Lawrence O’Donnell with a brilliant analysis of the latest stand by the empty vessel of vain ambition from Arizona. O’Donnell was as angry as I was hearing Sinema’s insulting and incoherent little speech about the inviolability of the filibuster and the lamentble death of two voting rights laws she deeply believes in, but he knew, from being a Senate staffer, that somebodywrote those words for her to speak. Making the words even more despicable, somehow.
O’Donnell then played back her spirited, spontaneous remarks from when she was in the House, mocking Joe Leiberman (before he actually joined the GOP) as a Democrat in name only and describing how the rest of the Democrats just have to vote aroundanobnoxious, not-with- the-teamcreature like that.
Friends of democracy, I give you the vain, vile, contrariangentlewoman from Arizona, the Honorable Kyrsten “dagger to democracy’s throat” Sinema, and an excellent editorial by Lawrence O’Donnell.
Democracy here is under active and energetic siege by a party of determined fanatics, backed by unlimited dark money, dozens of inluential right-wing nonprofits, a 6-3 far right Supreme Court and organized right-wing violence. There are two bills pending that will go a long way toward ensuring fair elections going forward. Trump’s cult, the GOP, has cut off debate on these bills in the Senate, using the filibuster, a parliamentary tool developed by slaveholders to block Senate debate
Thefilibuster was later embraced by supporters of lynching, defenders of racial segregation and proponents of voter suppression. On the state level the GOP has been tireless in enacting partisan laws to limit the vote, gerrymander themselves into disproportionate representation and give the final say on who won elections to proven partisans. 34 of thesenew Trump-inspired “Election Integrity” laws are currently in effect in 19 states.
The two voting rights bills currently being filibustered in the Senate by Trumpistas would protect the right to vote, limit partisan power grabs, restrain dark money and ensure the continued nonpartisan integrity of the counting of ballots that is the foundation of every nonauthoritarian government.
The GOP argument against these bills even being debated in the Senate, such as there is an argument, is strikingly similar to fucking Kyrsten Sinema’s demented, incoherent argument here: the filibuster’s requirement for a supermajority to debate a proposed law guarantees debate by enabling a minority to resist partisan tyranny by blocking debate, “as I am so sick of explaining to you cucks, trolls and morons.”
Filibuster rules have been changed more than 150 times over the years, including right after Trump’s election in 2016 when McConnell changed the filibuster rule to allow a simple majority vote for the Supreme Court, to allow a controverial, highly partisan trio of carefully vetted far right political operatives to round out the 6-3 majority on the Trump/Koch/McConnell Supreme Court. Sinema and Manchin just voted for a filibuster carve out to let Democrats take the full blame for raising the debtceiling, for fuck’s sake.
Check out this amazing talking pile of shit (but not if you’re eating), the former progressive from Arizonaand see if you can make anything coherent out of her remarks, outside of obstruction of debate on crucial election laws she claims to support, one she even co-sponsored, in the higher name of a hallucination of “bipartisanship” in the Age of Trump/McConnell/Koch. How about you and Manchin get one symbolic Repulicansenatorto sign on for bipartisan debate, dollface, show us all how it’s done.
Nothing to see here, really, but the $50,000,000 ad buy (paid for by donors to Trump’s “Legal Defense Fund”) promoting the false claim of a stolen election, likely paid mostly to Facebook, stopped on January 5th, the day before the peaceful MAGA protest at the Capitol that injured 140 police officers. Immediately after the election Facebook removed the pre-election safeguards against amplified, dangerous misinformation and hate speech because of a drop in its profits caused by these voluntary safeguards. Like other patriotic American billionaires, who had a windfall of literally trillions of dollars during the pandemic and upheaval of Trumpism, the head of Facebook had his bottom line priorities straight during months of propaganda-stoked rage and chaos that led up to the riot at the Capitol.
This reversion to Facebook’s normal business model to maximize emotional engagement and clicks allowed an infuriating lie to spread, like yer proverbial wild fire, to millions on-line and fuel rage against an imagined devilish conspiracy, involving evil Democrats, traitorous RINOs and other nefarious actors, including George Soros, George Clooney, George Burns, George Carlin, dead leftist dictators, corrupt voting machine makers and Italian hackers, to deprive the ordained leader, chosen by Christ Himself, of the presidency, after mathematically impossible masses of cheating brown people and various enemies, many of them dead, fraudulently voted for the sleepy Chinese puppet.
But, seriously, what is my point in even pointing any of this out?If Attorney General Merrick Garland doesn’t seem to feel any great urgency to investigate and prosecute conspirators who left a massive trove of public evidence of their detailed crimes against democracy, who am I to opine? Perhaps another superman, a non-authoritarian one, will rescue us from this gathering, hydra-headed catastrophe…
Rom Rosenblum was my dear friend Howie Katz’s best friend. Howie, a man with an irrepressible sense of humor, was never known to have said a bad word about anyone. Howie died the gentle, early death of a person beloved of God, he was stopped at a red light, his foot on the brake, and his life winked out like a candle flame extinguished by a whisper, his passenger unaware until the light changed and he said “Howie, Howie…”
Rom went to the airport to pick up Howie’s daughter for the funeral. “I’m the adult,” he told me, “her father’s best friend, who held her as a baby, I’m like her uncle, I’m supposed to be comforting her, but as soon as I saw her I just started crying, and she’s trying to comfort me. I couldn’t stop crying.” They both no doubt bawled together on that ride back to the city.
Rom was a beautiful soul, kind, funny, a great musician. I used the past tense because I got a text, out of the blue, that Rom died of pancreatitis a few days ago. I wish I’d known he was sick, I certainly would have called him. We might even have had a laugh. No matter how dark the situation, I think Rom could find a way to laugh about it.
Rom was about five years older than me. We met when I was seven or eight. Rather, he performed for my little sister and me when I was that age. It’s a story I can now never confirm with anyone, my father, who knew Rom well, was an appreciator of Rom’s quick, irreverent wit, and who Rom thought highly of, is gone. Now Rom is gone too. My first encounter with him was at a weekend convention of teenagers my father was supervising, held at a big hotel in Hampton Bays, Long Island, either November 1963, starting the day JFK was murdered, or perhaps the following spring. My father, a high school social studies teacher, had a second job as the director of the Nassau-Suffolk region of a Zionist youth movement for teenagers called Young Judaea. If my math is right, Rom was probably about the youngest of the high school-aged Young Judaeans at that convention.
He was walking with a cane, having injured himself, I always assumed, playing ice hockey, a game he loved. To my sister and me he looked a bit like a young John Lennon, which puts this convention the year after the JFK assassination, since no American kids our age had ever yet heard of John, let alone knew what looked like in November 1963. I recall the tall, skinny kid with the glasses and the attitude, slouching on a couch outside the dining room, where everybody else was still occupied. When he saw my younger sister (she was five or six) and me he went into a performance, pretending he was drunk (or maybe not pretending? he kept slurring the ad line “sure didn’t taste like tomato juice…”) and using the cane as a hockey stick to reenact the action on the ice, as he called out the exciting play by play of a sport I never understood “Giacomin with the save, wait, slap shot, SCORE!” and so forth. Eddie Giacomin, I confirmed years later, was a goaltender for the NY Rangers, the only NYC hockey team at the time.
My sister and I found the young Rom delightful, entertaining, as clever and hilarious as Peter Sellers, who he also slightly resembled. Here’s what he looked like in more recent years:
Our paths crossed over the years, as my father continued his involvement with the youth group and eventually became director of their summer camp in Barryville, NY. It was at this camp. in the summer of 1969, that I ran into Bruce Rosenblum, the guy who’d entertained my younger sister and me with his madcap improvisations years earlier. By then he was going by the name of Peanuts — on his way to Rom. His was riding in the back of a small, open, flatbed truck with a large group of other high school seniors at the camp, the overloaded truck negotiating a twisting road, when the truck flipped over, flinging its occupants, causing numerous injuries. Peanuts spent some time in the hosptial, I recall and came back from the hospital on crutches. He was no less stylish and cool, clompingaround the camp on crutches than he had been with his cane.
A few years later he was in Israel, a new immigrant, serving time in the Israeli army with his buddy Howie Katz. Howie was part of a tank crew that wound up in a firefight in the Sinai desert during the Yom Kippur War. I believe Rom was in the same crew. So was Don Tocker, the guy who’d go on to be the first director of the new kibbutz they were all founding members of. Suddenly, seeing something, Don yelled “jump!”and they all leapt off the tank. The tank blew up after a direct hit from an Egyptian artillery shell. The entire crew miraculously escaped unharmed. I met Howie shortly afterwards on that brand new kibbutz in the Aravah desert, in the valley across from the mountains of Jordan.Howie was my kibbutz father, and nobody ever had a better father than Howie. We became lifelong friends.
Howie eventually became disillusioned with life on the kibbutz, a small town where people gave him a hard time, among other things, for walking around everywhere naked. I don’t know much about Rom’s reasons, but after a year, or maybe more, he too left the kibbutz, and eventually returned to the US. They both settled in the Bay Area, Howie in San Francisco (where he and his wife raised two children in the heart of the Castro, the gay district of SF, during the AIDS epidemic, a time of great human rights battles over the “right to be gay”) and Rom settled across the bay, in East Bay, near Berkeley.
Over the years I maintained some contact with Rom. Any time I was in California I made a point of getting together with him. We played music together a few times, the first being at a Halloween party where, as part of an impromptu band, all in costume, Rom (a brilliant keyboard player) played an excellent harmonica and sang, and I played a borrowed electric guitar behind him. I can’t overstate what a great musician he was. He was also a recording engineer. I visited him in East Bay once, we played a bit, and then Howie came by in his truck to take me back to San Francisco. Howie requested “All Along the Watchtower” and Rom, in about a minute, put together a great loop of that simple vamp. We played variations on the theme for a couple of minutes, Howie beaming at us the whole time.
After Howie died suddenly, Rom, who was in agony, comforted me on the phone when I called to express anguish about inadverently alerting a difficult former friend of Howie’s who’d angrily written Howie off, who was now heading to Howie’s funeral and might upset Howie’s widow. I asked Rom for his help. “Don’t worry about it, it won’t be a problem. It’s not your fault you that talked to his mother, it will be fine,” said Rom, “There’s nothing you did, or can do, nothing I need to do, everything will be fine. Don’t worry, we’re all adults, it will be fine.” And it was.
A couple of years later Howie’s daughter asked a friend and me to do the music for her wedding. We were honored, it was a thrill, and very hard work leading up to the wedding, particularly for me, the entire rhythm section, in real-time, on one guitar. The guy I played with was very nervous, unsure if I was up to the task he’d set of me holding down the entire accompaniment for him. I had to arrange and learn each tune perfectly, the bass, embellishments, each chord, perfectly in time and at the right place. Otherwise we’d be embarrassed as his melodies crashed over an unsteady one man backing band.
I was not worried, but I knew I had to keep working my ass off to get ready. A few days before the wedding I spoke to Rom, who was officiating at the wedding with his wife Debby, both of them duly empowered by the State of California. As always, Rom urged me not to worry. He’d bring his keyboard and back us up, he would need no rehearsal could easily play off the cuff whatever we’d taken days to learn. It was a great relief that he’d round out the band, it instantly took a lot of weight off my shoulders. The plan was quickly nixed, it was deemed improper for the rabbi to be in the band. Taking Rom’s lead, I did not protest. I played 8-10 hours a day in the days before the wedding and mastered playing all the parts. The music came off without a hitch.
Rom and Debby performed a beautiful wedding ceremony. There was something otherwordly, and at the same time so fundamentally sane and perfect, in two great humanists, a married couple, ushering a young couple into marriage. Very joyous. Rom’s face, as he lovingly hugged everybody at the wedding, stays in my memory.It was the second to last time I ever saw him.
In this troubled world, people who seem slightly above it, more sensitive, more aware, gentler, more generous, more understanding and amused, readier to amuse, than most people, give the rest of us hope. The human is capable of this, and we have examples living among us. They inspire us to be better. Rom was one of the best of us.
If this many of his base had attended his inauguration, Trumpie wouldn’t have had to make Sean Spicer lie to reporters/everyone about the enormous size ofhis manly crowd:
Here’s the stirring two minute American carnage porn video the crowd was shown, narrated by Trump, scored with heroic rap music, since gangbangers like Kanye love the gold-plated Boss, right before the great man himself took the stage to exhort the crowd, resulting in thousands of energized patriots surging down to the Capitol to fight like hell to Stop the Steal, kick police ass and take names, give courage to, or kill, hesitant Republican elected officials likethe cowardly Vice President.
Bearing in mind that provable facts no longer matter to the Trump 39%, here’s fascism historian Jason Stanley on the echoes of Nazi propaganda on January 6th, right before the “violent terrorist attack” that Lyin’ Ted apologized for calling the peaceful protest to save democracy.Stanley’s powerful, informative essay putting the two minute call to arms in chilling historical context is called “Movie at the Ellipse a Study in Fascist Propaganda”. It sure enough was.
The only insight I have, and this took me years to really take in, is not to make depression more bitter by blaming yourself for feeling hopeless. This is the trap of depression — you feel depressed because you believe you don’t have what it takes, you lack the qualities that everyone else has, you are a loser, too weak to do what everyone else manages to do. That is the fucking depression talking, trust me. If you feel depressed, it is burden enough without adding unforgiveness toward yourself. It is also useful to remember that depression almost always passes, nuance, taste and color return.
As for good reasons for depression, there are currently many. At the top of the list is the accelerating pandemic, a wildly proliferating virus much cannier and more adaptable than the puny earthlings fighting over how to fight it, as the planet plummets toward ecosystem apocalypse. From the demented, “transactional” former president’s point of view, and millions in his cult, the more Americans who die of Covid-19 under Biden the better. It will prove that Biden is a loser, working with the Chinese Communist Party and Burisma Energy to kill as many white Christian Americans as possible and let George Soros replace them with brown fake Americans dumb enough to vote for elite pedophile cannibals.Luckily for Trump, he’s got a 6-3 Supreme Court majority poised to make it much harder for the Biden administration to fight this relentlessly morphing, deadly worldwide disease. US Covid death numbers are climbing every day, as a burned out health care force, on the front lines now for more than two years, in a war with no seeming end, starts to call in sick and quit. Talk about fucking depressing.
Any chance of justice after a president who lost reelection by a large margin repeatedly lies about a stolen “landslide victory” then unsuccessfully twists the arms of election officials to change results, then tries to get the DOJ to announce fake fraud investigations while his henchmen in Congress do the rest, then executes the elaborate, extra-constitutional “Green Bay Sweep” to sweep aside certified, recounted election results, based on what Ted Cruz yelled were “unprecedented allegations of massive electoral fraud,” before he unleashes a whipped up crowd, and everything else the defeated never-say-die motherfucker does daily? The Attorney General announced finally that the DOJ is very seriously considering doing something to restore faith in American justice, as long as the DOJ can convince people that it has no political agenda, in a society where even basic safety precautions during an unprecedented modern pandemic are weaponized for partisan advantage (by only one party, boys and girls).
Even Mike Pence, a Trump loyalist who embarrassed actual obsequious miniature poodles with his stone-faced ass-licking of his master, realized the game was over prior to the “Green Bay Sweep” on January 6. He consulted far-right former federal judge/Republican operative J. Michael Luttig about John Eastman’s absurd interpretation of the Twelfth Amendment which supposedly gives the sitting Vice President the right to overturn the results of any election that does not keep him in office. Even Luttig, a man who defended as proper Bill Barr’s meddling to get insane Trump fanatic Michael Flynn’s guilty pleas for perjury thrown out, told Pence not to do it. So did former VP Dan Quayle, in no uncertain terms.
Here’s the kicker: after Pence broke the bad news to Trump, that he could not hold up the certification of Biden electors, based on a lie — no matter how big — and a crackpot legal theory, Trump was furious. To Pence’s reported horror and anger, on the evening of January 5th Trump released a press statement announcing that Pence was fully on board with the plan to force another fraud investigation before Biden could be certified as the duly elected president.
Think about just the Pence angle of this hundred ring shit show MAGA seditious conspiracy circus. A crass yet obsequious far-right Christian crusader who had taxpayers fund Gay Conversion Therapy in Indiana (fuck the teen suicides, Jesus said to cure ’em!), an unlikable, charisma-free smudge of Santorum put in office by the connivance and funding of Charles Koch and company (like equally disgusting, suddenly invisible Mike Pompeo, who started as the Kochs’ personal Congressman from Topeka), Pence deserves whatever fate karma might have in store for his type. Still, when he decided to do the right thing, to follow the law, Trump set him up as a traitor by publishing a lie that made him seem like a suddenly vacillating liar too weak to do what he’d promised. That’s why the mob wanted to hang him as a cowardly traitor, because he’d chickened out at the last second, because he didn’t save America from the illegitimate brown and yellow hoards. When Trump sent a motorcade to evacuate Pence from the besieged Capitol, Pence declined to get in, fearing, not unreasonably, that his boss had taken out a hit on him. What the fuck?
We learn that the Fulton County DA spoke to Trump’s lawyers last month, and Trump reacted in fury that was then hard to understand, since nobody knew about the meeting with Trump lawyers, outside of the DA, the lawyers and Trump. The only sticking point in prosecuting Trump for that well-known attempt to cajole, persuade, threaten and otherwise get Georgia officials to “find 11,780 Trump votes”, we are cautioned, is the question of Trump’s intent.
What if Trump actually believed he’d really been cheated? What if he sincerely didn’t believe Barr, Chris Krebs and everybody else he appointed, and who were soon out of his government shortly after telling Trump there’d been virtually no voter fraud in 2020? I went to law school and practiced law, and I still don’t understand this lack of intent business, unless it goes to an insanity defense for the former president.
So, yeah, there are countless reasons to feel as depressed as I did opening my eyes this morning. Unless your depression is so severe that you feel life is not worth living (in which case, exert yourself to seek help) my best suggestion is get out of bed, use the bathroom, brush your teeth, take a shower, get yourself walking. Much of soldiering through depressing times is just getting yourself walking, and connecting with others, however you can, no matter how how horrific the prospect of being in contact with others may seem. It is very easy to feel alone in this, and very important to stay connected, as best you can. My two copeks on how to endure any perfectly reasonable depression you are feeling right now in these exceptionally depressing times.
Hard-hitting 44 second video From the Republican Accountability Project, a group of Republicans for democracy. Several will no doubt work for for the Liz Cheney for President campaign in 2024. Their message couldn’t be clearerfor 2022. Or more welcome.
StrongMedicine for a deadly, highly contagious disease, American fascism.
This ad is apparently eleven months old, (it has less than 70,000 views on youTube). They are currentlyrunning it as an ad on FOX, during Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Fox and Friends. Good luck convincing the Trump death cult that these are not all fake clips manipulated by vicious commies, but, more power to the Republican Accountability Project.More timely now than when they created it right after the riot at the Capitol.
“You fucking did this!” is what Liz Cheney snarled at Jim Jordan, pushing him away as he tried to take her arm as they fled from MAGA rioters sacking the Capitol.
Ted Cruz came to the Senate in 2012 in a wave of Tea Party candidates, an organized, well-funded “grassroots” expression of popular rage that exploded onto the national scene as a protest against Obama’s dictatorial plan to expand health care insurance coverage for struggling Americans. The Tea Party was fueled by the lie, funded by the same super-wealthy folks, that Birtherism was a true fact, that Obama was not only Black, and a secret Muslim, but not even eligible to have run for president, having been born in Africa. He was illegitimate and a liar.
Into this Tea Party Congress stepped the highly intelligent, ultra-right, former Ivy League debating champion Ted Cruz, the right wing billionaires’ obvious choice for president in 2016. He was the last man standing, before his billionaire backers the Mercers saw that Cruz couldn’t win the nomination, threw their money behind Trump, and put their network at his disposal, including ultra-right wing strategist Steve Bannon and supremely brazen attorney Kelleyanne Conway. Bannon and Conway, it should be noted, were both revealed to be members of the Council on National Policy. Bob Garfield and Anne Nelson, researcher and writer who exposed the powerful, secretive, nonprofit CNP, discuss:
GARFIELD: All right. Let’s now turn to the more-or-less present: the rise of Trump and the now violent assault on democracy. How was CNP involved in Trump’s ascent?
NELSON: The CNP was involved with Trump, initially, very reluctantly. He wasn’t one of them, he had no particular religious background, he was multiply divorced, and he really didn’t reflect their values in many ways. Their favored candidate was Ted Cruz, but they had a problem – which was that Cruz had a tremendous charisma deficit, and as he lost the primaries, they realized that either they supported Trump, the primary victor, or they lived with Hillary Clinton’s presidency, which was unacceptable to them.
GARFIELD: Oh, I – I’m sorry, I just – I just have to interrupt to remind you what then Senator Al Franken (laughs) said about Cruz.
AL FRANKEN: I probably like him more than most of my other colleagues like Ted, and I hate him (laughs).
NELSON: That is the case. Cruz is a formidable intelligence and strategist. He was not a winning candidate outside Texas. So the fundamentalists convened something, like, a thousand leaders and representatives in New York City in June of 2016 at the Times Square Marriott. They brought Trump out to parade him before them, and they had a number of leaders from the Council for National Policy there on the program. And publicly, what that event was about was to sell Trump to this thousand fundamentalist leaders, many of whom had been Never Trumpers, and they were like, “This is going to be your guy. You need to go home and tell your flocks that this is the plan.” But the second part of that agenda involved meetings where they cut a deal with Trump. They said, “You don’t have a war chest, you don’t have ground troops for the election canvassing, you don’t have a strategy. And all indications are you’re going to get creamed.” So we have all three of those that we can put into your service. But in return –
GARFIELD: We have a shopping list.
NELSON: We have a shopping list, and it’s basically got three items. The first one was enact some of our policies by executive orders. So when suddenly the Republican platform has this new anti-trans, anti LGBT language that was literally written by the president of the Council for National Policy, Tony Perkins, Trump enacted the anti-trans policy for the Pentagon against the Pentagon’s wishes, which, you know, the Pentagon said, “This is disruptive of our operations and trans people are not a problem,” but Trump had to deliver on his deal. The second part was to create an evangelical advisory council. Obama had a religious advisory council, but it included Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims. This one was 100% Protestant, and none of these other religions needed to apply. The leadership of this council were in and out of the White House on policy discussions and photo ops on a weekly basis. The third was by far the most important, far reaching, and devastating to our democracy. And that was when they got Trump to agree that any federal judges he nominated would be approved from a list that was submitted by three organizations run by members of the Council for National Policy. These were the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and the National Rifle Association. Now, what business the NRA has in recommending federal judge nominations? I do not know, but that’s how it played out, and after his first confirmation, he invited the representatives of these groups, most of them from the Council for National Policy, for a little victory luncheon at the White House.
GARFIELD: So that was the origin story of Trump’s deal with the devil, a man with not only no religion, but no ideology to speak of creating himself in the image of his political and financial sponsors. Over the ensuing – well, so then he was elected, more or less – and then over the ensuing four years, many of Trump’s 30,000 lies, big and small, find their provenance, what do you know, in the CNP. So, can we just tick a few of these off beginning with the COVID hoax, and the savior drug hydroxychloroquine?
NELSON: So if you get to the beginning of 2020, the Trump campaign is in trouble and the Council for National Policy recognizes it. They had hoped that the 2020 elections would be won with a popular vote, that was cast into doubt. COVID set in a couple of months later, and the whole strategy of the Trump campaign had been built around mass rallies and data harvesting from attendees of the rallies and building on that to secure a victory.
Well, mass rallies became impossible because of COVID restrictions, so there was a critical phone call that involved the president of the Council for National Policy and members of the Trump campaign staff, where they said, “We need to open up society, get the economy roaring again, and people are afraid of COVID, but they trust doctors. We have a group of doctors who will say that COVID is a hoax, will argue for the reopening of society and the mass rallies.”
So that summer, these doctors were convened by Jenny Beth Martin in Washington. Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of Tea Party Patriots and a leading figure in the Council for National Policy. At that point, the point person – when Dr. Simone Gold announced that hydroxychloroquine was a cure for COVID – she was put on partner media platforms of the CNP, including the Charlie Kirk Show and the Christian Broadcasting Network, spreading this disinformation
SIMONE GOLD: With the tyranny of medical apartheid nipping at our heels, rise up. Rise up. Rise up.
NELSON: And that has now expanded into a small army of unethical physicians who are continuing the hydroxychloroquine hoax. They’ve added ivermectin as a cure and, in fact, they have online prescription services charging money to people who are ordering ivermectin as a COVID cure.
As for the man Trump rebranded as Lyin’ Ted, who kicked off the January 6th MAGA “Green Bay Sweep” to keep Trump in office, after days of yelling about “unprecedented allegations of massive electoral fraud,” he’d narrowly held off a challenge for his Senate seat by Beato O’Rourke in 2018, as the New York Times noted:
Republican strategists and insiders said Mr. Cruz’s narrow victory did not mean that Democrats stood to make substantial gains in Texas. Rather, they believed it had more to do with Mr. Cruz himself, one of the most divisive political figures in the state, and the anti-Trump energy of Democrats.
here’s a highlight reel on brilliant, unlikable Ted’s nuanced, evolving views of Donald, compiled by the staff of Meet the Press (I was somehow thwarted from posting the clip I filmed in its original form, but here is my free ad for the NBC show starring Chuck Todd, in an audio workaround)
The enormous crowd that surged toward the siege and overran of the Capitol police, while planned as a Hail Mary option for the “Green Bay Sweep”, hurried to the Capitol to riot without police interference. The whipped up crowd had been promised “will be wild!” and it sure enough had been, so far. The best was yet to come.
They stormed straight down to the Capitol without encountering lines of police, as marches everywhere always do, because the Stop the Steal organizers had not applied for or obtained a permit to march from the mass rally at the Ellipse down to theriot at the Capitol.
No planned march, hence minimal police presence along the unannounced parade route.
Any emotional mass march is always closely supervised by police, if authorities know about it, if the proper papers have been filed, if the law has been followed.
So the path of the quick march of incensed patriots, down to fight like hell and take the under-policed Capitol and give courage to fainthearted Republicans in Congress to “Stop the Steal”, was very different than anything you’d ever see on any parade route in DC, or in any other city or town, or in any rural or suburban area, for thatmatter.
The Trump riot was not an overwheming law enforcement failure. It was lawless by design. Had the law been followed and a permit sought for the march, enabling authorities to protect the public and prevent traffic nightmares, the riot would have been prevented. Defeating the whole purpose of inciting the violence and making the leader and MAGA nation look weak!
Yeah, so we didn’t apply for a stinkin’ permit, boo fucking hoo. Yeah, we planned to teach those f-ing traitors a lesson, so we kept our secret, illegal plan quiet…
Duh!
“What don’t you motherfuckers get about ‘by any means necessary’ or the ‘ballot or the bullet’? Next time the boys will go down there armed with their sacred Second Amendment… and we’ll see what those weak, corrupt, elite, lying, cowardly blood drinking pedophiles have to say then…”
First a well-done light-hearted highlight tour of the career of Tea Bagger Ted Cruz, the most universally hated person in theSenate (with apologies to also-ran Josh Hawley) from Trevor Noah’s Daily Show.
And a more serious discussion of Cruz’s Trump-related craveness, and his direct involvement in Peter Navarro and the war room’s “Green Bay Sweep” strategy to block the certification of Joe Biden’s victory due to “unprecedented allegations of fraud” believed by FOX nation.
Cruz executed the opening play in the “sweep” on January 6 as the start of a coordinated Hail Mary, with the clock about to run out, to once more try to flip votes in swing states. The idea was to get Republican state legislatures all on the same page, attempt to decertify Biden electors, creating no winner in the Electoral College and throwing the presidency to the House to extra-constitutionally keep cuddlyTrumpie as president.
A final word on this snarling, squirming far-right billionaire-backed fuck nut nexttime I sit down to open his disgusting can of worms .
gratuitousblahg 