

Powell was literally in the room when it happened. She was going to play whatever role trump wanted her to do in order to disrupt the vote counts and overturn the results to favor himself.

This was a trumpian supporter who jumped from state to state, filing legal motion after legal motion to delay, overrule, and eliminate any election results that went to Biden. Rallying to a battlecry of "Release the Kraken!" Powell blundered through every case with poor and ill-informed legal challenges lacking credible witnesses or documentation, and that pretty much got herself laughed out of each and every courtroom.

With Powell flipped, she becomes an eyewitness to most of everything trump's inner circle of election deniers - Bannon, Stone, Giuliani, and many others - planned and committed before, during, and even after January 6th blew up.

I doubt any of the marquee names are going to flip - not yet - because their own grifting and personal fortunes are on the line to where fighting it out in court is the only path they can take (and still make money from MAGA believers).

But the lower-tier people in the plots and schemes don't have such options. They're facing serious jail time, and in Georgia there's no chance for parole until AFTER they've served in prison.

We're all just waiting for the rest of the Fulton County 19 to flip to save their own hides.

Get kraken, you fools. The ones who make the quickest deals get the best deals.

Georgia Indicts trump and his Big Lie

At last.

Stephen Fowler over at NPR has the basics: 

A grand jury in Georgia has indicted Donald Trump for his role in failed efforts to overturn the state's 2020 election results, implicating the former president as the head of a sweeping conspiracy to subvert his defeat.

It's the fourth indictment in as many months for Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. And it's part of a massive case brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis under Georgia's racketeering law, ensnaring a number of defendants that the DA alleges acted as part of a coordinated effort to pressure officials to change the election outcome.

In an indictment handed up Monday, an Atlanta-based grand jury outlined a series of charges against Trump, including violation of the Georgia RICO law and solicitation of a violation of an oath by a public officer.

RICO by the by is a racketeering charge, meaning trump and others engaged in a wide-ranging conspiracy to commit multiple crimes. Emptywheel - you know what I need to call her by name, so hello Marcy Wheeler! - has more details on the implications of trump getting hit by RICO:

To explain how, I want to first show that the indictment is, fundamentally, about protecting the integrity of Georgia’s government and elections. To see that, it helps to read counts 2 through 41 before reading the RICO charge, which is laid out in 70 pages describing 161 overt acts, many of which took place outside of Georgia...

LIES TO AND SOLICITATION OF GEORGIA OFFICIALS

Count 2 though Count 7: False claims and illegal requests made, many by Rudy Giuliani, before the fake electors scheme. These were lies told to official bodies of Georgia state government, and charging them is an attempt to prevent corruption in state government.

Count 23 through Count 26 charge Rudy, Ray Smith, and Robert Cheely with false claims and solicitations on December 30 — similar in structure and purpose to Counts 2 through 7.

Count 28 charges both Trump and Mark Meadows for the January 2 call to Brad Raffensperger. Count 29 charges Trump for the lies he told during the call.

Counts 38 and 39 charge Trump with lies and solicitations of Brad Raffensperger on September 17, 2021.

FAKE ELECTORS

Count 8 through Count 19: These are a series of six paired charges tied to various kinds of fraud involved with the fake electors. In each pair, the first count charges David Shafer, Shawn Still, and Cathleen Latham for doing the fraudulent thing, and the second count charges Trump, Rudy, John Eastman, Ken Chesebro, Ray Smith, Robert Cheely, and Mike Roman with soliciting the fraudulent thing. They’re a near parallel to the Michigan charges against the fake electors, except that in Georgia only the three most culpable fake electors are charged, and there’s a mirror charge for Trump’s side of the conspiracy.

ATTEMPTS TO ENTRAP RUBY FREEMAN

Counts 20 and 21 and : These charge two efforts to defraud Ruby Freeman by offering her help when in fact they were an attempt to entrap her.

Count 30 and Count 31 charge aspects of a plot to get Kanye’s publicist to travel from Illinois to Georgia to entrap Ruby Freeman into making false claims.

LIES ABOUT GEORGIA

Count 22 charges Jeffrey Clark for his attempts to get DOJ to claim the Georgia election was fraudulent.

Count 27 charges Trump and Eastman with lying about Georgia’s results in a lawsuit.

TAMPERING WITH COFFEE COUNTY TABULATORS

Count 32 through Count 37 charge Sidney Powell, Latham, and two others for tampering with the Coffee County vote tabulators. Again, this has a parallel in the Michigan charges against Matt DePerno and two others.

LIES DURING THE INVESTIGATION

Count 40 charges David Shafer with false statements told during the investigation.

Count 41 charges Robert Cheely with perjury for false claims made during the investigation.

As I understand it, these are the charges on which the RICO conspiracy is built. The RICO conspiracy gives prosecutors additional tools and penalties with which to prosecute this (similar to the conspiracy law charged at the federal level)...

That's a lot of criming (relax, Spellchecker, we can use slang while blogging), but what are the implications surrounding these particular indictments compared to the other three (and counting) trump and cohorts are facing? Why is this one a bigger deal than most?

One of the common elements in the Georgia indictment is the word "lies". Over and over, DA Willis spells out how trump and company lied and kept lying to other state officials in order to get them to violate the integrity of the 2020 election results. They have trump lying in a lawsuit, they have one underling Robert Cheely charged with straight-up perjury to the grand jury, they had people lying to county-level elections official Ruby Freeman to get her to "confess" to rigging ballots.

All of these lies, serving to the Big Lie that trump pushed and keeps pushing about the 2020 results. trump's Big Lie that the election "was stolen" and he "fairly" won.

I blogged about trump's Big Lie before, and why he can't stop:

Trump has made it clear he views the world in the simplest of terms: That people are divided into Winners and Suckers, and that HE (champion and most excellent of the former group) shall never be lumped in with the latter.

So just on this mindset alone, trump cannot admit – not to others, not to himself – that he lost... 

In one respect, trump lost in 2016: The Popular vote clearly went for Hillary. But due to the broken and anti-democratic nature of the Electoral College, trump squeaked into winning three battleground states with literally mere hundreds of votes that gave him their Electoral Votes instead. It should be noted that trump promptly crowed – against all evidence – that he had won a LANDSLIDE, not just the College but also the Popular vote, and claimed it was the greatest victory in history (ignoring the Electoral and Popular vote blowouts of 1984 and 1932 (we don't count Nixon's 1972 blowout because the cheating exposed by the Watergate scandal negates that)).

Trump can't crow like that this time. The illusion of the Electoral College can't grant him that excuse. So he has to settle on denial. Constant, whining denial that he's the victim of voter fraud and to get us to pity him back into office...

The horrifying thing was how easily trump got fellow Republicans to buy into his Big Lie all because the GOP fears the loss of political power:

The Republicans are stuck with the Big Lie because it happens to fit this One Truth:

The Republican Party cannot and will not share power with a Democratic Party they view as un-American and thus illegitimate.

Somewhere back in time - you can argue happening between the rise of the conservative Southern Strategy in the late 1960s or the rise of Saint Ronnie in the 1980s or the corruption of Newt's Contract On America in the 1990s - the Republican Party bought into the idea that only they were true God-fearing God-chosen Gun-worshiping patriots...

But the Republicans have a problem. Where their One Truth was merely a world-view that did not expose itself to self-destructive implosion (Republicans could keep believing it and still function rationally in polite society), the Big Lie is a direct attack on the Real World that sooner rather than later is going to hit the Brick Wall of Unbreakable Facts. The Big Lie compels trump's believers into direct action - SEE the January 6th Insurrection - and these actions have legal consequences where the Big Lie has not and cannot prevail.

The Republicans are betting on their Big Lie carrying them forward into the future. But it's a Big Lie stuck in the past of a failed 2020 election, pushed constantly by a Big Liar in trump who cannot avoid his impending fate either in civil or criminal courts.

With the Georgia indictments, we are at that moment of Truth for the Republican Party as a whole. DA Willis and her team are making a direct rebuke to trump's Big Lie, confronting it with facts and evidence that not only were the voted counted fairly but that trump and his people intentionally worked to subvert those fair counts.

I am paraphrasing Jean-Luc Picard here, in one of the greatest quotes about the quest for justice. Courtrooms are crucibles: In a courtroom we burn away irrelevancies (the lies and misunderstandings) until we are left with a pure product - the truth (based on fact), for all time. For all of trump's bullshitting at his rallies, for all of the deflection and deception by the Far Right media, for all the spineless quibbling of other Republican leaders who fail to hold trump to the factual truth, in a court of law those lies and deceptions cannot withstand scrutiny. trump will confront - at last - the lies he's been telling to everyone and even to himself, and that those lies have no power to keep him in power.

The reason why I remain so optimistic - giddy, even - about the criminal cases leveled against trump is that these courtrooms are going to be the few places where trump will be held accountable for the ongoing costs of destruction and ruin he has built up over the decades. trump's greed, trump's racism, trump's sexism, trump's rage, trump's delusions of grandeur... All of that finally getting added up and presented as a bill way past due that he has to pay.

Let trump face his lies and failures before the 2024 elections. Let the nation come to terms with the reality that trump should never hold any elected office again.

Let justice be done. Let truth prevail. At last.

The Damage of Far Right Lies

I don't know if I'd mentioned this on the blog, but one of the outcomes of the 2020 post-election madness - where trump claimed "rigged" or "stolen" voting happened, to incite his followers into acts of insurrection - was that one of trump's targets decided to fight back against the Fox News network for promoting trump's falsehoods.

Dominion, one of the companies that manufactures voting machines, got targeted with allegations of rigging their machines to where it cut into their ability to win contracts with states (and I believe other nations). So they filed a massive defamation lawsuit against Fox, and thanks to the discovery process of acquiring evidence to back their suit, revealed a lot of intraoffice scheming and plotting by the media corporation to shill trump's lies to keep their audiences and their profits.

To quote from Adam Serwer at the Atlantic (paywalled):

Fox News lies to its viewers. Its most prominent personalities, among the most influential in the industry, tell their viewers things they know not to be true. This is not accusation, allegation, or supposition. Today, we know it to be fact...

The most compelling example of Fox News consciously lying to its viewers, however, arrived yesterday with the evidence in the defamation lawsuits filed by the voting-machine company Dominion, over claims aired on Fox News echoing Trump’s lie that the 2020 election had been fixed by compromised voting machines. Dominion’s latest filing argues that privately, Fox News hosts admitted that the allegations of election fraud being floated by Trump allies were baseless, but they kept airing them, in part because they feared another right-wing network, Newsmax, was stealing their audience. The filing shows that when Fox News reporters shot down the allegations publicly, the network’s big personalities were livid, complaining internally that telling their viewers the truth was hurting the network’s brand.

“It’s remarkable how weak ratings make good journalists do bad things,” the Fox News executive Bill Sammon wrote to a colleague about the network’s coverage of the “fraud” conspiracy...

The Fox executives knew they were violating journalistic ethics - yes, those do exist - in pursuit of ratings.

The Dominion filing drives home a few points. One is that there is a Fox News propaganda feedback loop: The network inflames right-wing conspiracism, but it also bows to it out of partisan commitment and commercial incentive. Another is that despite the long-standing right-wing argument that conservatives distrust mainstream media outlets because they do not tell the truth, Fox News executives and personalities understand that their own network loses traction with its audience when it fails to tell the lies that the audience wishes to hear. There are infinite examples of the mainstream press making errors of omission, fact, or framing. But as the private communications in the Dominion filing show, the mainstream media’s unforgivable sin with this constituency is not lying, but failing to consistently lie the way conservative audiences want them to...

Not only is there a closed wingnut echo chamber, that chamber is bolted shut by an audience that wants to remain ignorant of the facts and angered by their own fears.

There is also a story here about how social media and analytics can compel even powerful media institutions to meet a strong demand for falsehoods. Fox News executives understood the election-fraud allegations were nonsense, and they also understood their audience wanted to hear them. Misinformation and propaganda are not novel problems, but modern technology renders the incentives to lie to an audience particularly clear, and the means to reach that audience particularly easy to access. There will always be a potentially profitable demand for self-flattering lies; ethical people and institutions resist supplying them. The ability of individual hustlers to amass an audience of sycophants by feeding them conspiracies puts pressure on more mainstream outlets to gently appease conspiracism, if not to fully capitulate to it.

This is where decades of Fox Not-News - and other Far Right media figures like Breitbart and Rush Limbaugh and James O'Keefe (who's not having a good month anyway) - twisted free speech protections to shill conspiracy instead of facts, lies instead of truth.

There shouldn't be a First Amendment right to lie, especially when those lies are malicious, designed to enrage a handful of followers into acts of violence driven by unfounded fear and hatred. We've seen the effects of conspiracy "replacement theory" racism towards Blacks and Jews that have led to mass shootings and constant harassment of innocent Americans.

What Fox Not-News does on a nightly basis - promoting fear, selling rage - has done legitimate harm to the American political discourse. This lawsuit by Dominion could well put a clamp on that harm, but we need to understand that the Far Right punditry will continue to shill that fear and rage until they can no longer profit from it.

We are long past due bringing out the big guns of fraud charges and going after that Far Right Noise Machine with professional malpractice laws. Go after Tucker Carlson's and Sean Hannity's wallets, people. Every penny they earn comes from lying, and no one should be allowed to profit from lies.

The Flop Sweat of Loser Trump

Update: Thank you Driftglass for adding this article to Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Hope everyone peruses the blog for all the other insanity I write about!

Earlier today as he faced the growing likelihood of criminal indictments across the legal spectrum, donald trump decided to break out his old battlecry of "STOLEN ELECTION" and "MAKE ME PRESIDENT NOW" by diving further into his own madness. Via the Twittersphere with Spiro Agnew's Ghost:

My god. The absolutely deranged, utterly delusional, mentally defective unhinged former POTUS just spewed out this complete lunacy, suggesting he should be DECLARED PRESIDENT/REINSTATED/have a new election based on the title of some random story written by a right wing website. pic.twitter.com/JaTJfMlXvs

— Spiro Agnew’s Ghost (@SpiroAgnewGhost) August 29, 2022

/Headdesk

Part of trump's delusional social media ranting comes from trump's greatest personal flaw: That he can NEVER ADMIT he lost, that he can NEVER be seen as a LOSER, and as such he must always accuse everyone else of cheating him of his "success." Accusing his enemies of committing "a massive FRAUD & ELECTION INTERFERENCE" is mostly deflection/projection of the reality that it was trump and his Republican buddies who attempted the fraud and interference in both 2016 and then 2020.

His throwing out there the wingnut meat of "Hunter Biden's laptop" - a faux scandal pushed by the Far Right to make the Biden family look more corrupt and broken than trump's own - is part of the deflection as well.

It doesn't help trump any that his demands are impossible anyway: There ARE NO Do-Overs in Presidential elections. There are special elections to fill Congressional vacancies, but the Presidency is voted on every four years no matter what (Article II Section 1), and any vacancy gets filled by the 25th Amendment process. This is trump whining like a 5-year-old that he's not being "treated fairly" as though he's not getting his second scoop of ice cream anymore.  

But this latest assault of ignorance from trump is setting up another matter: Inciting his fanbase.

By screaming this message, trump is trying to stir up the GOP faithful to believe his lie that he's both the victim and the hero here. trump is trying to get his followers to accept the lie that Biden is illegitimate, that the Democrats stole the Presidency from him. trump is spreading misinformation that restoring him to power by hook or by crook justified and doable.

trump is trying to set the foundation of another insurrection riot, with his political allies like Lindsey Graham bringing up the threat of rioting to rattle the Justice Department from pursuing any legal case against trump. 

the desperation is telling. As Heather Digby Parton notes at Salon:

Trump, meanwhile, has been throwing everything at the wall on this one and none of it seems to be sticking. The political benefits aren't materializing while the legal threat he faces is so very real. So he's now deploying his most dangerous strategy, one he hinted at right after the search when he sent a cryptic message to Attorney General Merrick Garland:

President Trump wants the attorney general to know that he has been hearing from people all over the country about the raid. If there was one word to describe their mood, it is 'angry,' The heat is building up. The pressure is building up. Whatever I can do to take the heat down, to bring the pressure down, just let us know."

According to the New York Times, this strange message had the senior leadership at the FBI "befuddled." I actually doubt that. These are people who prosecute mobsters all the time and they know a veiled threat when they see it. And it's certainly not the first time they've encountered it with Trump. They are in the midst of the largest investigation in history with the January 6 insurrection cases which are a direct result of his incitement. He was letting the Attorney General know that he might have to unleash his mob again if they pursue this case and they know it...

The fact that Trump is leveraging this particular power to incite violence around these legal cases is a sign of weakness. He cannot persuade anyone who isn't already persuaded and party officials are with him only out of fear or as long as he is useful to them. Calling for riots in the streets is a nuclear option that may or may not detonate the way he thinks it will. But it has the potential to blow the country apart either way...

trump is facing - after years of bending and breaking laws - the real possibility he will get indicted with criminal charges he can no longer evade or settle out of court. And like a Sicilian mob boss facing the reality of serious jail time, trump wants to cut a swath of blood and destruction to do whatever it takes to avoid that fate.

If it means triggering a Second Civil War in every American street, trump will cross that line. he cannot accept any other fate that would confirm his LOSER status in the eyes of everyone around him.

In the face of imminent violence, we as a nation must still hold trump accountable to the law. Let Justice Be Done Though the Heavens Fall. But it's going to be messy as hell.

Gods help us.

How Shall We Stretch Our Eye When Capital Crimes, Chew'd, Swallow'd and Digested, Appear Before Us

(the title quote is from Henry V Act II Scene 2)

If donald trump's call to Insurrection back on January 6 - to block Congress from its constitutional duties to confirm the 2020 election results - looks and smells and quacks like a coup attempt, that's because it was.

More documentation is getting out, and the paperwork is showing that trump and his inner circle knew what they were doing to start a riot at Capitol Hill and force his own Vice President Pence to throw out the results for Biden to allow trump to steal the Presidency. One of trump's lawyers involved in the planning (John Eastman) drew up a six-point memo laying out how it could work: It probably wouldn't, since the end result would have been civil war; still, the fact they were finding any rationale at all is horrifying. 

Along with that, Adam Serwer at The Atlantic pointed out all the other things we've learned trump did to cheat the American people that came close to subverting everything (paywalled):

Prior to November, the possibility of Trump attempting a coup was seen as the deranged fever dream of crazed liberals. But as it turns out, Trump and his advisers had devised explicit plans for reversing Trump’s loss. Republican leaders deliberately stoked election conspiracy theories they knew to be false, in order to lay a political pretext for invalidating the results. Now, more than 10 months after the election, the country knows of at least five ways in which Trump attempted to retain power despite his defeat.

1. Trump tried to pressure secretaries of state to not certify.

Trump held early leads in vote counts in several states—not because he was ever actually ahead but because of discrepancies between when states count mail-in ballots and Election Day ballots. This so-called blue shift was written about long in advance of Election Day, and was partially the result of Trump’s own attacks on voting by mail. Nevertheless, Trump made this a key part of his election conspiracy theories (as many predicted he would), insisting that Democrats were somehow inserting fraudulent ballots into the vote count in the presidential election (something they apparently forgot to do in close House and Senate races, in which Democrats did worse than polls had anticipated). To help substantiate these falsehoods , the Trump campaign attempted to pressure secretaries of state to either not certify the results or “find” fraudulent ballots...

The most infamous of these attempts was trump's call to Georgia's Secretary of State Raffensperger, which got caught on tape and which should have led to trump getting arrested for election interference and harassing a state official. Last I heard the attorney investigating the matter is getting stonewalled by the same guy trump threatened, alas...

2. Trump tried to pressure state legislatures to overturn the results.

Trump personally attempted to coerce state legislators to overturn election results in a few states that voted for Biden, on the dubious legal theory that such legislatures could simply ignore the results of the popular vote in their own states. In Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, and Georgia, Trump publicly urged Republican-controlled statehouses to “intervene to declare him the winner” and tweeted, “Hopefully the Courts and/or Legislatures will have the COURAGE to do what has to be done to maintain the integrity of our Elections, and the United States of America itself...”

Thankfully that attempt at social media bullying didn't go very far. Some of the state legislators made a show of it but none of them did it in sufficient numbers to pull it off. Nobody wanted to be the ones held accountable by their state voters afterward.

3. Trump tried to get the courts to overturn the results.

...As part of this effort, we can include the baseless “Kraken” lawsuits, filled with conspiracy theories about vote changes. Trump attempted to coerce the Justice Department into providing him with a pretext to overturn the results, but his attorney general, Bill Barr, refused to do so. Had DOJ leadership acquiesced, it would have lent credibility to Trump’s other corrupt schemes to reverse his loss. In a meeting with the acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, according to contemporaneous notes taken by Rosen’s deputy, Trump said, “Just say that the election was corrupt [and] leave the rest to me...”

If you kept track of trump's lawsuit efforts, well... There were 61 lawsuits overall (last count) and the only one his lawyers won was a procedural move to force a ballot count to end early. All that did was end that ballot count in favor of Biden. Everything got dismissed or turned down in court because trump's lawyers could not prove any massive vote theft/fraud had happened. 

Leading up to one of the craziest things I've ever seen in political history:

4. Trump tried to pressure Mike Pence to overturn the results.

It is hard to pick the most ridiculous means of executing a coup, but insisting that the vice president has the power to unilaterally decide who won an election is up there. Trump publicly hounded Pence to reject the results prior to the traditionally ceremonial electoral-vote count in Congress, and Pence reportedly took that demand seriously enough to seek advice from (former VP) Dan Quayle on the matter, “asking if there were any grounds to pause the certification because of ongoing legal challenges,” according to Costa and Woodward. That this got so far is profoundly disturbing, but even more disturbing is Eastman’s memo, which shows that the Trump team had thought very deliberately about how this scheme would work...

Quayle's advice to Pence to not knuckle under to trump's bullying is pretty much how we survived this ordeal. But look: When Dan FREAKING Quayle (he of "Potatoe" infamy, Murphy Brown bashing, and misquotes of folly) is the goddamned VOICE OF REASON in this entire Kabuki dance, you know damn well that History has given up and gone off to get drunk at a nearby pub. You can't make this shit up.

5. When all else failed, Trump tried to get a mob to overturn the results.

At the rally prior to the vote count in Congress, Trump urged the crowd to act, saying, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” The explicit goal of the rally and subsequent riot was to pressure Congress, and Pence in particular, into overturning the election results. Trump told his followers, “If Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election...”

trump and his defenders can try to repaint his rally all they like, but trump laid it out there to his riled-up mob that they had to pressure Pence to "do the right thing" (i.e. throw the results out and let trump "win"). And that's what happened when that mob crossed the streets to Capitol Hill and smashed/bullied their way in.

This is all out there now. Hundreds of cases are going on right now, with tens of trump's arrested rioters pleading their way to guilty charges to avoid harsher sentences. More and more reporting is digging up details like Eastman's memo showing just how everyone in trump's circle was plotting this out. More "revelatory" books like Bob Woodward's Peril is showing how insane the whole thing surrounding trump's election shenanigans was.

And there might be even more getting out there. Biden's administration is thinking of taking the unusual step of removing "Executive Privilege" of trump's White House documents so that the Congressional committee investigating the Insurrection can review them. To refer to Betty Cracker's take at Balloon Juice (she links further to the Washington Post article, but it's paywalled be warned):

The article cites a bunch of experts, including lawyers who served Democratic administrations and in pre-Trump Republican White Houses, and the consensus seems to be that post-executive privilege isn’t a thing. Unsurprisingly, one of the two go-to celebrity Trump-defender legal beagles disagrees:

“There is an unbroken tradition of deference by the incumbent presidents to their predecessors,” [GWU Professor Jonathan] Turley said. “In the past, incumbent presidents would generally support their predecessors in restricting access, despite partisan differences. It appears we may be poised here to shatter that tradition.”

In the past, incumbent presidents weren’t dealing with predecessors who claimed they won an election they lost and incited violence to cling to power. Dump those docs...!

I'm with Betty on this. A lot of our political structure is/was based on previous behavior as much as the written laws, but that was all based on Good Faith between parties to uphold the spirit of the Law as much as possible. trump went out of his way to destroy all that Good Faith, proving full well that "tradition" and respect for predecessor's guidelines should not apply to himself. Well, that's his petard getting hoisted now: Biden should not respect any preferential protections to the man who disrespected the office of the Presidency.

And it came out during this evening that the Congressional committee is taking that next step into the inner circle of trump's final days, with their subpoenas of people who had to have been in the room for the planning stages when all that shit went down (via Claudia Grisales at NPR):

The Democratic-led House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol has issued subpoenas to four former Trump administration officials, including former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and strategist Steve Bannon.

The panel also issued subpoenas Thursday to former Trump White House deputy chief of staff for communications Dan Scavino and Kashyap Patel, who served as chief of staff to then-acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller.

The subpoenas — the first issued by the select committee — compel the four to produce sought-after documents relevant to the deadly attack by Oct. 7, and then sit for a deposition the following week, on either Oct. 14 or 15...

"The Select Committee is investigating the facts, circumstances, and causes of the January 6th attack and issues relating to the peaceful transfer of power, in order to identify and evaluate lessons learned and to recommend to the House and its relevant committees corrective laws, policies, procedures, rules, or regulations," Committee Chair Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said in a statement.

In individually addressed letters, Thompson details further why the recipients are believed to have key information for the panel.

Thompson tells Meadows, for instance: "You were the President's Chief of Staff and have critical information regarding many elements of our inquiry. It appears you were with or in the vicinity of President [Donald] Trump on January 6, had communications with the President and others on January 6 regarding events at the Capitol, and are a witness regarding activities of that day..."

There is no doubt that these witnesses will fight appearing before Congress to the last letter, apostrophe, and comma on the paperwork, but they are on notice: These witnesses either have to double down being on the side of  Head Insurrectionist trump facing justice sooner rather than later, or speak to what they know and try to walk away without jail time for what they did nearly destroying America for that con artist.

If they're any smarter than the low-level foot soldiers already pleading out for their roles in the January 6th Insurrection, they'll testify. If they're any greedier (and sadly they might be) they'll try to ride this grift far past its expiration date, still dooming themselves but the rest of us in the process.

Gods, I do want to see justice moving a little faster than this...

Just Putting It Out There That Lasting Psychological Damage Has Been Done. Still, You Have To Laugh

Julie Nolke pretty much clarifies how 2020 will leaving lasting scars on all of us:

When WAS the last time you touched your own face?!

 

A Year of Pandemic, And Where We Stand Now

It was a Tuesday of March 17 2020, and the schedule for my library had me covering Tuesday evening shifts as a supervisory staffer until 8 PM with a number of part-timers (I was also the interim library manager at that time). I'd been busy before that getting an early dinner before 5 PM, so the interoffice emails I need to check from time to time hadn't been read until 20 minutes past that, after having helped a patron with printing jobs.

It turned out the city manager's office sent out an order closing all public areas at 5 PM for the city around 4:00 PM just as I started dinner. /headdesk

If there was any good news to this faux pas, it was that the library was barely in use that night, and had been for a lot of nights ever since the reports of COVID-19 hitting the cruise liners in December. Our main patrons are mostly the retirees of the community, and many of them had either not traveled down to Florida as snow birds from their northern residencies or they made the personal choice to stay home and avoid getting infected. Our daily visit numbers since January 2020 had dropped significantly.

Our city residents had proven more foresighted than our own state and federal leaders - you might recall trump himself was dismissing concerns right up until March 11 when the World Health Organization declared an official global pandemic - to where you saw places around town practically empty of shoppers or visitors. The local movie theater was mostly (more than half) empty the last time I went to see a film (Harley Quinn/Birds of Prey for you trivia buffs) that Saturday January 26.

The only place where it wasn't empty of shoppers were the grocery stores: Publix had been wiped out of toilet paper by the first week of February. But I digress.

What happened once I saw that email from city hall, I had summoned the part-timers together to have them tell the few remaining library users we had to close due to the emergency pandemic order. We didn't get any complaints and they vacated rather quickly. We did our standard floor check to make sure everything was shut down, corners cleared, bathrooms cleared, stairwell and elevator cleared, all that. Then I sent the part-timers home while I finished up making CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE signs for the front doors and changed the phone message for the library with the same emergency information.

I then made sure to email and call staff where I could to inform them the library was closed to the public but that we still had to work, such as handling hold requests to other libraries in the county and to the Books-By-Mail service. Once I took care of that, I sent myself home locking up for the night. I remember glancing at the library while standing in the parking lot, the sun was just beginning to set with the sky turning purple twilight, and I wondered what was going to happen next if we were ever going to open again that year.

I need to go back and check my personal notes, but I think we didn't get to that re-opening until September...? I think we had curbside service in August...

There were a lot of hazy days between then and now. We had to change our summer reading programs for the kids into virtual viewing events on Facebook and YouTube. We had to close our meeting rooms and cancel all library programs (I personally miss the computer training classes I hosted most months). Our library volunteers - many of them the elderly residents from the nearby retirement communities - still can't come back because as a public facility we're still a high-risk vector.

I can't tell you the number of times I have to go around on the computer floor to ask our users to keep the bloody masks over their faces. If I sound rude to anyone, it's because it's been months of being open and with signs everywhere asking our patrons to respect the mask rule, and they're STILL draping them over their necks instead of their mouths and noses. I'm sorry, but I'm not the problem here, people! PLEASE keep the masks on! Argh.

So here we are in March 2021, with the last three-four months of vaccine implementation and a gradual sense that we are seeing better days ahead. Even here in Florida where our self-serving idiot governor DeSantis is messing around with the vaccine deployments to richer likely Republican neighborhoods instead of more-deserving poor communities and essential workers, we're seeing a good number of daily treatments that are outpacing the number of new cases. Most observers are hopeful we'll see effective vaccine coverage by late May. Biden himself is aiming for a July 4 full vaccination deadline.

It's just a question now of when myself and my fellow library staffers get our chance at vaccination. Some of the older staffers have (anyone 65 or older qualified, last week I think they dropped it to 60) but the rest of us are still waiting. You'd think that city employees - who are in the public work areas meeting people all the time - would be a priority group, but sadly no...

Still. Hopeful days ahead.

The Self-Dug Graves of donald trump

A lot of holes in the desert, and a lot of problems are buried in those holes. But you gotta do it right. I mean, you gotta have the hole already dug before you show up with a package in the trunk. Otherwise, you're talking about a half-hour to forty-five minutes worth of digging. And who knows who's gonna come along in that time? Pretty soon, you gotta dig a few more holes. You could be there all fuckin' night.

-- Nicky, Casino

When I began writing this article on Saturday morning the impeachment trial was still ongoing. But then the day turned sideways, a vote on allowing witnesses turned into a debacle that I STILL can't figure out, and it ended with a vote in the U.S. that went 57-43 in favor of removing trump for his Incitement to Insurrection... which did not clear the 2/3rd supermajority needed to make it happen.

We knew it going in that the cowardly Republicans in the Senate would not rise above the gross partisanship of their own party's base, but there was still a slim hope that enough facts and evidence of trump's misdeeds would get out to convince enough Republicans to put country ahead of party. In the end only seven - Mitt Romney (UT) who had previously voted against trump over the Ukraine scandal, plus Richard Burr (NC), Susan Collins (ME), Bill Cassidy (LA), Lisa Murkowski (AK), Pat Toomey (PA), and Ben Sasse (NE) - realized the danger trump's riot posed to Congressional safety and our Constitution's integrity.

Mitch McConnell attempted to have it both ways: Blaming trump for causing an insurrection, but then voted to protect trump's ass from removal. Mitch's hypocrisy is damning and two-faced, and it will likely get more Americans killed as trump uses this as an excuse to continue his lying campaign to overturn an election he lost.

The only good news out of this day is threefold: One, it exposes how broken our Impeachment system is to where it needs to go away; Two, it proves we should hold sitting Presidents accountable to arrest on serious federal felony charges (so SCREW that OLC memo); and Three, it leaves trump still exposed to the civil and criminal charges he's facing already.

Let's go to Lloyd Green at The Guardian:

In case anyone forgot, the US attorneys’ office for the southern district of New York previously treated Trump aka “Individual-1” as un-indicted co-conspirator in Michael Cohen’s case. As a result, the confirmation hearings of Joe Biden’s pick for attorney general, Merrick Garland, will certainly be interesting.

Already, prosecutors in Manhattan have the Orange Don and his crew in their cross-hairs. According to court filings and published reports, Cyrus Vance Jr, Manhattan’s district attorney, is investigating the truthfulness of the Trump Organization’s financial reporting and the company’s relationship with Deutsche Bank...

In addition, Trump’s recent bouts of wrath have given lawyers in Washington and Georgia plenty to ponder. Local authorities in the Peach state are weighing a criminal investigation into his failed efforts to browbeat Brad Raffensperger, the state’s secretary of state, into submission. Trump telling Raffensperger to “find” 11,779 more votes and interfering with election certification may have been a step too far...

Green wrote that article back in January 20. That Georgia case just went to Hyperactive this week (via Stephen Fowler at NPR):

The Fulton County District Attorney's office has launched a criminal probe into former President Donald Trump's attempts to overturn Georgia's election results, including a call pressuring Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find" enough votes for him. The county includes Atlanta, Georgia's capital.

In a letter sent to state officials and obtained by Georgia Public Broadcasting, newly elected Democratic District Attorney Fani Willis said the investigation will look into several potential violations of state law, including "the solicitation of election fraud, the making of false statements to state and local governmental bodies, conspiracy, racketeering, violation of oath of office and any involvement in violence or threats related to the election's administration..."

The letter from prosecutors asked several state officials to preserve all records from administering the 2020 election, with "particular care" given to those that "may be evidence of attempts to influence the actions of persons who were administering the election."

In the hourlong call obtained by Georgia Public Broadcasting, an angry Trump alternately cajoled and castigated Georgia's top elections official, seeking to have him toss out the November election results, which was counted three separate times, and "find 11,780 votes" to declare Trump the winner.

trump cannot accept the reality that he lost, he clings to his own lying narrative of "stolen ballots" to keep alive his slim hope of regaining political power, and worst of all he's got a literal mob of followers willing to riot for him to make those lies become a bloody "truth" at everyone else's expense. The cost of letting trump off the hook to keep these lies going will lead to more riots, more anger, more bullshit that won't go away until trump goes away.

This is the only hope for sanity our nation has left: That someone, either in Manhattan or Atlanta or DC, puts it on the line to file credible criminal charges that will convict trump for the damage he's done and remove him from the political stage for good.

There is, for example, the possibility that Biden's Justice Department could reopen the Mueller Report findings and use that to file Obstruction of Justice charges that Mueller determined could be done once trump is out of office. These are serious charges and everything about them should already be lined up and ready to go.

The civil courts are a different matter: trump was already facing a number of civil charges especially a sexual assault/defamation trial from E. Jean Carroll. Any damages, and loss of life, that happened during trump's Insurrection could be charged in civil courts as well. trump has been delaying these trials over and over as he usually does (it's the only true way he's ever won in court, outlast the plaintiff until they quit or take a lesser deal) but he's running out of room to dodge these cases. Sooner rather than later, trump's got to face his accusers before the law.

The legacy of the donald trump post-White House years will be spent in the courtrooms. he will be dealing in cases that won't settle out of court, that won't sign off on any plea deal where he walks away without admission of guilt.

trump does have a terrifying habit of wriggling his way out of ANY accountability, but for the LOVE OF GOD he's broken so many laws and ruined so many lives, the bill for his sins HAVE to come due now. The grave that needs to get dug now is for his future, a future that ought to be trump sitting in a SuperMax jail cell wondering if his con jobs were ever really worth it.  

From The Long Dark Reach of 2020, the Murder Hornets Will Enter the Literary World in 2021

Good news, fans! That short story I wrote about MURDER HORNETS got accepted for the upcoming eighth volume of the Strangely Funny anthology!

From the story: The face of a Murder Hornet meant business, and that business was MURDER.

I asked the editors to allow me to revise the submission to include the red lighted foamy-looking hazmat suits for the Murder Hornet Squad. These were details I was not aware of when first I submitted it.

Updates on when and where the eighth volume will get published are forthcoming.

The Bad News

This Sunday, looking back at all the madness of the past week, past month, past year... past decade... Hell, pretty much everything since 1992... sigh.

There are more people who died during Wednesday's seditious coup attempt by trumpian Brownshirts at the U.S. Capitol. The woman I mentioned getting shot and killed was a QAnon believer attacking one of the officers defending a barricade. About three other protesters died during the riot, some of them in darkly karmic ways we shouldn't laugh about. Another was a Capitol police officer caught defending one of the doorways, beaten upon by the mob, reportedly his head crushed in with a fire extinguisher. There's video from the security cameras, it is not healthy to watch.

People may not understand just how close we came Wednesday to trump's rioters staging a successful insurrection. There are pictures of rioters running around with police-grade zip ties used to bind people: The rioters were planning on capturing people, possibly Congresspersons they wanted to harm. There is credible witness testimony that some of trump's rioters were plotting to seize his own VP Pence (because Pence has "betrayed" trump's call to overturn the election results). The rioters had built gallows outside the Capitol, at best to intimidate people and at worst to actually hang anyone they caught. (If you ever research the Far Right militia culture and their mindset, you will come across their Bible The Turner Diaries and find out how this insurrection was the closest they've ever come to cosplaying their bloody fantasies)

The COVID-19 pandemic is spiraling out of control, still, as has been since Thanksgiving. The holiday travel and family gathering were NOT GOOD IDEAS, Americans.

It does not help that there is a mutated strain of COVID - more infectious, more lethal - spreading just as fast as COVID-19 spread in January 2020.

At my state level, Governor DeSantis is still mismanaging things, failing to grasp the severity of the pandemic, desperate to avoid another lockdown because he's more concerned with revenues and happy businesses than with public safety and healthy families.

The overall vaccine rollout that's been happening for the past month has been haphazard at best nationwide. Stocks are not being deployed properly in certain states and metros. There has been almost no leadership at the national level on managing the deployment, which have left the states to struggle making their own guidelines (as in who gets priority treatment, essential workers obviously but then who?), which haven't been explained or enforced properly at the hospital/health provider level. This is what happens when you let trump dismantle the commission designed to coordinate all this stuff back in 2018.

Getting back to the political crises at hand, trump is still in the Oval Office winding down his days as President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice). His online ranting and calls to riot have become so threatening that the social media outlets - not just Twitter and Facebook but also Pinerest and Shopify! - have finally suspended or banned his accounts because he was violating their User Agreements. You might think this is Good News, but cutting off trump's supply of outrage to his fanbase is going to create a negative feedback implosion in whatever persists as trump's damaged soul. trump will well lash out in other ways.

With all of the public backlash at trump for his open call to insurrection at his riot audience on Wednesday, you would think most other elected Republicans would distance themselves at least, openly denounce the violence at best. But far too many Congressional Republicans in the House and Senate have doubled down on supporting trump and his messages of rage and conspiracy. Far too many Far Right pundits are refusing to admit their rhetoric and rage are responsible for the divided state our nation is in today. The madness will not go away when trump is dragged out of the White House.

Also, I think the cost of the Wendy's Baconator went up a nickel.

So there's the Bad News...

trump's Desperation to Make a Crooked Deal

I was going to blog about sedition, but then THIS shit dropped (via AP Newswire from Jeff Amy, Darlene Superville, and Kate Brumback):

President Donald Trump badgered and pleaded with Georgia’s election chief to overturn Joe Biden’s win in the state, suggesting in a telephone call that the official “find” enough votes to hand Trump the victory.

The conversation Saturday was the latest step in an unprecedented effort by a sitting president to pressure a state official to reverse the outcome of a free and fair election that he lost. The renewed intervention and the persistent and unfounded claims of fraud by the first president to lose reelection in almost 30 years come nearly two weeks before Trump leaves office and two days before twin runoffs in Georgia that will determine control of the Senate.

If you do listen to the audio of the conversation - which will be hard if you can't handle listening to trump's whining nasal voice - you'll notice how this self-proclaimed "Master" of "the Deal" is incapable of selling his pitch or convincing his mark to buy into his bull.

 Audio snippets of the conversation were posted online by The Washington Post. A recording of the call was later obtained by The Associated Press from a person who was on the call.

The president, who has refused to accept his loss to the Democratic president-elect, is heard telling Raffensperger at one point: “All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”

Georgia’s certified election results show Biden won the state’s Nov. 3 election by 11,779 votes...

Biden senior adviser Bob Bauer said the recording was “irrefutable proof” of Trump pressuring and threatening an official in his own party to “rescind a state’s lawful, certified vote count and fabricate another in its place.”

“It captures the whole, disgraceful story about Donald Trump’s assault on American democracy,” Bauer said.

At another point in the conversation, Trump appeared to threaten Raffensperger and Ryan Germany, the secretary of state’s legal counsel, by suggesting both could be criminally liable if they failed to find that thousands of ballots in Fulton County had been illegally destroyed. There is no evidence to support Trump’s claim...

This is where trump The Bully shows up, where the con artist tries to flip the pressure on everybody else in order to weasel his way out of trouble. It's telling that trump is accusing others of "crimes" that never happened in order to get them to commit crimes for himself.

There was no widespread fraud in the election, which a range of election officials across the country, as well as Trump’s former attorney general, William Barr, have confirmed. Republican governors in Arizona and Georgia, key battleground states crucial to Biden’s victory, have also vouched for the integrity of the elections in their states. Nearly all the legal challenges from Trump and his allies have been dismissed by judges, including two tossed by the Supreme Court, which includes three Trump-nominated justices.

Perhaps what trump is committing right now is seditious. trump, his lawyers, his political allies in Congress, all of them may be committing sedition right now. It depends on if I'm reading the U.S. Code properly:

If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.

trump and his cronies are attempting by bullying and threats "to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution" of electoral laws of the United States. In some respects, trump is opposing the authority of the rest of the government that's trying to uphold a legitimately run election as part of our nation's ability to manage itself. And that's just at the federal level: What trump is trying to do in Georgia and other states is to violate their state laws establishing how their elections are held.

trump is so unable to accept a loss he will burn the whole nation down if he could. The terrifying thing is the number of fellow Republicans willing to hand him the torches to do so.

January 6 is coming up, it's the official day that both houses of Congress have to certify the Electoral College results. There's already been a lot of storm and fury about what Pence could do in the formal role of Senate President. It's a moment where the nation can very well hit a brick wall one way or another.

Where I grew up, January 6 is also a great religious holiday, a day of Epiphany and the blessing of the waters.

I can only pray that our national Epiphany is that trump lost and that our nation not need to tear itself apart in violence defending his crooked efforts to deny that loss.

Gods help us.