Quick Followup On 1/6: Accountability and Arrests

 It's getting up to two months now, and the criminal charges stemming from trump's 1/6 Insurrection are picking up momentum (via Dina Temple-Raston at NPR):

The Justice Department charged six more people Friday it says are members of a right-wing militia group that plotted in advance of Jan. 6 to attack the U.S. Capitol.

The indictment offers the most sweeping evidence so far that members of the far-right extremist group known as the Oath Keepers had spent months allegedly planning to prevent Congress from certifying President Joe Biden's victory in a bid to keep former President Donald Trump in power.

The federal charges say 52-year-old Kelly Meggs, the self-described leader of the Florida chapter of the Oath Keepers, and his wife Connie, joined four other alleged militia members to breach the Capitol...

Last month, the Justice Department charged three members of the Oath Keepers with conspiring to undermine President Biden's win. Officials said that Thomas Edward Caldwell, Jessica Marie Watkins, and Donovan Ray Crowl had allegedly set up training for urban warfare and riot control in preparation for the Jan. 6 siege shortly after then-President-elect Joe Biden's election victory and had allegedly briefly discussed bringing weapons into Washington, D.C., by boat...

It's not just the Oath Keepers facing criminal scrutiny for their sedition: trump's favorite crowd The Proud Boys are also facing serious jail time. So far, there's been about 250 or so arrested and charged with their involvement in the violent attempt to disrupt Congress' role in confirming Biden's electoral victory.

And yet, this isn't anywhere near the number of people who rioted that day. There are thousands more out there yet to answer for their actions that day, especially the ones involved in the possible murder of Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick. 

There's still a serious need by federal, state, and even DC investigators to pursue possible criminal charges against trump for his incitement to riot that day.

And all of this on top of the reality that a strong plurality - if not a majority - of Republicans still think violence rioting to promote trump's "stolen election" lies is the way to move forward against their fellow Americans. it doesn't help that these conspiracy-addled wingnuts have bought into ANOTHER scheme that somehow March 4th is the "Official" Inauguration and that every President since U.S. Grant was illegitimate, therefore trump can be sworn back in as the legitimate one next month (never mind that theory would negate trump's one-term administration in the first place). 

The madness won't end until the Republican Party and their Far Right nihilist fanbase go away. /headdesk

No Requiem For A Wrathful Soul

Rush Limbaugh died today.

I know there's a saying "If you can't say anything nice about someone you shouldn't say anything at all."

Thing is, Rush never lived by that rule of public courtesy.

Limbaugh insulted anybody and everybody if he thought it would get him attention and score him points among his conservative allies.

Here's just a partial list:

Hillary Clinton. Christ. All Rush ever did was attack her. Even when he supported her (!) in 2008 it was because he wanted Hillary to out-primary Obama because he knew he could attack Hillary later in the general election.

Rush attacked then-college student Sandra Fluke over a woman's right to birth control, calling her a 'slut' even when Fluke was talking about the benefits of managing ovarian cysts and other menstrual issues.

Rush mocked Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's disease when the actor made an advocacy ad to improve treatments and searches for a cure.

Rush crossed the line constantly regarding racism, attacking Black protestors, downplaying the toxic role slavery had in American history, deriding Obama and other Black American leaders.

I never had a positive view of Rush Limbaugh: My studies in college in Journalism taught me the ethical lines of media broadcasting that Rush ignored and violated on a daily basis. On top of that was Rush's open disdain for others he did not treat as equals, his vulgar and crass views, his lack of empathy, absolutely no sign of grace or charity that we ought to be sharing towards others.

One of my earliest rants against Rush was back in 2009 after he had dismissed Moderates (I count myself as one even though I know I approve of a lot of Progressive issues). What I wrote then:

I am not a fan of Rush Limbaugh.

Which seems to be mutual. He's not a fan of Moderates.

Rush seems to think that moderates "cannot be governed by principle. They can't be. Moderates don't have principles. If they had principles, they'd be one thing or the other..."

Dear Rush: Here's a list of moderates' principles.

1) Moderates support competency. We support things THAT WORK. If it doesn't work (example: THE WHOLE BUSH ADMINISTRATION) we don't support it. So there...

I wrapped it up with

7) Moderates are perfectly capable of being as rude and vulgar as you wingnuts.

So I finish with the immortals words of Harry Truman: Fuck you, Rush.

Hope that clarifies things for you.

Thing about Rush Limbaugh was that he spent most of his adult life working a radio show designed to promote a Far Right Conservative agenda, selling it as wisdom but offering instead the sour vileness of rage and fear. To my knowledge, he never join a discussion panel, he never entered into a broadcast booth or studio with anyone who could challenge his opinion. He stayed hidden in a broom closet with a microphone in his face, where his Narrative would never be questioned or denied, like the coward that he was.

I have nothing nice to say about Rush Limbaugh. Everything he did and said does not deserve respectful silence, everything he did deserves - even on the day of his death - open scorn and ridicule. It was exactly what he offered to us, and that's all the rest of us should give back.

End of story.

 

Texas Is Frozen (w/Update)

(Update: Thanks to Infidel753 for adding this entry to Crooks&Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Just remember to help out any Texans you know and to be ready for any further GOP bullshit dodging of accountability over this. P.S. please check out the rest of my blog, thank ye!)

Well, a winter vortex thingee swirled across the United States and apparently the entire state of Texas got wiped out in the process. Via Jaclyn Diaz at NPR: 

As the state deals with piercing cold, roughly 4.4 million Texas customers were without power as of midday Tuesday after the power grid failed.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced late Monday that the Texas National Guard was being deployed to help get people to heating centers. He said state agencies are sending additional resources and personnel to help local officials clear roadways and to assist essential workers...

Attempts to keep the heat and lights on at the onset of the severe weather failed. Rolling blackouts scheduled early Monday to conserve Texas' energy supply turned into extended blackouts that are now expected to last well into Tuesday, and possibly longer, energy company officials said.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas said the grid lost some 34,000 megawatts of power. Energy sources powering the grid were knocked offline, most of which were powered by natural gas, coal or nuclear energy, according to Houston Public Radio.

The state grid was already facing some shortages because of frozen wind turbines and limited gas supply...

In the meantime, Republicans are doing Republican things by helping their communities survive the harsh cold blaming Democrats and liberals and Green energy policies that have nothing to do with the busted things Republicans failed to fix. Notice Diaz's article mentioning the major parts of the energy grid were gas, coal, and nuclear? Republicans promptly attacked the wind turbines instead (via Kate Aronoff at New Republic (paywall)):

Within a few hours of grid horror stories percolating out beyond the Lone Star state, outlets like Breitbart and the Wall Street Journal began to publish grisly tales of a green revolution: that an abundance of wind turbines in Texas had been rendered practically useless by a chilly day and posed a danger to state residents. “The windmills failed like the silly fashion accessories they are, and people in Texas died,” said Fox News’ Tucker Carlson. Yet a surprising number of mainstream media outlets also adopted the narrative. Reuters, for example, mentioned offline wind resources in the first lines of its story about the outages—illustrated with a picture showing a field of turbines. “Frozen wind turbines contribute to rolling power blackouts across Texas,” ran CNN’s headline. The New York Times led with it, too...

But here's what failed:

As of Monday afternoon, 26 of the 34 gigawatts in ERCOT’s grid that had gone offline were from “thermal” sources, meaning gas and coal. The system’s total installed capacity in the system, Power magazine’s Sonal Patel noted, is around 77.2 GW. Wind and solar power, meanwhile, produced near or even above planned capacity, according to energy analyst Jesse Jenkins, as only small amounts of wind and solar are utilized in peaking conditions. Wind turbines did indeed freeze, and did eventually underperform. But so did natural gas infrastructure, and to a far greater degree. That proved to be a much larger problem since it makes up such a huge proportion of the state’s power supply in extreme weather. And frozen power lines and equipment were a far bigger cause of outages than generation shortages.

And there's other factors at work here involving the poorly designed infrastructure, as Aronoff points out:

About 90 percent of Texas’s grid is part of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Save for a few lines, ERCOT is largely cut off from power in neighboring states. That’s because back in 1935, the state government was eager to avoid being regulated under the Federal Power Act. The Federal Power Act was passed to regulate interstate electricity sales, in the wake of massive scandals involving utility holding companies. It established what’s known today as the Federal Regulatory Energy Commission. To this day, Texas exists outside of FERC’s jurisdiction.

In short: Texas is screwed up this winter thanks to about two decades worth of Republican state-level misrule that failed to do anything to upgrade an aging power grid, and a Texan anti-federalist states-rights mindset that denied themselves the chance to plug into neighboring grids in case of emergencies.

And speaking of how their carbon-based energy resources are failing Texas, one of the reasons the state is getting caught unprepared for this severe shift in weather is because of the ongoing Far Right dismissal of climate change being real. For all the talk about global warming - and the constant Republican talking point of "oh look it's snowing outside, global warming is a myth!" - what's happening with climate change are the extremes getting deeper and catastrophic: The hot days are getting hotter and the cold days are going to get colder. That's what this "winter snap" represents.

What's happening now is a tragedy, compounded by the ongoing pandemic, with millions of lives at risk well into the rest of this week (depending on if any further cold fronts show up).

What should happen after all this passes is a reckoning: The state of Texas is going to HAVE to do something - and yes, it will involve spending public funds - to upgrade their broken energy resources system and prevent future disasters like this.

This should also mean every Republican official and every conservative pundit eating crow and getting drummed out of office in shame for their failures to serve the public trust and report the facts.

Texas may be frozen in ice now, but that state has been frozen in a self-serving self-destructive mindset for decades, going into centuries. That mental glacier is what's causing the deaths and tragedies now, and it needs to go.

The Self-Dug Graves of donald trump

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

-- Nicky, Casino

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

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

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

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

Let's go to Lloyd Green at The Guardian:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Second Impeachment of trump Began Today

...and I'm too busy at work during the day to watch it, and already utterly convinced that trump should be removed and blocked from running for future office, and also utterly convinced the godless and cowardly Republican Senate bloc will look the other way and let trump walk.

If the nine blog readers want to follow along, Balloon Juice already set aside some Impeachment threads you can follow on their site, for legal input I think Emptywheel's site might be helpful, and Digby is good to follow as well.

As far as I can tell, trump's main legal counsel Bruce Castor's opening arguments were so twisted they couldn't even count as a Chewbacca defense. It was so bad it cost the Republicans one of their Senators today (via Burgess Everett, Andrew DeSiderio, and Marianne Levine at Politico): 

“The House managers were focused. They were organized. They relied upon both precedent, the Constitution and legal scholars. They made a compelling argument. President Trump’s team were disorganized. They did everything they could but to talk about the question at hand,” said Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.). “And when they talked about it, they kind of glided over, almost as if they were embarrassed of their arguments.”

Cassidy even voted with 55 other senators that the trial should go forward and was not unconstitutional, changing his position from last month. “If I’m an impartial juror and one side is doing a great job and the other job is doing a terrible job on the issue at hand? As an impartial juror, I’m going to vote for the side that did the good job.”

Cassidy’s shift was the most electric moment of the day and highlighted what could only be seen as an incoherent defense by Castor. The Trump lawyer singled out senators who are mulling conviction and conceded he had changed his entire presentation after three of the House impeachment managers, led by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), made their opening arguments.

“I thought the first attorney for the president today did not present a case, which surprised me. Did not make any arguments,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who also voted to uphold the constitutionality of the trial. “The second attorney representing the president clearly did, and did a competent job. I’m puzzled by the presentation of the first attorney...”

trump's not working anymore with his "Best and Brightest" (cough Rudy cough) which wasn't all that great to begin with.

And the horrifying thing is that all this kabuki theater will still end with a "hung jury" of not enough Republican Senators choosing the Constitution and Rule of Law over their own unhinged, violent voting base.

Wake me when 17 Senate Republicans openly agree with the Democratic caucus that what trump did on January 6th was Incitement to Insurrection and riot. Until then, the only things we should be counting on are the state and federal criminal charges trump and his crooked circle of power still face.

One Month Later: An Insurrection Is Still An Insurrection No Matter How Much the Far Right Whines About What They Did

Remember, on January 6 donald trump summoned a mob of his supporters outside of the Capitol building to stir up anger towards the official counting of state Electors. 

Once he finished his speech and got out of the way, his mob stormed onto what was supposed to be one of the most secure buildings on the planet and proceeded to attack Capitol police and Congressional staffers, raiding the Senate and House floors, stealing laptops and papers and podiums.

Some of trump's rioters killed officer Brian Sicknick, and for some godforsaken reason nobody has been arrested for that murder yet. Two other officers committed suicide from the emotional aftermath. Several rioters died in the chaos, while one woman was shot by a police officer when she charged at him inside the building.

Enough people have died to make this a historic tragedy, multiplied an infinite fold due to the constitutional implications if trump's mob had succeeded in forcing Congress to violate existing election laws and legal requirements of the Electoral College.

Remember, the rioters weren't there to speak their mind: trump's mob was there to commit acts of violence. Gods, someone had enough planning to bring a damned gallows:

Photo taken by Andrew Callabero-Reynolds, via Getty Images

A number of witnesses report that the rioters were openly talking about finding Vice President Pence - trump's own Veep - and dragging him out to compel him to toss out the Electoral votes so trump could steal the win. If a Democratic Representative or Senator had been caught by the mob, there was every likelihood that person would be beaten or killed.

Everything that happened on trump's orders, on trump's organization, on his planning with cronies and allies, fits the very definition of insurrection. trump compelled his most fervent followers into acts of violence against the established government (It matters not that trump at the time was President Loser of the Popular Vote, he encouraged insurrection against Congress).

trump's rioters fit the definition of seditionist conspirators.

And remember this: As law and history calls on other elected Republicans to stand up against what trump and his rioters did, many of those Republicans are ignoring it, looking the other way, pretending none of it happened, blaming everyone else, and even censuring their own members who have enough courage to call trump's criminal acts for what they are. When goddamned Liz Cheney is the goddamned voice of reason - with what her family represents - the rot in the Republican Party sinks deeper than the goddamned Marianas Trench.

There may be an impeachment vote to remove trump - not from the Presidency, since he's no longer in office, but to block trump from running any future elective campaign - but everyone on the planet knows the plurality of GOP Senators don't have the balls to do the right thing and hold trump accountable on the Charge of Incitement of Insurrection.

The madness of the Far Right is not calming down, not reverting to moderation in any way. The Republican Party is long dead, has been for years, gone to hell thanks to letting the Social Conservatives, the Greedheads, and the Racists to rule over them all.

Remember this: The Republicans as a group still answer to trump, weeks after he's been punted out of the White House, and they are showing no signs of bipartisanship and comity that our nation needs to rebuild from these dark times.

The Republicans would rather whine, proclaim themselves the "true" victims, and continue on selling their hate and denial.

Gods help us.

One Quick Observation About the Republican War on Voters

This came up on Twitter, and my response sparked a realization about an irony regarding the Republican Party's obsession to suppress voters across all the states they can.

And this voter suppression effort is something that's been going on for a long time, this huge war against the Voting Rights Act that led to the Supreme Court's Shelby County v Holder ruling that essentially gave the Far Right states free license to throw up voting roadblocks however they see fit.

And this is with every legal assault pushed by Republicans claiming massive voter fraud they can never prove in the courts.

It's that, ironically enough, every recent attempt by Republicans to suppress voter turnout in the last two-three election cycles (since the Holder ruling) has probably done more to encourage massive voter registration and turnout with better and stronger evidence that such elections were fairly run.

From Wikipedia Commons created by Orser67

It's rather hilarious that the Republicans want to keep pushing for even more voter suppression attempts, especially in Georgia, when it's getting pretty obvious that a growing majority of Americans will push back against their efforts and vote accordingly. Every attempt the GOP legislators will come up with, the pro-voting groups will figure out how to hurdle those blocks and keep people voting. Other than outright denial of voting to ethnic minorities, women, and/or young people in open violation of the 15th, 19th, and 26th Amendments, the Republicans are going to make it worse for themselves.

I shouldn't complain. At this rate, the Republicans are going to be responsible for getting the 2024 Presidential election turnout well over 70 percent of the total population, which IMHO will be a great moment for American democracy (and the Democratic Party because the population numbers favor them).

Democratic Gamemanship, Also Known as Competency

If you're not following Balloon Juice website you should, it's magazine-quality blogging at a fraction of the price and with 150 percent more "OH HELL YES" you can enjoy reading.

Blog overlord John Cole is a rare poster but he will provide input from his frozen corner of West Virginia, where like myself he's stuck in a deep Red state praying for sanity to rain down and wash the Far Right wingnut madness into the ocean. One thing he's aware of is his state's major Democratic figure, Senator Joe Manchin, who likes to play throne-maker as a conservative Centrist holding the keys to Senate control to keep his more liberal party from doing much to actually benefit the nation. So this happened recently for Cole to cheer about:

There are two easy ways to fail as a Democratic politician. The first is to listen to the bobbleheads in the media, and the second is to listen to the online left on twitter and elsewhere. The Biden campaign famously ignored both of them, including yours truly, who consistently lobbied for him to not run. So when you see the Politico writing that Biden and Harris fucked up by having Harris speak to West Virginians, or you see the dumbest man in American politics call it a mistake, ignore it.

There is a reason VP Harris spoke directly to West Virginians, as I noted the other day, and here you have the fruits of that labor:

“Well, first and foremost, I wish we’d all come together,” Justice responded. “But, on the flip side of that, we’ve got a lot of people in West Virginia that are still struggling with paying their power bill because they got laid off because this pandemic just swept their job away from them.”

Justice continued: “What we need to do is we need to understand that trying to be, per se, fiscally responsible at this point in time, with what we’ve got going on in this country, if we actually throw away some money right now, so what?”

The governor added that “we have really got to move and get people taken care of and get people back on balance. I want to work with the Biden administration, just like I worked with the Trump administration, and I want us to move forward...

That was Republican governor Jim Justice, when asked by the state’s biggest political radio guy, Hoppy Kerchival, whether or not the COVID stimulus needs to be bipartisan. The only people who give a fuck about Joe Manchin and whether or not this was a mistake by the Biden team are Joe Manchin and the beltway morons. Governor Justice and the people don’t give a fuck about process or procedure or whose feelings were hurt, they want results. They don’t give a shit about bipartisanship or Rand Paul’s feels about the budget, they want to feed the kids and keep the power on and make sure grams doesn’t die from the ‘rona...

And you know what? Pelosi and Schumer just did this:

As President Joe Biden attempts to pass his $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief proposal with Republican support, Senate Democrats are working to move ahead without the GOP using an obscure, but powerful, procedural tool known as reconciliation.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Monday that they have filed a joint budget resolution — the first step to potentially enacting a budget reconciliation bill.

“It makes no sense to pinch pennies when so many Americans are suffering,” Schumer said in floor remarks Monday. “The risk of doing too little is far greater than the risk of doing too much.”

Pelosi and Schumer would not do this if they did not have the votes, so what you can bank on right now is that Manchin is one of those 51 votes in the Senate. So no, Biden and Harris didn’t fuck up by going directly to the people of WV and Arizona. They got Manchin and Sinema in line.

Much like Cole, I'm getting good vibes from this. If the Democrats in Congress are serious about getting things done, they have to bulldoze their way past any obstructionist efforts that McConnell can toss up in the Senate, and the powers in Reconciliation allow them that chance. That much of what needs to get done to resolve our pandemic woes fits the parameters of budgeting - the spending needed to keep people housed and fiscally safe, to keep businesses in the black on their spreadsheets, to help hospitals and medical suppliers - is something that the Republicans can't stop.

Oh, the Far Right - especially in the media - will try to push a "bipartisan" argument that Biden and the Democrats need Republican votes to make any pandemic aid package work, but what the Republicans have brought to the table so far - a miniscule package that only pays for a third of what's proposed, and doesn't include any stimulus checks most Americans need - is pretty much a joke.

The Congressional Democrats can push ahead with their stimulus package of $1.9 trillion dollars without ANY Republican votes, which would - guess what - make the Republicans look bad because a majority of Americans will see the Democrats claim this win while the GOP is pouting in a corner threatening to take their toys home (see if they care).

This is a moment where Biden can sign a much-needed and much-welcomed relief bill to the benefit of his own party, and where Biden can tell Mitch McConnell - bastard that he is - to go sink into the deepest pit of hell where Mitch belongs.

Have at it, Democrats. Get the sh-t done that a competent, well-versed political party can get done for America.

Question to My Nine Blog Readers

So you might notice that I submit entries to the Florida Writers' Association's annual Royal Palm Literary Awards. I did well last year with earning a Silver in the Non-Fiction Blogging category (and there was much rejoicing).

This year, I feel confident enough to submit around nine of the blog articles I wrote in 2020, although there IS a cost to submitting. In that regard, I am keen on narrowing down my submissions to five this year... and of course I can't agree with myself on which ones to go with.

So I need your input, please and thanks.

Consider from this list of nine articles the five I should submit to RPLA for their Blogging award:

• trump's Public Coup
• This Dark Memorial In Some Discarded Corner of America (I *do* consider this my best possible submission)
• The Five Reasons trump Refuses to Concede
• The trumpian Failure At Presidential Accountability
• Predicting Character: Warren Is Planning For That
• A trumpian Plague of Madness
• Not All Heroes Wear Capes
• Republicans Without a Plan
• How America Fell Into the Darkest Timeline of 2020  

Let me see if I can insert a Poll into this article, otherwise I will request you Add a Comment below to tell which ones you think would pass moral and aesthetic judgment. Email me otherwise, no spam you Chinese marketing bastards.

Sad to say, my Murder Hornet articles won't make the cut...

Top Ten Executive Orders I'd Like to See Out of President Biden

Apparently, Joe Biden hit the ground running as our 46th President of the United States by signing a vast number of Executive Orders, to the point where Republicans - who loved it when trump abused Executive Order signings so they didn't have to get held accountable in Congress with actual work - are whining about it (via Darraugh Roche at Newsweek): 

Biden has signed a significant number of executive orders in a short period and has drawn criticism from Republicans, some of whom have accused the president of ruling by diktat...

Some prominent Republicans have claimed that Biden has issued a modern-record number of executive orders in his first days in office. Biden had issued 37 executive orders during his first week, the New York Post reported on Tuesday...

The Economist noted on January 22 that Biden had signed more executive orders in two days than Trump had in two months and was setting a record pace, while NBC News lists 40 executive actions up to January 26.

Of the 40, 32 are listed as executive orders. The others are classed as proclamations or memoranda. However, it's common to refer to these as executive orders and they have a similar effect. Executive orders are listed at the Federal Register, but the site has not been fully updated yet.

"It's too early to know whether we'll see a large number of executive orders by Biden. It's not unusual for a president to sign several orders on his first day in office, but Biden did more of those than his predecessors, in large part to undo many of Trump's more controversial ones," said Seth Masket, professor of political science at Duke University...

And while a lot of them are necessary actions to undo the damage trump has done with immigration, trade, the environment, legal obligations, and so forth, there are still a number of Executive Orders I'd like to see from Biden that I think will go a long way to rebuilding our world.

So here you go, from David Letterman's legal counsel, our Top Ten Executive Orders I'd Like to See Out of President Biden!

10) Make it mandatory that everybody BUT donald trump gets two scoops of ice cream, poor donnie gets stuck one scoop from now on!

9) Send Rise of Skywalker back to the drawing board to get directed by Gareth Edwards with a better script that makes freaking gorram sense at the end!

8) Rename every street in front of a trump-own building or resort after Barack Obama!

7) Recast the entirety of next season's American Horror Story with Muppets!

6) Tattoo the names of every person who died due to the 1/6/21 Insurrection on trump's forehead!

5) Declare Skid Row the American Hair Metal Laurates of 2021! 

4) Require trump to have his golf games tracked by officials from the Professional Golfers' Association that he can't bribe or bully to document his actual golfing scores!

3) Make it legal for all spelling bee contests get decided with a Yo Mama smackdown between finalists!

2) Order all relevant agencies in the Executive branch to unredact every document of every investigation held on trump's own administration, from the Mueller Report down to every IG corruption probe held!

1) LESS TALK, MORE ROCK!

The Battle of GameStop

If you ever want it explained to you about Wall Street or unregulated capitalism, I find it helpful to refer to gangster movies.

Want to understand how insurance works? Watch Goodfellas.

Want to understand hostile takeovers? Watch The Godfather.

Want to understand corporate espionage and insider trading? Watch The Departed (or an actual movie about Wall Street crimes, Wolf of Wall Street).

Want to understand shorting stocks? Here's the opening bit to Miller's Crossing:

It's gettin' so a businessman can't expect no return from a fixed fight. Now if you can't trust a fix, what can you trust? - Johnny Caspar

What's happening in the real world is that the stock markets are reeling from a running gambit that hedge funds (Think billionaire vultures) had been using of "Shorting" the stock value of a retail company GameStop (Remember Blockbuster Video? GameStop is kind of like them but selling video games instead of movie rentals) for quick profits, only to get exposed by Reddit (social media) investors realizing those hedge funds overextended themselves (took on massive debts to pull off the Short) to where they were vulnerable to "Squeezing" (artificially raising the value of the Shorted stock so that the hedge funds can't turn a profit).

In short: The hedge funds are Johnny Caspar trying to make money off a fixed fight, only for Bernie (the horde of small investors) to flip the fix to make money while Caspar eats the losses.

For more details, let's go to Derek Thompson at The Atlantic for his take:

...To see how the whole thing went down, imagine a kind of misshapen nesting-doll set with four characters: GameStop, hedge funders, Reddit traders, and zillions of retail investors.

At the center is GameStop, which is not a great company. In 2019, the strip-mall fixture lost almost $500 million. In 2020, a pandemic forcibly shut down many of its stores and gutted its revenue...

I don't blame GameStop: they didn't ask to get Shorted by the big hedge funds like Melvin Capital (wait, seriously, they named themselves Melvin??? What the hell, was "Eagle Fang" already taken or something?).

One layer up, you have institutional investors, such as hedge funds, which “shorted” GameStop, or bet that the value of the stock would decline. Depending on how you look at it, short sellers are heroes of capitalism identifying rotten companies and industries on the verge of collapse, or they’re corrupt worrywarts picking on lovable, vulnerable firms. Either way, GameStop was one of the more popular targets of these hero-villains. By one metric, the company was the second-most-shorted firm out of more than 6,000 companies listed in the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq. If GameStop’s stock continued to fall, as it had consistently since 2013, hedge funds that had bet against the company would have gotten even richer than they already are...

Thompson doesn't seem to recognize the pattern of rich-brat bullying underlying the way the hedge funds were picking on GameStop. I highlighted the part he's ignoring as a sign that Melvin and the other investment groups weren't using Shorting tactics to weed out bad companies: The hedge funds enjoyed having an easy target like GameStop around to Short in order to generate billions in profits with little risk (because Shorting is a fixed fight). But risk did show up:

But they didn’t. That’s because, as short sellers were targeting GameStop, online investors were cooking up ways to target the short sellers. A band of Reddit users, led by a trader who goes by the YouTube name “Roaring Kitty,” had for months been eyeing GameStop as a tasty investment. Over the course of several months, they spelled out a detailed plan to buy up GameStop’s stock and push up the price, punishing the hedge funds and forcing them to cover their position by rushing to buy back shares, which would push up the stock’s value even more. This is called a “short squeeze,” and it seems to have served at least two purposes for the Reddit investors: sticking it to hedge funds and getting a little rich. Both happened. One hedge fund, Melvin Capital Management, has lost at least $2 billion, while Roaring Kitty is now estimated to have made more than $13 million on his GameStop investment...

What happened at the social media level was akin to a revolution, a sort of Occupy Wall Street where instead of protesting in the streets the lower rungs of society entered the trading floor to beat the rich kids at their own game. It not only brought about financial ruin for Melvin (with rumors of filing for bankruptcy because its debts on those Shorting deals are due soon) but sent much of Wall Street into a collective panic. If the day traders and middle-class self-taught investors can spot a Short taking place, any quick-rich plan to Short a company for billions is now at risk of getting Squeezed. Back to Thompson:

Maybe the only long-term outcome of the GameStop fiasco is that hedge funds will be more cautious about establishing enormous short positions in cheap brand-name companies, and investors will learn that stock manias, like memes, disappear as quickly as they go viral. Perhaps all we’ll remember from the past week is that a few hedge funds’ greedy doltishness accidentally helped mint some Robinhood millionaires, while a bunch of latecomers set their money on fire for lolz.

But something tells me that we’re at the dawn of something stranger. For a week, takes have flown wildly around the internet that tried to capture this saga in a tweet. The investor and former Trump White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci compared what we’re seeing now to the “French Revolution of finance,” with an army of scrappy traders engaged in a moral uprising. Others worried that the GameStop bubble was turning into a collectivized Ponzi scheme, in which innocents were being lured into a ruse that would take all their money after the market corrected. Given that online trading has been restricted and the company’s stock is now in a free fall, both the Mooch and the Debbie Downers might be right...

What Thompson refers to is how Robinhood, the brokerage site that started this Squeeze play, stopped all trading on GameStop and other Shorted stocks like AMC Theaters, preventing the investors from doing what they wanted (to either sell themselves before the artificial high prices dropped, or to buy even more to squeeze the hedge funds into full bankruptcy). That freeze turned a revolution into a meltdown, leading to one class action lawsuit already. There's a likelihood the Squeeze was as rigged as the Short.

We're witnessing in real-time the public exposure of one of Wall Street's greediest tricks (market manipulations) at the expense of the common ground-floor investor getting screwed either way.

In some respects, it's a damn good thing there are reform-minded Democrats now in charge of Congress to investigate this whole shell game. Have at 'em, Liz Warren and Maxine Waters. I hope you root out the whole rotten gang of greedheads.

Impeachment As a Toothless Law, As Partisanship Holds Sway

As we get set to watch donald trump get impeached for his involvement with the Insurrection riot of January 6, we need to consider how it's already a foregone conclusion that the Republicans in the Senate will not put country before corruption. It's not so much that they forgave his sins during the impeachment trial over his attempted extortion of foreign aid to scam the 2020 elections, it's that they're about to forgive the more violent act he attempted that threatened their very safety. Today's preliminary fight gives us an idea how the final vote is going to be (via Barbara Sprunt at NPR): 

After senators were sworn in Tuesday afternoon as jurors in the impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump, Sen. Rand Paul quickly pressed for a vote to force lawmakers on the record over the issue of the trial's constitutionality.

The Senate voted 55-45 to reject the Kentucky Republican's argument that the impeachment trial is unconstitutional because Trump is no longer in office.

Just five Republicans — Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Mitt Romney of Utah and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania — joined Democrats in voting to table the motion. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., notably voted with most of the GOP conference in support of Paul's motion.

A two-thirds majority is required for a Senate conviction. Paul's point of order likely foreshadows the intentions of most Republican senators during the trial and demonstrates how unlikely it is Democrats will garner the 17 Republican votes needed to convict Trump.

What is the use of a legal system when it has no means of enforcement? When the people entrusted to uphold the law and the Constitution itself refuse to do so? We saw the same thing last year when - in spite of all the evidence that trump abused our foreign relations with Ukraine in order to stage fake scandals to affect our own elections - a Republican-controlled Senate did the bare minimum to answer the House's impeachment charges and mocked the failed results.

Looking back at the history of impeaching those who served as President, we can recognize the moments where the need for impeaching a corrupt President did not occur because that President's party also controlled enough of Congress to make the point moot. We can see the moments when impeachment was used as a partisan weapon instead of upholding the Constitution. We can remember how only once in our nation's history did impeachment seem likely - Nixon was facing that fate before he resigned - only because our political landscape was genuinely bipartisan enough to see the reality of how Nixon's acts threatened the public trust.

Impeachment is broken. Either it is too partisan a tool that threatens the independence of the Executive Branch, or the Legislative Branch is too partisan and corrupt to properly employ the impeachment process in any legal and just manner.

trump's own regime is proof of that failure. When Republicans controlled both Houses of Congress, they refused to bring up the matter of impeachment when trump misbehaved and failed to adhere to policy, protocol, or the letter of the law. It took the Democrats - an opposition party - to win the House of Representatives to bring that threat of accountability to the table... and even then, the supermajority need from a nearly-split Senate made it impossible to follow through for removing trump for the crimes he'd committed.

The Founding Fathers may have created the Impeachment process but did so in an era when partisanship had yet to form during our nation's infancy. They did it under assumptions that civic duty and personal honor would drive the individuals in Congress to value integrity over impulsive selfishness. They never considered the reality that Congresspersons - especially when one of their parties turned corrupt the way the modern Republicans have - would avoid their own accountability, that the entire elective process - bent and battered by decades of gerrymandering and false narratives - would fail to hold them accountable when they failed the people and themselves.

The inability to use impeachment now creates ruptures in the entire legal system. One of the reasons Robert Mueller's investigation into the Russian interference with our 2016 elections cycle didn't go far enough was due to Mueller avoiding the implications of crossing a long-standing Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memo that sitting Presidents cannot be charged with crimes. Mueller was able to prove at one end that Russia DID meddle in the elections process and duly filed charges on culprits he uncovered. But any link that could have been proven from trump's end of things couldn't be proven because that memo prevented Mueller from digging deep enough to find proof that could stand in court.

That OLC memo has got to go. It shouldn't be upheld as legal precedent. Congress should pass legislation overriding that damn thing, and put in place the ability for a federal investigation/grand jury to file criminal charges on a President found to be breaking the law. It doesn't have to be everything under the sun, obviously: the argument against charging Presidents is to avoid them getting charged with petty-ante stuff every day by conspiracy nuts and partisan hacks. I understand that.

But there ARE certain crimes directly related to the powers of the office that CAN be investigated and charged. I'm talking acts of Obstruction - the one thing Mueller could prove trump had done, but had to leave to Congress to charge which they never did - and acts of Bribery and Extortion that are spelled out as impeachable offenses but are better resolved as criminal charges. I'm talking about serious felonies like Murder (personal cases of murdering individuals, not shipping soldiers off to war or anything), Sexual Assault/Rape, and/or Conspiracy to commit such crimes. We can't rely on a political method of accountability to play out on such crimes, because we're seeing that not enough politicians today will treat it seriously in a bipartisan manner.

trump's violations of the Emoluments Clause ended up going unpunished, because the Courts - now all happily aligned to the Far Right, protecting trump as best they can - kept redefining the line of who could file such complaints and delayed the result until it was too late. This is inexcusable. Congress needs to pass legislation spelling out exactly who can challenge such violations of our Constitution's ethics, and make sure it's something that any President who violates it gets charged and held right away. The Emoluments Clause is one of the few laws that relates directly to the President's misconduct, and it ought to be enforceable the second the corrupt Executive breaks that law. Impeaching him on Emoluments violations would never have passed the Republicans playing defense in the Senate.

Impeachment works great as a symbolic gesture, but it's become worthless when it can't be properly used. We need to move beyond this, we need to make the legal system understand the dangers of a corrupt monster sitting in the White House requires a more direct response. If you're worried about how criminal charges would disrupt the orderly workings of government, don't be. We have a 25th Amendment in place that can reasonably replace an arrested/detained President caught up in acts of provable corruption and allow for a smooth transition of power.

We have fallen too far within a partisan political landscape to allow criminal acts to go unpunished. Impeachment can't punish wrong-doers like trump: Federal felony charges are the only sane response left to us.

Inauguration Day 2021: Sharing My Thoughts To the Blogging World

(Update 1/26/21: Thanks again to Batocchio for adding this blog to Crooks&Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up!)

So today, we went through Biden's inauguration and nothing bad happened (as of yet, knock on wood), and as part of the change to a new administration the blogging site I always check every day - Balloon Juice - sent out a call for guest bloggers to submit essays to honor the change to a better world we were making this 2021.

So I wrote up a Looking Forward essay, and WaterGirl was nice enough to post it this afternoon, so let me share the link here:

Looking Forward

In taking a minute to look back, I have this feeling since November 2016 of just everything in my life getting put on hold because of what happened to put donald trump in the White House. It was like, here’s the universe chugging along, Hillary Clinton certain to get the popular vote, the political landscape mostly in lockdown because the Congressional Republicans were likely to freeze anything Hillary could do, and yet it felt rather normal: Because since 2011 those Republicans had put a hold on Obama’s ability to transform much of America, and yet we still had a more progressive nation with Gay Marriage rights legitimized along with a general sense that the long arc of history bending towards Justice was still bending that way.

And then trump won the Electoral College and that long arc turned into a pretzel.

I still remember two days after the results were pointing to trump’s victory over normalcy, where one of my library co-workers came up to me and said “get familiar with this word ‘kakistocracy’ because it’ll be everything that trump’s misrule will be.” Good thing I was in a library with a dictionary and found the definition: “government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state.” I knew with trump in charge – having witnessed up close some of his atrocities of broken land deals and his destruction of a decent spring football league (BRING BACK BANDITBALL) – we were facing a dark era in our nation’s history, but now I had a word to explain it and a way to define it...

I suggest you follow the link and read the rest of what I submitted. I'd like to think it's one of my best works, with some literary flourish...

We can look forward to a Biden administration that ought to respond better to crises and manage our nation’s needs. A Biden administration that ought to follow through on a lot of promises the Democrats made – forgiving personal debts like college loans for example, and helping families with housing and employment funds – that would benefit not just the younger generations but ALL Americans struggling to survive both a pandemic and the darkened remnants of trump’s broken dystopia...

I have more to say about this transition, about the hope we're getting with Biden's incoming tenure, about the scars left behind by trump. But my Internet is out at home, and I'm writing this off my mobile phone-into-hotspot so I'm using a lot of data at the moment. See you later.

We have hopeful days ahead.

Waiting On Sane Leadership to Respond To This

While we're all waiting for the next 24 hours to ensure we transition from a maddeningly inept trump administration to a more competent Biden admin, we need to make note of the major crisis still affecting our nation and the world: The COVID-19 Pandemic is ongoing, has swung upward across many nations on a third wave following the winter holidays. The United States reached 400,000 dead due to the virus (remember naysayers were whining "oh it's not as lethal as the regular flue" or "we have more people dying in car accidents than this," and have been proven very very wrong) and we're all waiting on vaccine programs to reach enough people to ensure a likely end to a virus that has been threatening the entire planet.

Problem is, we're still living under a cloud of extreme incompetence - trump's own Health and Human Services department revealed they lied about the amount of vaccines ready for second booster shots, ruining many states' plans for the near future - and we're facing the likelihood of the pandemic stretching well into Summer 2021 before we can feel even a modicum of relief.

It's feeling a lot worse down here in Florida, where the leadership out of Governor DeSantis borders between delusional and destructive. There's this to consider (via Lawrence Mower, Mary Ellen Klas, Ana Ceballos, Kirby Wilson and Allison Ross the Tampa Bay Times):

Ten months into the coronavirus pandemic, DeSantis’ hands-off governing style is still frustrating Floridians, health care industry groups and elected officials. Where they struggled to decipher the governor’s vague or conflicting orders at the start of the pandemic, they’re now scrambling to adapt to his ever-changing vaccination strategy.

In the last month, mayors in Miami-Dade have begged DeSantis for a phone call. Long-term care facilities resorted to contacting the media to get the governor’s attention. State hospital officials, including DeSantis’ former health secretary, continued to assert that his decision to have hospitals vaccinate the public saddled them with an unprecedented logistical task with COVID-19 hospitalizations surging.

The result has led to desperate seniors flooding health department websites and tying up phone lines, signing up for fake vaccine appointments and sleeping in their cars outside public health centers, embarrassing images of incompetence and confusion for the nation’s third-largest state...

Part of the problem is that DeSantis is an ambitious man: This is less about his running for re-election in 2022 as it is running for the Presidency in 2024. DeSantis is sucking up to his patron donald trump, by pandering to trump's broken narrative about the pandemic and downplaying the severity of the entire thing.

As a result, DeSantis is doing what trump did: dodging the responsibilities of leading on the issue, avoiding contact with the organizations and providers on the ground who need leadership to ensure things are getting done, and going after the image of success instead of the hard work to actually succeed.

You'll notice DeSantis is spending more time denouncing Biden's planned agenda to speed up the vaccine distribution and access than he is handling the crisis itself.

You'll notice that DeSantis is spending more time persecuting his biggest in-state critic Rebekah Jones with arrests on a questionable charge than he is meeting with health care providers to work towards improving our state's growing health care disaster.

You'll notice the current numbers for Florida infection and death rates on COVID-19 are going UP not down (screenshot made on January 18 2021):

This is where we're at: State-level leadership failing to lead on a serious health care crisis, and likely poised to sabotage the incoming federal leadership on the pandemic just to make President Biden look bad.

We're getting competent leadership in Washington DC tomorrow. I wish we were getting competent leadership Tallahassee to work alongside that.

The Last Con of donald trump

This ending may yet include bangs - especially if trump's mobs decide to try their rioting on state capitols this weekend - but by most measures donald trump's empire is about to end with a whimper. Let us refer to Jonathan Chait's overview of trump's troubles over at the New York Intelligencer: 

...But now, finally, the end is at hand. Trump is suffering a series of wounds that, in combination, are likely to be fatal after Joe Biden is sworn in on January 20. Trump is obviously going to surrender his office. Beyond that looming defeat, he is undergoing a cascading sequence of political, financial, and legal setbacks that cumulatively spell utter ruin. Trump is not only losing his job but quite possibly everything else.

One crisis, though the most opaque, concerns Trump’s business. Many of his sources of income are drying up, either owing to the coronavirus pandemic or, more often, his toxic public image. The Washington Post has toted up the setbacks facing the Trump Organization, which include cancellations of partnerships with New York City government, three banks, the PGA Championship, and a real-estate firm that handled many of his leasing agreements. Meanwhile, he faces the closure of many of his hotels. And he is staring down two defamation lawsuits. Oh, and Trump has to repay, over the next four years, more than $300 million in outstanding loans he personally guaranteed...

If this were still 2015, Trump could fall back on his tried-and-true income generators: money laundering and tax fraud. The problem is that his business model relied on chronically lax enforcement of those financial crimes. And now he is under investigation by two different prosecutors in New York State for what appear to be black-letter violations of tax law. At minimum, these probes will make it impossible for him to stay afloat by stealing more money. At maximum, he faces the serious risk of millions of dollars in fines or a criminal prosecution that could send him to prison.

Trump reportedly plans to pardon himself along with a very broad swath of his hangers-on. But a pardon hardly solves his problems. For one thing, a federal pardon is useless against state-level crimes. For another, the self-pardon is a theoretical maneuver that’s never been tested, and it’s not clear whether the courts will agree it is even possible to do so.

And what’s more, a pardon might constitute an admission of guilt, which could open up Trump to more private lawsuits. Remember how O. J. Simpson was ordered to pay $34 million to the families of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, even after he beat the murder rap? The families of victims of the January 6 riot might well sue Trump for his role in inciting the violence. Trump might try pardoning himself to make sure he can’t be charged with criminal incitement, but admitting the crime makes it even easier to bring a civil suit against him.

The easiest way out of the self-pardon dilemma would be for Trump to make a deal with Mike Pence, under which he would resign before leaving office and Pence would grant him a pardon. Unfortunately for Trump, Pence is still sore about the whole “whipping up a paramilitary mob to lynch him” episode. ABC reported recently that Trump does not want to resign, in part because he doesn’t trust his vice-president to pardon him.

The assumption until now has always been that Trump wouldn’t really be convicted of crimes or sentenced to prison, despite the fairly clear evidence of his criminality. American ex-presidents don’t go to jail; they go on book tours.

That supposition wasn’t wrong, exactly. It rested on the understanding of a broad norm of legal deference to powerful public officials and an understanding of the dangers of criminalizing political disagreement. But what has happened to Trump in the weeks since the election, and especially since the insurrection, is that he has been stripped of his elite impunity. The displays of renunciation by corporate donors and Republican officials, even if they lack concrete authority, have sent a clear message about Donald Trump’s place in American society...

I have written before on this blog during his campaign and then in the aftermath of 2016 that this - his run for high office, his tenure as President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice) - was it for him, the last con job in a string of con jobs he'd been running since his days as a racist landlord.

Everything about trump - the pandering and yelling toward the media to PAY ATTENTION TO ME, branding his name atop every property he could get his hands on, the grifting, the cheap products, the fake online university, the broken casinos, the busted sports league, the overall drive to promote himself as a success with every failure trailing in his wake - was about feeding his ego and satiating his greed. Neither of which could be served with each endeavor he undertook, even the only successful thing he truly had, a barely entertaining reality TV show that was as fake as he still is.

Getting into the White House was the next big con in his game. Oh sure, the talk is that he hoped to lose to Hillary in 2016 and then use the outrage from that to market his own cable "news" network to rival Fox's. But he had to know there was a risk he'd win, which the Electoral College did for him, and which led to his gleeful abuse of high office to line his own pockets some more.

And like every other con game trump played out, he had no idea what he was getting himself into and how poorly he was going to mismanage the whole thing. Four years of it, surrounding himself with a rotating parade of Yes men (and women) alongside other con artists using his administration to pull their own fleecing. Anyone halfway competent at their job didn't last more than a year. Anyone who conflicted with trump's graft and schemes found themselves isolated, banished, and fired.

There are so many points of corruption in trump's tenure it reaches further past what I can comprehend from where I sit watching it all: The violations of Emoluments Clauses using his hotel properties to entice foreign lobbyists to stay at his places and pay him the honor of doing so; Forcing Secret Service and other government agents to stay at his resorts at overbilled rates; Handing out no-bid contracts to business allies with hints of kickbacks; basically trump and his family ripping off taxpayers at every opportunity to indulge in God-knows-what... 

And then failing to realize that sooner rather than later trump will be out of the Oval Office and unable to hide all of the con jobs he pulled during his tenure. Even if trump HAD stolen his second term away from trump, there was no sign that trump would actually start managing his lifestyle habits any better in terms of what he needed to do.

Every trump con, where he jumped from one deal to another, seemed like he was trying to keep two or three steps ahead of creditors that he kept borrowing money from in order to keep his failing empire of half-abandoned resorts and buildings open. Even before the pandemic hit the tourist (and resort) industry, trump properties were deep in the red. trump had been living on credit even as President Loser of the Popular Vote, yet it never seemed like trump was using his corrupt practices to pay off those bills. You'd think that someone with 300 million dollars in guaranteed loans - as Chait pointed out earlier - would make an effort to pay those loans back.

It's as though trump thought - still thinks - he can keep using this big con job of being President Loser of the Popular Vote to extend his deadline, spin out his dues to another day, another year.

trump rarely had to pay for the bills that piled up on him. Sure, he filed for bankruptcy often enough - at least four or six you can find on Google searches - but those were his businesses, never his own ass. trump could walk away from them and still imagine himself - lie to himself - as a success story. "Aha, I tricked the courts into buying my sob story," trump probably mused, "now I can use that as a means to start a new business and find more suckers to finance me."

But he's now at a point where bankruptcy court can't save him. While his properties and business holdings are likely facing financial ruin as before, this time trump is now a direct target to fail. trump's flaunted too many rules, crossed too many lines, failed to pay his dues in ways that demand legal retribution... and he's running out of lawyers and legal loopholes to save him.

trump is facing legal matters that can hit his own person. The sexual assault and defamation lawsuits. Criminal investigations into his Emoluments violations launched by either a fully-led Democratic Congress or by Biden's Justice Department (maybe a special prosecutor backed by both branches), still needed after years of courts arguing over who had standing to sue on the Emoluments (with majority control of Congress, Dems now have a chance). State criminal investigations as mentioned by Chait and so many others, not just the tax evasion in New York but now elections interference in Georgia and elsewhere.

These are things that are going to stop trump from moving on, finding another con job or tricking potential business partners into another half-baked venture to promote his name in big gold letters.

I kept saying this was it for trump, because this was too big a con job to pull off. trump in the Executive Branch was too high-profile and too disastrous with his inept bankrupt leadership to lead to anything else.

It was too big for trump to resign early on when he had a chance to escape. It was too big for trump to risk self-pardons on (because the exposure of accepting his own pardon would be an admission of crimes, and likely doomed to fail even in Republican-led courts). It was too big for trump to moderate himself and avoid any stupid efforts at overreach, to avoid committing any further crimes that would trap him once he left the legal protections of the Oval Office.

And now it's too late for him. trump is stuck in a trap of his own making, and he can't charm or bully or bluff his way out now. trump's made too many enemies in too many places, and he's running out of resources - money obviously, but allies and cronies especially - he can rely on to survive.

This is it for trump. No more con jobs. No more social media assaults. he's done.

And good riddance.

Down In the History Books

Nixon: Dare I ask, will I be remembered?

Eleventh Doctor: Oh, Dicky. Trick Dicky. They're never going to forget you.

-- "Day of the Moon"

Never happened to John Tyler, although Congress tried. Never happened to James Buchanan, although it almost came up in committee. Never happened to U.S. Grant. Never happened to Warren Harding, but shoulda.

It happened once to Andrew Johnson, who barely survived by one vote. It happened once to Bill Clinton, but the charges were so farcical he was never at any risk.

It almost happened to Richard Nixon, who was the most likely candidate to have actually lost the matter and would have been the first President removed via Impeachment, except that he resigned before a full vote in the House could send the matter to the Senate.

Most of those names are for men who went down in U.S. History - save for Clinton, who's generally packed in the middle of passable Presidents - as the Worst Presidents our nation have ever seen.

They are joined by one more, a man more divisive than inspiring, a man more con artist than competent, a man who was already making the Worst Of list during his own tenure by historians who didn't want to wait the customary 20 years before passing judgment.

Except that donald trump has now set a standard no other Worst President ever reached:

Getting impeached twice in a single term of office. 

To David A. Graham at The Atlantic (paywalled):

This afternoon, Donald Trump, the third president in American history to be impeached, became the first to be impeached twice. The House of Representatives voted 232–197 to impeach Trump for inciting the attempted coup on January 6 and for trying to overturn Joe Biden’s election as president. The matter now goes to the Senate, where a trial is unlikely before Biden’s January 20 inauguration. No president has ever been convicted and removed.

It takes effort to get impeached, and it must be doubly so to be double-impeached. And to think, trump's been the laziest least-working President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice! Oh hey, it's a trend) since Coolidge (and at least Coolidge had an excuse). Back to Graham:

No matter what happens now, Trump will leave the presidency by January 20. But the circumstances of his departure and his future in politics are up in the air, because we don’t yet know what will happen in the Senate. It is not clear where Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell stands, nor how he might manage his caucus. It is not clear if GOP senators will break with Trump. It is not clear when a Senate trial will begin. It’s not clear who will defend Trump in a Senate trial or how the trial will run...

Yesterday evening, The New York Times reported that McConnell “has concluded that President Trump committed impeachable offenses and believes that Democrats’ move to impeach him will make it easier to purge Mr. Trump from the party.” Other outlets matched that reporting; Axios says McConnell is in fact leaning toward conviction. (His wife, former Department of Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, resigned from the administration after the attempted coup.) In a letter to colleagues today, however, McConnell said he had not made a decision about how to vote.

Parsing these reports is difficult. Such stories don’t get out without McConnell and people around him wanting them out, for whatever reason. The powerful Republican leader is sending a message, but it isn’t clear what he’s signaling, or to whom. McConnell’s support for conviction would be essential to any effort to convict. While the past month has already shown the cracks in his normally rock-solid control, the 17 Republicans needed to convict will not break ranks without his go-ahead, but his support might encourage senators who have long disliked or even loathed Trump privately to turn on him publicly...

It is unlikely the Republican-led Senate - which will flip soon when the Democratic winners from Georgia take their seats - will risk party division by getting the two-thirds needed to convict and remove trump. Even if the Democrats hold a legitimate Senate trial if the process is delayed long enough for them to hold it, they'll need 17 Republican Senators to risk the wrath of trump's voting base.

However, the Republicans themselves are at a crisis point: The two major factions - divided between the Old School pro-business tax-cut deregulation types who don't want to break the nation, and the New Blood Anti-Government Rapture-seeking nihilists who want to watch the world burn - know that whatever happens to trump decides the near- AND long-term future of their own party.

The Senators are going to have to gamble on the possibility that if they impeach trump, they break his hold on the political reins of the Far Right fanbase, who might move on to the next demagogue who can promise them cruelty and pain upon their enemies that trump can no longer offer. But they risk the possibility that the rabid Far Righters are already too far gone, that they will still follow up on their attack of the Capitol and on Congress to continue their Anti-Government Crusade and unleash more violence across their homes as well as the liberals'.

The thing is: The Democrats tonight are more organized and outraged by trump's acts of sedition and lawlessness than the Republicans are trying to defend themselves or defend trump. The Republicans are finding a little too late they cannot defend both.

One week to go, before Biden gets sworn in.

One week to go, to see the Worst President Loser of the Popular Vote trump go down not only in the history books, but going down to the local precinct to get booked for his crimes against the United States.

Some Lovely Parting Gifts For trump's Train Wreck

If trump wanted to make the history books, he's definitely earned this distinction of being the ONLY President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice) to get impeached TWICE in his one term of office. Let's take it to Andrew Prokop at Vox:

House Democrats claim to have already locked down nearly unanimous support for impeachment within their caucus, and if that’s true, that will make Trump the first president to be impeached on two separate occasions. House leaders are planning for a vote on Wednesday, January 13.

Trump has, of course, been here before. The House of Representatives impeached him for alleged abuse of power and obstruction of Congress in December 2019, because of his efforts to pressure Ukraine’s government into investigating then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. But the Senate acquitted Trump on both counts in February 2020, falling well short of the two-thirds majority necessary to convict him and remove him from office. The verdict votes split almost entirely along party lines, with Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) being the sole Republican to vote to convict Trump on one count.

A major difference this time around, though, is that impeachment proceedings are happening mere days before Trump’s term in office expires. Though some Democrats have argued that Trump’s immediate removal is a necessity, it’s obviously less of one if he’s going to be gone in a week anyway. It’s also unclear if the Senate would hold a trial before Biden’s inauguration...

Yes, this all seems a bit "too little too late." trump is out the door anyway in a week, and it does not look like trump is able (or willing) to cause more damage - other than motivate his followers into another round of seditious rioting - before his time is up.

However, the principle of the thing matters. The reason for Impeachment - again - is to make this stick out to future generations that trump's actions must be held accountable no matter what. Back to Prokop:

If it goes forward, the main question would shift from whether Trump should be removed from office to whether he should be banned from holding future federal office, effectively blocking him from running for president again in 2024. But whenever a Senate trial might happen, getting two-thirds support in the Senate for conviction — which would require at least 17 Republican senators — remains a tall order...

The impeachment is a response to the attack on the US Capitol by Trump supporters that took place last Wednesday.

Specifically, a resolution authored by Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) and other key members of Congress would impeach Trump on one count: incitement of insurrection.

The article of impeachment alleges that Trump incited violence against the government of the United States. It recounts how, as members of Congress gathered to count the electoral votes that would make Biden’s victory official, Trump spoke to a large crowd, made false claims that he was the true winner, and urged them to “fight like hell.”

“Thus incited by President Trump,” the article continues, “members of the crowd he had addressed... unlawfully breached and vandalized the Capitol, injured and killed law enforcement personnel, menaced Members of Congress, the Vice President, and Congressional personnel, and engaged in other violent, deadly, destructive, and seditious acts...”

We all saw what happened that day. Violence within the halls of Congress itself, something that both Democrat and Republican had to have seen with their own eyes, heard with their own ears, feared with their own lives at risk.

A number of Republicans are still out there, trying to shill to the public the same outrageous claims of mass voter fraud (that they can't prove) and the same excuses that the rioting was done by "Antifa" (even as too many of the rioters were proudly MAGA up to the moment the FBI and local police across the nation showed up at their doors to arrest them for the riots).

But a number of Congressional Republicans are refusing to play by trump's Narrative anymore. Liz Cheney of all people - her father Dick was a notoriously pro-authoritarian figure of his own - has gone public against trump and pledging her vote for the impeachment charge. Others are signaling they will follow suit. It arguably won't include the 140-odd Republicans who already doubled down on trump's plotting to overthrow a clean election, but this is a big sign that trump is not leaving on good terms with party leaders he'll need to deal with if he even thinks about returning in 2024.

trump's fate is now tied not to the past or the present, of what he can deliver to the Republican Party anymore. trump's fate is now tied to a future - of impending fraud lawsuits in New York, of criminal investigations involving his electoral interference and insurrection in Washington - that displays no mercy for him.

It'd be nice to say "Good Riddance" to the dumpster fire that has been the donald trump Era.

It's just there's still only one week left to go.