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Day Three — Yes, Trump planned the attack

Day Three

Yes, Trump planned the attack

February 11th, 2021

The third and final day of the House Manager presentation occurred today, and it was actually somewhat anticlimactic, not because of any lack on the part of the presenters, but because the first two days were amongst the most riveting and jarring days of presentation in the history of the Senate.

They set out to show that for the better part of a year, Trump knew he was going to lose, and set up the false narrative that if he lost, it meant the election was stolen. He hammered that idea to cheering crowds and millions of credulous twitter followers hundreds of time, perhaps thousands. “They [the insurrectionists] came because he [Trump] told them to,” congresswoman Diana DeGette said.

It was the Big Lie technique; repeat something simple often enough, and people will come to believe it. An inveterate reader of Adolf Hitler’s My World Order (it was his bedside reading for years, perhaps his only reading), he was familiar with the concept. Keep it simple. Say it all the time. Pretend it is an absolute truth, not to be questioned.

As the election neared, it was already an article of faith amongst his followers. Democrats were going to steal the election. Trump had inculcated the idea so thoroughly into his brainwashed followers that no amount of evidence could dissuade them. Not that Republicans overall did better in the election than expected. (Does anyone seriously think if Dems were stealing elections, McConnell and Greene would have won?).

At the same time, he was following another portion of the approach Hitler used to take power. He formed a legion of brownshirts—Proud Boys, 3 Percenters, Oath Keepers and other cryptofascistic groups, fed them the same toxic mix of hypernationalism, racism, and Got Mitt Uns, and carefully groomed them to be ready to take up arms on his behalf.

Independent of the Senate trial, we learned yesterday that between the election and January 6th, Trump’s campaign pumped $2.3 million to them, more than enough to secure paramilitary gear and transport hundreds of them to Washington. Today, in another court case deposition, CNN reported that Oath Keepers leader Jessica Watkins, “who planned and led others in the Capitol siege to attempt to stop the Biden presidency — believed she was responding to the call from then-President Donald Trump himself.” According to the filing, prosecutors said Watkins texted “I am concerned this is an elaborate trap. Unless the POTUS himself activates us, it’s not legit. The POTUS has the right to activate units too. If Trump asks me to come, I will. Otherwise, I can’t trust it.”

It’s safe to say that ‘POTUS’ activated them.

The Managers demolished what was left of the First Amendment argument Trump’s lawyers half-heartedly presented on the first day of the proceedings, noting that if anything, Trump’s deliberate lies about the election were intended to deprive the 80 million plus Americans who voted for Biden of their First Amendment rights.

Inciteful speech has never been protected by the First Amendment. If I go out on a street corner and start shouting “Hang Mike Pence!” the cops are going to arrest me. Yes, even now, when Mike Pence is no longer Vice President and I pose no credible threat. Had I shouted such things while standing near the Vice President with a rope in my hand and calling for his death, I would be looking at twenty years in federal prison. Trump clearly sent people to kill Mike Pence.

Unsaid at the trial but hanging in the air like a bison’s fart was the fact that Trump sent his mob to the Capitol knowing that people were likely to die. He didn’t care. He didn’t even care which people died. He has never expressed remorse for the five people who died, not once. I have a feeling, knowing his sociopathic narcissism, that he would have been flattered that people died in his name. The more, the better.

And the first two days of testimony made it clear that it came very close to being a bloodbath, and could have been far worse than it was. It could easily have been a Joe Abercrombie battle scene.

The Managers closed by noting what the Managers said in the first impeachment trial: if he gets away with it now, he’s going to do it again.

The Republicans probably won’t convict, and it will come back to haunt them. It will come back to haunt all of us.

At this point, there are four only types of Republicans that still support Trump:

1) Cowards 2) Traitors 3) Liars 4) Fools

Call your Republican representative and ask which of those four categories apply. In all likelihood, all four will for the Senators.

And keep working to crush the Trump movement and its brownshirts.

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Day Two — Trump’s Riot, Detailed

Day Two

Trump’s Riot, Detailed

February 10th, 2021

It was another horrific day for Trump and the Republicans, particularly those in the Senate. Everyone knew it was going to be rough, since today was reserved for the prosecuting House Managers. They proceeded to detail, over six staggering hours, just how horrible the assault on the Capitol was, the deliberation and planning Trump put into planning and inciting the rioters, just how close it came to becoming a mass murder event, and the utter lack of concern by Trump, not just for the people in the Capitol building, but his own allies and the police trying to defend the Capitol.

He takes a place in history alongside Guy Fawkes and Marinus Van der Lubbe, who also led assaults against the seats of government in history. On far thinner evidence than that presented against Trump today, the two were, respectively, burned at the stake and beheaded. We live in more humane times, and while it’s unlikely the pathetic filth of the GOP will permit him to be convicted by the Senate, he will face criminal charges, and he will die in prison.

He will die in prison. That is his fate, bought and paid for. He may face dozens of other charges from his long, sordid criminal life, but the testimony today will ensure that he will never be a free man after a true jury has heard what was presented by the House managers today.

For those of you who couldn’t watch today, I strongly urge getting a transcript, or at the very least watching the cable news recaps. The detail of the explanation of events, and the corroborating evidence, are incredible.

Perhaps the most jarring element of all was the recordings that showed the true nature of the beast that Trump unleashed. Many of the insurrectionists who were the first to arrive came in full paramilitary gear, and a terrifying array of weaponry. Some had hand-ties. Some had clubs and spears. One thoughtfully brought along a hangman’s noose. These are not hallmarks of a peaceful protest. Some of them came determined to kill Democrats and Republicans that Trump had turned on.

As I watched, the hoary term “baying of the mob” kept coming to mind. Most of us have only heard it in movies and TV shows, and perhaps thought of it something invented by Hollywood just to add a sense of dread to the scene. It isn’t. Not in real life, not in the US Capitol. It was a mob, and the inchoate shouts of rage and glee were the epitome of the phrase, “the baying of the mob.” This was a group of people determined to harm, determined to murder. Some passed along encouraging tweets from Trump encouraging and egging them on. They wanted to hang Mike Pence. They wanted to “shoot Nancy in the friggin’ brain.” There were happy shouts as police scrambled back, shouts for police and Capitol staff to tell them where the Congressionals were hiding. The video removed any doubt that they were wise to hide—even the scum that supported the rioters. Their treason did not make them safe because mobs don’t care about niceties such as “for us or against us.”

The House Managers did an amazing job of showing how Trump primed his violent and extremist fans and ensured that they came to Washington the day of the vote certification with the specific intent of trying to intimidate Congress into overturning the results of the election. It was all out in the open, in social media, and in the IMs traded amongst the rioters. It’s indicated by the widespread warnings of possible violence and Trump’s refusal to provide National Guard coverage. Today Open Secrets had an explosive article detailing payments from the Trump campaign to leaders of the riots in the weeks prior to the attack.

While most Republican Senators at least pretended to be attentive, there were obvious exceptions. Josh Hawley, freshman and professional dirtbag, according to writer Chip Franklin. “…is ignoring the trial reading stuff that has nothing to do with the impeachment… even sitting with his legs up on the seat in front of him. If this gets you kicked out of Biology class, why doesn’t it get him kicked out of the Senate?” Hawley tried claiming he actually was paying attention and reading notes on the trial, but it’s pretty unlikely. Chuck Grassley had an Ipad in his desk in contravention of Senate rules. It’s problematical as to whether Grassley was being contemptuous or simply didn’t understand what was going on, but I’m sure he levelled up several times in his favorite game. Rick Scott, demonstrating the moral and intellectual vacuity that is his trademark, sneered that the proceedings were “a waste of time.”

The only sign of moral outrage amongst Republicans came from Utah’s Mike Lee, who huffed indignantly that stories that he received calls from Trump intended for the intellectual giant Tommy Tuberville and proceeded to pass his phone to Tommy so he could get his marching orders from Trump were totally untrue. Unfortunately, his own chief aide told CNN the story, back on January 8th. CNN reported back then, “Lee picked up the phone and Trump identified himself, and it became clear he was looking for Tuberville and had been given the wrong number. Lee, keeping the President on hold, went to find his colleague and handed Tuberville his phone, telling him the President was on the line and had been trying to reach him.”

Oops. Well maybe you’ll do better the next time one of the rat herd you’re in need frantic lies to stay afloat.

Today’s proceeding won’t change many minds amongst Trump supporters, if only because they will have refused to watch, but for the rest of us, it removes any residual doubt in anyone’s mind about the precalculation and viciousness of Trump’s complicity.

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Day One — The Trial of Trump

Day One

The Trial of Trump

“You will not hear any member of the team representing former Pres. Trump say anything but in the strongest possible way denounce the violence of the rioters,” — Bruce Castor, Junior. Defending Trump at the Senate trial.

“So go home. We love you. You’re very special.” — Trump, to those same rioters.

If the GOP had just 17 Senators with integrity, courage, and patriotism, Trump’s long criminal career would have died this morning. It remains to be seen if 1 in 3 Republicans has any personal decency left, but in the eyes of the public, the already deeply-unpopular ex-President took a fatal blow today.

The House managers prosecuting Trump began with a ten minute video of the riots, juxtaposed with Trump’s speech urging them to go to the Capitol and “fight to save our country.” If you’ve been in a cave and not seen it, you can view it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtnBvOqEgbw&feature=youtu.be It’s extraordinary. It’s irrefutable proof of Trump’s complicity and guilt.

Jamie Raskin, leader of the House management team, followed it with what turned into a breaktakingly brilliant exposition of whether the trial was constitutional, and why it was so utterly necessary (diplomatically omitting the large possibility that a large majority of Republican Senators will rise to the absolute minimum of civic duty expected of every loyal citizen in this country) He began by saying, “You ask what a high crime and misdemeanor is under our Constitution? That’s a high crime and misdemeanor. If that’s not an impeachable offense, then there’s no such thing.”

“President Trump may not know much about the Framers, but they knew a lot about him,” Raskin explained how the founders, Hamilton in particular, realized that democracy would inevitable produce corrupt fools and thieves. Hamilton wrote, “”When a man unprincipled in private life[,] desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper . . . despotic in his ordinary demeanour — known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty — when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity — to join in the cry of danger to liberty — to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion — to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day — It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’” Trump’s impeachment team were dryly aware of it, with one quipping that he was going to warn the Senate that they stood to reap the whirlwind, a biblical allusion, but discovered the phrase had “already been taken.” It stood out as the only witty or clever thing the Trump representatives had to say today.

Another House management member, Joe Neguse, observed that not only was there precedent for impeaching officials after they had left office, but coined an arresting phrase that is sure to stick in the public mind: “The January Exception.” The premise is that if you can’t try officials for high crimes and misdemeanors committed in the waning days of their terms, then any official will feel free to commit such misdeeds and then just run out the clock, knowing that once out of office, they couldn’t be punished.

David Cicilline then noted that Trump was continuing to insist the election was stolen after the riots, showing an utter lack of remorse for the violence and damage done in his name. One of the most memorable moments in his presentation came when he said, “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!” Every time I read that tweet, it chills me to the core. The president of the United States sided with the insurrectionists.

Raskin then took over, recounting that the day before the assault on the Capitol, he had just buried his son. “the saddest day of my life.” Raskin had brought his young daughter with him to the Capitol to share her grief and loss, and after the frightening hours they were separated, told her, “it would not be like this again” when she returned.

Raskin, now crying, said his daughter told him, “Dad, I don’t want to come back to the Capitol.” It was one of the most profoundly moving moments I’ve ever seen in Congress. I was crying.

The Trump team seemed at a loss after that presentation. Bruce Castor argued that the trial was an attack on free speech, even though the trial is on incitement to riot, which has never been protected by the First Amendment. He made the truly bizarre statement that if the Senate really felt Trump had done that, they should arrest him. Something the Senate isn’t empowered to do. All they can do is try him—which Castor seemed to think was overstepping. His presentation was a bit of a mess, really. He reminded me of nothing so much as a schoolboy giving a book report on a book he had not read. Only where a kid might have to figure out how Captain Ahab met with a fishing accident for five minutes, Castor had to drone on for a full hour with nothing to say, which he said, over and over. Even Alan Dershowitz, a master of barristeric obfuscation, couldn’t make head nor tails of what Castor was saying. There’s an unconfirmed report that Trump, watching from Mir-A-Lago, was screaming in impotent rage at his performance. Rage and fear look good on the face of Donald J. Trump.

David Schoen then took the floor, arguing that convicting Trump would not unify the country, but could even lead to civil war. Apparently someone forgot to tell him that many of the clowns attacking the Capitol wore T-Shirts that said “Civil War II: January 6th, 2021”. He then proceeded to flat-out lie, saying that Nancy Pelosi had demanded the trial take place after Trump left office. I would have loved to see the expression on Mitch McConnell’s face when he said that.

Schoen, an observant Jew, had brought his religion to the forefront already, first demanding that the trial be recessed on Friday for his Sabbath, and when the Senate acceded, bizarrely backtracked and said it was ok to have the Friday session. During the session today, he put his hand on his head when sipping from a glass of water, observing his belief that the head must be covered when drinking. Normally it wouldn’t be worthy of mention, but combined with the weird backtracking and his performance today, it probably left a lot of Jews in the country wishing he hadn’t made his Judaism such a prominent feature in a trial that is bound to put him in a bad light.

He tried claiming the assault was a hoax, made by Hollywood to put Trump in a negative light. No, really.

Castor returned, continuing a policy of trying to defuse the interest in the case by being as soporifically incoherent as possible.

It was the most one-sided set of opening arguments since Godzilla vs. Bambi.

Donald Trump may be the defendant, but it’s the GOP who are really on trial.

Today did them no favors.

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First Week of February — Second half of winter

First Week of February

Second half of winter

February 7th, 2021

There’s going to be a traffic jam at Mars this week, which is a bit disconcerting. Three craft are expected to arrive in the next ten days. The first one, tomorrow, is the United Arab Emirates’ first attempt at Mars exploration. It’s going to drop into orbit around Mars tomorrow, and spend the next few years analyzing the Martian atmosphere, looking for signs of any biological activity (methane, for instance) and perhaps determining what became of 99% of the atmosphere which Mars lost.

The following day, the Chinese effort weighs in. Dubbed Tianwen-1, or “Quest for Heavenly Truth”, it’s perhaps the most lyrically named of all the Martian craft, especially after the flat invocations of Horatio Alger wet dreams that adorn most American craft, or the English effort named after a cute but annoying breed of dog. (And yes, I know it was Darwin’s ship—don’t write). For a first effort, it’s ambitious in ways only the Chinese can manage these days. It will orbit Mars for three months, remotely surveying the surface before launching a small rover to the surface.

The US effort is another Horatio Alger invocation, Perseverance. It’s a full one ton rover, by far the largest yet, and will have the most dramatic landing, especially since it will be a full seven minutes before anyone knows its fate. Among other things, it will collect rock samples to be picked up by a player to be named later.

The reason for the log jam is that the shortest and most effective transit between the two planets occurred last summer, something that happens every 22 months, and nobody wanted to wait that long for holiday rates.

So if you want to visualize what Mars looks like right now, just turn on an old computer running Windows 3. Wait for the screen saver to pop up. All those flying toasters?

Yup, that’s about what Mars looks like right now. Hopefully all three will settle into their various assigned niches and be making delicious toast by the twentieth or so.

On an even stranger and more alien planet, the trial of Donald John Trump in the US Senate begins. The single charge is insurrection. Trump won’t testify, which is a pity; America sort of misses the ongoing circus/zoo that was life under Trump now that he no longer has the power to get us all killed. We can all have fun watching the Republicans huff in moral outrage as they jettison any final shreds of actual morality.

I’m fairly sure that there’s no life on Mars other than what rode along on the various craft that have landed there. We may find viruses on Mars, and if one of the happens to be COVID-19, we’ll know that we infected the planet. Now, admittedly I would like to be wrong about native life on Mars—I am old enough to remember the old John Carter stories and the notion that Mars had canals. If there is life, and assuming all three craft arrive successfully, we might actually know in the next year or so. That would definitely make up for the Canadian Football league season being canceled last year.

I wonder if we could send Trump to Mars? Tell him the whole damn planet is unclaimed, there’s no zoning regulations, and he can build whatever he wants. If he encounters other difficulties, such as lack of oxygen, temperatures colder than Antarctica, bone-melting radiation, or a dusting of perchlorates all over the planet, well, he should have done the reading. It was in the intelligence reports. I mean, if we’re going to contaminate the planet anyway…

The future isn’t as grim as it appeared scant weeks ago. Biden promised 100 million doses in the first hundred days, and after 16 days, 34.5 million had been administered. Biden caught flak from both sides on that promise, with one side saying it was a ridiculously optimistic forecast, and the other noting that it would be almost two full years to get everyone both their innoculations. However, COVID is fighting back, as expected. The new South African strain is somewhat unaffected by the shots. The good news is that it is affected enough that the mortality rate will be very low. But you know, that’s evolution. Build a better mousetrap, and eventually you get better mice. COVID is going to become part of our lives, the way Influenza has. Since we, too, are creatures of evolution, we’ll adapt, too.

Climate change is a far more serious challenge, and we’re pretty much out of time. The damage that has been done has yet to arrive, and there’s no turning back. No matter what changes or advancements we make, costs will be in the trillions of dollars and millions of lives over the next decade, and may worsen after that. But we are making advances in non-carbon energy and energy storage, and in the wake of Biden’s pledge to have an all-electric federal fleet, GM voted to be all electric by 2035.

Our grandchildren won’t be grateful that we screwed around for so long, but maybe we wised up soon enough that some of us will have grandchildren to sneer at us. The alternative is worse.

Oh, and this is America’s highest and most solemn religious holiday today, and my fearless forecast is that one team will win and the other will lose. That sounds boring as hell, so I’m not paying attention.

The landing of Perseverance is going to be much more interesting.

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M4A — Making a medical system for the United States

January 31st, 2021

Joe Biden is off to a promising start. Nobody outside of Qtrumpville disputes that. He’s signed dozens of executive orders undoing many of the most hateful and cruel executive orders Trump signed. He plans to use the Reconciliation process to get a solid COVID relief bill through the Senate, and it looks like he has the 50 votes needed. Due to a quirk in the annual budgeting process (caused, ironically, by Republican intransigence) he’ll get a second opportunity this spring to use the reconciliation process, and various high-priority and dire items need to be addressed. Climate crisis, infrastructure, education, voting reform, campaign financing reform, minimum wage, racial justice…it seems an endless list, indicative of a nation left reeling and on the ropes by the nihilistic fascists of the GOP.

Major health care reform is very high on that long, long list of things that need to be done. The American system is the worst in the developed world, cruel, inefficient, and devoted not to treating the ill and injured, but to lining the pockets of insurance companies, the Catholic Church (which owns a majority of hospitals in America), lawyers, medical suppliers, and the pharmaceutical companies. It’s a disgrace, one in which people are dying because they can’t afford insulin and other common drugs necessary to treat the sorts of illnesses that are commonplace.

It’s cruel and viciously inefficient, but the medical profiteers don’t care: it’s a feature, not a flaw, because it enhances profits. And they use a small portion of those profits to buy up whores in Congress eager to sell out the United States because they love America. (America without the United States is just a wasted patch of land separating Canada from Mexico, but with the pretense of a nation in place, it is a cash cow for billionaires and international corporations.)

Medicare For All, the simple expansion to provide Medicare for all residents of America, is the easiest answer. The profiteers will fight it tooth and nail, of course, since they stand to lose trillions in profits, and will send their soulless minions out to spend billions of dollars assuring the American people that expansion of a largely successful and comparatively efficient system will turn the US into a Soviet wasteland in which people die because they can’t afford aspirin. Something like what we have now, only the party apparatchiks are corporate and church, rather than the state. A lot of businesses that don’t have a thing to do with health care will fight it because controlling their employees’ access to health care gives them more power over those employees, and a controlled workforce is a good thing.

In reality, Medicare for All will be a huge step forward. Various projections, even those provided by private insurance companies, indicate savings to the nation of anywhere from a half a trillion a year all the way up to 3.5 trillion.

Why such a huge range in estimated savings? Part of it is bias on the part of who is doing the estimating, of course. Aetna and Bernie Sanders could come up with the same proposals and data and be quite far apart on their hypothetical bottom lines. And private medical providers like to continue to keep their own presence in because profits. They know that a unified health coverage would save billions just in paperwork and redundancy alone.

But the biggest item of all is the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003, hooted through by Republicans in Congress and gleefully signed by Bush the Lessor.

Bad enough that it provides a raft of subsidies and entitlements to Big Pharma. A lot of those go to underwrite research of new drugs, which quickly became a joke since it’s mostly public universities and overseas firms that do the actual research, whereas “research” by American pharmaceuticals often amounts to legal studies on how to extend a trademark on a profitable drug by making it mint flavored or something.

Another provision was Medicare Part D, which mandated private insurance or personal wealth for drugs for amounts over $2,400 a year, creating an often insurmountable burden on retirees and low-wage workers. Obamacare lessened the burden, but didn’t get rid of it. It must go.

Finally, the Act forbade the government from negotiating drug prices with the pharmaceutical companies. Can you imagine running a business where you cannot bargain shop? Maybe in the Soviet Union, or its private sector alternate, the United States. But the provision left the companies free to charge whatever the hell they wanted, with the grotesque results we see today.

Billy Tauzin, R-LA, pushed through that particular poison pill, and was lavishly rewarded after he retired from Congress the following year.

Getting rid of the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act alone will save trillions. Combining it with Medicare for All, and you would see the United States going from the worst medical system in the developed world to the best, where it was before Nixon inflicted HMOs on us and the US began a precipitous slide into a capitalistic nightmare of gouging, greed, and inefficiency.

It’s problematic what Biden can do against the trillions that will be spent to defend those profits, and the fascist lapdogs in the Republican caucus, but he can at the very least be a bully pulpit, informing and educating people as to what a parasitic rip off the medical system is, and who makes all the money denying us basic medical care. Anyone who says medical care isn’t a right is a thief, or a lickspittle for thieves.

We may never have a better opportunity to get these thieves off our backs.

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Biden Our Time — Good Trumps Evil

Biden Our Time

Good Trumps Evil

January 21st 2021

At 9:01am PST yesterday I posted a one-word post on Facebook.

The post said, “WHEW!”

It might be the only all-caps post I’ll ever make, since I regard people who post in all-caps to be total idiots. I am quite capable of attaining truly sublime levels of idiocy without artificial aids from my caps-lock key, thank you very much.

We all expected things to turn weird and disgusting between the election and inauguration day, and of course things did. And yes, there were a lot of grim things. COVID continued to explode, with the death toll now well over 400,000, and the Trump regime bungled the vaccine rollout. Trump gleefully sabotaged Open Skies and other treaties, giving a gleeful Vladimir Putin an entire basket of tactical Easter eggs. They had an insurrectionist attack on the Capitol and comprised, for the most part, of meth heads trying to play soldier and absolutely lunatic conspiracy theory freaks. Even more troubling, we discovered that much of the Republican party would rather destroy the United States than share power with those of the wrong race, or the wrong religion, or who were simply guilty of not being rich.

If one good thing came of the Trump regime, it was that he forced America to look in the mirror, and learn that it’s really no better than any other country, and can no longer pretend to be a shining beacon of reason and ethics. Not that it ever really could, but the facade had been torn away.

I don’t envy Joe Biden. He took office yesterday facing a national crisis every bit as great as the one Franklin Roosevelt faced in March of 1933. FDR only had to face the First Great Depression. Biden is facing the Second Great Depression, along with the pandemic, the worst since 1919, and an opposition that is anything but loyal; a large chunk of the GOP leadership are seditionists at best, traitors at worst.

I’m sure I’ll oppose Biden on some items, sometimes vehemently. But unlike his predecessor, I won’t be questioning his loyalty, his courage, or his good intentions. That’s a huge improvement right there. Trump is filth. Biden is not.

I’m having grim fun watching the GOP writhe and twist. The militias have come face to face with the fact that no coup can succeed without popular support. Power comes, not from the barrel of a gun, but the will of the people. It’s something the fairy-tale stories about overthrowing evil kings and the like often miss; no regime happens in a vacuum. You need, at the very least, the support of one third of the population, and at least another third willing to not take up arms against you. When 3/4s of the population are openly disgusted with you and want to throw you in jail (or under a guillotine) then your cause is lost. Most people hate the so-called militias, with their open embrace of Nazism and white superiority. Theirs is the philosophy of war, of death camps, of genocides. A large majority of Americans are better than that, and won’t fall to that level except under the circumstances that led to the French Revolution, the Soviet revolution, the Putsch and rise of Hitler, or the final disintegration of the USSR. We aren’t there yet, and with any luck, we won’t be.

The QAnon conspiracy nuts have to come to grips with the fact that Trump isn’t going to be a God-Emperor here to save us from the utterly imaginary depredations of the Clintons, Obama, or the lizard people. Quite a few of them hit a wall of reality beginning on the sixth of January and crashed and burned with the sight of Biden taking the oath of office. Q himself apparently stopped posting shortly after the election. Many will just find a new form of insanity to embrace, but quite a few are wailing that they were misled and lied to, and that their new religion failed them. I imagine Christianity must have faced a similar setback when Jesus’ prediction that many of those living would see his return failed to come to pass. In other words, don’t expect QAnon to just go away. The ability to rationalize is deep amongst the deluded and the insane.

The the ‘sane’ part of the GOP, the ‘good Germans’ are popping up all over the place. “Oh, I never supported Trump.” “I just went along because I was afraid.” “I was just following orders.” Suddenly, they want to talk about unity, negotiation, and compromise. There may even be some who are acting in good faith, but it’s a sure bet that most are just trying to salvage what they can for the ruins of their party, and are probing Biden and the Democratic Party for any signs of weakness. A favorite seems to be “Well, 74 million people voted for Trump and you can’t ignore them.” The reality is 81 million people voted for Biden, and unlike Trump won’t be out to viciously take revenge on the Trump voters. Biden isn’t going to refuse aid to red states, and he isn’t going to address the pandemic only in states that voted for him. He isn’t Trump. He isn’t a monster.

To the Trump voters I say, “Biden is here to govern, not rule. He isn’t going to make you second-class citizens because of how you voted. He isn’t going to turn America into a Soviet wasteland, no matter what the high-paid liars on the right wing media say. He is going to make changes, and you may not like all of them, but if you have any honesty, any decency, you’ll reserve judgment and see what the changes mean in your lives, your work, your schools, your health care and your country. You don’t own America, but America exists to serve you, and Biden seems to be totally aware of that.

“We tried your way, and it was a catastrophe. Trump was the worst president in our history. Expect better with Biden.”

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Six Days — Countdown to the end of the Trump era

Six Days

Countdown to the end of the Trump era

January 14th 2021

Even without the attempted coup at the Capitol last week, everyone would be on tenterhooks right now. While the threat of any significant violence strikes me as overblown—Gravy Seals and Meal Team Sucks against 20,000 police, National Guard and the Army—there’s little doubt in anyone’s mind that Donald Trump is engaged in what psychiatrists refer to as decompensation. That’s the utter breakdown of a world created by a neurotic and/or psychotic person in the face of implacable reality. Trump is learning, at the end, that he is not widely loved and admired, and his efforts to dominate and bully people is at an end. Not only that, but next week the last of his power vanishes, and he must account for his crimes. He has suffered humiliation after humiliation, from losing the election by a huge margin (and finally having to admit it, if only to himself) to his second impeachment, and the horror of most of the nation at his effort to violently overthrow the election.

Decompensation is a psychological crisis. It results in severe depression, psychotic rage, and a blind lashing out at enemies, real and imagined. It often results in suicide, violence, and/or unbridled acting out, often on the same level as the tantrum of a two-year old.

Case in point: Mike Pence was the most servile lickspittle of all of Trump’s administration. When Pence had to admit that he couldn’t carry out an impossible demand of somehow overturning the Electoral College vote, Trump sent the baying mob to hang Mike Pence. His own vice-president.

The danger signs are so clear and immediate that Congress and the armed forces have (hopefully) taken steps to neutralize some of the destruction a US President is normally capable of. At this hour, it’s not clear that the military will accept orders from their commander-in-chief. In an extraordinary communiqué, the Joint Chiefs of Staff announced they would not participate in any efforts by Trump to reverse the results of the election or prevent President-Elect Joe Biden from taking office.

Hopefully, that addresses another very real fear—that Trump might ignite a major war with Iran or perhaps China as an excuse to declare Martial Law and use that to try to maintain his role as President. Or provoke a domestic crisis (such as the attack on the Capitol) to the same end.

I’ve said for many years that Trump’s best features are his cowardice and his incompetence. He’s great at bullying people, but hopeless at managing them. He demands loyalty but offers none in return.

An amazing example of that trait is happening with the hapless Rudy Giuliani. After offering the barely-qualified Giuliani $20,000 an hour to represent him in court cases, he left it out that being dissatisfied with Rudy’s ability to win any court cases where there was no supporting evidence or even rationale, he wasn’t going to pay Rudy. This the same day he asked Giuliani to lead his legal team in his second impeachment trial in the Senate. (Honestly, I can’t believe I’m writing this stuff. My keyboard wants to crawl under my desk in shame. But it’s all real.)

Trump seems incapable of formulating a business plan, let alone a coherent policy for running a huge nation, and it’s no surprise to anyone familiar with his actual record as a businessman that he would be an utter and inept failure as a president. He doesn’t have the mental wherewithal or the emotional flexibility to deal with crises, even those that are self-generated. His utter inability to address the marches during the spring and summer, or the pandemic, are absolutely true to type. He never had to deal with the huge messes he created throughout his tawdry life from lack of discipline or intelligence, leaving those to an army of Michael Cohens, but as president he created messes too big and too immediate for anyone to brush away.

Having finally realized that he went too far in sending that mob to the Capitol, he gave a scathing denunciation of the violence and damage the mob caused. Trump has made a living out of pissing on people and telling them it’s holy water, but I doubt this particular mob is going to be too pleased, especially since hundreds of them are going to go to jail, branded as traitors, and the thousands more who did nothing worse than protest will be tarred with the same brush. I semi-joked the other day that Q was going to have to explain to his circus of freaks and psychotics that Donald Trump had sold out and joined the deep state conspiracy to destroy Donald Trump.

I’m cautiously optimistic that when President Joe Biden enters the Oval Office (possibly to find a large mound of Donald’s shit on the Resolute desk), it will be without major incident, and only a few inchoate demonstrations on the fringes of the military perimeter and around a few state Capitols.

As for Trump, he may be arrested the same day or at least detained on what we in California call a 5150; restrained because he presents a danger to himself and others. The Southern District of New York supposedly has a fire hose of criminal charges awaiting Trump. And that’s just the beginning.

That’s why Trump has been so desperate and so frightened that he’s willing to destroy the country to remain in office: he faces ruin and prison the minute he stops being President. I have no sympathy: it’s all self-inflicted, and he did immense damage to many people on the way.

If it weren’t for the knee-jerk servility Americans have toward any self-proclaimed successful capitalist, Trump would have never been anything other than a bad joke, in and out of prison on various scams and petty thefts. I doubt people in general will learn from his example, although the lesson is immediate: wealth does not equate to wisdom, honesty, or decency. It never has, and it never will.

In the end, Trump, by becoming President, showed the world what he really was.

And we’ll be paying for that for many years.

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Keeping it Lit — Fighting the darkness

Keeping it Lit

Fighting the darkness

January 9th 2021

It was January 6th, and just about the time strange things began happening on Capitol Hill, I turned to my wife and said it was about time to take down the Solstice Tree. The tree itself isn’t anything fancy: a 4’ artificial pine with white LEDs, supplemented by a strip of USB string lights that can flicker, flash, cycle through seven colors and all that neat stuff. We usually take it down about the 5th or so, when we are coming out of what I think of as our Solstice trough. The sunsets already started getting later back around December 15th, and the sunrises started becoming earlier about the 4th of January. It’s all up hill from here. There were also two family birthdays on the 5th and 6th, and that felt like the closure of the holiday season.

My wife looked at the images of the bizarre people trying to overthrow the government and said slowly, “I think I would like to keep the tree up until the 21st this year.”

I didn’t need to ask what she meant. I had already told some people that I wouldn’t consider 2020 to be really over until Inauguration Day, and screw what the calendar thought.

So the tree is still next to my desk, and still lit, and it will stay that way until Joe Biden says, “So help me God” and the nightmare of Trump is officially over. It’s the symbol of hope during a very dark and scary time.

The nation is scrambling, somewhat belatedly, to contain the damage Trump has done. Pelosi and the Joint Chiefs of Staff have sat down and discussed what to do if Trump orders a military action, whether against Iran, China, or Los Angeles, or in the event he wants to launch some nukes. That means the US military is effectively paralyzed for the next 11 days, but that seems a small price to pay if it prevents the most egregious land war yet, or worse, a nuclear conflagration. While that represents a possible exploit for bad actors like Putin or Xi, that it is only eleven days should give them pause. There’s also the fact that Mike Pence is already acting president in all but name (it was he, and not Trump, who finally authorized the National Guard to go into Washington DC and quell the insurrection) and I suspect the Pentagon has quietly agreed to take orders from him, and not the madman in the White House.

Trump’s flathead followers are horrified to learn that they are not the spearhead of a vast national upwelling intent on elevating Trump to dictator for life. The events sparked national outrage on a level not seen since the Civil War. It’s one thing to protest; to invade Congress, kill people, smash property and loot desks, and desecrate national icons crossed a bloody red line. The sight of Confederate flags—the rags of traitors and slavers—being waved in the Rotunda sickened and disgusted most Americans. One group tried, without success, to replace the US flag atop the building with a “Trump 2020” flag.

Trump, who egged them on, promising to march with them to the Capitol, immediately fled, and the next day gave a speech condemning the rioters and looters and calling for them to be punished severely. In other words, he did what he always does to people whose loyalty he demands; he whipped around and fucked them sideways with a chainsaw.

The flatheads lost their little minds, and did what reactionary extremists always do when they realize they’ve lost; they started eating their own entrails to stay alive. I watched people argue simultaneously that Donald Trump was a cowardly cuck (true) and that the video was deep faked (false). One managed to argue that Trump had joined the deep state conspiracy to destroy…Donald Trump. The most cowardly ones tried to claim that Trump supporters were actually Antifa, staging a false flag operation. When I encounter one of those (which I have quite a few times in the past few days) I just tell them to show a little courage and Own. Their. Shit.

Republicans in Congress tried saying nobody could possibly have seen this coming, even though some of the assailants had T-shirts and flags that read, “Civil War II: January 6th, 2021”. No, it wasn’t entirely unexpected. Only the craven behavior of the Capitol Police was unexpected.

Trump rightly gets blamed for the slow response by federal forces—he deliberately refused to let them go in and rescue the Congressional hostages for the simple reason that they were being held as HIS hostages, and he had a demand to make of them. But the images of Capitol police opening doors for the rioters and taking selfies with them mean that it will be many years before the Capitol Police are trusted and respected by anyone. They suffer from the same problem many police forces and the Air Force have: they have been infiltrated by right wing extremists, neo-Nazis, religious freaks and brownshirt bullies, and if America is to survive, this trash must be purged. There’s a reason for the BLM movement, and the same reason is why the neo-Nazis hate BLM so much.

Nobody knows what will happen over the next 11 days, but remember, sanity is on the horizon, and people now recognize Trump and his vicious followers for the danger they are.

Keep the tree lit.

Don’t lose hope. Never lose hope.

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January 6th 2021 — The Coup-Coo Brigade Strike

January 6th 2021

The Coup-Coo Brigade Strike

Various people today have declared that today’s assault on the Capitol of the United States was a date that would “live in infamy”.

My mum wouldn’t have been too thrilled to hear that. If she were alive, this would be her 102nd birthday. She wouldn’t have been chuffed at having her special day listed along with December 7th or September 11th.

She wouldn’t have been too surprised if she were around to hear how the story came about. From the 80s up until her death a few years ago she took the measure of Donald Trump and considered him an utterly vile man, amoral, rude, and vulgar. Since my own view of Trump was about the same, I used to watch the members of my family who liked Trump squirm uncomfortably should anyone mention his name within her earshot. Her profound deafness in her final years was no protective wall; like many people in her position, she had a knack for hearing key words in a conversation. Discussing Bridge, or British terms for flatulence, could provoke an outburst.

She was old. She wasn’t stupid. Trump was trash, and she knew it.

Today’s events, and Trump’s role in them, wouldn’t have surprised her. It didn’t surprise me. It’s a wonder it surprised anyone, really. Trump had been saying right along that he didn’t accept the results of the election, and would encourage his inane clown posse to fight on his behalf. Indeed, the reason Congress was vulnerable to such an attack stemmed from the notion that Congress could somehow overcome the will of the states (not to mention the people) by disrupting the normally ritualistic tabulation of the electoral college votes. Stooges and seditionists in Congress planned to object and drag out the proceedings in a forlorn hope that somehow they could get Congress to abandon the vote.

While this was going on, Trump stood in the speech and told his tin-foil hat brigade to march on Congress and that he would march with them. They began marching, and Trump promptly scurried off to the Führerbunker formerly known as the White House.

In a weird way, he may have actually done the nation a favor. On several levels, really.

First the events of today unleashed a tidal wave of anger and rage against Trump and the “Stop the Steal” movement. Suddenly it stopped being one of those loony things the crowd that believe the Queen is a lizard or that Hillary ran a pedophile operation in the basement of a pizza shop, and became a genuine insurrection against the country. Even people who like Trump were taken aback by today’s events. “Support the President.” Doesn’t matter how trashy or crazy the president is, and Trump is part of a rather long list of Presidents who didn’t belong in office. But supporting the president no matter what is a thing—until that president tries to overthrow the government of the US. You have to go back to antebellum days to find one of those. “Support the President”? Well, OK. “Destroy the Country?” Not so much.

Trump is finished. There are rumors that the Cabinet is considering 25th amendment removal of Trump before he does yet more damage. Congress may take up an unprecedented move to impeach, and if they do, it’s likely that Trump will be convicted. A wave of resignations in his administration has already begun. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have all suspended his account.

His supporters that don’t feel they can abandon him are going to ridiculous lengths to rationalize the events of today. One Trumper I spoke to this morning denied any knowledge of the assault on the Capitol, and when I told him to switch on his TV, airily replied “Why? There’s nothing I can do about it.” Several Trumpers, including the idiot A-G of Texas, proffered the theory that all the thousands of protesters waving Trump, Confederate and even Nazi flags were actually all Antifa in disguise, a false flag operation.

I’m listening to the debate in resumed hearings tonight, and it’s clear that support for Trump has effectively collapsed. I suspect that holds true in much of the country. I’m watching the Senate vote on debate on objections to the electoral vote count, and this morning 11 senators were expected to sustain the objection, but I think there’s only five “ayes” now.

Even Qanon crazy Loeffler switched sides. (The final vote was 93-6).

Another thing that may benefit the country in the long run is that the insurrection today was a cold shot of reality. Americans believed it could not happen here. I was raised in England, two big civil wars, endless religious strife, and war after war after war, not only with the other nations in the British Isles, but with much of Europe. Insurrections, regicides, riots—all part of the glorious tapestry that is England. England regards itself as a great nation, fully cognizant of the fact that it has unrest and violence as part of its legacy. I was born in Canada, one of the most genuinely peaceful and stable nations on Earth—one with a long and not entirely vanished history of violence against First Nations people. The Riel rebellion, the FLQ crisis, and even major riots over hockey games. Canadians KNOW they aren’t “better than this.” It’s part of history.

America is better at regrowing its spiritual hymen better than any other nation on Earth, aside from the French who consider whoring an alternate virginity. For a generation, at least, Americans will be cognizant of the danger presented by extreme and even insane political movements.

If this beast rises its head again, perhaps they won’t have politicians coddling them, cowardly presidents leading from behind, or police taking selfies with the nuts because the nuts wave Confederate flags.

Perhaps American will learn to recognize, and adjust for their own humanity.

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The Smoking Gun — Trump spends an hour lying, wheedling and threatening—on tape.

The Smoking Gun

Trump spends an hour lying, wheedling and threatening—on tape.

January 3rd, 2021

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger must have felt as surreal as a Dali painting listening to Donald Trump telling him he needed to rustle up 11,780 votes so he could reverse the results of the vote in Georgia. I suspect that Trump has made quite a few similar calls to officials in at least six other states, in a grim effort to steal the 2020 election. But this time, the Secretary—or someone in his office—recorded the call, a high fidelity sound quality that left absolutely no doubt about who said what. A full hour of it.

The phone call wasn’t just unethical—it was illegal, a state and federal felony that by itself could get Trump twenty years in jail.

People old enough to remember old [Expletive Deleted] remember that the tapes were redacted and the sound quality was poor enough that there was honest debate over who said what, and the only “smoking gun” was that the tapes showed he lied about being involved in the cover up of the Watergate hotel. It was years before we learned that Nixon knew of the break-in before it happened, or the full extent of the cover up. Had the full story been known, perhaps Gerald Ford might have refused to pardon Nixon, or been impeached for doing so. As it was, it did immense damage to the spirit of the nation, which had prided itself that no politician was above the law.

Even worse, it taught Republicans that not only does crime pay, but that so long as they have a weak and corrupt guy in the White House, they are above and beyond the law. The latest spate of get-out-of-jail free pardons by Trump are just the latest round of abuses by strutting and grinning fascists in the GOP. This may be the worst; they include four individuals whose burned and charred corpses ought to hanging from a bridge across the Euphrates. They are blatant efforts to obstruct justice; the pardons try to keep the people who made up the most corrupt administration in American history out of prison—including Trump himself.

The weirdest part of the extremely strange call was Trump’s demand that Raffensperger “find” 11,780 votes, baldly explaining that the specific number of “found votes” would make him the winner of Georgia by one vote. That violates 52 U.S. Code § 20511. Just for the record, here is that provision in federal law:

A person, including an election official, who in any election for Federal office—

(1) knowingly and willfully intimidates, threatens, or coerces, or attempts to intimidate, threaten, or coerce, any person for—

(A) registering to vote, or voting, or attempting to register or vote;

(B) urging or aiding any person to register to vote, to vote, or to attempt to register or vote; or

(C) exercising any right under this chapter; or

(2) knowingly and willfully deprives, defrauds, or attempts to deprive or defraud the residents of a State of a fair and impartially conducted election process, by—

(A) the procurement or submission of voter registration applications that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under the laws of the State in which the election is held; or

(B) the procurement, casting, or tabulation of ballots that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under the laws of the State in which the election is held,

shall be fined in accordance with title 18 (which fines shall be paid into the general fund of the Treasury, miscellaneous receipts (pursuant to section 3302 of title 31), notwithstanding any other law), or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.

The tape reveals a prima facie violation of that law. It also violates state law. And we can be pretty certain that Trump made similar calls to the Secretaries of States in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Michigan, desperately leaning on people to keep him in office and out of prison.

With only seventeen days left in his term, there simply isn’t time to impeach and convict him, even if the weak, criminal, strutting treasonous cowards that make up much of the GOP were willing to do so. But after the election, his actions yesterday can be added to the pile of criminal prosecutions he will face, no matter how many criminals he pardons. (If you accept a pardon, you are acknowledging that you did, in fact, commit criminal acts.)

Biden has promised he will not pardon Trump. It’s possible that Trump may resign the morning of the 21st so Pence can be a half-day President with the sole purpose of pardoning Trump, but Pence’s problem is there is nobody to pardon him, and he will face charges of obstruction of justice at the very least. A first-year law student could win a case of corrupt intent—normally nearly impossible to prove—in this particular case.

Republicans have no courage or self-respect. Let’s hope, for the sake of the country, that the rest of America does, and ends this corrupt cabal once and for all.