So many stories landed today that some will have to wait. Tonight’s news, though, boils down to Republican attempts to retake control of the government in the 2022 elections…and, if Trump has his way, even earlier. This morning, CNN revealed another bombshell story from the forthcoming book by veteran reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa: a six-point memo from pro-Trump lawyer John Eastman laying out a plan for then–vice president Mike Pence to steal the 2020 election for Trump.
I have another bone to pick with the media. Why was the blonde girl's disappearance national news? Why was her disappearance so much more important than all the native women and black women that have gone missing and even died? I want to thank Joy Reed for asking this question on her show and sharing stories of some of the native and black women who have gone missing.
Last Friday morning, I was awakened around 3:00am by a most dreaded sound: that of a freight train about to run over me. Native Midwesterner that I am, I grabbed my dog and old cat and headed to the basement. About a minute after I got there, I heard a very loud boom and felt the ground under my feet shudder.
An EF 0 tornado had popped out of the clouds right above my back yard and twisted off the tops of three mature oak trees and dumped them on the ground. My neighbors lost a poplar and a giant cottonwood; another neighbor had a huge spruce laid flat on his house. 20 minutes later, the storm had passed.
Reading this LFAA this morning felt like having another tornado pop out and lay me out flat like my beautiful trees. So much effort out there to shred democracy and subvert the peaceful transfer of power. And they are still at it.
Took me a while but I now have crashed through to the fact that these duly elected bastards really do want to destroy this country. Gobsmacked yes. Go down in their ship? Never.
Like many here, I often feel helpless in the face of such greed and hubris. But I also know that one person can make a difference- even if only for themselves and their immediate community.
I have a ton of work to do to clean up my backyard literally as well as politically. I’m on it. Chop wood, carry water. Write letters to my representatives, postcards to voters, phone calls to potential voters, checks to good candidates. Sucks but I just will not give up without a fight. Glad you all are here.
"Trump is under criminal investigation in Georgia for his previous attempts to overturn the state’s election results."
He's been under investigation in NY, on a number of issues, by NY state and federal SDNY attorneys. When are we going to hear from any or all of these investigations?
All I want for Christmas, 2021 please, not '22 or '23, are some indictments!
Methinks you need more than one early night per week. This news is nightmarish!
What 45 and the GOP have plotted -- and continue to connive -- is beyond horrific! I dare Stephen King to write a more destructive horror story! That monster and his lackeys have no right to be free while so many innocent human beings are behind bars.
As a nation, in order to retain a small modicum of normalcy, we must vow to vote the GOP out at every turn!
I listened to Alex Jones in the days leading up to the January 6th insurrection. He had a few guests on his show like John Eastman laying out ' legitimate ' paths forward for Trump to reclaim the 2020 election. One major component was that the count in the House be interrupted. Of course this would be the job of the 'Trump following, public demonstrators '. This is awesome how you have parsed this out HCR. I guess reading Woodward and Costa's book would explain what you've said here in excruciating detail. This is serious business because this is another example of these 'determined people' throwing stuff up against the wall in order to see what will stick ... Democracy hanging in the balance.
Once again, America is at a point where the right decision would be to charge the former president with either insurrection or treason, and with plenty of evidence, it won’t be done.
In this country, we chase commies out of fear, but let fascism bloom; Americans believe the boogie-man stories about Democrats but don’t address real violence against women and children; Americans believe justice comes in the courtroom when it sees an injustice, but can’t tell a real crime from a false charge made to politically smear someone. And Americans believe falsely that millions of non-Americans are voting th create invalid election results, when in reality, other countries around the world are making themselves stakeholders in our election process that they are influencing our democracy.
There are people today who claim Pres Biden is a criminal running our country, so every act he takes is unlawful and invalid. THIS MUST STOP, and the former president continues to tell the world that he won’t stop until he is forced to stop. He has plenty of fans and enables in government who also see their own demise in the new For The People Act provisions.
One would hope that Republican voters would wake up and acknowledge that Trump is a liar, cheater and a psychopath and will not vote for another sh*t show in 2024, but if he runs, they'll put the MAGA hats back on. One would hope that as Trump's chickens come home to roost--charges of tax evasion, potential indictments out of Georgia for trying to sway the 2020 election, rape charges, enormous personal debt defaults--would dim his star, but they won't. And now, in the face of voter suppression laws, Democrats are scrambling to eek out a win in 2022. The odds are definitely stacked against them.
Good doesn't always prevail. The recent Russian elections in which Putin opposition candidates were purged from the ballots demonstrates this. As Leonard Cohen sings, "Everybody knows the dice are loaded, everybody knows the good guys lost." Republicans are loading the dice and Americans must fight back.
"Democrats sued Friday to stop the release of the voter information, and two Democratic representatives to Congress have asked the Department of Justice to investigate whether the subpoenas could violate federal laws by leading to voter intimidation."
Regarding Trump's effort to get Pence to refuse to verify the Electoral College ballot count on 6 January, we see how Trump gets others to perform acts of commission that would provide him cover of plausible deniability of intent to commit an illegal act in his own name. He used others the same way: Michael Cohen, Allan Weiselberg (sic), President Zelinsky of Ukraine (unsuccessful), the white supremacist groups of January 6 at the Capitol fame, to name a few I can recall. He's using the tactics of a mob-boss, one with a sick mind. I'd love to know the name of the person, or persons, who create such incredible game-theory schemes for Trump; I detect he learned a few things working at his daddy's elbow. I don't believe Trump himself has enough of an attention span, or powers of imagination, to put such barely believable Lego machines together.
Teflon Don. After a life of crime, he’s still free to terrorize us. A painful lesson for the USA. We need laws and timely justice to prevent bullies from taking over our country while we watch.
"without opening itself to Republican attacks that it is 'soft' on immigration"
"the administration kept the public health guidelines established during the pandemic under former president Trump [...] But right-wing media is, once again, insisting that Biden is allowing a flood of immigrants to overrun the U.S"
These realities stand in such stark contrast to each other.
There is no longer any such thing as behaving in such a way that one doesn't open oneself up to attacks my Republicans. They've learned they can make up a narrative out of whole cloth at any time they choose, about anyone, and it's become one of their only tools. They declared him illegitimate from before the beginning - of course he has already been declared unacceptably soft on immigration, and even if he were to out-Trump Trump in cruelty, that would be the narrative simply because he stands in the former President's way of power.
This is post-reality. We've moved well past a point where it was possible to earn respect or bipartisanship through any means. Being too soft will doom us far less quickly than trying too hard to avoid the ire of a group of people among whom esteem is only earned, temporarily, through corruption and predation.
This is exhausting and demoralizing, which is exactly the objective. The endless barrage of lies, lawsuits, and gaslighting is pure Trump.
By creating mistrust, chaos and fear he keeps his opponents off balance, reactive and confused. It’s how he ran his business and now the Republican Party. The US is his ultimate mark.
I have nothing profound to say about all of this. Sometimes I'm whelmed by the fact that our country is FUBAR. Constant, outrageous Republican behavior. TFG's perpetual, evil manipulating. Sedition and treason arguably (?) the foundation of the radical right. By the time I finished reading, my heart was pounding and tears were trying to out themselves. One might reasonably conclude that I could use a sedative and/or a good therapist. One might be right. But I maintain that knowing instead of guessing is the far better thing. That's why I come here. But damn!! It's really hard.
I think we should be sharing the following and making sure people understand that it's President Biden taking care of our children.
Open SmartNews and read "When Joe Biden said his COVID relief package would ‘cut child poverty in half’ he wasn’t joking" here: https://share.smartnews.com/dJJXv
I have another bone to pick with the media. Why was the blonde girl's disappearance national news? Why was her disappearance so much more important than all the native women and black women that have gone missing and even died? I want to thank Joy Reed for asking this question on her show and sharing stories of some of the native and black women who have gone missing.
Last Friday morning, I was awakened around 3:00am by a most dreaded sound: that of a freight train about to run over me. Native Midwesterner that I am, I grabbed my dog and old cat and headed to the basement. About a minute after I got there, I heard a very loud boom and felt the ground under my feet shudder.
An EF 0 tornado had popped out of the clouds right above my back yard and twisted off the tops of three mature oak trees and dumped them on the ground. My neighbors lost a poplar and a giant cottonwood; another neighbor had a huge spruce laid flat on his house. 20 minutes later, the storm had passed.
Reading this LFAA this morning felt like having another tornado pop out and lay me out flat like my beautiful trees. So much effort out there to shred democracy and subvert the peaceful transfer of power. And they are still at it.
Took me a while but I now have crashed through to the fact that these duly elected bastards really do want to destroy this country. Gobsmacked yes. Go down in their ship? Never.
Like many here, I often feel helpless in the face of such greed and hubris. But I also know that one person can make a difference- even if only for themselves and their immediate community.
I have a ton of work to do to clean up my backyard literally as well as politically. I’m on it. Chop wood, carry water. Write letters to my representatives, postcards to voters, phone calls to potential voters, checks to good candidates. Sucks but I just will not give up without a fight. Glad you all are here.
"Trump is under criminal investigation in Georgia for his previous attempts to overturn the state’s election results."
He's been under investigation in NY, on a number of issues, by NY state and federal SDNY attorneys. When are we going to hear from any or all of these investigations?
All I want for Christmas, 2021 please, not '22 or '23, are some indictments!
Dear Prof. HCR,
Methinks you need more than one early night per week. This news is nightmarish!
What 45 and the GOP have plotted -- and continue to connive -- is beyond horrific! I dare Stephen King to write a more destructive horror story! That monster and his lackeys have no right to be free while so many innocent human beings are behind bars.
As a nation, in order to retain a small modicum of normalcy, we must vow to vote the GOP out at every turn!
I listened to Alex Jones in the days leading up to the January 6th insurrection. He had a few guests on his show like John Eastman laying out ' legitimate ' paths forward for Trump to reclaim the 2020 election. One major component was that the count in the House be interrupted. Of course this would be the job of the 'Trump following, public demonstrators '. This is awesome how you have parsed this out HCR. I guess reading Woodward and Costa's book would explain what you've said here in excruciating detail. This is serious business because this is another example of these 'determined people' throwing stuff up against the wall in order to see what will stick ... Democracy hanging in the balance.
Once again, America is at a point where the right decision would be to charge the former president with either insurrection or treason, and with plenty of evidence, it won’t be done.
In this country, we chase commies out of fear, but let fascism bloom; Americans believe the boogie-man stories about Democrats but don’t address real violence against women and children; Americans believe justice comes in the courtroom when it sees an injustice, but can’t tell a real crime from a false charge made to politically smear someone. And Americans believe falsely that millions of non-Americans are voting th create invalid election results, when in reality, other countries around the world are making themselves stakeholders in our election process that they are influencing our democracy.
There are people today who claim Pres Biden is a criminal running our country, so every act he takes is unlawful and invalid. THIS MUST STOP, and the former president continues to tell the world that he won’t stop until he is forced to stop. He has plenty of fans and enables in government who also see their own demise in the new For The People Act provisions.
One would hope that Republican voters would wake up and acknowledge that Trump is a liar, cheater and a psychopath and will not vote for another sh*t show in 2024, but if he runs, they'll put the MAGA hats back on. One would hope that as Trump's chickens come home to roost--charges of tax evasion, potential indictments out of Georgia for trying to sway the 2020 election, rape charges, enormous personal debt defaults--would dim his star, but they won't. And now, in the face of voter suppression laws, Democrats are scrambling to eek out a win in 2022. The odds are definitely stacked against them.
Good doesn't always prevail. The recent Russian elections in which Putin opposition candidates were purged from the ballots demonstrates this. As Leonard Cohen sings, "Everybody knows the dice are loaded, everybody knows the good guys lost." Republicans are loading the dice and Americans must fight back.
"Democrats sued Friday to stop the release of the voter information, and two Democratic representatives to Congress have asked the Department of Justice to investigate whether the subpoenas could violate federal laws by leading to voter intimidation."
... uh, d'ya think ...?!
“The wheels of justice turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine.” Some days it seems the wheels turn not at all.
Regarding Trump's effort to get Pence to refuse to verify the Electoral College ballot count on 6 January, we see how Trump gets others to perform acts of commission that would provide him cover of plausible deniability of intent to commit an illegal act in his own name. He used others the same way: Michael Cohen, Allan Weiselberg (sic), President Zelinsky of Ukraine (unsuccessful), the white supremacist groups of January 6 at the Capitol fame, to name a few I can recall. He's using the tactics of a mob-boss, one with a sick mind. I'd love to know the name of the person, or persons, who create such incredible game-theory schemes for Trump; I detect he learned a few things working at his daddy's elbow. I don't believe Trump himself has enough of an attention span, or powers of imagination, to put such barely believable Lego machines together.
Teflon Don. After a life of crime, he’s still free to terrorize us. A painful lesson for the USA. We need laws and timely justice to prevent bullies from taking over our country while we watch.
You can not make this stuff up. I’m ready for this sorry show to end.
"without opening itself to Republican attacks that it is 'soft' on immigration"
"the administration kept the public health guidelines established during the pandemic under former president Trump [...] But right-wing media is, once again, insisting that Biden is allowing a flood of immigrants to overrun the U.S"
These realities stand in such stark contrast to each other.
There is no longer any such thing as behaving in such a way that one doesn't open oneself up to attacks my Republicans. They've learned they can make up a narrative out of whole cloth at any time they choose, about anyone, and it's become one of their only tools. They declared him illegitimate from before the beginning - of course he has already been declared unacceptably soft on immigration, and even if he were to out-Trump Trump in cruelty, that would be the narrative simply because he stands in the former President's way of power.
This is post-reality. We've moved well past a point where it was possible to earn respect or bipartisanship through any means. Being too soft will doom us far less quickly than trying too hard to avoid the ire of a group of people among whom esteem is only earned, temporarily, through corruption and predation.
This is exhausting and demoralizing, which is exactly the objective. The endless barrage of lies, lawsuits, and gaslighting is pure Trump.
By creating mistrust, chaos and fear he keeps his opponents off balance, reactive and confused. It’s how he ran his business and now the Republican Party. The US is his ultimate mark.
I have nothing profound to say about all of this. Sometimes I'm whelmed by the fact that our country is FUBAR. Constant, outrageous Republican behavior. TFG's perpetual, evil manipulating. Sedition and treason arguably (?) the foundation of the radical right. By the time I finished reading, my heart was pounding and tears were trying to out themselves. One might reasonably conclude that I could use a sedative and/or a good therapist. One might be right. But I maintain that knowing instead of guessing is the far better thing. That's why I come here. But damn!! It's really hard.
I think we should be sharing the following and making sure people understand that it's President Biden taking care of our children.
Open SmartNews and read "When Joe Biden said his COVID relief package would ‘cut child poverty in half’ he wasn’t joking" here: https://share.smartnews.com/dJJXv
To read it on the web, tap here: https://share.smartnews.com/czLm8