The Good News

(Update: Thanks again to Infidel753 for including this article in Crooks&Liars' Mike's Blog Round Up. I should mention this article is the twin article to a Bad News article that you might want to read to get a sense of balance on what's happening right now, thank you. Here's hoping things improve after January 20!)

After what needed saying earlier, here are the Good News: 

Despite all of trump's bluster, bullying, and open intent to disrupt the Electoral College count... and despite the Congressional Republicans' attempt to object to the results... The 2020 elections are finally done and Joe Biden will be the next President of the United States on January 20, 2021.

No matter what donald trump will attempt next to avoid what's coming for him - another coup attempt, another riot in Washington DC or elsewhere so he could declare martial law and suspend the whole government, declare war on Iran and impose emergency powers through that (even if that could work) - on January 20 he is officially out of office and can get dragged out of the White House by his diapers if need be. Anything trump could try to do to retain power - or embezzle, or straight-up steal from the federal coffers - will end the second Biden puts hand to Bible and swears the Oath of Office.

Granted, this means that between here and now trump can and will do anything like that to make sure he squeezes out the last penny he can get, but the odds already are that most of the Executive agencies are putting holds on any actions until the incoming Biden administration can sort things out.

In other news, the confirmation means Kamala Harris is the next Vice President. She will be the first woman elected on the Presidential ticket, albeit as the Veep. Harris will be the first woman President of the Senate, which has great significance which I'll get into later. She is the first bi-racial Veep, making her both the first Black American Veep (and second Black American winning the ticket since Obama) and the first Indian (Asian, not Native) American at that high an office.

The incoming Biden administration means we will be getting in 10 days a President who will take the COVID-19 Pandemic serious, and with luck control our nation's response in a more effective, swift manner than the incompetent trump.

In other political news, the seditious riot in Washington overwhelmed the news that Democrats in Georgia won both Senate race runoffs. Not only are two potentially corrupt Republican Senators out of office, but this means the Democrats hold a 50-50 split with Republicans for Senate control... which Kamala Harris makes a 51-vote "majority" as Senate President (the official title/duties of the VP).

This means that a more liberal agenda can get considered and even passed through Congress that otherwise would have been shut down by obstructionist Mitch McConnell had he retained a one-seat majority. It does depend on how the most conservative Dem left in the Senate - Manchin from West Virginia - will set the rules for the rest of his party to accept, but a lot of reforms to the existing health care system, voting rights, wages and employment help, student debt relief, energy and environmental policies, police reforms and social justice, and financial systems can get passed through the House and squeaked through that Senate.

It does depend on what happens to the filibuster and cloture rules - something that Manchin views as tools he still needs to hold influence above his fellow Senators - but the urgency in getting those bills passed during this pandemic crisis would make it likely a lot of it will get done.

Before I get any further, what happened in Georgia was historic and epic in their own ways. Raphael Warnock will be the first Black man elected to the Senate from that Deep South state (the first Black Democrat as well, although not the first Black Senator from the former Confederacy because Mississippi sent two during Reconstruction, and South Carolina has elected Republican Tim Scott in 2014 in a special election). Fellow Democrat Jon Ossoff is the first Jewish Senator elected from the Deep South since 1879.

Their victories matter a lot because they represent a significant shift in the voting demographics in Georgia. Ever since the party shifts of the Republicans going full Conservative since the 1990s, when they became dominant in the state and federal elections, this is the first crack in the Republican political control of the Southeastern U.S. region (AKA the Southern Strategy). Granted, Florida has fluctuated as a battleground state to where Dems have a chance to win, and the Republicans have lost Virginia since 2006. But Florida hasn't been considered a Deep South state since the population boom of the 1980s brought too many Northern liberals and Midwest moderates into the state. Virginia is now so much a part of the DC metro area - heavily liberal suburbs dependent on Federal largesse expanding into the northern counties - that the Conservative power base in that state can't compete. Getting a seriously Deep South state (from Louisiana through Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia and South Carolina) to flip Blue in major elections after 25-30 years of Red Conservative dominance is a sign the Far Right control of a heavily-populated region is about to collapse. That it's Georgia - the next-largest Electoral state behind Texas (which is divergent enough to be its own political ecosystem) and Florida - means the Republicans can plan on losing future Presidential bids for the 2020s decade and beyond.

The Georgia results is also major vindication for Stacey Abrams. Denied a win of the Governor's seat in 2018 due to ethically-questionable behavior from the Republican winner Kemp, Abrams took her national profile from that campaign and turned it into a voter-registration drive to break the GOP's voter suppression efforts and return more favorable results for her fellow Democrats. In the process, she demonstrated to the national Democratic leadership - which at times refuses to organize and recruit in states they felt were lost to them already - that YES it does matter to fight for every vote in every state, and has likely established to other state party leaders how to organize their own efforts to win in other hard Red states.

There are thousands of others in Georgia who worked hard to get the voters registered and motivated, and to her credit Abrams congratulates them as much as everyone else is congratulating her. Her celebrity stock among Democrats is sky high right now, she's proven herself a major player, and with luck she's converting her credibility among the leadership to expand the voter effort and seat challenges everywhere she can. If anyone can work to get more states to turn Blue, it's her.

Speaking of the DC Metro, one of the Democratic party agendas can well get passed within the first month of Biden's tenure: Statehood for DC and Puerto Rico. While these aren't popular issues with the nation at large - and heavily despised and dreaded by Republicans - these are key issues with Democrats looking at the big picture of Senate control. Right now, too many small population states - mostly in the Midwest - are heavily conservative and unlikely to consider Democratic choices for election. These small Red states have few residents, but will have outsized representation in a Senate that constitutionally grants every state Two Senators no matter what. This means roughly 30 percent of the nation's population gets 60-70 percent control of the Senate (another element of Minority Party Rule at the federal level). the demographic and geographic advantage of such skewed representation can hinder the American majority's needs to get things done (at all, given the GOP's obstructionist ways).

The recent trumpian assault on the nation's Capitol is another reason to expect Democrats to push for DC statehood right away: That lack of state-level control prevented the local authorities from aiding in either crowd control during the rally as well as stopping them from protecting the Capitol when the Capitol police got overwhelmed. DC's National Guard doesn't answer to the city, they answered to the DoD (which meant trump and his people benefited from them standing down: Congress had to get National Guard aid from Virginia and Maryland, and even then trump's Pentagon delayed Maryland's response). You can expect the Dems to proceed on granting DC statehood - that the local citizenry need to establish their own law enforcement and protect their own rights - on those grounds alone.

But what will happen with DC - and Puerto Rico - statehood is the expansion of the American charter to more diverse populations. DC is well-known as a Black-majority metropolis (although in truth the ethnicity is more even between Blacks and White in the last ten years of gentrification). Puerto Rico would become the first true Latino-majority state (98 percent!) in the U.S. (New Mexico would be closest at 42 percent). Entering both into the ranks of statehood would be major historical achievements for any Presidential administration (and we haven't done so since 1959).

Ironically, these moves for statehood might not resolve the Senate control in the Democrats' favor: Latinos in 2020 voted in surprisingly high numbers for Republicans, even in spite of the Republicans' harsh anti-immigration stances towards their very ethnic group. That's because the Latinos do not vote on any one singular issue, and are socially conservative on enough matters that Republicans still appeal to them. This would be interesting to witness down the line, but still this coming event should be considered good news for the betterment of the United States' soul.

We're also looking at the good news of Democrats pushing for voting rights laws to fill the void created by bad Supreme Court rulings and by decades' worth of Republican suppression. One thing I'm personally hoping for is a dedicated effort to kill off the Gerrymanders - used by battleground Red states to skew results and corruptly maintain Minority Party rule - and make more states competitive in elections. The Democrats need to, otherwise they run the risk of losing control of the House again like what happened in 2010.

Other good news to consider is that the United States can get back on good terms with our allied nations in Europe and Asia after four years of chaotic and harsh trumpian meddling. We can see the United States resume normal relations with Mexico - and see about undoing the ecological damage that trump's wall obsession had caused. We'll be rejoining the Paris Climate Agreements. We should see more efforts to spread high-speed Internet into rural areas (this would be a big deal where I live). 

We should see a lot of work done to investigate the horrors committed on immigrant and refugee families under trump's draconian rule. We can pray that many of the families pulled apart - and as many children wounded by trump's policies can be recovered - can be mended as best as possible under a more humane immigration system. Depending on if trump and his lackey Stephen Miller haven't blown it all up before Biden takes office.

A lot of this is still speculative. We have to see how things turn out on January 20 and from then on.

But we're facing a better future now than the chaotic uncertainty and violence of the trump regime.

Hope still matters.

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 Twitter in Twilight

Things have been hectic since Wednesday, when our government almost fell to a seditious riot by trumpian Brownshirts, but one major development since then has been Twitter - the social media app trump used the most to stir up rage and madness the last five years - finally banning trump for his ongoing hate-filled rhetoric. 

They first suspended his account for 12 hours because of a Tweet he posted post-riot that called for more "protests" (hint hint, more violence), with the promise he could get back online once he removed the offending Tweet. So he deleted it, and he got back on...

And pretty much posted a more rage-filled Tweet that proved he didn't learn his lesson to behave by Twitter User Agreement policy.

After all that drama, Twitter suspended his account permanently (they may recover it later, after January 20, because of national archival reasons) and then had to give a public statement to why they had to do this:

After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them — specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter — we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence. 

In the context of horrific events this week, we made it clear on Wednesday that additional violations of the Twitter Rules would potentially result in this very course of action. Our public interest framework exists to enable the public to hear from elected officials and world leaders directly. It is built on a principle that the people have a right to hold power to account in the open. 

However, we made it clear going back years that these accounts are not above our rules entirely and cannot use Twitter to incite violence, among other things. We will continue to be transparent around our policies and their enforcement...

I've gotten in a few debates about Free Speech before, regarding how Hate Speech was - and still is - a serious violation of what Free Speech stands for. We have to remember the First Amendment is NOT an absolute right. For example, shouting "FIRE" in a crowded theater to cause a panic will get you arrested. Threating to kill someone will get you arrested for harassment/verbal assault. Standing before a mob encouraging them to go storming into a government building to disrupt an election count should get you arrested for incitement to riot.

This is all trump's public speeches have been, ever since he rolled down that escalator in 2015 and launched his campaign on a diatribe against Mexicans and the Chinese. trump has been crossing the line of decency on social media for years, throughout every call to Twitter's ownership and internal security that trump was violating their code nearly every day.

It had to take an actual coup attempt with people wounded and killed in the Capitol building for Twitter (and Facebook) to realize they couldn't pander to trump's hate anymore.

What is happening now with shutting down trump's main pipeline to his rabid fanbase are arguments from trump's still-pandering Republican allies whining about how Twitter's shutdown is a threat to Free Speech. No, it is not.

This is about Hate Speech. This is about speech designed to enrage others and drive them to madness and violence. We've watched that Hate Speech roll out and infest our national psyche. We've just seen the results of all that Hate: Our nation's Capitol raided and vandalized, rioters and now a police officer dead from the violence, our global prestige degraded by trump's words (and the deeds he's driven others to commit in his "honor").

Words have power. It's one of the few things trump - the eternal lying bullshitter, the constantly grifting con artist - understands all too well. It's a power he's used to drive this nation apart.

And while trump's been cut off from his Twitter feed, he will find a way to keep lashing out at the fate that awaits him on January 20, 2021.

Gods help us, how far into madness and the void trump's Hate will drive us.

Blood Today in the U.S. Capitol

I dreaded this day, and trump finally pushed the viciousness of his mobs too far.

Here's NPR's banner tonight (via Alana Wise, Elena Moore, and Benjamin Swasey):

Pro-Trump Extremists Breach U.S. Capitol Amid His Baseless Election Claims

The U.S. Capitol was the scene of chaos on Wednesday, as supporters of President Trump responded to his call to head to the complex and then breached it, leading to unprecedented violence in the seat of America's federal government.

The insurrectionists interrupted proceedings in the House and Senate, as members of Congress were tallying President-elect Joe Biden's Electoral College victory. The counting of the votes is normally a relatively pro forma session.

But for two months, Trump has falsely and continuously claimed the election was stolen from him, and dozens of fellow Republicans had planned to object to slates of electors from various states they considered contested.

Lawmakers were debating an objection to Arizona's results — a state Trump lost narrowly — when the sessions were recessed as the U.S. Capitol Police attempted to put the complex on lockdown...

trump had sent out word to his devoted voter base, the ones with the rifles and MAGA hats and Confederate flags, to show up to protest a ceremonial performance that Congress has done for over 100-plus years. trump did this knowing many of his base are Far Right conspiracy wingnuts eager to roleplay as militias in their culture war against the rest of America.

It does not help that there's a number of video clips and pictures out there showing the Capitol Police - or some other law enforcement groups working the barricades to keep the building secure - actively opening up those barricades and gleefully joining in with the rioters/terrorists with goddamned selfies.

And because of trump, because of his riling up of his fan base, because of him knowingly telling his gun-wielding Proud Boys to "be ready" to rise up, because of the violence today, a woman is dead (via Rhea Mahbubani at Business Insider):

A woman was shot dead in the Capitol on Wednesday after violent and armed supporters of President Donald Trump stormed and occupied the building, law enforcement officials told NBC News and DC police told the Washington Post.

Lindsay Watts, a reporter with a Fox News affiliate in Washington, DC, first said on Twitter that she'd learned from a paramedic source that one person had been shot and resuscitation efforts were underway. CNN later reported that a woman had been shot in the chest and was in critical condition. PBS NewsHour confirmed this, adding that the person who was struck by a bullet was not a uniformed officer...

There is a family tonight missing a loved one. All because trump needed to have his goddamned temper tantrum to disrupt the Electoral count proceedings of both houses of Congress today. Back to Mahbubani:

Congress met on Wednesday to certify the Electoral College votes for President-elect Joe Biden. But the session was interrupted by the violence, and the House is now in recess with members of Congress, including Vice President Mike Pence, being led to safety.

Photos from around the nation's capital showed massive crowds of people milling around, some of whom were carrying American and Trump's "Make America Great Again" flags. Dozens of ambulances and law-enforcement vehicles were also spotted, as were nooses.

The melee inside the building, which was breached, evacuated, and rocked by flash bangs, involved an apparent armed standoff between police and rioters, both of whom were armed, as well as Trump supporters breaking into and leaving notes in lawmakers' offices. CNN also reported that a police officer had been injured in the scuffle...

trump got what he wanted. His gangs interrupted the count, delaying the result for another day, until trump can come up with another excuse to prevent the legal transition of office to President-Elect Biden.

In the meantime, a woman was shot dead in the violence and confusion today.

None of this had to happen. Those Far Right trump-worshiping bastards did not have to be so riled up to commit acts of sedition and insurrection today. The election would have been resolved months ago had trump done what every other electoral loser had done until now, concede and allow the smooth transition to let America remain at peace with itself and the world.

None of this had to happen to take away that woman's life like that.

Goddamn you, trump. Goddamn your narcissism, goddamn your cruelty, goddamn you.

You've earned your body count now, you Son Of A Bitch.

Now the Savage Days Are Here

Washington heads in the toilet bowl/
Don't see supremacist hate/
Right wing dicks in their boiler suits/
Picking out who to annihilate

Toxic jungle of Uzi trails/
Tribesmen just wouldn't live here/
Fascist flare is fashion cool/
Well, you're dead, you just ain't buried yet

Under the God
Under the God

As the walls came tumbling down/
So, the secrets that we shared
I believed you by the palace gates
Now the savage days are here

Under the God...
- "Under the God," David Bowie/Tin Machine

I would prefer my days of Epiphany to be focused on religious piety, blessings, and Greek food, but trump and his Proud Boys army is making that unlikely for tomorrow. They've already arrested the leader of the Proud Boys before the street protests in DC take place (via Elena Moore at NPR.org):

Enrique Tarrio, 36, was taken into police custody and charged with destruction of property, according to a statement from the Metropolitan Police Department.

The charge is related to his actions during last month's pro-Trump demonstration in D.C. that turned violent. Tarrio admitted to removing and burning a Black Lives Matter banner from a historically Black church, an action the Proud Boys are now being sued over.

According to the police statement, Tarrio is also being charged with possession of a high-capacity feeding device. Officers found two high-capacity firearm magazines with him when he was arrested.

The FBI says the Proud Boys have "ties to white nationalism," and the organization has previously been associated with acts of violence...

One thing to note is that Washington DC has very strict gun-carrying laws on the books, and there's every likelihood the Far Right wingnuts marching - in protest of the Certification count in Congress that would confirm Biden won the 2020 Presidential Election - on January 6 are going to be testing those laws early and often to where even the local cops are going to push back hard.

Meanwhile, city leaders are preparing for possible violence, especially as reports show members of the Proud Boys are planning to attend the march dressed incognito...

What the plan seems to be - and they're being so obvious about it - is to have enough of their own cosplay as "Antifa" (the catch-all Far Right insult of anti-fascists) and have those cosplayers instigate the violence, and then claim afterward that the Far Left are terrorists causing enough violence to justify trump declaring emergency martial law.

It'll sell well on NewsMax and even Fox Not-News (which has been trying, honestly enough, to walk away from trump's narcissism... and failing), but nobody else will be convinced. All it's going to do is get innocent people harmed, likely hurt some cops and other law enforcement types, and drive the wedge of madness deeper into the nation's existing schisms.

What they're hoping to do is bully enough people in Congress - especially any wavering Republicans who haven't signed onto trump's suicide pact - into nullifying the 2020 election results: Specifically, getting VP Pence as the Senate President to toss out the certified Electoral Votes and declare trump the winner in spite of everything.

If we're lucky, the violence will be minimal to various acts of vandalism and car burnings. trump will try to bully Congress to his whims, but the procedural count - which is baked into the system and mostly for ceremony - will likely be as expected, a Biden victory.

But we can't rely on luck, not in a Darkest Timeline where trump can NEVER accept a loss and where he's pumped up his fanbase to "Stand By and Stand Up" at his call.

Everyone in DC that I know of, stay safe tomorrow.

To the rest of the nation, here's hoping sanity and legality prevail.

Posse Incompetence

Over at Balloon Juice, Adam L. Silverman - who does a lot of professional review of military/foreign intelligence and has been aware of trump as a national security threat for some time - sent up a red flare about the bigger red flare just sent up by 10 former Defense Department senior officials (including former Secs of Defense):  

There is no way this letter is put together and then pushed for publication unless someone senior, most likely either senior uniformed personnel (general officers/flag officers) and/or senior executive service personnel at the Department of Defense or one of the Services unless someone got a message out to one or more of their former bosses...

Silverman then quotes the letter (viewed directly through the WaPo link if you can afford to pay the firewall):

As former secretaries of defense, we hold a common view of the solemn obligations of the U.S. armed forces and the Defense Department. Each of us swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. We did not swear it to an individual or a party.

American elections and the peaceful transfers of power that result are hallmarks of our democracy. With one singular and tragic exception that cost the lives of more Americans than all of our other wars combined, the United States has had an unbroken record of such transitions since 1789, including in times of partisan strife, war, epidemics and economic depression. This year should be no exception.

Our elections have occurred. Recounts and audits have been conducted. Appropriate challenges have been addressed by the courts. Governors have certified the results. And the electoral college has voted. The time for questioning the results has passed; the time for the formal counting of the electoral college votes, as prescribed in the Constitution and statute, has arrived.

As senior Defense Department leaders have noted, “there’s no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of a U.S. election.” Efforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory. Civilian and military officials who direct or carry out such measures would be accountable, including potentially facing criminal penalties, for the grave consequences of their actions on our republic...

This is essentially a reminder to the military at large, from the top brass down to the grunts working KP duty - that any attempt by trump to call the armed forces to him and enforce martial law is a big damn HELL NO.

Thing is there is a matter of protocol - tradition, Good Faith as it were - that the military leadership made up of general and admirals cannot publicly criticize the civilian leadership (the Presidency) they answer to. The Joint Chiefs, the ones who work directly with the White House, could arguably go as one onto the major cable networks - even Fox - to make a shared statement aimed against trump's attempts to overturn a legal election. However, that would destroy any future controls a civilian government could hold over our military, which is necessary to keep the United States the democracy it's supposed to be. It would, in some respects even with good intent, come across as a coup against the current government (trump is still in office until January 20), and it would disrupt any authority any future administration - even Biden's - would need to regain the control and trust of our nation's first, second, third, fourth, AND fifth lines of defense (screw the sixth line, Space Force is just an empty office selling marketing merch).

In my lifetime, in the awareness I've had of previous transitions between Presidents and parties - Carter to Reagan, Bush the Elder to Clinton, Clinton to Bush the Lesser, Bush II to Obama, even Obama to trump - I have never seen or read anything from former officials of such key office like the Secretaries of Defense make such a direct plea to the military as a whole about "respecting the electoral process" and avoiding "election disputes (that) would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory."

But something has to be going on behind the scenes for such a letter to go public. The generals and Joint Chiefs may not be able to go public about their concerns, but they can talk in private to their retired colleagues and bosses, and those guys - like Dick "Go Fuck Yourself" Cheney, for God's sake, even HE co-signed this letter - could then go public with these concerns to let someone (cough trump cough) know that illegal use of military power will be resisted.

If trump's been desperately calling state governors to try and nullify the election results, he sure as hell been trying to call the generals and admirals to see about using martial law to suspend everything so trump can stay in power.

January 6 is going to be a chaotic day.

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.

In The Year 2021, Will a Just and Shining Future Finally Be Won

The year 2020 is officially ended, although much of the madness and dread that permeated that long long soul-sucking period of history - such as a trumpian administration sinking faster into corruption before Biden's inauguration - still awaits a future purging.

I still need to make a reckoning of that year - part of me wants to write up a Winners/Losers checklist but it's difficult to finish while the chaos is slipping to and fro - but in the meanwhile we do need to look ahead as Infidel753 does at his blog: 

1. When 2022 and 2024 arrive, most of the Democratic voting base will judge Biden and the Democrats in Congress mainly by results.  Has the pandemic been vanquished?  Have jobs and wages (not "the economy", which takes in all kinds of things, but jobs and wages specifically) recovered?  Has federal legislation to protect voting rights from state-level gerrymandering and vote suppression been enacted?  Has Medicare access been expanded or some other kind of public option been provided?  Have DC and Puerto Rico become states?  If the Democrats achieve results, our voters will care only that it was done, not how it was done.  Conversely, if little or nothing is accomplished, nobody will much care about whatever reasons or excuses are offered...

You need to go to Infidel's blog and read the whole article: It's not so much a checklist of a Liberal To Do List as it is a manual (and warning) of what to expect in the coming political cycle.

Much of what's coming is a pattern of destruction and obstruction we've already seen: The Republicans have already made it abundantly clear they will NOT respect the legitimacy of Biden's Presidency and will do everything to break it (and break the nation in the process). The Far Right media will obviously beat the "Impeach Biden" war drums within a day of Biden's swearing-in: for example, pinning the fault of 350,000+ Americans dead of COVID on his shoulders rather than on trump whose actual malfeasance in the affair was - and still is - the primary culprit in that tragedy.

The Republicans are going to spend 2021 - all of the 2020s decade - doing everything they can to hold onto the corrupt Minority Rule powers they wield. They've gotten to the point of Rule Or Ruin in their world-view, they no longer believe in the ebb-and-flow of power cycling between the major parties like it's done for much of the 20th Century. They're at the point that Republicans are terrified of the future... because the path forward from here follows the Democratic/Liberal ideals, not their own.

Half of what Infidel discusses on his article can only occur if the Democrats hold slim control of both halves of Congress, so with the Senate still on the edge with two Georgia Senatorial runoffs we can't be certain how far the Democratic agenda can go. All of what Infidel suggests is where it SHOULD go, such as the needed inclusions of new states to grant those regions - a broken Puerto Rico in particular - the legitimacy of statehood to stabilize their communities and promote better public service. A lot of what Infidel lists are things that should have been happening for ages, denied or blocked only because a calcifying Republican Party refused to see the merits of such efforts (has it ever occurred to Republicans that a habitually conservative Puerto Rican population could go Red and NOT Blue in future federal elections?) to even compromise or provide bipartisan effort to achieve them.

But Republicans can't and won't compromise any more: Politics is officially a Zero Sum game to them, so it's left to the Democrats to get things actually done anymore.

Which is where this coming decade offers so much potential for getting things done. While the Game of Demographics - the shift from older white conservative voting blocs to younger ethnically open liberal blocs - is still not really there yet for liberals to feel safe about achieving results - in health care reforms, civil rights, wage and employment rights, better education, a more just and loving world - the signs are aligning towards it.

What Biden, Harris, the Democratic leaders in Congress, the GOTV leadership of Democrats in battleground states -not just Stacey Abrams but thousands like her - what they can achieve this first year in a Biden Presidency is the foundation of a Liberal (not yet Progressive, sorry BernieBros) era that ought to repair not only the damage done by a vandal-plagued trump Era but also build past the roadblocks that Republicans have been throwing in our nation's path since 1994.

A lot of this still depends on those Georgia Senate races - the early voting on that (with huge numbers) wrapped up and the official election day for that is coming up next - to where none of us can feel safe about what's ahead. If Republicans can keep a slim 51-seat lead in the Senate, that means Mitch McConnell remains in power and can wield every obstructionist tool at his disposal to delay the Democrats' agenda for another two years at least.

If it comes to that, if Congress becomes a pit of McConnell's hellish desires, Biden and the Democrats can still try to rebuild as much of the federal system they can - while still wary of the conservative Judiciary trump and McConnell have built to oppose the oncoming Blue Path - with a dedicated effort to undercut the corruption the Republicans have been operating with at the state level. 

The long-term objective of breaking the Republican Minority Rule needs to focus on the insane level of Gerrymandering the Republicans commit at the state level in battleground states - Texas, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida especially - and that the Far Right will keep deploying to suppress future Democratic voter turnout. There have been successes in weakening the Gerrymander efforts, but our nation has yet to find a way to kill those damn things outright. With the chaos trump infused into the 2020 U.S. Census efforts, it's likely the Republican-controlled states will use skewed numbers to Gerrymander even more to prevent Democratic majorities - even slim ones - in those states to elect honest proportional representation.

That's just one thing I can think of that Biden and the Democratic Party needs to be doing. Infidel's list of To Do's - again, go to that link - lists a whole lot more. Every one of them a necessary act to recover from this pandemic, from this economic malaise, to repair this collapsing edifice we know as the United States of America.

We should see an end to the trump years like the fading nightmare it's all been.

We are going to wake up to a busy decade of hard work. That shining future is just the morning sunrise. Get some coffee if you need it.

Four Years of trumpian Chaos, What History Will Note

"I'm a One-Termer! I'm a Jimmy Carter!"
-- tears shed by Dana Carvey on SNL while performing as Bush the Elder back in 1992, although he probably expressed the shame the real-life Bush felt.

David Frum, attempting to take the high road to speak of trump's doomed one-term Presidency, compared trump to the recent history of other one-termers who achieved more effective and long-lasting policy goals:

In his single term as president, George H. W. Bush negotiated the peaceful reunification of Germany. He liberated Kuwait while losing few American lives. He signed legislation to end acid rain. He did a budget deal that reduced federal deficits, enacted the Americans With Disabilities Act, and successfully resolved the collapse of the savings-and-loan industry.

Jimmy Carter, in his one term, deregulated passenger aviation. He updated the regulation of rail freight, shipping, and trucking, laying the foundation for America’s modern delivery system. He negotiated the Camp David Accords, ending belligerency between Egypt and Israel. He avoided a major crisis in Central America with his Panama Canal Treaty.

William Howard Taft also achieved much in his one term as president. It was his Department of Justice that busted the Standard Oil monopoly. Taft forcefully advocated a central bank for the United States, although that project was not completed until the year after he lost the presidency to Woodrow Wilson. Taft urged free trade with Canada and negotiated the treaty that ended a century of rancorous North American waterway disputes.

To say the least, Donald Trump is not a president in the league of Bush, Carter, or even Taft. Few presidents have left office with so little accomplished, impeached and disgraced. Trump took a lot of credit for the economic growth of his first three years, but the economy was already growing strongly when he took office. Pick a measure, almost any measure, and the trajectory of his first three years was identical to that of Barack Obama’s final three years: unemployment, manufacturing, wages, you name it. And whereas Obama passed a successful economy to Trump, Trump bequeaths a wreck to his successor...

Frum does list a number of policy "successes" but a number of them - the prohibition on vaping, for example - would have been minor moments in any other administration that would have garnered a mere page of mention in any historian's book. He also cites things like "normalization in the Middle East" as part of a peace process that still hasn't seen serious dividends for the region or the world, and in fact highlighted corrupt actions by trump and his family that in other respects should be viewed as scandals. None of it has pacified the nations still at war with each other, nor have they resolved the key dilemma of the fight between Israel and Palestine for a Palestinian homeland.

Frum also viewed trump's actions revising our immigration and asylum practices as effective reforms, without recognizing the chaos and cruelty those revisions actually created. That's not even going into the cruelty of the family separations he let happen on his watch, allowing ICE to become an out-of-control police force causing harm to our reputation and national soul.

The appeal of the Space Force that trump created - the forward-looking idea of creating a real-life Starfleet - is dimmed by the reality that trump expanded the military bureaucracy into a program that currently has little real-world applicability and will likely turn into a bloated money pit making the out-of-control spending of the Defense Department even worse. It doesn't help that the look and style of trump's Space Force have Trekkies mocking them for tone-deafness and/or tastelessness.

What Frum ignores during his "damned with faint praise" review of trump's administration are the overt acts of sabotage and damage to the federalism model of our nation's government, the weakening of our country's ability to respond to disasters - especially the ongoing nightmare of the COVID pandemic - and the absentee leadership that created a void for four years that can take a decade for this country to recover from.

If there is anything positive about donald trump's time in the Oval Office pretending to be our nation's President Loser of the Popular Vote, it is that trump exposed all the flaws and breaking points in our government's system of checks and balances.

trump broke every norm in the books. If not actual laws - such as the ones regarding Emoluments violations or the Hatch Act needed to separate the Presidential office from the politics of campaigning - then he broke the gestures of good will and unity that the Presidency is supposed to perform. trump exposed the reality that much of our government's ability to work relies a lot on Good Faith behavior between groups and factions, not necessarily bipartisanship but at least cooperation.

Without that Good Faith, a lot of what our government could do stopped happening. Even when trump had a receptive and willing Republican-controlled Congress, he would balk, he would whine, he would self-immolate, he would accuse and deny, he would refuse to set agendas, leaving the work to Congressional leaders who needed to coordinate with the Executive branch to stay on message and achieve their goals. Aside from the massive tax cut law trump signed, there wasn't any other major legislative act worth noting. The GOP attempt to nuke Obamacare for example kept running into either interference from trump or inertia without trump's input.

Nearly everything trump did - and did not do - in office highlighted areas where major reform is needed - there's a link to that CREW article released this month detailing where trump committed ethical breaches that need fixing - and would otherwise have gone unmentioned under any other President's administration. It takes a crook to show you where the security flaws exist in your bank. It takes a demolitions expert to point out where your bridge is most vulnerable.

It took a Shitgibbon to make us see how dangerous a terrible and corrupt con artist will be when given power.

This is what history will note. The judgment that trump deserves.

The worst crook who ever lived, serving as the worst President the United States ever saw.

The Disaster Movie of the Year IS... The Year 2020

Just when you thought it was safe to dive into the Sharknadoes once more...

When you consider this was a year full of tragedy and trauma and MURDER HORNETS, it's the kind of year that would make any documentarian cream their shorts to make a dramatic 2-hour retrospective aboot. And yes, even before the year ends, someone's done that!

Annus Horribilis doesn't even begin to cover it. 

One Sentence Explanation Why Republicans Are Still Pandering to trump's Coup Attempts to Subvert the 2020 Elections (w/ Update)

It is not that Republicans really believe Democrats stole millions of ballots, and it is not that Republicans can PROVE Democrats stole millions of ballots: It is that Republicans have to demonstrate to each other their absolute fealty to the GRAND FAR RIGHT NARRATIVE that Democrats/Liberals are all evil Commies, and so the Republicans must top each other with a kind of escalating madness to prove their loyalty to the cause even at the expense of making fellow Republicans look bad, which has the added benefit of forcing those other Republicans into acquiescing to that madness to keep the rest of the Republican Party in that downward spiral of "No, *I* can be crazier than thou!"

And there is nothing - outside of the courts just collectively going "fuck it, Contempt of Court for every one of these bastards for wasting our time" - that can compel them to stop that downward spiral.

Okay, that's two sentences, but it all needs to be said even with this third sentence.

(Updated 12/31/20): This is adding to the blog entry, but I saw this on The Atlantic by Peter Wehner and thought of placing it on a separate blog article but then realized it fits here better: 

Hawley knows this effort will fail, just as every other effort to undo the results of the lawful presidential election will fail... Every single attempt to prove that the election was marked by fraud or that President-elect Biden’s win is illegitimate—an effort that now includes about 60 lawsuits—has flopped. In fact, what we’ve discovered since the November 3 election is that it was “the most secure in American history,” as election experts in Trump’s own administration have declared. But this immutable, eminently provable fact doesn’t deter Trump and many of his allies from trying to overturn the election; perversely, it seems to embolden them...

It is one thing for Hawley to position himself as a populist, something he had done even before he was elected in 2018; it is quite another for him to knowingly engage in civic vandalism and, in ostentatiously unpatriotic ways, undermine established norms and safeguards. This is precisely what Senator Hawley is now doing—and he is doing so in the aftermath of Trump’s loss, when some political observers might have hoped that the conspiracy mindset and general insanity of the Trump modus operandi would begin to lose their salience...

What is happening in the GOP is that figures such as Hawley, along with many of his Senate and House colleagues, and important Republican players, including the former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, are all trying to position themselves as the heirs of Trump. None of them possesses the same sociopathic qualities as Trump, and their efforts will be less impulsive and presumably less clownish, more calculated and probably less conspiracy-minded. It may be that not all of them support Hawley’s stunt; perhaps some are even embarrassed by it. But these figures are seismographers; they are determined to act in ways that win the approval of the Republican Party’s base. And this goes to the heart of the danger...

The problem with the Republican “establishment” and with elected officials such as Josh Hawley is not that they are crazy, or that they don’t know any better; it is that they are cowards, and that they are weak. They are far more ambitious than they are principled, and they are willing to damage American politics and society rather than be criticized by their own tribe...

The weakness is how they abandoned their duties as party leaders to actually lead: The people in charge are supposed to correct possible errors, guide others to enlightened paths, set examples, and make sure things are done right. That may sometimes require getting into the pit of madness, sorting out the troublemakers to prevent them from making things worse, and getting back up on that horse to charge into battle.

The modern Republican Party does not want to correct their lies because that would kill the Narrative they've built this failing structure upon. The GOP leadership would rather pander and succumb to the followers who've gotten addicted to the Fox Not-News lies that feed their rage and foolishness.

Like I keep saying about the Republicans, it's now trumps all the way down. And they're dragging the rest of the nation down with them.

What If: The Thing That Would Not Leave 2020 Edition

So trump has been making some noises that in spite of all the legal evidence he lost, he is refusing to leave the Oval Office... not just figuratively but literally.

Prompting many a joke about how "Sweet Jesus, make this Pay-Per-View so millions can watch him get dragged out of the building like a whiny bitch."

But it does beg the question: How would you actually DO it? We've never had a One-Term President Loser of the Popular Vote throw a conniption and barricade himself inside the White House before. (True story: I once did a college comic strip for the University of South Florida during the 1992 Election cycle, "Young Moderate Republicans" a very poor Doonesbury ripoff, and I drew half-jokingly that one-termer Bush the Elder grabbing a pillar of the White House portico crying "But I worked so HARD for this!" while Secret Service agents were dragging him out. It was meant in jest, and Bush the Elder did not act that way in Real Life, he attended Clinton's Inauguration as tradition warranted with the graceful exit the nation expected of him.) 

Digby did some digging to find out a few things (which she pulled up from The Daily Beast, but it's behind a paywall so bleh):

If there are any checklists or plans, procedures, or guidelines for the Secret Service to follow in the event of an autogolpe—a crisis in which a sitting president refuses to transfer power—a half-dozen former officials privy to the government’s most sensitive contingency plans aren’t aware of them.

None would speak for the record, owing to both the secrecy of the plans and to the sensitivity of the moment: They don’t want to encourage President Donald Trump to cross a line that authorities haven’t conceived of...

One is: Will there be a question about who the president really is? The other: What happens if, in a fit of pique, the former president simply will not vacate the seat of American government?...

The first question is easy to answer. After the certification of the Electoral College on Jan. 6, the White House Military Office will prepare a briefing for President-elect Joe Biden on the contents of the president’s emergency satchel, often known as “the football,” with a secure satellite phone and laminated nuclear-war option guide inside. They will accept, from the National Security Agency, a set of presidential authentication cards, known as biscuits, that will be active the moment Biden is sworn in...

This is pretty much the game there. Control of the nuclear arsenal is the power of the modern Presidency, and the military has in place procedures to ensure a smooth transition from one administration to the next. There may be a chance trump will try to order the DoD/Pentagon officials to delay that January 6th briefing and transfer of power, so it's a moment to stay alert, but it's unlikely the military will bend to trump's will here (The Joint Chiefs will know when an order from a sitting President is illegal enough to ignore, and trump's interference would be illegal as hell).

trump hasn't been able to prove a single argument by himself or his lackeys about the election being "stolen" from him. Every vote count has been certified by officials with the authority to do so, every certification accepted by the state legislatures, every Electoral College vote done by the letter of the law. Biden won: Only an outright refusal by a Republican-held Senate would disrupt the January 6 acceptance of the EC, but they don't have enough Senators willing to disrupt it (unless trump succeeds in bullying enough of them to do his bidding).

No matter what trump has done to break the federal system of government, much of that system remains intact and able to perform the tasks needed doing. The agencies - even the ones corrupted by trump's fellow crooks - will update their chains of command to reflect Biden being in charge and his advisors/Cabinet nominees as the people to report to. trump can barricade himself in the Oval Office on Inauguration Day January 20 2021 and pretend he has control, but the bureaucracy will no longer answer to him. That won't be the problem.

The problem will be Question Two from the Daily Beast: How do you fucking get the Toddler-In-Chief out of the building itself? Back to Digby's referral:

Former senior government agency heads and Secret Service detail leaders pushed to think through this scenario offered several plausible solutions. “I think I’d have a conversation with the chief of staff, and then the family, Ivanka and the other kids and say, ‘It’s going to be your job to make sure he’s gone,’” a former senior Secret Service official said.

Another possibility: “When the staff leaves on January 19, don’t let them back into the complex the next day. He can’t do anything without his staff.”

An isolated president, in other words, would be more susceptible to just throwing in the towel...

This is kind of correct. trump cannot survive without an audience around himself. The minute he can't bark at an underling to run an errand, he will flee from the scene and make his way to somewhere he can bark at underlings.

There are some possibilities that by January 6, when Congress accepts the Electoral College results, that trump will simply flee DC altogether, and make his way to Mar-A-Lago in Florida where he could rule in absentia doling out more corrupt pardons and issue more norms-breaking Executive Orders to complicate Biden's opening 100 days as President.

But trump is all about presentation and image. The White House and Oval Office are stages of power on the global stage. he may not want to leave it, flee from it as though he was admitting he lost. Letting Biden move in would be an incredible humiliation after all of trump's accusations and denials of reality. In the end, trump may think in terms of pro wrestling: the Heels must put on acts of public indecency to keep their fanbase appeased.

So one thing I'd worry about is this: Does trump still have a private bodyguard service protecting him alongside the official Secret Service?

I recall reading before that he did not want to give up his private retinue of bodyguards - after all, a lot of them know too much of the crap he's pulled over the years - so if there's still a handful of them working within the White House itself, this may be a means for how trump tries to seize the building...

• For starters, January 18 is Martin Luther King Day, a national holiday two days before Inauguration Day (January 20, by law). trump could schedule a series of events that day to bring in religious leaders to mark the occasion.
• At the last minute, the guests get switched out for 40-50 armed Proud Boys while trump's private bodyguard seize control of the Secret Service command center. During the confusion, the white supremacists bus in another 100 more armed agitators to help secure the outside barricades that trump had been adding all 2020 against the Black Lives Matter protests.
• trump declares a national emergency from the Oval Office, with "proof" that China corrupted the "Deep State" into faking millions of ballots to steal the election for Biden. trump declares martial law, the suspension of Habeas Corpus (what Lincoln did at the start of the Civil War, but which got overturned by the Supreme Court as Congress has that power) and the Constitution itself, and orders the military to seize control of the five state capitals that "stole the election" (PA, MI, GA, AZ, WI). he calls on "All true Americans who love me and love what I've done for America" to overthrow any Democratically-held state office so that "new honest elections" can be held for Republicans to win.
• The White House turns into seized territory by trump's personal army. Anyone caught inside who's not in on the plot are made into human shields.
• Meanwhile at the Pentagon, trump's appointed lackeys - some of them put into offices after the November elections - begin disrupting the chain of command in the Defense Department, ordering lower-ranking officers to ignore or even arrest the Joint Chiefs that would openly oppose trump's orders (which would violate laws regulating the use of military force inside the states). They will attempt to get the US Armed Forces to side with trump even though it would violate their Oaths to the Constitution (loyalty is to America, not the Man). A certain number of officers who are politically biased may attempt to do so, but will likely get arrested as most of the military will stand down against trump's "extraconstitutional" violations.
• Outside of the barricades, the rest of the government's response would most likely extend the safety barricades around the White House to ensure no further incursions, also to keep any anti-trump protesters out of range of the extremists' weapons. Everything in a five-block radius is going to turn into an armed battleground.
• The media will play along with the drama, as usual, with the Beltway Media underplaying the dangers of trump's coup and the Far Right media egging it on to the point of encouraging armed protests by other Far Right groups in the contested battleground states. Gunfights and attempted building seizures may happen, but most of them will end badly for the outgunned or underplanned wingnuts. The worst that will happen is a lot of innocent civilians will die the crossfire.
• However, none of that is going to change the handover of the Presidency to Biden, who goes through with his Inauguration ceremony - most likely inside the Capitol dome for security reasons - and who cancels any celebrations afterward because of security needs in the DC metro.
• The whole thing turns into a waiting game, with trump typing out more insane Tweets every hour while Biden gets his administration in order. Any disruptions from Republican Congresscritters will try to paint Biden as illegitimate or an usurper, but little of that will change things in the real world. All that would matter would be the safety of the hostages, and the mental state of some of the Proud Boys gun-toters in trump's employ who are going to turn angry at the realization the game isn't playing the way they thought it would. In-fighting may kick in, probably within five days or more, especially if any of the gun-nuts or even some of the hostages show signs of COVID symptoms.
• trump's display of bravado will end up doing nothing for him. Control of the military will resume to the Joint Chiefs, who will answer to President Biden - most likely working from Camp David during this standoff - and who will clean out the trumpian coup plotters in short order. trump will barter with the FBI and local officials to allow him and his immediate family to leave the White House under their own security for the nearest business airport where they would fly unmolested to Mar-a-Lago and await further lawsuits (or likely flee the country altogether). Some of the Proud Boys may dig in and try to burn down or blow up the White House, and kill some of the hostages doing so, but odds are most of them will surrender to the cops and take their chances with all-white juries acquitting them for being violent jerks.

It might provide a few weeks of international drama, which is what trump would want... but it's not going to change anything.

trump is getting dragged out of the White House. And no matter how many corrupt pardons he's flinging out there, he's still facing state charges of fraud and other criminal misdeeds.

You're better off running, donald. Depart I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!

Settling All trump's Business

As mentioned before, we're at the point where if trump is going to pay back his lackeys for their criminal misdeeds done in his name, the last 30 days before he gets dragged - literally by the sounds of it - out of the White House is when he's going to do so. Using the one tool in the Presidential arsenal he can deploy with no limit (he thinks, the law might disagree on some of them) or punishment: Pardoning his crooked buddies.

It makes a twisted kind of sense for trump to do all these near Christmas time, as though he was offering out gifts of mercy and justice. Except that he's not: He's handing out gifts to his grifters and even to war criminals. As Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo points out: 

What Trump has found time for is granting pardons and commutations to, among others, four Blackwater mercenaries who massacred civilians, three corrupt former Republican congressmen, and two former Border Patrol agents who shot fleeing suspects. Among the 26 partridges and pear trees in Wednesday’s tally are longtime Trump ally Roger Stone, former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and Charles Kushner, father to Trump’s son-in-law, Jared.

Foreign agent and former sometime national security adviser Mike Flynn got a pardon. So did “coffee boy” George Papadopoulos, and more...

The ones in trump's orbit were the obvious ones, not just the lackeys who helped him cheat in 2016 with Russia's help but also the inner circle members who had family members, personal allies, or employees that needed a favor done.

The pardon to Charlie Kushner was a long-delayed payoff to trump's most loyal - and most incompetent - underling Jared. When you see what Kushner had been convicted of - massive acts of fraud, tax evasion, witness intimidation, and campaign fraud - you'll notice Charlie and donnie are pretty much brothers-in-crime cut from the same cloth. It's not surprising trump pardoned Kushner Senior: Not just because he's family by marriage, but because trump would think Kushner did nothing wrong since he does those things himself.

The Blackwater mercs seem to be a payoff to Erik Prince, one of trump's closest political and financial allies, but it also fits into trump's world-view that violence and cruelty towards others is perfectly acceptable. Those four war criminals had opened fire on an Iraqi public square at unarmed civilians back in 2007 and killed 17 people, it had taken years by 2014 for justice to be served, and now with a stroke of his pen trump undid all that. Without caring how this would look not only to Iraqis now betrayed by trump's callousness, but to a world that can no longer look to the United States as a beacon of justice.

It's not just the killers whom trump pardoned that underscores that cruelty:

Among the lower-profile pardons: one for Stephanie Mohr, a former Maryland police officer. Mohr was convicted for setting her K-9 partner on an unarmed homeless man who had surrendered to police during a burglary stakeout. Ricardo G. Mendez, a Mexican national, was not a suspect. He and another man had been sleeping on the roof of a printing shop in Takoma Park. She served ten years for a felony civil rights felony. The dog “bit a chunk out of the man’s leg.”

There wasn't a huge outcry for leniency towards Mohr, it's not like there was a constant drum-beat on even the Far Right media outlets defending her case. Yet trump found out about her and her act of cruelty somehow fit trump's ideal of how law enforcement should be encouraged to behave. Horrifying doesn't begin to describe the result this pardon deserves. Back to Sullivan:

The New York Times Editorial Board believes Trump “has made a mockery of mercy, doling out clemency to some of the most deplorable people in the country, an alarming number of whom happen to be his friends, while ignoring tens of thousands of more deserving applicants.” Trump has pardoned “a rogues’ gallery of wrongdoers who shouldn’t have been on anyone’s mercy list.”

But of course he would. Immediate family members are next, we suspect...

trump may be publicly claiming he's "won a second term" but he's governing this month like he's running out of time. That he'll offer pardons to his own kids and in-laws - who are currently under investigation and likely facing future criminal charges once they're out of power - even without specifying what they're needing pardons for will underscore the truth that everything trump and his people have done the past four years was run a criminal regime. Of course, trump and his children are too shameless to admit that.

The scary/funny thing is the likelihood trump will pardon himself. The one line that's NEVER been crossed even when the temptations were there for previous amoral/immoral Presidents facing their own fates (Nixon seriously considered it, but even he stepped back... and got Ford to do it instead). It's a line no ethical person ever conceived would be crossed: Taft, the only man to ever be President as well as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, never imagined the pardon power would be abused this way, and so granted that power a lot of leeway in its use.

But this is where power corrupts: When power is used for personal gain and avoidance of accountability.

And trump is going to do it. Everything points to him pardoning himself before he gets dragged out of the Oval Office. There is no norm of political protocol he won't break, there is no line he won't cross if it meant saving his own ass.

It will be the ultimate legal test of our Constitution, the limits of power itself when it is bent so far it becomes broken. It would be unlikely trump can pull it off: Most legal experts argue the concept of pardoning prevents it from being self-serving.

But trump has defied political and legal logic before. It is terrifying to think if trump gets away with this final act of firebombing our political reality.

As 2020 Draws to A Close, We Contemplate Our Year of Madness

Just needed to wrap up this year as drunkenly as possible:

By the way, Julie from 2020, there's still 10 days left before the year officially ends. ANYTHING could happen in those days, this year should have taught us that for God's sake. (I should blog about that monolith thingee as a year's end wrap-up)

As for getting drunk, you might recall I tried doing that with hard cider a few years ago. I did not enjoy the taste of it, and had stayed sober since. This year brought back that urge to get drunk because DAMMIT WE ALL NEEDED TO AFTER THIS 2020 so I considered the possibility the cider I had gotten was too spicy with cinnamon. So I went and got a standard cider, no extra flavoring, just straight from the bottle...

And I still hated the taste of it. Ugh. I couldn't finish it, poured it down the kitchen sink. I got five bottles of it now sitting in my fridge looking for a new home. I'm sure someone can quarantine the bottles for 5-14 days before finishing them off, if anyone's interested... 

This trumpian Winter of Discontent

(Update: Thanks again to Batocchio for sharing this blog on Crooks&Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Io Saturnalia to you all, and stay safe for 2021!)

In this past week or so - after the Electoral College performed its duty and officially confirmed Joe Biden as our next President and Kamala Harris our next Vice President this January 2021 - I felt the need to apologize in some way. I was looking back at all the things I'd been blogging since before Election Day, taking note of all the times I was raising alarm at some of the more unsettling and violent things donald trump and his fervent Far Right voting base were plotting to do. 

I looked at some of the stuff I was posting and I'd come to a shameful understanding that I seemed to be fearmongering much in the way the wingnuts had been fearmongering about Dems and Progressives. I'd kept posting stuff like "Oh SHIT they're arming and marching stay alert America" at every trumpian outburst, and it didn't look good. I mean, fear is a rational response to an irrational situation, but I might have been overdoing it.

And then THIS SHIT happens - like an ex-cop on a wingnut payroll kidnapping a repairman and his truck in a desperate attempt to prove thousands of ballots had been "stolen" - and I retract my apology, because CHRIST ALMIGHTY it's getting crazier out there. Here's the statement from the Harris County DA office:

According to a court document describing probable cause for the charge, Aguirre told police shortly after the Oct. 19 incident, that he was part of a group of private citizens called, “Liberty Center,” who were conducting a civilian investigation into the alleged ballot scheme.

According to Aguirre, he had been conducting surveillance on the victim for four days under a theory the victim was the mastermind of a giant fraud, and there were 750,000 fraudulent ballots in a truck he was driving. Instead, the victim turned out to be an innocent and ordinary air conditioner repairman.

Aguirre ran his SUV into the back of the truck to get the technician to stop and get out, according to the document. When the technician got out of the truck, Aguirre, pointed a handgun at the technician, forced him to the ground and put his knee on the man’s back – an image captured on the body-worn camera of a police officer.

Aguirre directed police to a parking lot nearby where another suspect, who has not been identified, took the truck. There were no ballots in the truck. It was filled with air conditioning parts and tools.

Aguirre never told police that he had been paid a total of $266,400 by the Houston-based Liberty Center for God and Country, with $211,400 of that amount being deposited into his account the day after the incident...

It's that last paragraph where I think the media is burying the lede. Aguirre was on a payroll for this obscure but obviously well-funded organization focused on proving voter fraud that no one has been able to prove. This ex-cop was getting paid a handsome sum - few people are paid six-figure wages like that! - to prove a lie. Results were expected for that kind of money, you'd think. There's a saying from Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” There should be a related saying to that: "When a man is getting paid to prove a lie, expect that man to commit crimes to make that lie come true."

There are hundreds of political operatives and consultants - there is an army of trump lawyers charging back and forth across every courthouse - trying to force trump's lie of a "stolen election" to come true. There's millions of dollars floating out there paying every single one of them to subvert any morality and commit any sin, just to gain a foothold somewhere to keep trump happy.

But the courtrooms - despite all the partisan hackery that trump and Mitch have pushed through the Senate to fill those benches - are crucibles, in them we burn away irrelevancies until we are left with a pure product: The Truth, for all time. (Yes I am quoting Picard, actually the screenwriter is Melinda Snodgrass). trump's lies about voter fraud can find no safe haven in the legal system, and so any legitimate excuse for trump to seize and remain in power cannot exist.

It doesn't mean trump won't stop trying. Which is why this past Friday when word got out about trump plotting with some of his crazier allies about seizing the ballot machines and declaring martial law, it should have activated every DEFCON-1 warning among Americans that shit is getting real:

SCOOP - Sidney Powell was in Oval Office last night as POTUS discussed making her special counsel for election fraud. @KannoYoungs and me https://t.co/wUB8ZMrPxp

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) December 19, 2020

If we can go to Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine for more details:

At the White House on Friday, President Trump held what may have been his most deranged meeting yet. In it, the president raged at his loyalists for betraying him, and discussed taking extralegal measures to overturn the election.

The meeting, first reported by the New York Times, included lawyer and conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell, convicted felon Michael Flynn, and Rudy Giuliani. One plan floated at the meeting was for Trump to appoint Powell as a “special counsel” overseeing allegations of voter fraud. Powell’s voter fraud claims are so fantastical she has been mocked even by other far-right legal conspiracy theorists. Andrew McCarthy, a former birther and author of one book titled How Obama Embraces Islam’s Sharia Agenda and another calling for his impeachment on multiple counts, has described Powell’s vote-fraud claims as “loopy.”

Trump also reportedly brought up Flynn’s proposal, which he has expounded on cable news, to impose martial law and direct the military to hold a new election. “At one point in the meeting on Friday, Mr. Trump asked about that idea,” reports the Times...

There is no reason to believe Trump commands the power to actually implement any of these wild ideas. Trump’s best chance to steal the election was to have the decisive voting margin in the Electoral College determined by the counting of mail-in ballots that were mailed before, but arrived after Election Day. This would have let him either persuade the Republican-controlled Supreme Court to invalidate those decisive ballots, or Republican-controlled state legislators to disregard their state’s voting results and appoint pro-Trump electors to represent their state...

They tried to force "competing Electors" last week in publicly-staged counter-votes during the Electoral College's actual count, as though these fake results could be presented in Congress to force a negation of the real thing. Problem is, there's no guarantee that Congress will overturn the voters and put trump back in office. At best it would still evict trump and Pence from office on January 20 and make Pelosi (as Speaker) promoted to the Presidency due to the succession rules of the 25th Amendment.

None of this is stopping trump or the Republicans from arguing that Biden is an "illegitimate" winner, although by all measures - legal voting results, no evidence of mass fraud, a verified Electoral College - Biden is indeed our President-Elect set to swear into office exactly one month from now.

None of this is going to stop trump and his cohorts - his rabid fanbase, the wingnuts paying themselves to perpetuate their own lies, the greedy and corrupt - from pursuing even more outlandish and likely violent reactions to the basic norms of political reality. The legal filings are going to get worse and the Freudian slips marginally funnier ("Plenty of perjury"? Don't they have these legal forms on a bloody template by now? Where's the damn Spell-Check on WordPerfect?!)

 

I am not apologizing one bit for fearmongering about trump's efforts to start up his coup and break the Constitution.

I am not going to relax until January 20th rolls around and the Secret Service drags him out of the White House by his feet.

Anything can happen in the next 30 days. Stay alert and stay safe. AND GODDAMMIT WEAR THE DAMN MASKS, COVID IS GETTING WORSE. /muttergrumble

 

Io Saturnalia for 2020, And Not a Moment Too Soon

Tonight is December 17 and the official start to Saturnalia, as always an excuse to ask Mithras for presents and avoid the Krampus like the plague. Or have I gotten holiday traditions mixed up again?

Anywho, for a brief moment I would like to thank the planet Saturn for agreeing to meet with Jupiter to form a Great Conjunction in the night sky for December 21, here's hoping it doesn't cause any prophesied dooms on Earth, 'cause you know how the fake preachers around here like to grift their flocks whenever freaky sky stuff happens.

And if I can pass along to the Gift-Givers of the Solstice, I'm personally okay this year so I would instead ask the Powers That Be to make sure every trump-worshiping asshole refusing to wear masks in public all catch COVID-19 like they deserve and to keep every honest decent American wearing masks and trying to survive these last two months of trumpian bullshit safe from the pandemic. Gratias vobis ago.

And with that, a Saturnalia YouTube is in order!

So I Own a Copy of the Repo Man Soundtrack, I Play the Coup D'Etat Song A Lot

The government gets overthrown/
A sudden force, a major blow/
Over out, the new comes in

Coup d'état/
Give me a bomb/
A molotov/
It's a coup d'état!
- "Coup D'Etat," The Circle Jerks

Okay, technically what trump is trying to do with all of these lawsuits, all these attempts to nullify millions of votes in only the battleground states he lost, it's what's called an "autogolpe" for a self-coup when the current leader in power tries to overthrow the rest of government from within. But everyone understands what a coup d'etat is, so it's easier to call it a coup attempt.

Okay, not to scare anybody but Monday December 14 is when the Electoral College officially gathers to cast their votes to officially choose the next President of the United States starting January 2021. Once that happens, trump can whine all he wants about "fake voters" and "stolen election" but Biden becomes President. The only thing stopping that from happening is if enough of the 306 Electoral pledged to Biden turns Faithless, and votes for trump to get him past the 270 votes needed. There's still a chance - Gods help us - there's Electors who would turn against their own candidate of their own free will (so watch out for bribes, and YES "Saturday Night Live" did a skit of that back in 2016 about stopping trump), however most states have rules in effect to discourage that sort of flipping.

Okay, I did say "The only thing stopping that from happening," what I meant to say was "The only LEGAL thing stopping that from happening." We're talking about trump here, we're talking about a Republican Party abetting his attempts to break the democratic process of elections. We are facing the possibility that trump will try something ILLEGAL to avoid the official counting of his greatest loss.

Okay, there's good news that the Supreme Court tossed out Texas' blatantly unconstitutional attempt to nullify votes cast in other states, something the court decision noted "Texas had no legal standing" to do, with every Justice saying a big NO including the three Far Right Justices trump put on that bench (even with Alito and Thomas kind of saying they would have allowed the hearing because they ALWAYS want to hear a case conflict between states for the sake of posterity, but even then those two sided with the others noting Texas had no standing anyway). That pretty much means trump has no legal recourse left to nullify 81 million votes and steal a second term for himself.

Okay, I still point out "no legal recourse" for trump, because there's still an illegal recourse left to him.

Okay, I'm talking straight-up coup d'etat.

Calling up the National Guard to seize control of major cities, getting his Proud Boy Neo-Nazi Klansmen militias to set fire to the streets, anything like that.

Something he could do Monday morning is go to the cameras, announce that he has "absolute proof of massive voter fraud," and even without showing one whit of that proof proclaim a national emergency to prevent the College from gathering at all. He could then arrest the Electors, and/or the Democratic leadership from Biden and Harris on down to Pelosi and Schumer and some of the Governors he doesn't like (especially Whitmer in Michigan), trump might even try to arrest the Republican Governors like Georgia's Kemp who refused to break their own state laws to steal the election for trump.

Okay, if trump tries ANY of that, it's going to be probably the most chaotic Monday since (checks notes) December 17 1860 when South Carolina's secession conference voted unanimously to quit the Union.

Okay, tomorrow is going to be a pretty stressful day.

Damn You 2020 (The Hero Gotham Needed)

I found out this morning that Tom "Tiny" Lister passed away likely from COVID-19 complications.

NOOOOO DAMN YOU 2020!

If you watched movies since the 1980s, you can't miss him. He's the tall scary-looking black guy with unexpected gravitas (via William Hughes at AVClub):

Tom “Tiny” Lister Jr. has died. Although he gained some acclaim from a short-lived wrestling career in the WWF in the early 1990s, Lister was best known as an actor, contributing his unforgettable physical presence to literally hundreds of TV shows and movies across a 30-plus-year career. As the villainous Deebo in the Friday films, the no-nonsense president in Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element, and a nameless, noble prisoner in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, Lister intimidated, elevated, and impressed in equal parts. Per Variety, he died today after reportedly displaying symptoms of COVID-19. Lister was 62...

And in the meantime, well: Lister worked. His 200-plus-role resumé is a laundry list of small roles made much harder to forget by the man performing them: A Klingon in Star Trek: Enterprise here, a brief turn on Nash Bridges there, a major role as one of the demonic brothers in Little Nicky over there. (His political role as “Galactic President” in The Fifth Element might not be entirely clear, but the gravitas he brought to the part certainly was.) And that’s the point: It’s not that Lister was big, or that he had an intriguing face. (He was born with a detached retina in his right eye, giving his gaze a distinctive mien.) It’s that he was able to project certainty in a way few other actors could, and practically never with so few words...

All of which brings us to The Dark Knight, and one of the most memorable (if small) roles in Christopher Nolan’s entire superhero trilogy. As the prisoner who rejects the Joker’s attempt to turn a ferry full of Gotham City inmates into one of his sick social experiments, Lister’s character—identified only as “Tattooed Prisoner”—stands right at the heart of Nolan’s film. Intentionally invoking the “scary black man” tropes that unfortunately defined what could and should have been a far more varied career, Lister projects calm—even a bit of seduction—into the request for the prison officials to hand over the deadly remote. And then the real performance comes through just as powerfully, as he calmly chucks the device through the window, weary contempt visible on his face. It’s a small performance, a blip in a movie that stretches to sometimes histrionic heights. But like the man giving it, it was also deceptively huge...

That last bit has to be put in context. Throughout the movie, the Joker had been playing a game of Sadistic Choice, forcing his victims to make decisions they normally would not commit - often with a gun or bomb threatening their lives - to prove the Joker's point that humans are bastards willing to turn on each other once the mask of civilization falls away.

I just did what I do best. I took your little plan and I turned it on itself. Look what I did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets. Hmmm? You know... You know what I've noticed? Nobody panics when things go "according to plan." Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it's all "part of the plan". But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!

It culminates in a point where the Joker has threatened the entire city of Gotham itself, forcing residents to flee on ferries on which the Joker's mooks had hidden bombs on two of them. Because the police under Gordon's (battlefield promotion) authority as Police Commissioner was worried Joker's plan would involve breaking out criminals to unleash chaos on the city, one of the ferries was commandeered to transit the worst of the worst. The second ferry was filled with scared civilians ranging in income, ethnicity, gender, and age (families are prominently shown).

The Joker stalls the ferries in the middle of Gotham Harbor, and issues his next "joke" (his ultimate step to prove himself right about the darkness in people): The detonator for each ferry's bombs are on the other boat. One ship has to turn the key on their detonator to blow up the other ship by midnight, otherwise the Joker detonates both ships. If the ferry filled with prisoners overwhelm the guards to seize their switch, they blow up innocent lives. If the ferry filled with families are terrified enough that the other ferry will jump first, they blow up criminals but must live with the guilt that they themselves became killers. Either way, the Joker wins.

The civilian ferry goes through the process of rationalizing their guilt by going through a quick vote on whether to do what the Joker wants. While the majority vote is clearly in favor of saving their own lives, nobody at first is willing to do it. Even the ferry captain holding the detonator is openly pondering "we're still here, the other boat hasn't done it yet" implying hope that he won't have to do the deed.

Meanwhile on the prisoner ferry, the prisoners are rioting but held at bay by the guards while the warden trembles holding the detonator. When it seems like the prisoners will risk getting shot to get at the switch, the scariest-looking of them (Lister) stands up and approaches the warden. Not even the guards aim at him, terrified at his approach.

You don't want to die, but you don't know how to take a life. Give it to me. These men would kill you, and take it anyway. Give it to me. You can tell 'em I took it by force. Give it to me, and I'll do what you shoulda did ten minutes ago.

When I heard him say that in the theater first time I saw the movie, I sat upright and nodded. I understood exactly what Lister's character was going to do...

Meanwhile back on the civilian ferry, a frustrated businessman stands up and declares he's willing to make the hard decision nobody else on the boat wants to make. This is a clear contrast to the black criminal who just made a moral decision to spare the civilian ferry. The businessman makes a lot of bluster about doing it, but with the detonator in his own hands he finds he can't cross that line himself, and quietly puts the switch back in its box.

The Joker, watching all of this from a nearby skyscraper, was eagerly waiting with a captive Batman to see the fireworks. He was genuinely convinced both ships would be blowing the other up by the midnight deadline. The laughing grin fading into confused disappointment is one of the great moments in an already great movie. The Joker was finally confronted by two things he could not comprehend: That innocent civilians had hope that the worst would not happen; and that hardened prisoners can have moral compasses seeking atonement.

In that moment, Lister's unnamed prisoner - moreso than the businessman character - was the moral hero Gotham needed.

It may be a small scene, just mere minutes in an epic film, but Mr. Lister's understated, important performance in a key scene in a movie that will be watched and praised forever will echo through the ages. 

RIP Mr. Lister sir.