Last Call For The Trump Tear-Apart Twist

The Republican Party is imploding, and the non-Trump loyalists are suddenly realizing -- far too late, mind you -- that they will never be allowed to remain as Republicans.

The Republican Party is entering a period of political powerlessness in Washington badly fractured from within, lacking a unifying message and set of principles and missing a clear bench of national leaders — a party with internal divisions and outside obstacles so significant that it may not easily weather the splintering underway.

While all parties go through reckonings after losing power, the G.O.P. has lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections and, for the first time since Herbert Hoover, ceded the White House, Senate and House in a single term. President Trump is staring down a second impeachment, members of his administration have resigned in protest of his actions, and senators from his party have called for him to do the same.

What’s more, the party’s political messaging is likely to be inspected intensely by social media platforms that have already barred Mr. Trump and others on the far right. Business and corporate donors are threatening to cut off the party’s financial spigot, and tech companies are stifling Mr. Trump’s ability to raise money online, the lifeblood of his political operation.

But the most acute danger for the health of the party, and its electoral prospects to retake the House and Senate in 2022, is the growing chasm between the pro-Trump voter base and the many Republican leaders and strategists who want to reorient for a post-Trump era.

“Have you heard what some of these folks waving MAGA flags are saying about Republicans?” said Representative Peter Meijer, Republican of Michigan, whose first days in Congress this month were marked by evacuations to escape from a mob. “They don’t identify themselves as Republicans.”

Mr. Meijer was among the Republicans who voted to affirm President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s Electoral College victory last week, in the proceedings that rioters incited by Mr. Trump interrupted. The vote set off another round of vitriol and threats.

“Our expectation is that somebody will try to kill us,” said Mr. Meijer, an Iraq war veteran. “That is the scenario that many of us are preparing for.”

 

Yes, this is a sitting Republican predicting there will be assassination attempts against Republicans in Congress by Trump voters.

 

Stop and think about this.

 

I will repeat this.

 

This is a sitting Republican predicting there will be assassination attempts against Republicans in Congress by Trump voters.

Mike DuHaime, a Republican strategist who served as a top adviser for Chris Christie in his 2016 run for president, said the violence at the Capitol represented a breaking point for his party’s relationship with Mr. Trump.

“Now the two camps are, who is a Trump sycophant and who is not,” Mr. DuHaime said. “That spells doom until we can get past Trump.”

Mr. Trump won 74.2 million voters, a Republican record, even in defeat in 2020. Some party leaders fret that as of now, they cannot win with Mr. Trump, and they cannot win without him. Right-wing voters have signaled that they will abandon the party if it turns on Mr. Trump, and more traditional Republicans will sour if it sticks by him.

The twin losses last week in Georgia, where the Republican incumbents yoked themselves closely to Mr. Trump and his baseless accusations of election fraud, not only cost Republicans control of the Senate but also offered a warning sign for the future. The dynamics mirrored the 2018 midterm elections, when Mr. Trump’s divisive brand of politics was better at mobilizing Democrats than Republicans when he was not on the ballot himself.

In the coming days, the specter of more violence is clear and present. The National Guard said Monday that it was planning to deploy up to 15,000 troops in the nation’s capital for the inauguration, and the F.B.I. warned in a bulletin about the potential for armed protests at all 50 state capitols between now and the inauguration.

 

It looks like the predictions of a violence-filled start to the Biden era is coming true.

The Brewing Bevinstan Booting Of Beshear

Kentucky Republicans, now controlling more than three-fourths in both chambers of the general Assembly, are now threatening to impeach and remove Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear at will, and frankly they have more than enough votes to do it.

 

Kentucky’s Republican House Speaker David Osborne says a committee will be formed to determine whether Gov. Andy Beshear should be impeached, after four citizens submitted a petition asking for it.

Though the House can receive impeachment petitions at any time, the creation of an official impeachment committee is unusual, said Frankfort attorney Anna Whites.

Whites worked for former Democratic House Speaker Greg Stumbo. She said during Stumbo’s tenure, impeachment petitions would be sent to the Judiciary or Rules Committee for review, and then in most cases, “they would be determined not to be worth moving forward on.”

“I think it is unusual to immediately appoint a committee to review it prior to letting Judiciary or Rules have a first look at it, since they have experience in this,” Whites said.

Osborne was a member of the Rules Committee when Stumbo was speaker and White said “he is clearly familiar with this process.”

The four citizens who filed the petition asking for Beshear to be impeached are Jacob Clark of Grayson County, Tony Wheatley of Mercer County, Randall Daniel of Bullitt County and Andrew Cooperrider of Fayette County.

Cooperrider is the owner of Lexington coffee shop Brewed, which continued to provide indoor dining during Beshear’s coronavirus restrictions in November and December.

The petitioners accuse Beshear of violating the Kentucky Constitution by imposing restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic, including the mandatory closure of non-essential businesses and in-person religious services early on during the state of emergency.

The Kentucky Supreme Court ruled in November that Beshear has the power to issue orders that attempt to slow the spread of the virus.

Speaker Osborne said on Friday that the House doesn’t have a choice but to “take action” on the impeachment petition.

“The constitution is very brief and very vague about what we have to do. But we have to take it seriously. This is a serious issue, regardless of whether anything comes of it or not,” Osborne said.

As of Friday, Osborne said he has not read the petition yet.

The petition was filed after the “Impeach Beshear” rally last Tuesday, which featured a yard sign that said “make hanging traitors great again.”

Beshear’s communications director Crystal Staley called the petition, “silly and completely unjustified,” comparing it to rhetoric that spurred the riot at the U.S. Capitol last week.

“The Kentucky Supreme Court ruled every step the Governor has taken is legal. But more concerning, this is the type of dangerous, angry rhetoric and disinformation that led to Wednesday’s attack on the U.S. Capitol and our very democracy. People are watching and listening. Everyone has a duty to be responsible,” Staley said.

 

Kentucky's Constitution works just like the federal one on impeachment, the House impeaches and brings charges, the Senate tries and needs a two-thirds majority to convict and remove. The KY GOP has 75 of 100 seats in the House and 28 of 38 seats in the Senate, meaning they can convict and remove Beshear and Lt. Gov. Jackie Coleman at will, in which case the next person in line is Senate President Robert Stivers.

This is an open threat to Beshear, folks.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Violence Problem, Con't

The FBI is taking the extraordinary step of warning law enforcement agencies across the country that violent insurrections are being planned at all 50 state capitol buildings and again at the US Capitol next week in advance of Joe Biden's inauguration.

The FBI is reportedly monitoring plans for armed protests against Donald Trump’s election defeat in all 50 US state capitols and at the US Capitol in Washington between Saturday and 20 January, the day Joe Biden will be inaugurated as president.

ABC News said it had obtained an internal bulletin which detailed calls for the “storming” of state, local and federal courthouses and buildings, if Trump is removed from power before inauguration day.

House Democrats formally introduced an article of impeachment in Washington on Monday, charing Trump with inciting an insurrection in regard to the riot at the US Capitol last week, which left five dead and has led to multiple arrests.

Democrats also called on Vice-President Mike Pence to implement the 25th amendment to the constitution and remove Trump from power.

That effort seems unlikely to succeed. Any impeachment trial in the Senate is not likely to be held until after Trump has left office.

Nonetheless, ABC reporter Aaron Katersky said the FBI had “received information about an identified armed group intending to travel to Washington DC on 16 January [Saturday]. They have warned that if Congress attempts to remove [Trump] via the 25th amendment a huge uprising will occur.”

 

Republicans will continue to screech that Trump, and by extension the Republicans who enabled Trump's awful behavior, cannot suffer the consequences of inciting a terrorist insurrection because it might cause more terrorist insurrections, so we can only do absolutely nothing. 

So odd how giving in to the terrorist demands are reasonable when the terrorists are American white supremacists.

At least the Capitol Police are starting to take things seriously.

Capitol Police briefed Democrats on Monday night about three more potentially gruesome demonstrations planned in the coming days, with one plot to encircle the U.S. Capitol and assassinate Democrats and some Republicans.

On a private call Monday night, new leaders of the Capitol Police told House Democrats they were closely monitoring three separate plans that could pose serious threats to members of Congress as Washington prepares for Democrat Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration on Jan. 20.

The first is a demonstration billed as the “largest armed protest ever to take place on American soil.”

Another is a protest in honor of Ashli Babbitt, the woman killed while trying to climb into the Speaker’s Lobby during Wednesday’s pro-Trump siege of the Capitol.

And another demonstration, which three members said was by far the most concerning plot, would involve insurrectionists forming a perimeter around the Capitol, the White House and the Supreme Court, and then blocking Democrats from entering the Capitol ― perhaps even killing them ― so that Republicans could take control of the government.

The members of Congress whom HuffPost spoke to Monday night were extremely concerned by the call.

“It was pretty overwhelming,” one member said.

Officials on the call warned lawmakers about sharing too much information with the media, saying that divulging specific dates, times and countermeasures could aid the organizers of the plots. HuffPost is not disclosing certain information, such as who appears to be organizing these plots and when they are to take place.

One member was explicit that these groups were trying to get journalists to report on their demonstrations.

“Some of their main communications to organize these have been cut off, so they’re purposely trying to get the media to report on this as a way to further disseminate information and to attract additional support for their attacks,” this member said.

 

Again, these are white supremacist domestic terrorists, folks. They want to kill Democrats and overthrow the election to put Trump in power. 

It's way past time to start considering them as such, starting with Donald Trump.

StupidiNews!

• Six Congolese park rangers were ambushed and killed at a gorilla sanctuary by poachers Monday, the attack at Virunga National Park is the deadliest there since 12 rangers were killed in April.
• Two Democratic Congresswomen, Bonnie Coleman of New Jersey and Pramila Jayapal of Washington, have tested positive for COVID-19 in the wake of last week's US Capitol attack.
• The US Supreme Court has once again refused to take up several cases filed by the Trump campaign falsely claiming that the 2020 presidential election was stolen by "election fraud".
• Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf has abruptly resigned and is being replaced by current Trump FEMA chief Pete Gaynor ahead of next week's inauguration.
• NASA will extend its Mars InSight rover and Jupiter Juno spacecraft missions into 2022 and 2025 respectively in order to explore more of the Martian surface and Jupiter's moons and rings.

Last Call For The Reach Again To Impeach Again

Impeachment 2: Impeach Harder is coming along at a near record pace as House Democrats have introduced a single impeachment resolution over Donald Trump's incitement to violence last week directly resulting in the US Capitol terrorist attack, and Pelosi says they have the votes to proceed.

 

Speaker Nancy Pelosi is on the cusp of majority support in the House to impeach President Donald Trump, part of a two-front effort to punish and remove him for inciting the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol last week.

Key members of the House Judiciary Committee introduced a single article of impeachment Monday that has already gathered at least 218 cosponsors, according to a congressional aide involved in the process, meeting the majority needed in the House. Pelosi signaled Sunday night that the House would vote on that article if Trump refuses to resign and Vice President Mike Pence won’t initiate other procedures to remove him.

“Because the timeframe is so short and the need is so immediate and an emergency, we will also proceed on a parallel path in terms of impeachment,” Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) told reporters Monday. “Whether impeachment can pass the United States Senate is not the issue.”

“There may well be a vote on impeachment on Wednesday," he said.

At a brief House session on Monday morning, the House formally accepted the resignation of Sergeant-at-Arms Paul Irving, who was partly responsible for security arrangements on Jan. 6. And moments later, Rep. Alex Mooney (R-W.Va.) blocked unanimous consideration of a resolution from Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) that would have urged Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment process to remove Trump from power. The House intends to vote on the resolution Tuesday.

Although some Democrats have voiced worry that impeaching Trump with just days left in his term could hamstring President-elect Joe Biden’s early weeks in office, momentum has only grown as new and disturbing footage of the violence wrought by the rioters has emerged. That footage included the beating of a Capitol Police officer, yanked out of the building by a crowd of Trump supporters. The officer in the video has not been identified, but it surfaced after the news that at least one officer, Brain Sicknick, died of injuries sustained during the onslaught.

Every new indication that the rioters included a more sophisticated contingent of insurrectionists has inflamed the House anew, even as Republicans have continued to express wariness, if not outright opposition, to impeachment.

 

Facing an armed terrorist insurrection with people seeking to kill you or to take you hostage in order to install Trump in a coup has a remarkably clarifying effect on your goal priorities, and I'm glad to see Democrats essentially united in getting this done.

So what happens in the Senate trial? Is it moot once Trump is out of office? John Cassidy at The New Yorker covers that scenario:

Given the Republican Party’s continued refusal to take responsibility for Trump, what can be done to bring a dangerous President to book? Some Democrats are concerned that starting the Senate trial as Biden takes office, which is the timetable that McConnell has put forward, could endanger the new Administration’s policy agenda and its hopes of getting its Cabinet nominees confirmed quickly. One option that Pelosi and her colleagues are exploring is delaying the impeachment trial in the Senate, perhaps for as long as two or three months. Under this scenario, which Representative James Clyburn, the third-ranking Democrat in the House, laid out on Sunday, the House would pass the article, or articles, of impeachment this week but then hold off on passing them along to the Senate. “Let’s give President-elect Biden the hundred days he needs to get his agenda off and running,” Clyburn, who is a close ally of Biden’s, said on Fox News on Sunday. “And maybe we will send the articles sometime after that.”

If the only goal of impeachment is to prevent Trump from running again in 2024, delaying a trial might be a defensible option. The danger is, though, that it might lessen the pressure on Senate Republicans to vote for a conviction. With many G.O.P. members already trying to wriggle away from their responsibilities in the immediate aftermath of Wednesday’s insurrection, how much less likely are they to answer the call in three months? Conceivably, a delayed trial could give Trump yet another burst of publicity at a moment when most Americans are hoping to be rid of him—and then end with him claiming to have been vindicated.

One other option that is worth considering, Eisen told me, is invoking Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which says that anybody who has called for an insurrection against the federal government can’t run for office. Trump’s actions certainly seem to satisfy the statute, and Section 5 of the Amendment gives Congress the power to enforce it. “That’s certainly something that should be in the mix,” Eisen said. “But we should lead with impeachment.”

What’s required is a way to punish Trump for his sedition, make sure he can’t run for President again, and deprive him of the oxygen he so craves. The permanent ban by Twitter goes a long way toward meeting the third goal, but the first two are arguably even more important.

In other democracies, a leader who tried to overthrow an election result and incited a violent insurrection might well be cooling his heels in prison by now. In this country, the job of policing the President falls largely on the legislative branch. For four years, it has failed dismally to carry out this task. Even after the unprecedented events of last week, it’s far from clear that Congress will prove up to the task now. But this time, surely, and for the sake of American democracy, Trump must be held accountable.

 

Sadly, it looks increasingly like Republicans in Congress will refuse to hold Trump accountable. As for New York or other states, we'll see.

 

But more is coming, I guarantee. 

The Coup-Coup Birds Came Home To Roost

Part of the process of justice for last week's attempted coup has to involve a through investigation into what the military, intelligence and police knew about Trump's plot to incite a violent terrorist mob to stop the electoral vote count with deadly force. The evidence was overwhelming that something terrible was going to happen, and failure after failure occurred that could have resulted in the deaths of dozens of lawmakers and staffers. It's time to know what the Capitol Police were told, and who told them what.

The FBI and the New York City Police Department passed information to U.S. Capitol Police about the possibility of violence during the protests Wednesday against the counting of the Electoral College vote, and the FBI even visited more than a dozen extremists already under investigation to urge them not to travel to Washington, senior law enforcement officials said.

The previously unreported details undercut the assertion by a top FBI official that officials had no indication that violence was a possibility, and they add to questions about what intelligence authorities had reviewed before the Capitol riot, which led to the death of an officer and four other people, including a rioter who was shot and killed by police.

"Social media is just part of a full intelligence picture, and while there was First Amendment-protected activity on social media to include some people making threats, to this point, investigators have not found that there was an organized plot to access the Capitol," a senior FBI official said.

It was immediately obvious after the Capitol was seized by a violent mob Wednesday that Capitol Police, whose job is to defend the facility and the lawmakers who work there, had completely misjudged the security threat. The chief of the force was quickly forced out of his job, as were other key legislative security officials.

As evidence mounts that some extremists had told the world what they had in mind through social media, questions are emerging about whether the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies took the postings seriously enough — and why, if they did, they didn't step in until well after the building was under attack.

Asked Friday whether the slow police response Wednesday was the result of an intelligence failure, the official who leads the FBI's Washington field office, Steven D'Antuono, said no. "There was no indication that there was anything [planned] other than First Amendment-protected activity," he said.

 

First Amendment-protected activity.

 

They're going to cover their failures with "well, free speech, so we couldn't have done a thing." 

Guess next time we have to wait until even more Capitol Police die defending the country from insurrection.

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

Missouri Democratic Rep. Cori Bush is the House Democrat from St. Louis, including Ferguson, Missouri. An activist and pastor, she ran for the House in 2018 and lost her primary to long-time Democratic Rep. Lacy Clay, but beat Clay her second time around last August and easily won election last November. She knows what being attacked by police is like, maced just a few months ago while at a demonstration in Missouri and she is not pulling any punches on dealing with the sedition caucus in the GOP.

On Wednesday, as I sat in the House gallery listening to my colleagues debate the certification of the electoral college votes, something prompted me to get up and leave. I left the chamber and quickly went to check on what was happening outside. The doors were locked, but as I stood on the second floor of the Capitol and looked out through windows in the doors, I could see Trump flags and Confederate flags gradually moving closer. I froze in disbelief. The next minute, my staffer was rushing me back to my office.

Once I was in my office and we secured the door, I felt a different kind of burn — this time inside. Watching on TV, we saw white supremacists stroll past Capitol Police, untouched and unscathed. Just minutes after we had locked our door, the mob entered the House Rotunda. The rioters broke windows, sat in the House speaker’s office and invaded the Senate floor.

There was no way to avoid the comparison or to duck the obvious answer: Would this have happened if the rioters were there to fight for Black lives rather than white supremacy? We’ve been tear-gassed for much less, beaten for much less and shot at for much less. We’ve been assaulted by law enforcement for much less.

But it’s clear to me that top law enforcement leaders on Capitol Hill had little interest in preventing this attempted insurrection. Videos have emerged of police taking selfies with protesters, walking them down the stairs and even opening gates for them. The front line of officers were not in riot gear, they were not wearing gas masks, they were not holding guns loaded with rubber bullets. And, above all else, there were no police dogs.

We faced police dogs when we fought for justice for Mike Brown in Ferguson in 2014. There were police dogs at protests for Black lives this year, from the East Coast to the West. The president himself tweeted in May that the “most vicious dogs” awaited protesters standing up for Black lives at the White House.

But there were no police dogs awaiting the white supremacists who gathered outside the Capitol. It was no coincidence that this tool of racial control was absent Wednesday, as rioters carried the flag of the slave-catcher’s Confederacy — and its modern manifestation, the Trump flag — through the House Rotunda.

Many have said that what transpired on Wednesday was not America. They are wrong. This is the America that Black people know. To declare that this is not America is to deny the reality that Republican members of the U.S. House and Senate incited this coup by treasonously working to overturn the results of the presidential election. It’s to deny the fact that one of my senators, Josh Hawley, went out of his way to salute the white supremacists before their attempted coup. It’s to deny that he appropriated the sign of Black power, the raised fist, into a white-supremacist salute — a fist he has never raised at a march for Black lives because he has never shown up to one. It’s to deny that what my Republican colleagues call “fraud” actually refers to the valid votes of Black, brown and Indigenous voters across this country who, in the midst of a pandemic that disproportionately kills us, overcame voter suppression in all of its forms to deliver an election victory for Joe Biden and Kamala D. Harris.

This is America, and it will continue to be America, until white supremacy is dismantled. Justice starts at removing each and every representative who incited this insurrection. I’ve unveiled my first piece of legislation that would do just that. We cannot denounce white supremacy and allow its endorsers to continue serving in our government.

 

Bush is introducing legislation this week to expel the sedition caucus member of the GOP that voted for Trump's coup. It will go to the House floor. And it will go on record.

If there's anyone who deserves to be expelled from the House, it's Qball nutjob Marjorie Taylor Greene, and gun fetishist Lauren Boebert.

Here's hoping.

StupidiNews!

• Naval search and rescue teams in Indonesia have recovered human remains after a Boeing 737-500 passenger jet crashed into the ocean Sunday shortly after takeoff with 62 people aboard. 
• Congressional lawmakers have been advised to get tested for COVID-19 after a staffer tested positive who exposed members sheltering from last week's coup attempt at the US Capitol.
• At least 23 are reported dead after police raided gang territory in Caracas, Venezuela, as President Maduro's anti-gang task force FAES conducted military operations in the La Vega favelas.
• US Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy says at least two dozen domestic terrorism cases have been opened in the wake of last week's coup attempt, US National Guard troops are already in DC.
• New York City Council is going after computerized hiring algorithms for possible discrimination, proposing employers disclose when software is used to judge candidates through video recognition.
  

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

The world's most dangerous malignant narcissist needs his adoration fix after getting kicked off social media Friday night, and confident that both Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell will prevent any plan to remove him from office and that the GOP will still do whatever he commands, the plan appears to be taking a victory lap on the media interview circuit and daring Republicans to try to run from the last four years.

According to two sources with knowledge of the matter, the president and several close advisers are now discussing the possibility of Trump sitting for multiple media interviews in the coming days, in an attempt to boast about his time in office, including with one potential interview they're hoping will focus on the Middle East deals he and his son-in-law, senior White House adviser Jared Kushner, helped to strike.

However, various current and former Trump officials who don’t think he should resign immediately feel that he should just get out of the picture now before President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration.

Asked if the president should resign, Barry Bennett, who served as a senior Trump adviser during the 2016 campaign, said on Saturday, “No. But go to Florida and stay. This is not a time to escalate the boiling anger across the country. Smart leaders will understand that anger on both sides is the real threat to our country. Not Trump. Escalation is not unlike what he did. We can’t afford to go any further down this road…If it’s not too late.”

Apparently this is going to start at the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas on Tuesday to brag about his wall, but I honestly hope this is all he does in the next ten days. Feeding his ego so that he doesn't lash out and incite another white supremacist insurrection is probably the best we can hope for since enough of Trump's enablers will remain in power to block any attempts to get rid of him, but at the most this will only occupy him for a day or two. If he mopes around Camp David or Mar-a-Lago for the rest of his term and just golfs and yells at the staff, we'll be lucky to escape with just the colossal damage to the Republic that we've already sustained.

Given the events of the last several days however, anyone who tells you they know for sure what's going to happen is lying to your face. His cultists aren't going away and regardless of what Trump says or does, his enablers in Congress, the hundreds of federal judges and thousands of executive agency loyalists that he's planted like landmines, the 6-3 Supreme Court, and his tens of millions of fanatical followers can still cause massive chaos and misery well into the Biden presidency, and even if we make it through the next ten days we still have a national pandemic that's killing 4,000 people a day and infecting 300,000 to deal with.

We could drag the country across the finish line on January 20th only to get run over by an oncoming truck, for sure. But my real fear is that we get hit by the truck before that date, and it's loaded with nitroglycerine, thermite, and napalm, and when the smoke clears there's not much of a republic left to try to piece together.

Just a blast crater from sea to shining sea.

Going Back To Move Forward

Democrats, to their credit, have now given up on the whole Obama-era "looking forward" plan and the proposed Biden "unity" plan and are finally facing the ugly reality that Trumpists will do whatever it takes to hold power, and that accountability and justice need to happen or that next time the coup will succeed.

 

Whether or not the House pursues impeachment charges against Mr. Trump for his role in inciting his supporters to storm the Capitol on Wednesday, many Democrats say that impeachment is not enough.

Once President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. takes office on Jan. 20, wide segments of his party are eager to see investigations and prosecutions of an array of Trump aides and allies — an effort, they say, that would bolster the rule of law after a presidency that weakened it and serve as a warning to future presidents that there will be consequences for illegal actions taken while in office.

The rioting at the Capitol has only intensified that desire. More than a dozen Democrats interviewed in recent days said the president’s role in inspiring the mob violence had prompted them to change their positions: They now want the Biden Justice Department to investigate the president and his aides.

“I was not on the investigate-and-prosecute train before yesterday,” Kathleen Sullivan, a former chairwoman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, said on Thursday. “However, undermining the very foundations of democracy and the Constitution is a crime that can’t be ignored.”

So far, Mr. Biden has not taken a position on impeachment, let alone the broader agenda of launching criminal investigations. He has said he would leave any decisions about it to his Justice Department, which he has promised will return to the pre-Trump norm of maintaining independence from the White House. His choice of Merrick B. Garland, a centrist judge, as his nominee for Attorney General is another indication of his more measured approach to pursuing investigations and indictments.

His stance reflects not only his politics but a natural inclination not to settle scores — much like Mr. Obama, whom Mr. Biden served for eight years as vice-president. Mr. Obama said shortly before his own inauguration that he believed the nation needed “to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

But interviews with more than 50 current and former Democratic elected officials, Democratic National Committee members and party activists found an overwhelming consensus across the party’s ideological spectrum toward holding Mr. Trump personally accountable and launching congressional and Justice Department investigations into him, his family and his top aides — not only for inciting last week’s violent mob at the Capitol but for a host of other actions during his presidency.

The transgressions they cite include collusion with Russia, tax fraud, illegal pressure on state elections officials, using federal offices for political activity and violation of the constitutional provision that prohibits a president from profiting from foreign governments.

A Georgia elections official on Saturday confirmed a third call Mr. Trump made to officials in the state trying to reverse Mr. Biden’s victory. The calls began with one to Gov. Brian Kemp in early December to berate him for certifying the state’s election results. The efforts to change election results could be construed as illegal attempts at election interference or other criminal violations, but legal experts said proving a case could be difficult.

Harry Reid, the former Senate majority leader, said Mr. Trump, former Attorney General Bill Barr and others need to be investigated by Mr. Biden’s Justice Department, though he warned that Mr. Biden himself should keep his distance from any prosecutions to avoid the appearance of politicizing them.

“There’s a desire from me to never hear from Trump again, but I don’t think the issue should be ignored,” Mr. Reid said during an interview on Friday.

The push for accountability for Mr. Trump and his allies is starkest in the party’s liberal wing, especially among progressive people of color who have watched the Trump administration direct the use of tear gas against demonstrators for racial justice, and threaten them with long prison terms.

“Absolutely Trump should do jail time,” said Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York. A Justice Department investigation, Mr. Bowman said, “needs to happen on Jan. 20, as soon as possible.”

If Harry Reid, about as much as a Senate Emeritus "elder statesman" centrist that the Dems have, and Jamaal Bowman, the newly-minted Bronx BLM firebrand who kicked Eliot Engel out on his ass after 32 years, are both calling for Justice Department investigations of Trump, his family, and his regime, well that's just about as wide a spectrum on the Democratic side as you can get.

 

And Americans want Trump gone. Now.

A majority of the country believes President Donald Trump should be removed before President-elect Joe Biden is sworn in on Jan. 20 and two-thirds hold him accountable for the violent insurrection on Capitol Hill, according to an ABC News/Ipsos poll released Sunday.

In the new survey, which was conducted by Ipsos in partnership with ABC News using Ipsos' Knowledge Panel, 56% of Americans think the sitting commander-in-chief should be removed from office before the official transfer of power in less than two weeks, while 43% say he should not. Among those who say Trump should not be removed immediately, nearly half (45%) nevertheless say his actions this week were wrong.

Ousting the current president before his term expires splits Americans along partisan lines, with 94% of Democrats and only 13% of Republicans supporting the move. A majority of independents -- 58% -- also back removing him.

Some thoughts, then:

Does Trump pardon himself, and will that hold up or will SCOTUS side with Trump?

Does Pence pardon a January 19th resigning Trump after Trump pardons everyone else (maybe including Pence?)

Since Dems only need 50 votes now (plus VP Kamala Harris) to confirm, what do Joe Manchin, Jon Tester, Kyrsten Sinema etc. want in return for appointing Garland to Justice?

 

Politico's Tim Alberta sums it up:

The stuff I've heard in the last 72 hours—from members of Congress, law enforcement friends, gun shop owners, MAGA devotees—is absolutely chilling.

We need to brace for a wave of violence in this country. Not just over the next couple of weeks, but over the next couple of years.

— Tim Alberta (@TimAlberta) January 10, 2021

 

We'll see just how right he is. As bad as 2020 was, folks...2021 is going to be worse.

Sunday Long Read: 12 Monkeys' Business

As the movie 12 Monkeys turned 25 last year, this week's Sunday Long Read is Eric Ducker's deep dive at The Ringer into the dystopian pandemic present that Terry Gilliam's film portrayed, and just how much the movie got right about where we were headed even back then.

There is a scene toward the end of 12 Monkeys in which James Cole sits in a 24-hour movie theater watching Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Cole, played by Bruce Willis, is not entirely certain whether he is a prisoner who “volunteered” to time travel from a future when 99 percent of the world’s population has been killed in a pandemic and the survivors live underground because the surface air is deadly, or whether he is just a man with a serious dissociative disorder. Next to him, applying a fake mustache to his face, is Dr. Kathryn Railly (played by Madeleine Stowe), his once doubtful psychiatrist who has become his coconspirator in investigating a group run by Jeffrey Goines (played by Brad Pitt) called the Army of the 12 Monkeys and their role in unleashing the virus on the planet.

Examining Kim Novak and James Stewart on screen, Cole is confused and agitated, his mind either scrambled by the effects of time travel or just in its natural state. He thinks he’s seen the movie before, maybe on TV when he was a kid, but something about it feels both familiar and unfamiliar. “It’s just like what’s happening with us,” he tells Railly. “Like the past, the movie never changes. It can’t change, but every time you see it, it seems different, because you’re different. You see different things.”

Arriving in select theaters at the end of 1995 before getting a wide release 25 years ago this week, 12 Monkeys was an immediate commercial success. Directed by Terry Gilliam, it was the middle installment of the three movies the iconoclastic filmmaker made for major American studios during the ’90s. But audiences quickly began to see 12 Monkeys differently.

In the midst of a wave of global natural disasters, film critic Elvis Mitchell wrote in a 2002 New York Times essay, “It’s as if the world has finally caught up to the lyric paranoid streaks in the imagination of the filmmaker Terry Gilliam.” In the ensuing decades, authoritarian-minded governments proliferated, environmental catastrophes continued, overpopulation went unabated, and the climate crisis neared the point of no return. More people started to feel like Cole, knowing witnesses to a civilization that seems destined to end during their lifetime. Writing for Vulture in 2018, Abraham Riesman called 12 Monkeys, “[O]ne of the most currently relevant pieces of science fiction ever committed to celluloid.”

And then came the coronavirus pandemic. At the time of this article’s publication, it’s estimated that COVID-19 is directly responsible for more than 1.8 million deaths, and that number is expected to continue to rise across the globe in the coming months, even as vaccines become more widely available. When lockdowns and restrictions were put in place during the first quarter of 2020, viewers started returning to 12 Monkeys or checking it out for the first time. “It had a whole new life,” says Charles Roven, one of the film’s producers. “It holds up really well.”

A TV adaptation of 12 Monkeys debuted at the start of 2015 and ran for four seasons on the Syfy network. Though the show is far different from the movie, it too has become a streaming favorite, even finding an audience for the first time in countries like India. “I certainly don’t love how topical our show has become,” says cocreator Terry Matalas, who estimates he saw Gilliam’s film in the theater three or four times when he was a student at Emerson College.

The movie Outbreak came out several months before 12 Monkeys, and journalist Richard Preston’s 1994 book The Hot Zone about lethal filoviruses was a national bestseller. Still, for most of the world’s population, a massive pandemic had not been a pressing concern since the Spanish Flu killed 50 million people between 1918 and 1920. Now there is a rising feeling that the next one won’t come a century from now. It could arrive much sooner and could be far worse. “I think the very first spoken words that aren’t voice-over in our show are, ‘It’s never been about if. It’s always been when,’” Matalas says. “When you start to really dissect that data, it’s terrifying. Right now we’re on the precipice of a vaccine, but are we truly ready for the next [pandemic]? I don’t think so.”

In 12 Monkeys, Railly has written a book called The Doomsday Syndrome and gives a lecture at a museum about madness and apocalyptic visions. She discusses the Cassandra complex, the idea taken from Greek legend about figures who know the future but whose warnings aren’t heeded, leading to what Railly describes as, “[T]he agony of foreknowledge combined with the impotence to do anything about it.” In the 25 years since its release, 12 Monkeys is increasingly seen as a Cassandra of its own kind.

“We told you so,” Gilliam says.

 

Watching Outbreak and reading The Hot Zone in college scared the crap out of me, but 12 Monkeys is the movie that made me uncomfortable around the idea of a pandemic, not about a virus itself, but how the world would utterly fail to respond to it.  The bad guy in the movie isn't the virus or even the Arm of the 12 Monkeys, but the people who made sure that the pandemic overwhelmed the world, and did it for their own selfish reasons.

And wouldn't you know it.

Here we are 25 years later.

 

You'll find the movie running on Hulu, HBO Max, or Amazon Prime if you have a subscription. It's worth watching again just to see how relevant it remains to today.

Retribution Execution, Con't

Back on Tuesday I noted that US Attorney for Northern Georgia, Byung "BJ" Pak, abruptly resigned for "unforeseen circumstances." Now we know why: Trump crucified him because he couldn't take out his rage on others by firing GOP Gov. Brian Kemp or GOP Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

White House officials pushed Atlanta’s top federal prosecutor to resign before Georgia’s U.S. Senate runoffs because President Trump was upset he wasn’t doing enough to investigate the president’s allegations of election fraud, people familiar with the matter said.

A senior Justice Department official, at the behest of the White House, called Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney Byung J. Pak and told him he needed to step down because he wasn’t pursuing vote-fraud allegations to Mr. Trump’s satisfaction, the people said.

Mr. Pak resigned abruptly on Monday—the day before the runoffs—saying in an early morning email to colleagues that his departure was due to “unforeseen circumstances.”

The pressure on Mr. Pak was part of Mr. Trump’s weekslong push to try to alter presidential election results favoring President-elect Joe Biden, which included his win in Georgia. Mr. Trump this week, following the U.S. Capitol riot, said he would leave office on Jan. 20 when Mr. Biden is inaugurated.

Recently departed Attorney General William Barr has said the Justice Department hadn’t found evidence of widespread voter fraud that could reverse Mr. Biden’s victory, including claims of fraud, ballot destruction and voting-machine manipulation.

 

 Surprise, right?

Everyone other than Donald Trump is expendable to Donald Trump. I don't know how much clearer than that I can be.

Trump went after other Georgia election officials to engineer his coup too.

President Trump urged Georgia’s lead elections investigator to “find the fraud” in a lengthy December phone call, saying the official would be a “national hero,” according to an individual familiar with the call who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the conversation.

Trump placed the call to the investigations chief for the Georgia secretary of state’s office shortly before Christmas — while the individual was leading an inquiry into allegations of ballot fraud in Cobb County, in the suburbs of Atlanta, according to people familiar with the episode.

The president’s attempts to intervene in an ongoing investigation could amount to obstruction of justice or other criminal violations, legal experts said, though they cautioned a case could be difficult to prove.

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger had launched the inquiry following allegations that Cobb election officials had improperly accepted mail ballots with signatures that did not match those on file — claims that state officials ultimately concluded had no merit.

In an interview with The Washington Post on Friday, Raffensperger confirmed that Trump had placed the Dec. 23 call. He said he was not familiar with the specifics of what the president said in the conversation with his chief investigator, but said it was inappropriate for Trump to have tried to intervene in the case.

“That was an ongoing investigation,” Raffensperger said. “I don’t believe that an elected official should be involved in that process.”

The Post is withholding the name of the investigator, who did not respond to repeated requests for comment, because of the risk of threats and harassment directed at election officials.

The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

 

Again, I was willing before Wednesday's events at least to entertain the notion that not making a martyr out of Trump would be better for the country in the long run, and that I still don't think Trump would be even indicted, let alone face actual justice.

But now, well, I have to be wrong, because Trump needs to absolutely be perp-walked into prison somewhere and we have to make it clear that these treason-happy assholes will be shown the door into the nearest jail cell.

Last Call For Looking Black At The Week

Black author and speaker Jim St. Germain sums up the week at Vulture, and nothing accomplishes that more effectively than the photo of this would-be revolutionary from Wednesday's terrorist attack right the hell here.

The picture, taken by Win McNamee of Getty Images, has circulated widely and generated many silly memes. In an Instagram Story by Jamie Foxx, the intruder is saying “Hi, mom! I made it!” I liked that one, but I prefer to think of him saying “Hi, mon,” like a member of the Jamaican bobsled team. Like all great photographs, the image fires the imagination. I believe it should be printed, framed, and hung in the National Portrait Gallery. In the background, you can see an enormous painting of George Washington displayed in a pompous gold frame. That’s the America white people think we live in — a beacon of democracy, a paragon of dignity. But the photograph itself is the America Black people know. An America where ignorant white people walk off with your shit and smile about it, secure in the knowledge that nothing bad will happen to them. An America built on the theft of labor, land, and life.

On Wednesday, Joe Biden insisted that the ridiculous and violent scene playing out at the Capitol was “not who we are.” Maybe that’s his truth, but it isn’t mine. When I was 15, I was arrested for a nonviolent drug offense. Thanks to Biden and the racist crime bill he sponsored back in 1994, the judge was required to take away my freedom. Like most of us, I ended up voting for Biden anyway, because if you’re Black in America, freedom is the right to choose your oppressor. This week, I figured I’d have to endure a day or two of white people talking about how the fabric of our union is strong. Then the barbarians arrived. They knocked over barriers, scaled the walls, put their boots up on Pelosi’s desk, posed for selfies with cops, got blazed in a senator’s office, and smeared their shit — their actual shit — in the hallways. They caused the world’s most powerful people to cower in the basement. They smashed in the windows like the bad guys breaking into Kevin McCallister’s mansion in Home Alone.

A lot of remarkable photographs emerged from the mayhem, but the Getty Image of my homie Getty, as some of us have taken to calling him, is special. If his hat didn’t say “45,” you might think he’d gone to the Capitol because he wanted to witness Biden’s confirmation. He’s got practical Asics. Skinny jeans. Golden surfer hair and a scarf. His smile is friendly, free of worry, content. It isn’t the bitter grimace of those “bad” white people — the deplorables I’m supposed to fear. It’s the carefree smile of the dad at the farmers’ market who doesn’t realize he just ran over my shoes with a stroller. It’s the smile of the dude who moved into my building and says he loves the neighborhood because it’s so culturally vibrant but is unaware that he’s living in an apartment my grandma could no longer afford. It’s Biden telling a group of Black leaders last month that he’s the “only white boy” who has stood up against white supremacy. It’s a face I know well, the face of unearned power, and it belongs to white people in both political parties.

As it turns out, that face has a name: Adam Christian Johnson. Records indicate he was arrested for a nonviolent drug offense when he was a teenager, just like I was, and got locked up again a year later for violating his probation. But things seem to have worked out well for him. He lives in a six-bedroom house on a golf course in southwest Florida with his wife, a family physician. According to the Bradenton Herald, he studied psychology at the University of South Florida and now makes and sells furniture, which may explain why he was so excited about his find. Over 300,000 Americans are dead from the coronavirus, unemployment is soaring, and this guy looks like he just secured a bag on Antiques Roadshow.

As someone who has survived violence, I’m not happy that five people died at the riot. But I can’t deny that this picture of Mr. Johnson gives me life. It reminds me of another classic American image — a white man dressed in blackface, flanked by velvet curtains with fancy gold trim. Do a Google image search for “the original Jim Crow,” and you’ll see it. Note the bugged-out eyes, the mindless grin, the hand held out in a cheerful wave. For years, white people portrayed us as happy, vulgar fools undeserving of the rights and dignity America supposedly represented to the world. Now the greasepaint has been wiped away, and white people are seeing that they are what they’ve always made us out to be. Some are embarrassed. Some are scared. It’s our turn to be entertained.

 

Straight up, Biden was never my first choice, but I never hesitated to vote for him in the primaries and again in the general here in KY this year when it became clear that the opposing choice was an authoritarian white supremacist fascist asshole. 

 

And yes, folks, the face in the picture is the face of white privilege I'm used to seeing, not the asshole rolling coal and flying the traitor confederate flag on the back of his rusted out Ford pickup because I know never to get within 100 feet of them, but the dude in that picture telling me he thinks I'm "surprisingly well-spoken" in the Zoom job interview, the one who has the loud phone conversation about why voting for Trump will help "all of them", the one who is screaming at city council in the viral video about masks violating the First Amendment.

It's not the racist uncle who has gone from FOX News to Newsmax that you've already disavowed that was at this terrorist shindig.  It's the partner at the firm, your brother-in-law you haven't talked to in a while, your youth pastor, your contractor buddy from the softball team, your kid's friend's dad or mom (you know, the one with the pool), it's that guy you went to high school with who has the really, really high number of hunting and fishing photos on Facebook.

So yeah, unmask those guys and have a good laugh at the clowns that they are.

Then help us deal with them.

Mitch's Final Act Of Cowardice

As the book closes on Mitch McConnell's reign as Senate Majority Leader, his final stroke of evil genius is delaying any Senate trial on House impeachment to 1 PM on January 20th, an hour after Trump's term expires, rendering the entire process null and void.

The document, which was first reported by The Washington Post, lays out how the Senate would proceed if the House approves articles of impeachment and transmits them to the upper chamber before or by Jan. 19, when senators are scheduled to resume regular business after the January recess.

McConnell says the most likely scenario if the House impeaches Trump in his final 12 days in office is for the Senate to receive a message from the lower chamber notifying it of the action on Jan. 19. That would then give the Senate the option of ordering the House managers to present those articles on the same day.

Senate Impeachment Rules require that at 1 p.m. on the day after the managers exhibit the articles, the Senate “must proceed to their consideration,” the memo states.

As a result, the Senate trial would not begin until one hour after President-elect Joe Biden takes the oath of office.

“The Senate trial would therefore begin after President Trump’s term has expired – either one hour after its expiration on Jan. 20, or twenty-five hours after its expiration on Jan. 21,” the memo states.

The document was confirmed by a source familiar with its contents.

McConnell’s memo notes that the Senate, which is scheduled to hold pro-forma sessions until Jan. 19, the day before Biden is to take the oath of office, cannot conduct any business during those pro-forma meetings without unanimous consent.

The GOP leader notes that would preclude the Senate from acting on any articles of impeachment received from the House until Biden is president, raising an implicit question about the point of such an exercise.

“It would require the consent of all 100 senators to conduct any business of any kind during the scheduled pro forma sessions prior to January 19, and therefore the consent of all 100 senators to begin acting on any articles of impeachment during those sessions,” the memo states.

The document notes the Senate “can receive a message announcing that the House has impeached the President” while the Senate is in recess, but the Secretary of the Senate wouldn’t notify the chamber of the message until the next regular session, which is scheduled for Jan. 19.

Mitch has won on this and he knows it. Even if there were 67 votes to remove Trump, and prevent him from ever holding office again, the Supreme Court would almost certainly rule that the Senate trial was legally moot and that Trump would remain eligible, especially after he pardons himself. It'll be years of legal wrangling ahead, and the state trials are still not certain, and the wrangling over that could take years too.

As I predicted earlier this year, I just don't see Trump held accountable in any way. He'll be back to plague us for a long time.

A Tale Of Capitol Offenses

The New Yorker's Zach Helfand records for posterity the harrowing experience of one Pelosi staffer on Wednesday's terrorist assault on the US Capitol.

I’m the floor director for Speaker Nancy Pelosi. My job is to make sure that the House floor runs properly. Any legislative procedure that comes into the chamber falls under my staff’s purview. I came to D.C. after college, in the nineties, and started waiting tables at California Pizza Kitchen while I figured out how to get a job. I remember, when I first started working on the Hill, someone said, “You’ll know when it’s time to leave when you don’t have that tingle when you see the Capitol.” Now I live a mile away, and when I walk to work the sun is behind me, shining on the Capitol, and when I walk out, if I turn around, I see the sun setting over the Capitol. It’s special.

Originally, we’d been planning on spending more than twenty-four hours in the chamber. When the Arizona challenge happened, the Senate paraded out. They took the certified ballots with them in these big, fancy brown boxes that have been used for years.

As the notices came in, I found my old boss, Congressman Jim McGovern, from Massachusetts. I said, “Hey, we might need you up in the chair, just hold tight.” He’s the chairman of the Rules Committee. He knows that sometimes the Speaker just needs a break.

All of a sudden, it hit. They say, “We need to bring the Speaker down.” I asked to not do this so fast that it’s chaotic. Let’s make it look normal. She was not expecting to come down. I said, “Ma’am, we’ve got to go.” We put Mr. McGovern up, she went out the doors, and she was out of my sight. The Majority Leader, the Majority Whip, and the Minority Whip, they were pulled out, too. That was when it really hit people.

It was a weird vibe. Some were calm, some getting agitated, and then you had a machismo from some people. The noise in the chamber picked up. People were really loud, really not listening. I went into the center of the chamber and just yelled, “Everyone sit down, stay calm, let’s get some information!”

Capitol police said, “They’re coming. They’re inside the building.” They told us to pull out escape hoods—the gas masks. They started pointing: “Lock that door, lock that door!” We helped the police move a couple of old, credenza-type bookshelves into place in front of the doors. We become a hermetically sealed room. You’re not supposed to be able to get in. Well, at some point you start hearing: Bang! A couple of members were there. They were going to protect our colleagues, protect our friends, and protect the chamber.

Capitol police decided we’re evacuating. They opened one of the doors into the Speaker’s lobby and started pushing people out. But up in the gallery there’s no easy way out. It’s literally like an obstacle course. I’m pointing and yelling, “Go, go, go! That way! Get through!” The banging on the front door is intensifying. It sounded violent. All of a sudden you hear a crack. It sounded like a gunshot. The police had their guns out. And I just sprinted out of the chamber.

We ran down some stairs, underground into these old, old spaces. Some older folks can’t move all that quickly. It took us a while, but we finally got to, essentially, a holding area.

We looked around the room. We didn’t know what was happening, but we knew the Capitol had been overrun. Someone would say, “We’re missing someone!” The Capitol police would try to find them. And then you have this din, the mechanical filter of a hundred and fifty gas masks—this high-pitched whirring. It sounded like a hundred and fifty kazoos.

It was a weird mix. Remember, this was everyone who’d been on the floor. In one corner, you had all the Republicans who think we stole the election. You can see people looking, thinking, The people outside are here because of what you’re doing. We were also concerned about the fact that many of them don’t wear masks. Some of them were saying they were glad the “protesters” were there. Everybody else, including many Republicans, was figuring out what’s happening, what’s going on with our institution, with our society, with our democracy. And how do we get back? We knew we had to finish that night. It was never a question of if—it was how. That’s part of my job. I can’t really get into this, but we have alternatives to the House chamber, if we need them.

Someone said, “Where are the boxes? Do we still have them?” One of the parliamentarians came over to me and said, “The ballot boxes are safe.” If they’d been stolen or destroyed, to be honest, I don’t know what happens.

I don't know how many times I'll have to say this in the days, months, and years ahead, but this was a planned coup operation. It failed but only just. If the terrorists had gotten their hands on congressional hostages or the boxes with the electoral vote ballots or both, we'd be talking about a very different scenario right now. 

We're going to find out that Trump had shifted executive authority to deploy or not to deploy the DC National Guard under the Pentagon's civilian Defense Policy Board that he stuffed full of loyalists late last year, loyalists like Corey Lewandowski and former 2016 campaign manager David Bossie. I told people then that it seemed like Trump was up to something foul, and five will get you six that the deliberate sabotage of the US Capitol's defense was driven by Trump's people.

They just needed time to get their hands on lawmakers and ballots. They could have forced them to vote for Trump, or destroyed the ballots and forced the issue back to GOP state legislatures, who would have then overturned the election, or forced an electoral vote by the House by state delegation.

Either way, Trump almost ended up winning. We're going to find out just how close we came.

And you know what the worst part is?  This is nowhere near over. Trump still has 10-11 days. The coup failed. Unless Trump fries like bologna in a skillet, the next Republican-led fascist coup will be successful.

There will be a next time, folks.