from Heather Cox Richardson’s most recent “Letters from an American” (for history only, scroll to “headline” font I’ve inserted);

… Meanwhile, the president appears to have lost whatever interest he might have had in actually governing. As the country reels from the coronavirus surge that has now infected more than 10 million of us, killed more than 244,000, and crippled the economy, he is apparently focused exclusively on the past election. He has not gone to a coronavirus task force meeting in at least five months, rarely reads the daily reports on the virus, and is no longer briefed about the crisis by doctors. He has apparently decided simply to let the conflagration burn. At the same time, he is refusing to let his staffers talk to incoming Biden staff about the pandemic.

“The duty of a president is to protect the national security of the United States, and this is the most prominent disease of mass destruction America’s ever faced, and we have a commander in chief who has run away from the problem and has made it worse,” Jack Chow, a U.S. health official under George W. Bush, told reporters from the Washington Post. “We had an opportunity twice over the past eight months to bring it down to safer levels, and we failed. We are on the verge of losing control of this pandemic.”

And yet, most Republican lawmakers are not willing to challenge Trump in public.

Indeed, in his willingness to abandon governance for his own benefit Trump is simply following the lead of Republican lawmakers like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) who has steadfastly refused to take up bills from the Democratic-led House of Representatives, including a coronavirus relief package to address the coronavirus recession. Instead, McConnell has focused on packing the courts with pro-business judges. Excerpts from a new book by former President Barack Obama, due out next week, reveal McConnell’s response to a plea from then-Vice President Biden to pass a worthwhile bill. McConnell answered: “You must be under the mistaken impression that I care.”

Today’s Republican Party has traveled a long way from the party of Abraham Lincoln.

In the 1850s, the Republican Party rose to stand against a small group of wealthy southern white slaveholders who had taken over the government. Those slaveholders made up only about 1% of the American South. They ran the Democratic Party, but they knew their system of human enslavement was unpopular and that they were in a political minority even in the Democratic Party. It was only a question of time until the majority began to hem in their ownership of other human beings.

So when folks started to urge the government to promote infrastructure in the growing nation, building roads or dredging harbors, for example, these southern leaders worried that if the government began to intervene in the economy, the regulation of slavery would be just around the corner. They pushed back by insisting that the government could do nothing that was not expressly written in the Constitution. Even if the vast majority of the people in the country wanted the government to do something, it could not.

As pressure grew for government to promote economic growth for ordinary Americans, the southern slaveholders worked to cement their power. They courted poor white voters, telling them that any attempt to regulate slavery was an effort to lift Black people over them. From their stronghold in the Senate, southern leaders stopped legislation to develop the country and instead pushed laws that spread slavery into the West. When northerners objected, southern leaders packed the Supreme Court and got it to agree that Congress could not stop the spread of southern slavery even across the entire nation. But while they insisted the federal government could not promote the economy for ordinary Americans, they demanded a sweeping federal slave code to protect slavery in the West.

Their system was best for the nation, they explained. Society was made up of a mass of workers, drudges who weren’t terribly smart, but were strong and loyal. They were the “mudsills” of society, akin to the wood hammered into the ground that supported the grand plantation homes above. Directed by their betters, these mudsills produced capital, which accumulated in the hands of the wealthy. There, it did far more good than if it were distributed among those who had produced it, because society’s leaders used their wealth to innovate and build the economy, doing what was best for the workers, who could not understand their own interests. The nation thrived.

To secure this system, though, it was imperative that the mudsills could not vote. If they could, workers would demand more of the wealth they produced. White southerners had enslaved their laborers, South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond told his northern colleagues in 1858, but northerners had not, and they foolishly allowed them to vote. “If they knew the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than “an army with banners,” and could combine, where would you be?” Hammond demanded. “Your society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided… by the quiet process of the ballot-box.”

Men like Abraham Lincoln organized to overturn the idea that they were mindless workers, doomed to menial labor for life. In 1859, Lincoln articulated a new vision for the nation, putting ordinary men, rather than elite slaveholders, at the heart of national development.

Lincoln’s “Free Labor” theory held that the nation worked best when the government supported ordinary men rather than a wealthy elite. Ordinary men worked more intelligently and innovated more freely than an elite, and when the government used its power to free up resources for them, they built the economy far more efficiently than the enslaved workers who were hampered by the commands of an out-of-touch plantation owner. Rather than shunning economic development, the government should embrace it, they said, spreading free labor, rather than slavery, across the West.

When Lincoln won the 1860 election, southern leaders refused to accept the results of the election. They left the Union to launch a new nation that rejected the idea of human equality and was instead based on human enslavement.

Left in charge of the government, the new Republican Party rebuilt it according to Lincoln’s vision. To pay the enormous cost of the Civil War, they invented our first national system of taxation, including the income tax. Then, to enable people to pay those taxes, they spread opportunity to ordinary men, giving them western land (that we now recognize belonged to indigenous people), establishing our state universities, and building a railroad to take people across the country. Ultimately, they included Black men in their vision, abolishing slavery, establishing Black citizenship, and guaranteeing Black men the right to vote so they could protect their own interests.

Under the leadership of the Republican Party, Americans were, Lincoln reminded them, resolving “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

As I’ve often said, the hugely influential New York Times does some excellent and very important investigative reporting. As I’ve also said:

As much as I respect the Times for some of their invaluable reporting, I also hate them for their sometimes absurdly prissy insistence on an even-handed “respectability” that amounts to non-reporting. 

Case in point:

The Times contacted election officials in all fifty states, to determine whether any of them had seen the kind of fraud and irregularities Trump’s lawsuits keep insisting are widespread and have resulted in a rigged election with a fake result. They ran this unequivocal headline over a fine piece of reporting:

The Times Called Officials in Every State: No Evidence of Voter Fraud  [1]

The Times then contacted top federal election officials and ran this headline, over another excellent bit of reporting:

Election Officials Directly Contradict Trump on Voting System Fraud 

Then, inexplicably, they ran an article headlined:

Trump Election Results Lawsuits Don’t Have a lot of Good Evidence

containing this grotesque example of the maddening, status quo supporting schizophrenia of the Grey Lady:

While these suits have alleged systemic fraud in at least five states, the evidence they have offered has been different. At least so far, it has been limited, narrow and, according to several judges and experts, unlikely to affect — let alone to overturn — the outcome of the race.

Editor– does that “different” at the end of the first sentence refer to “not systemic” evidence or what? Is “different” really the best word to characterize the “evidence” submitted by Trump’s lawyers? Trump brought these baseless lawsuits in “in at least five states”? I suppose the nonzero number of 40 or 50 states (his army of lawyers brought something like 300 election-related lawsuits nationwide) would fall under “at least five”. Though, in fairness to the Times, the article is about post-election lawsuits, contesting results, of which there have been at least five, but less than the hundreds Trump initiated prior to the election.

Calling no persuasive evidence “limited and narrow” evidence is not as accurate as stating that Trump’s lawyers have presented “virtually no evidence of fraud or irregularities”, as found in lawsuit after dismissed lawsuit, and confirmed by officials in all 50 states and by federal officials — as definitively reported by the New York Times.

“According to several judges and experts” is, one could argue, a high-minded way not to cite the New York Times itself for the propositions noted above, one supposes. It is also like saying “according to several scientists and experts, global warming is exacerbated by human activities”. Would those “several judges” be an overly even-handed reference to every judge who dismissed virtually every Trump election lawsuit nationwide? Would it be fair to assume that the term “experts” includes virtually every lawyer and legal scholar in the country, and internationally, as well as all citizens who read the arguments and decisions in these cases and apply common sense?

“Unlikely to affect– let alone overturn” — goddamn it, you fucking idiot! “Unlikely?” Do you read your own newspaper? It does some excellent investigative reporting, you know.

On the good side, and another reason to look favorably on the Times, they published this fine letter by my cousin yesterday. I almost never read the letters to the editor, or write them, but last night, for whatever reason I did and — wow! Good letter, cousin Marcy!

To the Editor:

Re “Trump Marshals Federal Power to Overturn His Election Defeat” (front page, Nov. 11):

President Trump’s outrageous refusal to accept the election results — and the appalling lack of integrity shown by most Republicans, who are apparently willing to risk what’s left of this country’s democratic traditions by once again failing to stand up to Mr. Trump — is even more troubling when viewed in a historical context.

Until now, all presidential hopefuls have put the country’s institutions, values and stability before their own ambitions. Four years ago, despite winning three million more votes than Mr. Trump, Hillary Clinton graciously conceded. In 2000, Al Gore accepted the ruling by the Supreme Court that installed George W. Bush as president.

It’s bad enough that Mr. Trump won’t concede — no one really expected he would suddenly set aside his autocratic leanings, megalomania and vanity for the good of the nation — but the craven absence of integrity on the part of other Republicans is inexcusable.

Marcy Stamper
Twisp, Wash.

 

[1]

72,462,126 Americans (and counting) cast a vote I can’t begin to comprehend.

Let’s do a thought experiment and assume Trump’s request for a little favor from the Ukrainian president — an announcement of fabricated dirt on presidential opponent Joe Biden (and good job, Donald for knowing it would be Biden) — was the only wrong thing he’d done as president. Let’s pretend he’d never done anything else remotely bad or even objectionable.

Let’s say the president had only been caught, on the phone, with tapes available to verify it, and a publicly released presidential team-prepared transcript containing the corrupt-sounding statements in question, and sworn testimony from several people who were on the call, (and leaving aside Bill Barr’s illegal efforts to squash the whistleblower’s complaint) telling the new Ukrainian president that he’d get the weapons Congress had already authorized to defend his country from Putin, but that first he needed a favor, though.

Even if that malfeasance was deemed, on a strict 51-49 party-line vote, not technically an unethical quid pro quo or any kind of abuse of power that would justify impeachment and removal from office, it is right and proper for the American president to pull that kind of unethical shit?

But let’s give this one to the 72,462,126 Trump voters, say this one is a pure, political judgment call you can legitimately make one way or the other depending on your party and your political view. Say you want Supreme Court justices who will abolish a woman’s now constitutional right to decide whether to give birth, you want to protect every fetus from cold-blooded murder, you’d lean toward not removing a president who has vowed to appoint more such justices from office. Someone on the other side would naturally lean the other way, equally hard. Fine, fair enough, I suppose.

Forget the seeming cruelty of young children ripped from their mothers’ arms as a deliberate federal policy, hundreds having lost their parents forever, we can call that one a wash too. If you think the good or evil of forcefully taking a kid from her parent’s arms is purely dependent on who the child is and who the parents are, you could still righteously cast one of those 72,462,126 votes. I also understand this, many people, if not most people, do not get worked up about the troubles, even atrocities, no matter how terrible, inflicted on people who are only abstractions. The world is a tough place, and we are all overwhelmed, understood.

The thing I really don’t get, and maybe somebody could explain it to me, because it’s as fascinating as it is horrifying — how do 72,462,126 votes get cast for a candidate who, as president,continues to actively ignore a deadly pandemic he knows is spreading uncontrollably and killing tens of thousands (and we now knew he understood COVIDS terrifying airborne deadliness very well on February 7th when he told Bob Woodward how disastrous this plague was).

Worse still, this candidates unscrupulous and deliberate conspiracy to suppress the “science believer” vote by forcing people to be willing to risk infection in order to cast a ballot, because it favored his chances of reelection. Come on, now– get out of here with that “random mass death justifies political victory” shit.

During a deadly pandemic your administration does nothing to control, instead dismissing it as a hoax, claiming it will miraculously disappear, blaming traitors, the Chinese, “anarchist jurisdictions” and so on, then, while hosting mass super-spreader events where nobody takes sensible precautions against infection — you repeatedly blast out the lie that absentee voting is massively fraudulent. You have your Attorney General repeat this lie a few times on TV. Your top Congressional mouthpieces dutifully repeat this lie, giving it “legitimacy”.

You then engage in an open conspiracy, while tens of thousands are dying of this pandemic and are rightfully fearful of its spread, to disable the US Postal System, while filing literally hundreds of lawsuits to restrict absentee balloting in every form. You force millions of Americans to choose: cast a safe ballot during a deadly pandemic (mail) or cast a vote in person and just take your chances (like anyone who is not a weak, mindless, mask-wearing politically correct liberal pansy, haw!)

This last one, the willful denial of a deadly, uncontrollably spreading disease, is what makes this 72,462,126 Trump voters’ decision utterly incomprehensible to me — outside of the blind faith seen in death cults.

In most jurisdictions where Trump won the vote, there have been record surges of COVID infections and deaths. This happens when masses of people ignore the best advice science has and refuse to take simple precautions like wearing masks, as a sign of their strength and manliness — and their love of liberty. We are again seeing mobile morgues all over the country, to accommodate the overflow of American corpses as hospitals are once again overwhelmed, in Trump country as well as in his hated Anarchist Jurisdictions.

Forcing tens of millions of Americans to vote unsafely, to risk contracting a deadly and incurable disease, when there is an uncontroversial, safe and widely used alternative way to vote (that Trump himself uses every year, for fuck sake) that would have minimized the spread of a raging pandemic, is beyond criminal, beyond insane– it’s literally mass murder by depraved indifference.

The willful stupidity of anyone who could ignore that decisive America-first announcement by Trump — my reelection is way more important than your stupid little anonymous lives and deaths– is far beyond my ability to imagine it.

The graph of America’s world-leading COVID-19 infections and deaths has gone straight up since the voting started in this election. New daily infections topped 100,000 for the first time recently. Yesterday this was the new record number:

This while the man who got 72,462,126 votes insists he didn’t lose the election, watches TV, tweets lying, weak-ass defiance and has no plan for controlling the pandemic he dismisses. The other guy, who only got a pathetic 77,755,399 votes is already hard at work getting a national plan ready for the minute he’s inaugurated on January 20th.

How many more tens of thousands of American abstractions will die in the meantime, for the sake of a sulking loser’s bruised ego? Tough luck, losers. Get ready to vote for him again in 2024, yo.

72,462,126 votes for the King of Depraved Indifference, seriously. What the fuck, USA?

I began working on this a few days back, when there still seemed to be a dark and possibly effective plan for Donald Trump to overturn the election results. I stand by the premise that Trump has only one path to power now that he’s lost the election, though the likelihood of an armed revolution to facilitate a second, presumably lifetime, Trump presidency, seems even more remote to me than a day or two back. I originally wrote this piece by way of reassurance to any of my anxious fellow citizens who might stumble upon it.

Trump is a cruel, vindictive, unconstrained bully who rules by fear and intimidation. The terror he instills is real. People who work for him, and the members of his party, do his bidding, no matter how irrational, as much out of fear of his vindictiveness as for any other reason. When I began writing this many sensible people were still quivering in fear of Trump’s wild threats — hundreds of Trump lawsuits that would overturn vote counts, flying monkeys, Supreme Court, Proud Boys, rogue Republican state legislatures sending Trump electors in states Trump lost (after claiming undocumented fraud that never happened), the Klan, Steve Bannon’s zombie armies, the Insurrection Act and massive riot squads enforcing martial law, ramped up mass murder by COVID, and God knows what else the desperate madman has up his sleeve.

It pained me the other day to hear Jane Mayer, the brilliant investigative journalist, very worried about the unformed, fantastical idea of Trump’s 6-3 Supreme Court somehow installing Trump in an open quid pro quo that would make the installation of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush by a partisan 5-4 majority seem morally and legally high-minded. WNYC journalist and host Brian Lehrer shared her fear and added a few of the Trump-related terrors that keep him up at night.

A few words of a hopefully calming nature:

At the risk of sounding mean, violent overthrow of the legally elected government of the Unites States of America appears to be the only card left in Donald Trump’s arsenal if he is truly determined to stay in power as the first US dictator. His evidence-free, long-shot lawsuits have all been thrown out as baseless, he continues to spend millions on an army of second rate lawyers huffing and puffing in the courts, but that effort has come to nothing. The results of the election are clear, margins literally too big to rig, even if Trump could count on a sufficient number of corrupt, ideologically pure right wing judges to rule in his favor. The legal game is pretty much over, and Trump himself seems to know it.

Violent overthrow looks like the only scenario in which Mr. Trump has anything like smiling Mike Pompeo’s version of a smooth transition to a second Trump term, taking the oath on a Bible held by John Roberts, (or Amy, or Brett, or Neil), on January 20, 2020. To do that he will need to have literally overthrown the elected United States government by force in the next few weeks. Trump is probably game for rivers of American blood flowing in the streets, if it means he wins, but even terror of the ferocious lame duck winner might not be enough to motivate even his most fervent bootlickers in Congress to back that extreme anti-democratic play.

After lawful ballots are re-counted and unlawful ballots discarded, (as all of Trump’s backers insist be done, in spite of no evidence of electoral fraud that could change the result anywhere — see Election Officials Directly Contradict Trump on Voting System Fraud ), when the vote totals we know right now, plus or minus a few hundred ballots, are again tallied and officially certified, we will know for certain what we know for certain right now: Mr. Biden won the presidency, by any count you like and in an orderly election with no evidence of more than the usual, sporadic 61/138,000,000th of the vote that is shown to be fraudulent. Even if this election had been marred by 10 times, even 100 times, as much voter fraud as the 61 Heritage Foundation-documented instances from 2016, it is still only a drop in the ocean and would have no effect on the results anywhere.

Trump has no legal option left after his decisive loss. He has decisively lost virtually all his tens of millions of dollars of voting-related cases in every state. Sadly, the Supreme Court will almost certainly not be able to find grounds to intervene and overturn so unquestionable an election result, particularly when every lawsuit contesting the results has been tossed. For all Republican states Trump lost by irrefutable margins to declare massive fraud (without any evidence), overturn their state elections and send Trump Electors to the Electoral College would provoke violent outrage nationwide, and internationally. That outrage would be justified in a democracy after the overturning of an fair election, by a man proclaiming himself dictator. It would likely provoke civil war, leading again to the one path that remains to Trump: violent overthrow of the elected government of the United States [1].

I’m hoping somehow, and against all odds, that for the first time in Trump’s life, cooler heads prevail before he makes another willful, titanically stupid decision (written a couple of days back). A decision to unleash war on your own country rather than concede defeat would be about the worst made by the erratic, headstrong president, in a very competitive field of very bad decisions made over the course of a life of unlearned lessons.

Trump has never been accountable for any of his disastrous mistakes, which is what makes him so irrationally confident of his infallibility. He seems depressed now, and more distracted and disorganized than usual. He has been publicly silent for several days now, multiple news cycles. It is hard to imagine that he’s consulting with a crack team of five-dimensional chess masters about how to pull off a historic bloodless coup d’etat.

I can even understand that, facing the legal jeopardy and the real prospect of a prison term once he leaves office [2] the drama-loving Mr. Trump may feel that he’s willing to go down defiantly, in a glorious hail of traitors’ bullets, rather than admit he lost an election. After all, it’s not merely the election he has lost (something that statistically happens to 50% of candidates, there’s no shame there), or his present immunity from most prosecution (a real threat to him) –admitting defeat would destroy his childish conviction that he is a “winner”, a “killer” not a “loser” (his vicious father gave him this brutal choice early on — killer or prey). Conceding defeat would signal the end of his record-setting 74 year winning streak during which he was a 100% winner.

Trump might be willing to go out like Scarface, but would enough of his devoted followers be willing to die for a Trump dictatorship? I think not. I see no sign that tens of thousands, or even hundreds, or dozens, are willing to take up arms and die for the man they voted for.

To carry out a full-scale military coup he would need more than the willing obedience of inexperienced men chosen for their willing obedience, after Trump’s recent purge of anyone demonstrating the slightest principle besides personal loyalty to Trump, the American version of the old Führereid (Führer Oath) [3].

Trump demands absolute loyalty, which has become a mark of his party — McCain and Romney are both widely hated, since voting against Trump, as “traitors” by other Republicans. While his loyal enablers constantly provide the required unctuous adulation, no matter how humiliating Trump’s asks are of them, Trump is not assured of the undying loyalty of the military (who he has repeated mocked — the troops are suckers, dead ones are losers, most of the top generals are morons — along with our intelligence agencies, whose leaders he has publicly compared to Nazis). He literally decapitated Defense Department leadership in his rage at losing an election. Like the great patriot he is.

To carry out an actual military coup, under the Insurrection Act, with martial law and all the trimmings, he would need the active participation of our top generals in carrying out this violent overthrow of the duly elected US government — for the benefit of one man and his children. Trump would need a military willing to open fire on the massed majority that voted him out of offie. His success in an actual, not rhetorical, violent coup d’etat would be an extreme long shot. Call me a dreamer, but I don’t see it.

His only move in life is to “double down”, but in this case, even he can see how disastrous (and humiliating) for him a failed military coup would be. Besides, he can’t be sure the military would actually fire on masses of peaceful protesters, their fellow citizens, even if he declared them enemy combatants.

There is terror terror threat Trump has been hyping — private “militias”, the kind of violent freelancers who plotted to kidnap the governor of Michigan, try her for “tyranny” and behead her. Even if Donald wanted to let slip these dogs of war against his own people, assuming I’m right about the problematic military force option, where do the troops to carry it out come from? Will these unregulated militias enforcing their Second Amendment rights be enough? Doubtful.

Barr commands a few thousand armed men, Bureau of Prisons anti-riot squads, ICE forces and the like. Trump and Barr could, theoretically, invoke the Insurrection Act against an imaginary insurrection, why not? Say they do. His obedient new lapdogs in the highest echelons of the Defense Department can order the generals to advance, but it’s hard to see even these sycophants ordering troops (leaving aside that these civilian appointees cannot directly order troops to do anything, in a military hierarchy) to fire on fellow Americans to defend an illegal presidency and initiate actual American dictatorship. Harder still to see the career generals, admirals and so forth ordering the required massacres.

I don’t think Mr. Trump presently has quite the private army troop strength he wants among his private sector supporters. He does not have a solid 3% (the participation rate of citizens often cited as sufficient to defend against an insurgency) of the military-aged population organized, disciplined armed and ready to lay down their lives for the cause of Donald Trump. Millions of his followers love him, some devoutly, but not enough people love him enough that they are ready, tomorrow, to die for him. (In fairness to them, very few of those of us who hate Trump would be wiling to die standing against him, if it came to machine guns vs. peaceful crowds).

Even small groups of this violent type of Trump supporter did not turn out at polling places to intimidate voters and to suppress anti-Trump voting, as Mr. Trump menacingly promised would happen — where suspected Democrat polling places would be very, very carefully watched by strong men with guns, particularly in “anarchist jurisdictions” where names would be taken and lists made for reprisals afterwards.

We should be clear. Mr. Trump has so far excelled in everything every other dictator has to do before seizing power: brazenly and repeatedly lie to the public, have top underlings repeat the lies until they are accepted by millions, attack then swiftly and brutally punish contradiction of the lies, vilify the media and fact checkers of all kinds, abolish all laws as applied to the regime. That’s Dictator 101 and Trump gets top marks in all that.

Remember, though, most of the time actual dictatorship, beyond violent rhetoric and gloating over the helplessness of one’s enemies, involves physical confrontation in the streets, violent repression, followed by a violent civil war with many dead in the street on both sides. A Trump revolution, can only succeed if the forces of the State are unquestioningly loyal to the would-be dictator.

If I was a betting man, I’d have my money on the integrity of dedicated civil servants who have served many administrations, long-time, idealistic State Department and Department of Justice workers, the career military; generals and hundreds of law-abiding judges of unshakable integrity (take one example, Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan, 42 year-old Trump lifetime appointee who took 138 pages to ream Trump’s evidence-free voter suppression lawsuit dozens and dozens of times in dismissing it [4]) . I’d bet against a Trump dictatorship in 2020, though that’s not saying there won’t be blood on the streets anyway — or an Ivanka dictatorship down the road.

Loyalty is a virtue, and we should give good people the benefit of the doubt, because they are good people. That said, unquestioning tribal loyalty, especially to an unscrupulous leader, is a fearsome thing. Particularly when that loyalty is to a dangerous person armed with the most deadly weapons known to humans, the leader of the most powerful entity on the planet.

All said, though, I don’t see the zombie hoards showing up, heavily armed and ready to give their lives, to usher in the Trump dictatorship. Call me a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.

[1]

Related question: is Bill Barr truly up to supervising that apocalyptic bloodbath, assuming he could get sufficient numbers of American government employees to die for the cause of Donald Trump as dictator?

[2]

Former Trump “fixer” Michael Cohen is already a federal prisoner for his criminal conspiracy with Individual One– Mr. Trump — who gave the illegal orders Cohen followed — though Trump will get a prophylactic pardon for this, and all other federal crimes.

[3]

“I swear by God this holy oath, that I will render to Adolf Hitler, Führer of the German Reich and People, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, unconditional obedience, and that I am ready, as a brave soldier, to risk my life at any time for this oath.”

source

[4]

Judge Ranjan went into great detail explaining why each claim by Trump and the RNC had to fall, as a matter of law, on the merits, for lack of evidence. I see the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office has already posted a PDF of the decision on its website.

Georgia Senate Runoff Zoom session- Reverend Raphael Warnock

Thursday, Nov 12th at 5:00 PM Pacific/ 8:00 PM Eastern 

https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwlcOqprz4rGte6Vp8igGkvC5SAYFCk8J9_
Please RSVP here.

The Republican state government in Georgia (the party controls the state legislature, governor and court) has announced it will be recounting the Georgia ballots. Recounts never change more than a few hundred votes, which won’t change the runoff result or overturn the large lead Biden has over Trump, but no matter. In many states the candidate must pay for a recount in an election that’s not close, and Trump is strapped for cash after funding 300 failed election lawsuits. The Georgia recount, pure political theatre, will be paid for by the tax dollars of the good people of Georgia.

The recount is being done to bolster the false Trump narrative that millions of fraudulent votes were cast against him nationwide in every state he lost. The party wants to keep Georgia Republicans angry as hell about the stolen election, their new glorious, mythical Lost Cause, so they’ll vote by the millions in the Senate runoff in early January.

Trump and his enablers repeatedly make this eternally debunked voter fraud claim based no evidence whatsoever. Kris Koback boasted of the six fraud convictions his commission oversaw after the 2016 election, before the Presidential Voter Fraud Commission was disbanded after finding only a handful of fraudulent votes out of the more than 138,000,000 cast.

One of the greatest innovations of Trump’s reign has been the elimination of any requirement for evidence of any kind if you are TOTALLY RIGHT — as the president clearly is in not admitting that he lost the rigged, fraudulent, stolen election.

Trump’s party has its finger on the scale, in Georgia (where it purged more than 100,000 eligible voters from the voter rolls before Stacey Abrams lost Georgia’s gubernatorial race by under 55,0000 votes to the man who counted the votes[1]). They are united in upholding the Big Lie of the fraud narrative in every other state where Republicans have the power to try to change the outcome of a vote (or at least perceptions of that outcome) that went decisively against their leader. In its effort to keep things fair as fair can be, Georgia purged 309,000 more voters in 2019.

It seemed like hyperbole not long ago to say that the loudly expressed will of a majority of American voters is the only thing standing between the completion of a fascist coup d’etat and the continuation of our experiment in democracy. Our democracy now hangs on two senators from the great state of Georgia. An openly partisan state government doing its best to make sure their candidate wins versus a. democracy doing its best to ensure that the president-elect will be able to debate and pass laws, without the same mocking Congressional lynch mob that largely succeeded in hogtying Mr. Trump’s predecessor.

The two Republican senators from Georgia are diehard Trump supporters. Kelly Loeffler uses Trump soundbites in her campaign ads, features Trump thanking her for her loyalty against the “impeachment hoax”. In an ad against his Democratic opponent Jon Ossoff, Senator David Perdue said:

“A socialist government chooses your health care, kills jobs and takes more of everybody’s money to pay for their radical agenda that has failed across the world.”

Would it be snide to point out that a fascist government abolishes your health care, kills your family and spends all taxpayer money to promote a reign of terror against enemies real and imagined — to the eventual consternation of the entire civilized world?

51-50, recent history shows, is sufficient for democratic dominance in the Senate. Mitch McConnell has ruthlessly demonstrated the unaccountability of a narrow majority over and over, as has the 5-4, now 6-3, Supreme Court.

Senators Warnock and Ossoff from the good state of Georgia will make the Senate count 50-50, with the nasty “monster” Vice President-elect as the tie-breaker. We all need to do everything we can to make this so, future Americans will not forgive our failure here.

Georgia Senate Runoff Zoom session-

Reverend Raphael Warnock

Thursday, Nov 12th at 5:00 PM Pacific/ 8:00 PM Eastern 

https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwlcOqprz4rGte6Vp8igGkvC5SAYFCk8J9_

Please RSVP here.

As Republican Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said, in refusing to resign after the two current Republican senators from Georgia demanded he do so, after both were forced into runoff elections (under Georgia law) to stay in the Senate:

“… both Senators and I are all unhappy with the potential outcome for our President.”

source

the potential outcome for our President...

[1]

On a single day in late July 2017, Kemp’s office had removed from the rolls 560,000 Georgians who had been flagged because they’d skipped one too many elections. Abrams would later call the purge the “use-it-or-lose-it scheme.” An APM Reports investigation last year estimated 107,000 of the people purged under the policy would otherwise have been eligible to vote last year.

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There is a huge, vociferous and very influential radical right wing in America, led by a few wealthy people (many of them wealthy for generations) and followed by many millions of ordinary American voters. These increasingly radicalized voters are spurred by their unquestioned belief that the only trouble with this country is the goddamned Godless troublemakers who want to change everything from good to bad for no goddamned reason.

At the moment, the radical right and its “moderate” Republican enablers are united in insisting that just because one candidate won an election by 5,000,000 so-called “Popular Votes” and a wide margin in the sacred Electoral College, there is no reason to believe that that person actually won the election. By the way, all those races other Republicans all over the country won in the same rigged election? Perfectly valid elections.

I read an excellent op-ed in today’s NY Times that I will quote from and link to below, but first, a thought about the huge success of radical right wing activism, which has been hellishly effective in shaping our democracy.

Ideas that a few generations ago were exclusively believed among a lunatic fringe of the conservative spectrum, the incendiary, baseless conspiracy theories of The John Birch Society, are now standard Republican dogma (see, for example Q-Anon). This metamorphosis from conservative to radical was achieved by tireless, smart, well-funded political activism and the systematic cultivation of a new worldview in which the radical was normalized, loyalty paramount, and neither reasoned debate nor compromise permitted.

Here is the best example I can think of to illustrate how narrow ideological orthodoxy, without even the benefit of a better argument, can effectively overrule popular democratic measures.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed during the Civil Rights Movement to end the chicanery that, for a century, had prevented millions of black and brown people from voting. It made voter suppression tactics like poll taxes (charging certain voters a large fee to cast a ballot) and super-challenging “literacy tests” (read and interpret arcane hundred-year old legalese) illegal.

The Voting Rights Act ended these vicious practice, and created barriers to states concocting new, more subtle voter suppression schemes. The supervisory powers of the Act caused big strides toward more equality under the law for all voters. Enforcement of the Voting Rights Act (enforcement being necessary for compliance), via oversight by Congress and the Department of Justice, was authorized by the Act’s Section Five Congress voted to renew the law almost unanimously..

A few years later, in a case decided in 2013, the Supreme Court stripped the Voting Rights Act of its enforcement clause by a 5-4 party-line majority vote that struck down Section Five as unconstitutional.

The majority decision in Shelby County v. Holder, one usually said to have “gutted” the Voting Rights Act, was flat out — well, 5-4, as in many recent Roberts court decisions, including some very recent voting rights cases dashed off on narrow legal grounds by men like Brett Kavanaugh, graduates of the elite right wing finishing school, complete with its oaths and sworn loyalties (see, for example, decision about not allowing mail-in voting extended in Wisconsin — see also Bader Ginsburg dissent in that case, you be the judge of who had the better legal and moral argument).

I recently read and analyzed the respective “arguments” in Shelby County v. Holder. You can see that Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s powerful, detailed dissent is right on the money and that the five zealots who signed on to a bare bones narrow legal ruling were wrong — as subsequent nationwide voter suppression laws and rulings have demonstrated.

The radical right is fond of accusing the Supreme Court of Judicial Activism (if it rules, for example, that racial segregation is unconstitutional, or that the right to privacy includes a woman’s right to decide whether to have a baby) but it is impossible to imagine a more partisan, activist decision than the purely transactional Federalist Society rationale used to strike down enforcement of the Voting Rights Act as “unconstitutional”.

We learn from Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s brilliant dissent that nationwide support for the Voting Rights Act was almost unanimous. A bipartisan Congress passed an extension of the Voting Rights Act, after 21 hearings that produced 15,000 pages of evidence of continued attempts by states to suppress the vote, by a vote of 390-33 in the House and, after further debate, 98 to 0 in the Senate. President George W. Bush promptly signed the reauthorization into law.

President Bush proclaimed that the law was essential to support “further work . . . in the fight against injustice,” and called the reauthorization “an example of our continued commitment to a united America where every person is valued and treated with dignity and respect.” 

Nothing could be more uncontroversial, bipartisan or universally acceptable in a democracy than a law passed by that kind of overwhelming Congressional majority and enthusiastically embraced by the president Unless I am missing something essential about democracy.

The radical right disagreed with this seemingly innocuous, nonpartisan interpretation of how democracy is meant to work. Or rather, they saw the real problem with the law to ensure fair voting:

universal voting is bad for business, interferes with a certain kind of privileged liberty, encourages politicians to actually debate and compromise over policies essential to the lives of millions of less well-off citizens — to the disadvantage of the super-wealthy and their corporate interests.

The 5-4 corporatist majority, using the thinnest of narrow legalistic logic (finding that no new evidence of voter discrimination had been produced by Congress, so it was unconstitutionally unfair to the states that wanted to change their laws to hold them to a law based on old evidence), struck down the section of the law that made enforcement of the law possible.

The far right brought a strategic constitutional challenge to an uncontroversial, universally supported law. They filed suit on behalf of an Alabama County (the suit was masterminded by recent top Trump lawyer William Consovoy) (a county that had recently engaged in racially discriminatory voting practices, mind you), resulted in an unappealable one-vote majority decision that overruled the unmistakable will of an almost unanimous Congress and the American Executive branch acting to ensure the right to vote for all Americans.

Fucking hell, you say?

Within hours of the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, numerous states made more restrictive voting laws. These laws were prepared and waiting for a victory in the Supreme Court. Fast forward a few years, to see how abolition of enforcement of the Voting Rights Act plays out.

In addition to numerous restrictive voting laws that must be challenged in court, instead of reviewed under the Voting Rights Act, multiple Republican state legislatures and majority Republican party-courts, in the lead up to the 2020 election, ruled for Republican plaintiffs (the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee) that measures to make safe voting easier during a deadly pandemic (one that is seeing a record tidal wave of infections and deaths strike us since in-person voting surged) violated various state voting laws.

Louis DeJoy, a donor who’d given millions to Republicans, and a bushel of cash to Trump in particular, was appointed by other Trump appointees (Obama had been blocked by McConnell from appointing anyone to the Postal Board) to dismantle 672 high speed mail sorting machines in large Democratic districts, remove thousands of mailboxes in Democratic areas, create and fan fear that millions of ballots would not be delivered in time to be counted. Spread the false accusation that mail-in voting equals massive fraud. Have the Attorney General, as well as other top officials, insist this partisan rumor was true over and over in the media. All in a concerted effort to suppress absentee voting, a well-organized voter suppression conspiracy in the plainest sense of the all those words. Sadly for them, these herculean public efforts didn’t succeed in winning the presidency for the Republican candidate, too many people simply voted against the divisive demagogue, in margins too large to overcome.

The radical right remains united in their defiance of so-called democracy, loudly, proudly supporting the president in his insane and baseless insistence that his 5,000,000 vote loss was fake, another hoax orchestrated by evil, democracy-hating fraudsters funded by accursed blood drinking child molesters.

Top Trump bootlicker and supreme political hypocrite Lindsey Graham:

“Mitch McConnell and I need to come up with an oversight of mail-in balloting. If we don’t do something about voting by mail, we are going to lose the ability to elect a Republican in this country.”

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The widely disliked Ted Cruz, another Republican senator who has obediently fallen into line, having apparently acquired a love of the taste of Mr. Trump’s lowest sphincter, publicly supports the baseless narrative that the election was stolen from Trump. Cruz insightfully said this, four years ago, stating the extremely obvious:

This man is a pathological liar. He doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies. He lies practically every word that comes out of his mouth. And in a pattern that I think is straight out of a psychology textbook, his response is to accuse everybody else of lying.

He accuses everybody on that debate stage of lying. And it’s simply a mindless yell. Whatever he does, he accuses everyone else of doing. The man cannot tell the truth, but he combines it with being a narcissist. A narcissist at a level I don’t think this country has ever seen.

Everything in Donald’s world is about Donald. And he combines being a pathological liar, and I say pathological because I actually think Donald, if you hooked him up to a lie-detector test, he could say one thing in the morning, one thing at noon and one thing in the evening, all contradictory and he’ll pass the lie detector test each time. Whatever lie he’s telling, at that minute he believes it.

Cruz added:

Bullies don’t come from strength, bullies come from weakness. Bullies come from a deep, yawning cavern of insecurity.

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Thomas B. Edsall provides perspective on this uniquely grotesque, if not entirely unprecedented, manifestation of rage against the popular will, as expressed through the ballot box. Edsall ends his excellent piece:

The unpredictable danger Trump and his henchmen are putting the nation in has no antecedent. Trump’s irrationalism has become a contagion. As he presides over the destruction of reason, he exploits and electrifies his public. No one knows where this will lead. Delusion can become tragedy. It’s happened before.

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Trump’s irrationalism has become a contagion. As he presides over the destruction of reason, he exploits and electrifies his public.

On the other hand, it is also worth remembering:

Please join me Thursday at 8 pm EST for an online strategy session and discussion with one of the Democratic Senate candidates from Georgia, Reverend Raphael Warnock. Details below. We attended the session with Jon Ossoff on Sunday and found its details of a practical plan to increase the vote for the Democratic candidates inspiring.

With a one vote Republican majority hanging in the balance, and with it the GOP’s ability to hamstring President-elect Biden in every possible way, the stakes for those two contested Senate seats in Georgia could not be higher. The January runoff election (required by Georgia law) to decide (possibly by a single vote) the fate of Biden’s ability to pass laws is where all the political fire is right now.

Mitch McConnell, who continues to vigorously defend Mr. Trump’s baseless denial of the election results as 100% within the president’s legal rights, met with Bagpiper Bill Barr yesterday. It is not disclosed what they discussed at the private meeting, but you can be sure Barr’s subsequent announcement that the DOJ may conduct political investigations prior to the certification of final vote tallies (demonstrating again Barr’s unprecedentedly shameless political motivation) was related to Mitch’s strategic concern that he maintain his razor thin Republican majority control of the senate.

We have already seen how McConnell used that tiny majority to stymie all attempts at legislation (including economic relief to millions impoverished by the pandemic) and many appointments by Democratic presidents, including, most famously, no hearing on the highly qualified, politically inoffensive Merrick Garland for the months’ vacant Supreme Court seat Trump filled with a Federalist Society-endorsed right winger shortly after his Electoral College victory.

Barr broke his blessed, almost two week, silence to pull his latest political stunt. In a carefully worded memo he called for the release of Department of Justice dogs to chase down any and all leads about specific cases of credible fraud, although no credible charges of fraud have been made in any of Trump’s numerous lawsuits. Not a shred of evidence has been produced in any of the more than 300 court cases.

Every Trump lawsuit based on a fraud claim has been tossed out of court for lack of evidence. There is no evidence of any kind of significant election fraud in U.S. elections (as seen in Barr’s carefully worded legal directive to Trump’s Department of Justice). Even Mike Pence and the determined Kris Kobach’s presidential commission on voter fraud could not find any evidence, before they closed shop after six months in operation..

The court of public opinion, of course, is no longer concerned with evidence or lack of evidence. This is particularly true of low-information jurors who just want what they want. This segment of the public has a result it wants, what it believes is true (millions, including at least one recently elected to Congress, apparently believe Democratic leaders actually drink the blood of murdered child sex slaves) and the so-called facts will just have to be fitted to the desired result. Obama producing a fake birth certificate does not disprove “Birtherism” to the loyal diehards who strongly believe these things.

Barr, McConnell, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham and other loyal Trump enablers are performing political theatre for Trump and his base. His base doesn’t care who actually won or lost the so-called election, they care about Trump somehow staying in power and they love any story that holds out hope for that. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, smiling confidently at the podium, told America and the world today — especially all of the dictators that he and his boss so admire — that not Joe Biden but Donald Trump will be inaugurated on January 20th. A “smooth transition” the staunch Evangelical Pompeo assured America and the world “to a second Trump administration.”

Grotesque political theatre, grandly staged to hold out the final hope for four more years of Trump by stoking populist rage and bringing the heavily armed, violent patriots out in massive numbers to support “law and order” by forcefully overthrowing the fraudulently elected Socialist order represented by Biden and Harris.

It seems unnecessary to point out, as many have, how idiotic this “widespread election fraud/stolen election” story is. If there was a vast conspiracy to steal the election, by this secret cabal of powerful child molesting traitors, why did they not flip three or four Senate seats, including McConnell’s and Graham’s, to ensure they’d be able to actually pass laws? A pretty stupid fraud scheme, to steal an election for a president who will be immediately put into a political strait jacket and mocked for his weakness by a defiant Republican party, right into the midterm elections.

The logic in the argument for an illegitimate, stolen election? Don’t look too hard, you’ll hurt yourself. Every place where a Republican won is a place where, by this argument, fraud was defeated. Every place where Biden won, massive, systemic, George Soros-financed fraud. Where Trump needed more votes, chant “Count the VOTES!”, where Trump’s lead was shrinking as the vote counting continued, chant “STOP the Count!”– there’s no contradiction there, none at all.

How about Georgia? Two run-offs, required by Georgia law, clearly caused by voter fraud in each case, clearly. Both Republican candidates subjected to the indignity of a fraudulent run-off have called for the resignation of the corrupt Republican secretary of state of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger.

Raffensperger’s response was quick:

“Earlier today Senators Loeffler and Perdue called for my resignation,” Raffensperger, who is also a Republican, said in a statement. “Let me start by saying that is not going to happen. The voters of Georgia hired me, and the voters will be the one to fire me.”

“As Secretary of State, I’ll continue to fight every day to ensure fair elections in Georgia, that every legal vote counts, and that illegal votes don’t count,” Raffensperger continued.

READ: Georgia secretary of state’s statement rebuking senators’ call for him to resign

“I know emotions are running high. Politics are involved in everything right now. If I was Senator Perdue, I’d be irritated I was in a runoff. And both Senators and I are all unhappy with the potential outcome for our President.”

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Just noticed one tell-tale line in that otherwise fine response. The Republican shares his Senators’ unhappiness about the “potential outcome” for a president who lost both the popular vote and the Electoral College by wide margins. Always on the base-pleasing talking points, even when otherwise speaking sensibly. What is with these fucking fucks?

Georgia’s secretary of state:

“And both Senators and I are all unhappy with the potential outcome for our President.”

the potential outcome for our President...

Georgia Senate Runoff –

Reverend Raphael Warnock

Thursday, Nov 12th at 5:00 PM Pacific/ 8:00 PM Eastern 

https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwlcOqprz4rGte6Vp8igGkvC5SAYFCk8J9_

Please RSVP here.

It was really not surprising, horrific as it also was, to hear unhinged fascist Steve Bannon call the other day for the decapitation of Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI director Christopher Wray. Their heads, he stated, on his podcast and via Twitter, should be on fucking pikes. For the capital crime, presumably, of treason to the Leader. In Bannon’s view, Fuhrerworte haben Gesestzeskraft — the Leader’s word has the force of law, (as long as Bannon gets to have a say in who the Leader is and what he says).

The blowhard was slapped hard by Twitter after posting these incendiary opinions. Banned from the social media app. He is awaiting acquittal, conviction, or some kind of plea deal, in the fraud case against him for allegedly (and most likely) fleecing gullible, trusting, sincere Trump supporters of millions of dollars for his personal enrichment in a fake Build That Wall crowd-funding scheme. He exploited the patriotism of those low-information supporters too uninformed to realize that Mexico had already fully paid for the Southern Border Wall that has solved virtually every one of our great nation’s problems. As promised by the Promise-Keeper-in-Chief.

Is it reasonable to fear some kind of mass violence by Trump’s fired up, heavily armed supporters? Probably, the president is keeping all options on the table, his tweeted commands are routinely obeyed by groups of diehard Trump activists who don’t shrink from violence. Bannon (Sloppy Steve, who was pushed out of the Trump administration when he took too much credit for being Trump’s brain) was on Fox on Election Day, keeping the troops fired up with deliberate, provocative misinformation, infuriating lies, if you will. This snapshot is about all you need for the gist of his “argument”, I wasn’t able to watch more than a moment of it.

The beauty part, of course, is that evidence is no longer necessary to prove your case– you just have to tell your followers clearly how they are being abused and by whom.

If evil people are openly trying to steal an election, suppress your vote, cheat to win– isn’t it only right to go out with baseball bats, at minimum, and smash them in their smug faces? I mean, isn’t it?

Here are some more thoughts from historian Heather Cox Richardson, about how Trump, Bannon and their ilk, exploit and stoke misinformation, expressed with a bit of optimism about the sudden spine of the mass media and of prominent Republicans publicly abandoning Trump that may have been premature.

First of all, much of Trump’s power during his term has come from his ability to dominate the public narrative through threats or rumors. From his insistence that he had hired detectives to investigate President Obama’s birth certificate, through Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails and Hunter Biden’s laptop, he has gathered power by warning that something untoward was looming just over the horizon. But yesterday, after all the hype about expected violence at the polls, there was remarkably little trouble.

Trump’s attempt to control politics by controlling the narrative continued early this morning, as the Department of Justice sent an email to federal prosecutors telling them that, while the law prohibits sending armed federal officers to polling places, it did authorize them to monitor “voting fraud” by sending armed federal officers to the places where election officials were counting ballots. About a half hour later, Trump called a press conference in which he declared victory and claimed that the ongoing counting of legally cast ballots must be stopped. Counting the ballots, he said, was the Democrats’ attempt to “steal the election.”

But Trump’s power is wavering, and he can no longer control the narrative. As he spoke, NBC News and MSNBC cut in to note that he was lying. After he finished, other media outlets also pushed back. On ABC News, Terry Moran said: “This isn’t law, this isn’t politics, this is theater,” Moran said. “And let’s be blunt: it’s the theater of authoritarianism.” Throughout the day, Trump tweeted angrily about the on-going counting of ballots; Twitter hid many of the tweets behind warnings that they were spreading disinformation.

Republican leaders have been surprisingly quick to turn on the president. Last night, the Fox News Channel was the first to call the state of Arizona for Democratic candidate Joe Biden which, according to Gabriel Sherman of Vanity Fair, led Trump to call Rupert Murdoch, who owns the Fox News Channel, to demand a retraction. Murdoch, who has said for months that Trump would lose the election, refused.

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She provides us another important story that slipped through the cracks, as the high-powered shit hoses were flooding the zone in every way Trump and his allies have become so proficient at in our rightful terror over being terrorized by a terroristic party of violence- threatening extremists.

Another news story dropped quietly yesterday while people were distracted with the election. The Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security issued a report challenging Acting Director Chad Wolf’s actions this summer when he sent law enforcement officers from the department to Portland, Oregon. The report challenged the deployments’ legality on a number of fronts, and concluded that the issue is open, unresolved, and urgent. The Department of Homeland Security’s top attorney, Chad Mizelle, an ally of senior White House policy adviser Stephen Miller, rejects the inspector general’s findings.

Of course, if he gets a moment, Trump knows exactly what to do. You fire the damned Inspector General, screw him, traitor! Put his head on a goddamned pike next to Fauci’s, Wray’s, Mueller’s, Comey’s, Sessions’s, Lindsey Graham’s (no, wait, Graham defended him yesterday), Omorosa’s, Hillary’s, Obama’s, Tillerson’s (who’s the fucking moron now, Rex?) those five fucks who raped the woman in Central Park and got away with it, Joe Biden’s, Hunter Biden’s, Stephen Colbert’s, Rosie O’Donnell’s, Oprah’s, Mary Trump’s, Giuliani’s, etc.

In our divided, fearful world, at this moment of disorienting uncertainty, billions of us increasingly facing imminent death and destruction, we can only go one of two ways — toward greater humanity or greater inhumanity. Sadly, the impulses seems to be solidly divided 50/50 at the moment.

I could seriously use a nice a nap, couldn’t you?