Reality literally in prison while these fuckers pretend
11 Likes
Wow, projection much, from the recipient of $500k of Russian money?
8 Likes
December 10, 2020 (Thursday)
Today more than half of the Republicans in the House of Representatives signed onto Texas’s lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to overturn the results of the 2020 election and install Trump, rather than the legitimately elected Joe Biden, into the White House.
Democrat Biden won the election by more than 7 million votes and by 306 to 232 electoral votes. Trump has lost 55 of the 56 court cases he has brought to change the election’s outcome, and all 50 states have certified their election results. This election is not close; attempts to overturn it reject the central concept of democracy: that voters choose their leaders.
The story is this: Texas’s Attorney General Ken Paxton is asking the Supreme Court to hear an original case between the states—which it can do, but it’s rare—arguing that Texas was harmed by voting procedures in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Essentially, Paxton is arguing that mail-in voting in those states, which Democrats used more extensively than Republicans did after Trump insisted it was insecure, stepped on Texans’ rights. This will be a hard sell.
If the Supreme Court does say Texas can sue, Paxton is hoping that 5 justices will then decide to toss out the electoral votes—but not the votes in the downballot races-- from those states. This would take away Biden’s victory in the Electoral College, handing the election to Trump.
After Texas filed the lawsuit, Trump filed a request to join it.
This is a crazy lawsuit. As Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) said: “It’s just simply madness…. The idea of supplanting the vote of the people with partisan legislators is so completely out of our national character that it’s simply mad…. [T]his effort to subvert the vote of the people is dangerous and destructive of the cause of democracy.” University of Texas Law School Professor Steve Vladeck was more succinct: “In a nutshell the President is asking the Supreme Court to exercise its rarest form of jurisdiction to effectively overturn the entire presidential election.”
It is possible—likely, even—that Paxton is advancing this nonsense because he has been under indictment since 2015 for securities fraud, is now under investigation by the FBI for bribery and abuse of office, and is hoping to impress Trump enough to get a presidential pardon. Just today, the FBI issued at least one subpoena for records from Paxton’s office. Knowing that this lawsuit has virtually no chance of winning, he could file it and win points with Trump while also knowing it would go nowhere.
But this moment has grown far beyond Paxton’s lawsuit into a fight over the future of the Republican Party and, ultimately, over the future of democracy.
States have squared off on both sides of Paxton’s lawsuit. Last night, seventeen other states supported the suit to hand the election to Trump, including Missouri, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia. Later, Arizona joined them.
Today, the four states named in the suit made it clear they are standing up for democracy. Pennsylvania’s brief notes that Trump has “flooded” the courts “with frivolous lawsuits aimed at disenfranchising large swaths of voters and undermining the legitimacy of the election.” Adding to “the cacophony of bogus claims,” Texas is trying to throw out four state elections because it doesn’t like their results. Its demand “is legally indefensible and is an affront to principles of constitutional democracy.” The brief warns, “Texas’s effort to get this Court to pick the next President has no basis in law or fact. The Court should not abide this seditious abuse of the judicial process, and should send a clear and unmistakable signal that such abuse must never be replicated.”
“[T]his case is not ordinary,” the Wisconsin brief says. “Texas is asking this Court to overturn the will of the people of Wisconsin—and the nation—based on meritless accusations of election fraud. If this Court agrees to do so, it will not only irreparably harm its own legitimacy, but will lend fuel to a disinformation campaign aimed at undermining the legitimacy of our democracy.”
Twenty-three Democratic-led states and territories, along with the Republican Attorney General of Ohio, Dave Yost, today signed a brief supporting the four states Texas is attacking. The District of Columbia, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Guam, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, U.S. Virgin Islands, and Washington all backed the states whose votes Texas is trying to throw out.
But six states—Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Utah—joined Texas’s lawsuit today. Members of the Pennsylvania General Assembly filed a brief supporting Texas and Trump, signing on to the idea of taking the vote away from their own people.
Then the 106 Republican members of Congress jumped aboard the lawsuit, signing a brief in support of it. Trump worked the phones and enlisted Representative Mike Johnson (R-LA) head of the Republican Study Committee, the party caucus of social conservatives in the House, to hold members’ feet to the fire. Johnson sent around an email saying that Trump had “specifically asked me to contact all Republican Members of the House and Senate today and request that all join on to our brief.” Johnson noted that Trump “will be anxiously awaiting the final list to review,” in order to see who was on his team and who was not. Only ninety House Republicans refused to sign.
What on earth is going on?
First: Trump is throwing at the wall anything he can in hopes of staying in office. The more chaos it creates, the happier he is. The lawsuit crisis has, for example, muted the story that at least 2,923 Americans died today of Covid-19, and 223,570 cases were reported, a 28% increase in the weekly average of cases since two weeks ago.
It has also diverted attention from the fact that there is no deal, and no real sign of a deal, on a coronavirus relief bill. A bipartisan group of senators has managed to hammer out a $908 billion deal but Republicans refuse to allow its $160 billion for aid to state and local governments and Democrats refuse to agree to shield businesses from liability for coronavirus injuries. The bipartisan group tried to put the two things together, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says that’s a non-starter. Meanwhile, 26 million Americans say they don’t have enough to eat.
Second: There is a war underway for control of the Republican Party. While a losing incumbent president usually loses influence in the party, Trump intends to continue to call the shots. He wants to run again in 2024, or at least to anoint a successor, rather than letting the Republican National Committee pick a presidential candidate. There is a struggle going on to control the RNC and, as well, to figure out who gets control of the lists of supporters Trump has compiled. Trump also controls a lot of the party’s money, since he has been out front as its fundraiser without a break since he decided to run for office. He was the first president ever to file for reelection on the day of his inauguration, permitting him to hold “rallies” and to raise money throughout his presidency.
So Republican lawmakers are willing to swear loyalty to him, either because they want to attract his voters in future elections, or because they want access to the cash he can raise, or both. They no longer defend traditional policy positions; they defend Trump.
This loyalty requires contortions. In Georgia, the Republican Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr called the Texas lawsuit “constitutionally, legally and factually wrong.” But Georgia’s two senators, Republicans David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, have backed it. The senators are facing a runoff election in January against Democrat challengers Jon Ossoff and the Reverend Raphael Warnock, and they need Trump’s support. So they are taking a stand against their own voters. So are nearly half of Georgia’s Republican congressional delegation, despite the fact that this position logically would overturn their own elections.
Third: Texas’s lawsuit and the Republican Party’s embrace of it is an unprecedented attempt to destroy the very foundation of our democracy. Since the 1980s, Republican leaders have managed to hold onto power by suppressing votes, promoting propaganda, gerrymandering states, gaming the Electoral College, and stacking the courts.
Now, so unpopular that even gaming the mechanics of our system is not enough, they have abandoned democracy itself.
11 Likes
Since this has stopped working, they now have to come clean and just admit that they hate democracy and need to overthrow the elected government and seek to establish an oligarchy. Sedition, anyone?
10 Likes
8 Likes
I emailed my congress critter and called her seditious directly. I would encourage any of us unfortunate enough to be repped by GOP’ers to do the same.
10 Likes
i mean with all the fraud, are you sure she’s even your representative? we might as well let the supreme court make all our electoral decisions at this point. /s
9 Likes
December 11, 2020 (Friday)
Today, twenty more House Republicans, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, the top Republican in the House, and Greg Pence, Vice President Mike Pence’s older brother, signed onto the lawsuit filed by the Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton asking the Supreme Court first to take up the lawsuit, and then to throw out the presidential electors for Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Michigan. If it would do so, those state legislatures could appoint a new slate of electors for Trump, thereby tossing out President-Elect Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election and handing the White House back to Trump.
Also joining the Texas lawsuit were “New California State” and “New Nevada State,” pseudo states supported by movements that want to break the rural counties of California and Nevada away from urban counties. Spokespeople for the proposed states claimed that their new states are “suffering under many governmental usurpations,” and that the governors of the actual states were engaging in “lawless actions” by permitting same-day voter registration.
And yet, this evening, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case. Two justices, Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas, said they would have permitted the court to hear the case—this is consistent with their longstanding position that the court must allow states to file in a dispute between states-- but would have decided against it. So Trump, who had joined the Texas lawsuit, has lost his bid to have the Supreme Court overturn the election results.
The Electoral College meets on Monday, and Congress counts the electoral votes in a joint session on January 6. It is possible that Republican loyalists in the House will gum up the congressional acceptance of the electoral votes, but the election is over. Joe Biden will be inaugurated on January 20, 2021.
The larger story is not over.
The Republican Party has become a dangerous faction trying to destroy American democracy. Fittingly, after the Supreme Court decision, the Chair of the Texas Republican Party, Allen West, promptly issued a grammatically muddy statement saying, “Perhaps law-abiding states should bond together and form a Union of states that will abide by the constitution.”
Americans unhappy with the results of a presidential election have done precisely this before. It was called “secession,” and it occurred in 1860 when elite southern Democrats tried to destroy the United States of America rather than accept the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln to the White House.
In 1860, as today, there were two competing visions of America. In the South, members of a small wealthy class had come to believe that they should lead society, and that “democracy” meant only that voters got to choose which set of leaders ruled them. Society, they said, worked best when it was run by natural leaders, the wealthy, educated, well-connected men who made up the region’s planter class.
As South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond explained in 1858, society was naturally made up of a great mass of workers, rather dull people, but happy and loyal, whom he called “mudsills” after the timbers driven into the ground to support elegant homes above. These mudsills needed the guidance of their betters to produce goods that would create capital. That capital would be wasted if it stayed among the mudsills; it needed to move upward, where better men would use it to move society forward.
Ordinary men should, Hammond explained, have no say over policies, because they would demand a greater share of the wealth they produced. No matter what regular folks might want from the government—roads, schools, and so on—the government could not deliver it because it could do nothing that was not specifically listed in the Constitution. And what the Constitution called for primarily, he said, was to protect and spread the system of human enslavement that made men like him rich.
In 1859, Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln rejected Hammond’s vision of America. In a speech at the Milwaukee Agricultural Fair, Lincoln denied that there was any such thing as a “mudsill” in America. No one, he said, should be locked into working poverty for life. Society did not work best when a few rich men ran it, he said; it worked best when government made sure that everyone was equal before the law and that ordinary men had access to resources.
Under the system of “free labor,” hardworking farmers applied their muscle and brains to natural resources. They produced more than they could consume, and their accumulated capital employed shopkeepers and shoemakers and so on. Those small merchants, in turn, provided capital to employ industrialists and financiers, who then hired men just starting out. The economic cycle drove itself, and the “harmony of interest” meant that everyone could prosper in America so long as the government didn’t favor one sector over another.
Lincoln’s vision became the driving ideology of the Republican Party.
In 1860, when Democratic leaders demanded that the government protect the spread of slavery to the West, Republicans objected. They argued that the slave system, in which a few rich men dominated government and monopolized resources, would choke out free labor.
Southern Democratic leaders responded by telling voters the Republicans wanted a race war. To win the election, they silenced opponents and kept them from the polls. And when the Democrats nonetheless lost, southern leaders railroaded their states out of the Union and made war on the U.S. government. They threw away the idea of American democracy and tried to build a new nation they would control.
That moment looks much like the attempt of today’s Republicans to overturn a legitimate election and install their own leadership over the country.
But there the parallels stop. When southern Democratic leaders took their states out of the Union in 1861, they rushed them out before constituents could weigh in. Modern media means that voters have seen the ham-fisted legal challenges that have repeatedly lost in court, and have heard voices condemning this effort to overturn our democracy. Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE), for example, issued a statement tonight: “Since Election Night, a lot of people have been confusing voters by spinning Kenyan Birther-type, ‘Chavez rigged the election from the grave’ conspiracy theories, but every American who cares about the rule of law should take comfort that the Supreme Court — including all three of President Trump’s picks — closed the book on the nonsense.”
Make no mistake, though: today’s Republican Party has drifted away from its original principles to attack American democracy. Fully 64% of the House Republican delegation endorsed Trump’s bid to steal the election. Some likely signed onto Paxton’s frivolous lawsuit because they honestly believed in it. Many others likely supported it either because they feared retaliation from Trump or they recognized that they would face primary challengers from the right in their gerrymandered districts in 2022 if they did not. Either way, the party as it currently exists is not going to repudiate this week’s anti-American stand.
But Republicans who still value democracy and their traditional values of equality before the law and equal access to resources could repudiate the radicals who have taken over their party.
They could reject the ideology of the Confederacy and reclaim the Party of Lincoln.
8 Likes
But, I fear, most will not.
6 Likes
We can still smell the Trump on you, Ben. That will never wash off.
6 Likes
December 12, 2020 (Saturday)
Maybe it’s just me, but it sure feels like we could all use a night off.
Tonight’s image comes from photographer Peter Ralston, again. It’s called “Holding Ground,” and in case the boat at anchor in the rough water makes people worry, here’s what Peter says about it:
“The title refers to those places where the bottom is good, where one’s boat will be safe and where the anchor or mooring will not drag,” and where, in the middle of a three-day storm, “you hope that all of the attention you’ve paid to your ground tackle will reward you with a boat still there in the morning.”
A perfect sentiment for America in December 2020.
See you tomorrow.
[photo, “Holding Ground,” by Peter Ralston.]
12 Likes
Alas, some are not taking the night off…
4 Likes
December 13, 2020 (Sunday)
As of today, the United States has more than 16 million confirmed coronavirus infections, with more than 200,000 cases diagnosed every day. We are closing in on 300,000 deaths from Covid-19. On Friday, the Food and Drug Administration gave Emergency Use Authorization to the coronavirus vaccine developed by BioNTech and Pfizer. Today, Pfizer began to ship the first of about 3 million doses of vaccine from its facility in Michigan. Pfizer will be working with UPS and FedEx to send the vaccines around the country.
The first to get the vaccine will be high-risk health care workers. Along with them, White House staffers who work close to Trump will be among the first to receive the vaccine, to prevent more of them from becoming ill with Covid-19 after so many of them have become sick in the past months. There has been a backlash to this information, as critics note that the administration has downplayed the virus, officials have refused to wear masks, and the White House has held large gatherings that turned out to be superspreader events, so the idea that Trump staffers will now take scarce vaccines doesn’t sit very well. After the New York Times broke this story, Trump tweeted late Sunday night that he has asked for staffers not to get the vaccine immediately, “unless specifically necessary.”
Still, the eagerness of Trump administration officials to take it might help convince reluctant Americans that the vaccine is safe. The Biden-Harris team has already launched a drive to educate people about the vaccine, worried that the Trump administration’s downplaying of the virus has set that effort back significantly. While a president-elect generally stays quiet in the weeks before taking office under the principle that America has only one president at a time, Biden is indicating that he will not stay silent in the face of mounting deaths the White House refuses to acknowledge. “We’re in the teeth of the crisis right now,” the president-elect said Friday. "This nation needs presidential leadership right now. … You know, we… have to face it head on.”
To combat widespread skepticism about the vaccine, Biden is highlighting trusted public health experts like Anthony Fauci, as well as other well-known figures who have agreed to be vaccinated on television. Biden’s team is also working with the Advertising Council, a nonprofit organization of advertising agencies that produces public service announcements, to launch a $50 million advertising campaign in the new year. This effort is late getting started and has been hampered by Trump’s politicization of the vaccine process, which led executives from both Pfizer and Moderna, the companies with the most promising vaccines so far, to skip Trump’s “vaccine summit” at the White House last week.
Aside from his aggressive action to combat the coronavirus, an evaluation of Biden’s nominees tells us a great deal about what we can expect of his administration. He has chosen institutionalists with a great deal of experience, and with a general bent toward fairness in government. So, for example, Dr. Janet L. Yellen, Biden’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, has served as chair of the Federal Reserve and chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and her hallmark was always her defense of wage workers at a time when leading Republican lawmakers insisted that building the economy meant cutting taxes for those at the top of the economy.
Yellen is known to support lower interest rates, which tend to boost borrowing and thus the economy, but also worries about the extraordinary debt under which the country now labors. The budget deficit in 2020 was $3.1 trillion, and the debt is more than $20 trillion, which means that more than $52 billion of our tax dollars every year go into paying interest on the debt. That amount is as much as the combined budgets of the Departments of Commerce, Education, Energy, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Justice, and State. Yellen has suggested that she sees a need to raise taxes—which heartens progressives—and to cut retirement programs, which horrifies them. She worries about the long-term effects of the rising debt as baby boomers age, doubling spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
Last year, Yellen told the National Investment Center for Seniors Housing & Care Fall Conference that she thinks our financial issues “will not be solved without some additional revenues on the table, but I also find it hard to believe that it won’t be solved without some changes to those programs…. So this is certainly something that people in this audience should have in their sights as something that will greatly affect the well-being of our cohort or, more likely, our children.”
This moderation is cheering former Republicans, like Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post, and making progressives despair. But Biden’s picks seem to be less about indicating the content of his administration than indicating he plans to have an administration in the first place. He seems to be signaling that he intends to rebuild the framework of the government that Trump has dismantled in his four years. As for what comes once that framework is rebuilt, his choice of California Senator Kamala Harris—the first woman, and the first woman of color, on a presidential ticket-- as his running mate suggests he is not signaling a return to the past. Biden has always been famous for being in the middle of the Democratic pack, and will move to the left or the right according to what he hears from the public.
The president-elect is rushing to jump into the presidency in the face of a leadership vacuum as Trump continues to stew over his election loss and to plot yet more ways he can try to overturn the results. All those options are weaker than the ones that have already failed. That’s not to say damage isn’t being done: yesterday, Trump supporters who refuse to accept his defeat roamed U.S. cities, including Washington, D.C, where last night, people were assaulted, 33 were arrested, and four stabbed.
It is not clear what is going to happen to the Republican Party with Trump demanding loyalty even as he is losing battle after battle after a very clear defeat in the election, and his base turning violent. Those lawmakers who have signed on to Trump’s attack on our democratic processes have painted themselves into a corner along with the extremist Trump base, and their strategy might weaken them politically.
In an important move today, evangelical leader Beth Moore, the founder of Living Proof Ministries, a Bible-based women’s group from Houston, Texas, who has almost a million followers on Twitter, tweeted: “I do not believe these days are for mincing words. I’m 63 ½ years & I have never seen anything in these United States of America I found more astonishingly seductive & dangerous to the saints of God than Trumpism. This Christian nationalism is not of God. Move back from it…. Fellow leaders, we will be held responsible for remaining passive in this day of seduction to save our own skin while the saints we’ve been entrusted to serve are being seduced, manipulated, USED and stirred up into a lather of zeal devoid of the Holy Spirit for political gain….”
Moore follows this weekend’s statement by evangelical Karen Swallow Prior, who said she was “now embarrassed and ashamed” for voting for local and state Republican candidates (although she had never voted for Trump). “What a bunch of money-grubbing, power-hungry, partisan cowards who care nothing about conservatism,” she tweeted. Conservative journalist David French also wrote this weekend that “the frenzy and fury of the post-election period has laid bare the sheer idolatry and fanaticism of Christian Trumpism.”
If evangelicals return to their traditional stance that politics corrupts religion, the modern-day Republican Party is in trouble. In this year’s election, about 80% of white evangelicals supported Trump. They make up 15% of the U.S. population, but because they turn out in huge numbers, they provided about 40% of Trump’s votes in 2020. Since the Reagan years, white evangelicals have been a crucial part of the Republican base. If they are starting to rethink their loyalties, it will be a game changer.
7 Likes
December 14, 2020 (Monday)
Today, Americans began receiving the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine. Dr. Michelle Chester administered the first dose to Sandra Lindsay, a nurse at Long Island Jewish Medical Center. Lindsay is a Covid nurse and said she hoped seeing her get the vaccine would convince people it was safe. “I have seen the alternative, and do not want it for you,” she told the New York Times. “I feel like healing is coming. I hope this marks the beginning of the end of a very painful time in our history.” The pandemic has hit Americans of color particularly hard, making it fitting that the first U.S. dose was administered by a Black doctor to a Black nurse.
Finally, there is light at the end of the tunnel. But that light is still a long way away. Today we passed 300,000 official deaths from Covid-19, with well over 16 million infections. We also set a new single-day record of at least 232,369 new coronavirus cases. Outbreaks are escalating, not dropping, and the upcoming holidays threaten to spread the virus further.
There is, as well, an issue with the distribution of the vaccines. While the federal government invested in the development of the vaccine, it provided funding and a plan only to get the vaccines to the states. Getting the doses from a central point into people’s arms remains largely unfunded and unplanned. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Health and Human Services have dug into their existing budgets to find some money for states to start planning, but there is currently no money for states to distribute the vaccine, especially in light of the financial crisis caused by the pandemic. Federal funding of vaccine delivery is set to run out about February 1, just in time for it to fall into Biden’s watch.
The good news is that Congress appears be narrowing in on a coronavirus relief package. Lawmakers expect to announce a $1.4 trillion compromise measure tomorrow. The Republicans still hate the idea of state and local funding; Democrats still hate the idea of a liability shield for businesses whose workers contract the coronavirus at work. So, negotiators have split those two issues off from the items that have bipartisan support. A $748 billion bill will provide less-controversial funding for unemployment assistance, small businesses, food assistance, rental assistance, health funding, education, and transportation; and a $160 billion bill will offer local and state aid and liability protections.
Today was a big day in politics as well as in health. The Electoral College formally elected Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. president, and Kamala Devi Harris vice president. Tonight, Biden spoke to the American people. He rebuked Trump for his effort to steal the election, saying “In America, politicians don’t take power-- people grant power to them.”
Biden tied today’s contest for democracy to our history. “The flame of democracy was lit in this nation a long time ago. And we now know nothing — not even a pandemic — or an abuse of power — can extinguish that flame,” he said. He asked Americans to move on, focusing on combatting the pandemic and rebuilding the economy.
The election is finally over.
But, although 62% of American voters say the election is “over and settled” and it’s “time to move on,” Trump continues to insist that he won it. In the face of the Electoral College confirmation of Biden’s win, this position increasingly seems a ploy to raise money. Even as the Electoral College was voting, the Trump campaign filed yet another lawsuit challenging the outcome of the election. It has lost 59 of 60 court cases, and the Supreme Court last week refused to hear a case in which Trump planned to argue that mail-in voting in swing states that voted for Biden—but not the states that voted for him—injured Republican voters in Texas.
Senate Republicans, who have set the Electoral College vote as the condition on which they would acknowledge Biden’s victory, are swinging behind the idea that Biden is indeed the President-Elect. But the Trump loyalists are not giving up. The state Capitols of Michigan and Wisconsin had to be closed to the public out of safety concerns before the Electoral College delegates met; the electors in Arizona had to meet in an undisclosed location. One Republican state representative in Michigan hinted at potential violence against the delegates to the Electoral College; leadership later stripped him of his committee assignments. Despite the fussing, members of Congress are expected to certify the Electoral College votes on January 6, 2021.
The Republicans’ willingness to entertain Trump’s tantrums means that, unlike most Americans, 82% of Trump voters say they think Biden’s victory is illegitimate and that Trump should refuse to concede and should do all he can to stay in power.
This was finally too much for Representative Paul Mitchell of Michigan, who announced today he was switching his affiliation from Republican to Independent. Mitchell is retiring from Congress, perhaps freeing him to speak his mind. In his announcement, he called out Ronna McDaniel, the chair of the Republican National Committee, for suggesting that Trump’s loss was because of Black voters in Detroit. “Ronna,” he wrote, “you know Michigan politics well.” (McDaniel is the granddaughter of former Michigan Governor George W. Romney, and served as chair of the Michigan Republican Party from 2015 to 2017). “Trump did not lose Michigan because of Wayne County, but rather he lost because of dwindling support in areas including Kent and Oakland County, both previous Republican strongholds.”
Mitchell called out “political candidates” who “treat our election system as though we are a third-world nation and incite distrust of something so basic as the sanctity of our vote.” He warned, “If Republican leaders collectively sit back and tolerate unfounded conspiracy theories and ‘stop the steal’ rallies without speaking out for our electoral process, which the Department of Homeland Security said was ‘the most secure in American history,’ our nation will be damaged.” He condemned the “raw political considerations” that led party leaders to support the “stop the steal” efforts. He noted that members of Congress take oaths to support and defend the Constitution, not “to preserve and protect the political interests of any individual, be it the president or anyone else, to the detriment of our cherished nation.”
Tonight, just in time to disrupt the news cycle before Biden was set to address the nation, Trump announced that Attorney General William Barr is stepping down on December 23. Barr was a true loyalist, politicizing the Department of Justice to protect Trump from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, stepping in to defend Trump in a defamation suit by a woman who claimed Trump had sexually assaulted her, favoring Trump’s friends, and supporting Trump’s attack on this summer’s protesters at Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C. Barr’s resignation letter was full of praise for Trump, but the two men have been at odds since Barr refused to sign on to Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. On December 1, Barr told the Associated Press that there was no evidence of widespread election fraud that would change the outcome of the 2020 election, thus undercutting the president’s arguments.
While the timing of the resignation announcement seems pegged to try to upstage Biden’s win, the timing of the resignation itself might well reflect that Trump is planning some controversial pardons and Barr didn’t want to be associated with them.
Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen will become the acting Attorney General.
There is one more big developing story. Yesterday, the administration admitted that hackers acting for a foreign country—almost certainly Russia—have breached many of our key government networks, including the Treasury Department, the Commerce Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department, the National Institutes of Health, and other agencies related to our national security. Hackers apparently began to sneak malicious code into software updates for business and government computers last March. The breach has enabled them to extract information for many months.
If indeed it was Russia that broke into our system, it will be their most sophisticated break-in since 2014 and 2015, when operatives broke into unclassified email systems in the White House, State Department, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then went on to hack the Democratic National Committee. The recent hack was so serious the National Security Council, which advises the president about national security, military affairs, and foreign affairs, had an emergency meeting about it on Saturday.
10 Likes
Is it really a “hack” if they are given the passwords by the outgoing occupant?
6 Likes
I would have to say yes, given that Trump pretty much acted as Russia’s mole.
3 Likes
But, is he a mole if he was never underground? I mean, that’s just a rat.
9 Likes
Well, loud and never-ending cognitive dissonance from the right pretty much polluted the discussions as to Trump’s true loyalties (apart from himself). Can a mole be an effective mole when he’s so clearly outed by his actions. Yes… if you’re POTUS and are supported by a corrupt party.
6 Likes
Still not a mole. More like a pile of rats in a trench coat.
8 Likes
I wasn’t disputing the “rat” analogy. I was just pondering moles and how a mole can be a mole while under suspicion for being a mole. “Rat” is just as good. (It’s just that rats are cuter than moles, IMHO.)
5 Likes
