Never forget. Trump did this. But the Republicans, every last one of them, even Mitt Romney who could have switched parties, collaborated.
This. Is. On. Them.
"what digby sez..."
Month: January 2021
I know, there are other things going on today that are worth attending to, but this short observation, buried in the middle of an article that was buried in the middle of the Times today, is something to ponder:
Mr. Trump is highly unpopular in Britain and, even after a $150 million renovation, the [Scottish golf] course has consistently lost money, and the president has been determined to drive business to it.
At any previous time in American history, this sleazy, wildly inappropriate and likely illegal attempt for a US president to line his own pockets would be — by itself! — grounds for impeachment and removal from office. It is simply outrageously wrong for any public servant to act like this, especially the president of the United States.
But now, it’s nothing. We expect it. It’s just a simple description of how this president acts.
We’re used to it.
PENCE: “It is my considered judgment that my oath to support and defend the Constitution constrains me from claiming unilateral authority to determine which electoral votes should be counted and which should not.”
Oh baby, Trumpie is going to be very, very unhappy about that.
Meanwhile:
This is WILD
Trump told them to do this and then went back to the White House.
This is escalating.
As I write this, the results of the two Senate runoff races have not yet been officially certified, but most of the smart election analysts project both Democrats have won. The Cook Reports’ Dave Wasserman issued his famous “I’ve seen enough” early Tuesday evening for Democrat Rev. Raphael Warnock, who successfully challenged unelected incumbent Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler, and a couple of hours later tweeted the same for Democrat Jon Ossoff, who has apparently defeated Republican multimillionaire David Perdue to become the first millennial in the Senate.
Anything’s possible in close races so I am withholding my euphoria — but if this holds, it’s hard to overstate just how important this result is going to be. If the Senate is ultimately tied 50-50, Kamala Harris is able to cast the deciding vote as vice president.
Georgia’s election results mean the difference between the U.S. finally controlling the pandemic to recover economically and … not doing that. Lives will be saved and families and businesses will be able to get back on their feet. That is the immediate crisis we face and with the Congress in Democrats’ hands, the Biden administration can move much faster and more efficiently than if Mitch McConnell remained in the way as majority leader of the upper chamber.
As for the rest of the Democratic agenda, we will have to see. History shows that when the Congress is divided so closely, power tends to flow to the “moderates” in both parties who tend to form a coalition and serve as a veto point for both conservative and progressive legislation. In Barack Obama’s book, this comment in the preface is an important insight that I hope he’s discussed with his wingman Joe Biden:
“I confess there have been times during the course of writing this book, as I reflected on my presidency and all that’s happened since, when I’ve had to ask myself whether I was too tempered in speaking the truth as I saw it, too cautious in either word or deed, convinced as I was that by appealing to what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature, I stood a greater chance of leading us in the direction of the America we’ve been promised.”
In his quest to unify the country and embrace a bipartisan Grand Bargain, Obama now seemingly admits, he empowered slick hyper-partisans like Paul Ryan, the former Republican from Wisconsin who served as speaker of the House, by treating him as an honest broker. The Republicans responded to Obama’s overture by sabotaging as much of his presidency as they could. It took Obama and his team much too long to realize that the Republicans were radical obstructionists regardless of what he proposed or how much he tried to “reach across the aisle.” The administration’s flailing in the first term only made Republicans realize the extent of the power and they have been exercising it ruthlessly ever since. After Trump, Republicans will no longer be bound by any sense of shared commitment to the Constitution or even democracy.
Considering how close the Senate split is likely to be, it’s also important to remember that Obama was hindered by some of the centrist divas in the Democratic caucus as that may end up being a greater challenge for Joe Biden.
Even with a Senate majority, there will still be Joe Manchin, D-W. Va, both Kirsten Sinema and probably Mark Kelly, the moderate Democrats from Arizona, along with some others like Virginia’s Mark Warner and Delaware’s Chris Coons who will join with the GOP’s perpetually concerned caucus of Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, Maine’s Susan Collins and Mitt Romney of Utah to wring their hands and clutch their pearls about anything necessary for fundamental change. We already know this much:
Former President Barack Obama has called on the Senate to do away with the filibuster, but that won’t happen if West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin has anything to say about it.
“I will do everything I can to prevent it from happening,” Manchin, a Democrat, told Yahoo News in an interview on Wednesday. “We will not have the democracy we know today if that [filibuster elimination] happens, I can assure you.”
Recall that the Democrats briefly had a 60-vote majority in 2009 and getting Obamacare passed was a months-long, hard-fought negotiation that ended up being stymied when Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy died and was replaced by Republican Scott Brown. Even with 59 seats, Democrats still had to pass the Affordable Care Act through the reconciliation process so they would only need 50 votes. It barely passed.
Doing anything important is difficult in a polarized country with an undemocratic institution like the Senate. Sometimes a crisis can move the dial a bit more dramatically, but, for the most part, it’s like pulling teeth to make fundamental change through legislation these days. I’m just hoping that Biden will use whatever executive power he has and that the Democrats move quickly to deliver material improvements to people.
None of that is to say this isn’t a huge relief and a major opportunity. With a Democratic majority, Biden will be able to make the appointments he wants, including judges, and the Democrats will set the agenda. They will control the committees and will have the ability to investigate what has happened during the Trump era and seek some justice for the outrageous assaults on our democracy over the past four years.
Doing anything important is difficult in a polarized country with an undemocratic institution like the Senate. Sometimes a crisis can move the dial a bit more dramatically, but, for the most part, it’s like pulling teeth to make fundamental change through legislation these days. I’m just hoping that Biden will use whatever executive power he has and that the Democrats move quickly to deliver material improvements to people.
None of that is to say this isn’t a huge relief and a major opportunity. With a Democratic majority, Biden will be able to make the appointments he wants, including judges, and the Democrats will set the agenda. They will control the committees and will have the ability to investigate what has happened during the Trump era and seek some justice for the outrageous assaults on our democracy over the past four years.
What happens now is anyone’s guess. But now that the Senate appears to be in Democratic hands I would be lying if I didn’t admit to feeling a tremendous sense of schadenfreude at what’s about to take place in the Republican Party. It couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch of people.
With all the pardons he must issue in the nest two weeks, it’s a wonder the outgoing president finds time to salt the earth. Still:
The Trump administration is pushing in its final days to undo decades-long protections against discrimination, a last-ditch effort to accomplish a longtime goal of conservative legal activists.
The Justice Department is seeking to change interpretation of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin by recipients of federal funding. Under these rules, actions are considered discriminatory if they have a discriminatory effect, what’s known as a “disparate impact,” on protected groups. Under the new version, only intentional discrimination would be prohibited.
The Trump administration has been considering this change for more than two years but waited until its final weeks to try to put it into effect. A notice about the change was filed for regulatory review at the White House last month and a copy of the proposal was shared with The Washington Post.
With creditors breathing down Trump’s neck, with recriminations on tap from Republicans burned by his four years of misrule capped by losing control of the Senate, and with the city and state of New York preparing indictments, it’s important to take pleasure in the little things, I guess.
Like embracing your man-cult.
In half an hour, the conspiracist-in-chief will speak to the “Save America March” scheduled in advance of today’s joint session of Congress. Members will ceremonially count Electoral College votes that will affirm Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as the next president and vice president. (Arrests are underway.) The march is one of several pro-Trump events happening this morning in Washington, D.C. Things were spicy in the streets there last night, including altercations with police.
It’s a desperate, frightening world for men whose only professional/coping skills are shouting and punching. Outside employment as a Vogon Guard, you never see those listed on a resume or job listing.
Jon Ossoff (D) leads Sen. David Perdue (R) by over 16,000 votes this morning in the runoff race for Georgia’s second U.S. Senate seat. By 9:40 p.m. Eastern time, Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman had already “seen enough” to declare (in his early call) that Raphael Warnock (D) had defeated Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R) for the other. Warnock makes history as the first Black senator from Georgia and the first Black Democrat to represent a southern state.
Warnock’s victory by over 50,000 votes puts him ahead by over a point with 98 percent of votes counted statewide. Ossoff’s lead is more tenuous. No winner has been declared. Ossoff’s lead is under a half a percentage point and within the threshold for a recount. Readers will recall that Donald Trump’s multiple Georgia recounts failed to erase the 12,000 statewide vote lead Joe Biden held in November.
Soon eneough (and after now-standard court challenges), a second seat called for Ossoff will mean a 50-50 Senate. President-elect Joe Biden will have legislative opportunities he did not have hours earlier. He will have months to beat back the coronavirus pandemic; alleviate its economic impact on Americans; improve health care; strengthen voting rights; raise the minimum wage; lead criminal justice reforms; roll back the worst of Trump’s economic, environmental and foreign policy damage; and more. It’s exhausting just typing it up.
Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell may revert to Minority Leader status, but he will launch an all-out effort to stymie every effort by Biden to chalk up wins. If the filibuster remains in place, he will still have a lot of leverage. And with control of the Senate hanging on tie-breaking votes by Kamala Harris, expect posturing conservative Democrats such as Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia to do their deficit-scold best to gum up Biden’s works.
The hero of the hour, of course, is Stacey Abrams. “Revenge can be very cathartic,” she said after her narrow 2018 loss to Brian Kemp in the Georgia governor’s race. Last night she got it, and more:
Ms. Abrams, the former minority leader of the Georgia state House, has spent a decade building a Democratic political infrastructure in the state, first with her New Georgia Project and now with Fair Fight, the voting rights organization she founded in the wake of her losing campaign for governor in 2018.
Late Tuesday night, Ms. Abrams came close to declaring victory in a tweet that praised the thousands of “organizers, volunteers, canvassers & tireless groups” who helped rebuild the state’s Democratic Party from the rump it was when she became the state House minority leader in 2011.
While Ms. Abrams is widely expected to run for governor again in 2022, she is at the moment one of the most influential American politicians not in elected office. It was her political infrastructure and strategy of increasing turnout among the state’s Black, Latino and Asian voters that laid the groundwork for both President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in November and the Democrats’ performance in the Senate races. Ms. Abrams was not alone in Georgia, of course: Numerous other Black women have led a decades-long organizing effort to transform the state’s electorate.
Abrams had plenty of help from on outgoing president whose pity-party rally Monday night in Dalton, Ga. failed to boost turnout there. In fact, Republican turnout was down over 12% from November (based on unofficial results). Election Law Blog’s Rick Hasen believes “we’ve reached peak saturation of the conspiracy machine.” Trump’s conspiracy shtick played poorly in the suburbs. Recriminations have already begun. McConnell will not be spared. Democratic strategist James Carville predicted Republicans will go after each other with meat cleavers.
As the runoffs began, Warnock cautioned in a now-famous TV ad that Loeffler would spew lies and disinformation about him. If Warnock had a similar preemptive ad “in the can,” last night would have been the time to launch it. Because when Republicans win, Real Americans™ have spoken; when Democrats do, the default right-wing explanation is Democratic fraud.
This is a new GOP Congresswoman:
Check out the ridiculous Sarah Palin glasses. Sorry, Lauren, they don’t make you look any smarter than she is. And she is not smart.
God, I’m sick of gun nuts. And anyway, she’s wrong. It’s not legal for her to open carry in DC
Washington, D.C.’s police chief said Monday he intends to reach out to GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert about her intention to carry a Glock handgun in the city, which has strict limits oncarrying concealed firearms.
Chief Robert Contee III, when asked during a press conference about the newly elected Colorado lawmaker’s plan to carry a gun to the Capitol, said he wants to ensure that “she is aware of the what the laws of the District of Columbia are.”
“That Congresswoman will be subjected to the same penalties as anyone else that’s caught on the D.C. streets carrying a firearm,” Contee said.
Boebert has made no secret of her intent to bring a handgun to the Capitol complex, where lawmakers are exempt from otherwise strict prohibitions on firearms, so long as they’re stored in the members’ offices and transported safely and unloaded. Democrats considered a change to the rules that would have barred even members of Congress from bringing guns to the Capitol, but the rules package introduced by House leaders last week included no change to the policy.
The current guidelines for weapons in the Capitol is set by the Capitol Police Board, which includes the sergeants-at-arms of the House and Senate, the architect of the Capitol and the chief of the Capitol Police. Lawmakers have been exempted by the board from the restrictions for decades.
Boebert drew attention to her plans for carrying a weapon on Sunday, when she posted a video on social media declaring her intention to carry her gun in Congress.
“Government does NOT get to tell me or my constituents how we are allowed to keep our families safe,” she said.
Boebert, who ran a gun-themed restaurant called Shooters before her bid for Congress, has made Second Amendment rights a centerpiece of her platform. A spokesperson for Boebert on Monday said she “will comply with all applicable firearm laws and regulations.”
So, she can carry her gun but she can’t wear it loaded, on a holster, in public like she’s fucking Annie Oakley. This provocative preening is just an obnoxious attempt to own the libs. It’s tiring.
I have to say that this new crop of GOP congresswomen includes some real pips. But then only the looniest of women are still in the GOP. Unfortunately, there are a lot of them.
I was going to excerpt the looney parts of Trump’s last rally as president (maybe second-to-last actually, since he plans to address his crazies in DC tomorrow) but I decided that Tim Miller’s report was a better way to memorialize it:
Last night the president of the United States held a rally during which he called on the vice president to refuse to certify the election results in order to keep himself in power against the will of the people.
President Trump held this reckless event against his own government’s health guidelines and without acknowledging the contagion that on his watch has ravaged the country. You would never know from listening to him that the pandemic just had its deadliest week so far. He long ago gave up even the pretense of attempting to ameliorate the loss of life.
But other than that Mrs. Lincoln. . .
It is important to state clearly what it is happening during this extraordinary interregnum, given that our senses have been dulled by the president’s bat-guano avalanche and the legacy media’s inability to properly contextualize this comically inept yet historically unprecedented antidemocratic project.
It’s honestly hard to blame them. This is not what a coup is supposed to look like.
And the ringleader is a man who at times tonight seemed barely capable of comprehending the illicit words that were on the teleprompter a few feet from his face, which does not not exactly inspire confidence in his ability to successfully execute a coup.
Trump’s rambling, incoherent performance was marked by what seemed to be a case of TDS—Testosterone Deficiency Syndrome—so bad that it caused even the maskless cult members who packed into the Dalton, Georgia event site to become bored by the show.
But Trump’s unintelligibility and TDS do not take away from the gravity of the undertaking. The rally was ostensibly in support of Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue’s Senate run-off campaigns, but in reality it was an opportunity for the president to ensure that said senators—and any others who dare cross him, like Mike Lee, whom he name-checked more than once—see that their only path forward is by participating in his effort to overturn the election.
Luckily for Loeffler, this fact was not lost on her. She recognizes that her entire political program is in service to the whims of this man and the crowd that gathered before them, thus she opened her own remarks with a paean to his attempt to seize power.
“I have an announcement, Georgia. On January 6, I will object to the Electoral College vote,” she said to raucous cheers. “That’s right. We’re gonna get this done!”
(“This” in that sentence is, again, to be clear, the coup. “We’re gonna get [the coup] done” is what she was saying there, in case there is any question for those heading to the ballot box on Tuesday about where she stands on maintaining American democracy.)
The crowd rewarded Loeffler with a chant—it apparently was “Stop the Steal,” but it sounded like “Plot the Steal,” which makes much more sense in context.
Trump went on to lavish praise upon Marjorie Taylor Greene, the newly minted QAnon It Girl in Congress.
The Republicans who are like Brian Kemp—that is, those who do not have Loeffler’s chameleon-like ability to morph into whatever the MAGA masses want—did not fare as well during the speech. Trump used the opportunity to bully them and send a message to anyone else who might cross him.
“I’m going to be here in a year and a half and I’m going to be campaigning against your governor and your crazy secretary of state,” Trump said.
Because that’s what this was all about. Despite the timing and despite the lip service to Loeffler and Perdue, it wasn’t an effort to campaign for Senate races that Trump couldn’t care less about.
It was a president taking one last opportunity to get on a hickory stump and to bully all of those who have submitted to him. To ensure that they go with him the last, hopeless mile. To guarantee that their obituaries will start with their willingness to attempt to end the American democratic experiment in service to this devilish buffoon who knows that he’s been beat but wants to bring the rest of us down with him.
Yep. That’s him.
Here’s a little video of the gathering in DC today. Tomorrow will be even bigger — and loonier:
So, uh, the Trump rally in DC is off to a good start
these people are out of their minds
“The Covid-19 PCR tests are fake … the models were fake” — Now a coronavirus truther/grifter is speaking at the Trump rally
“Who here is up to the task of not wearing a mask? … Jesus is king and it’s time to let freedom ring”
“I’m going to give everyone three action steps … turn to the person next to you and give them a hug. Someone you don’t know … it’s a mass-spreader event! It’s a mass-spreader event!”
beyond parody
MyPillow guy Mike Lindell: “You need to pray for our vice president to look up to God & say, ‘I need to make a decision, Lord,’ & make the right decision for our country…you don’t have a [civil] war when the other side didn’t win anything…they were trying to steal it from us”
these pro-Trump rallies in DC really illustrate how Trumpism has merged with batshit views of all stripes, including anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, coronavirus trutherism, QAnon, anti-Semitism, and so forth
Originally tweeted by Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) on January 5, 2021.
The Trump cult is an actual cult. You know, like the People’s Temple or Heaven’s Gate.
It’s hard to believe they are doing this, but they are:
We’re at a dangerous time in this country,” John Fetterman, the lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania, told me by phone. “One party is ignoring court rulings and election results. If the results don’t match what they like, they do their level best to subvert them.”
That quote could be applied directly to President Trump and much of the national GOP, of course. On Wednesday, dozens of congressional Republicans will side with Trump and try to invalidate President-elect Joe Biden’s electors in numerous states.
But in this case, Fetterman, a Democrat, is talking about Republicans in his state of Pennsylvania, where an ugly power play is unfolding that carries unsettling implications.
Here’s what’s happening: The GOP-controlled Pennsylvania State Senate just refused to seat Democratic Sen. Jim Brewster, even as numerous other senators did get seated, after Brewster defeated his Republican opponent by 69 votes.
The rationale is that the senators supposedly need time to consider the Republican candidate’s objection to contested ballots that were missing dates on outer envelopes but were otherwise filled out accurately and submitted on time.
The GOP candidate is doing this even though the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has ruled that the ballots are valid. And the state has even certified the results, which Democrats point out calls into question the need for the review by GOP senators in the first place.
“At the end of the day the Republicans refused to seat the senator,” Fetterman told me.
Fetterman, who is the state Senate’s presiding officer, tried to blocked the refusal to seat Brewster. So Republicans voted to remove Fetterman and replace him as presiding officer with the Republican interim Senate president pro tempore, Jake Corman.
Tell me again that I’ve been too hysterical over Trump and the GOP these last few years. This is happening in Pennsylvania.
I’m just going to leave this here. It’s Michelle Goldberg’s column today:
According to Title 52, Section 20511 of the United States Code, anyone who “knowingly and willfully deprives, defrauds, or attempts to deprive or defraud the residents of a state of a fair and impartially conducted election process” for federal office can be punished by up to five years in prison.
Donald Trump certainly seems to have violated this law. He is on tape alternately cajoling and threatening Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find 11,780 votes,” enough to give him a winning margin in a state that he lost. He may have also broken federal conspiracy law and Georgia election law.
“This is probably the most serious political crime I’ve ever heard of,” Michael Bromwich, a former inspector general for the Department of Justice, told me. “And yet there is the high likelihood that there will be no accountability for it.”
At this point, demanding such accountability feels like smashing one’s head into a brick wall, but our democracy might not be able to stagger along much longer without it. Republicans already often treat victories by Democrats as illegitimate. Their justification for impeaching Bill Clinton was flimsy at the time and looks even more ludicrous in light of their defenses of Trump. Trump’s political career was built on the racist lie that Barack Obama was a foreigner ineligible for the presidency.
Now Trump and his Republican enablers have set a precedent for pressuring state officials to discard the will of their voters, and if that fails, for getting their allies in Congress to reject the results.
It isn’t working this time for several reasons. Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory wasn’t close. Republican state officials like Raffensperger behaved honorably. Democrats control the House, and some Senate Republicans retain a baseline commitment to democracy.
None of those conditions are likely to be permanent, though. Minimally decent Republicans are particularly endangered. Expect Trumpists to mount primary challenges to them and replace them with cynics, cranks and fanatics.
True democracy in America is quite new; you can date it to the civil rights era. If Trump’s Republican Party isn’t checked, we could easily devolve into what political scientists call competitive authoritarianism, in which elections still take place but the system is skewed to entrench autocrats.
Some are trying to constrain Trump’s lawlessness. Two Democratic members of the House, Ted Lieu and Kathleen Rice, asked the F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray, to open a criminal probe. In Atlanta, the Fulton County district attorney has expressed openness to bringing a case, saying, “Anyone who commits a felony violation of Georgia law in my jurisdiction will be held accountable.”
But there is little appetite in the House for impeaching Trump again, though he transparently deserves it. (“We’re not looking backwards, we’re looking forward,” Hakeem Jeffries, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said on Monday.) Joe Biden doesn’t seem to want his attorney general to investigate Trump, though he’s also said he wouldn’t stand in his or her way. And experts point to numerous reasons federal prosecutors might decline to bring a case.
The first is what we might call the psychopath’s advantage: Prosecutors would have to prove that Trump knew that what he was doing was wrong. “You’re not dealing with your ordinary fraudster or your ordinary criminal or even your ordinary corrupt politician,” said Bromwich. “He seems to believe a lot of the lies that he’s telling.”
There’s also the sheer political difficulty of prosecuting a former president. “My guess is that in the weeks and months that a prosecutor takes to develop a case like that, they’re at the end of the day going to say, ‘The guy’s not in office, nothing happened, we’re not spending our resources on it,’” the Republican election lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg told me. “Which doesn’t take away from the really immoral nature of the call.”
Taken on their own, most excuses for not investigating or prosecuting Trump make at least some sense. Launching an impeachment less than three weeks before Biden’s inauguration might appear futile. It could even feed right-wing delusions by creating the impression that Democrats think Trump might be able to stay in office otherwise. Both the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress will be fully occupied dealing with the devastation to public health and the economy that Trump is leaving behind. Beyond its legal challenges, a federal prosecution of Trump would maintain his toxic grip on the country’s attention.
Yet if there is no penalty for Republican cheating, there will be more of it. The structure of our politics — the huge advantages wielded by small states and rural voters — means that Democrats need substantial majorities to wield national power, so they can’t simply ignore the wishes of the electorate. Not so for Republicans, which is why they feel free to openly scheme against the majority.
During impeachment, Republicans who were unwilling to defend the president’s conduct, but also unwilling to penalize him, insisted that if Americans didn’t like his behavior they could vote him out. Americans did, and now Trump’s party is refusing to accept it. It’s evidence that you can’t rely on elections to punish attempts to subvert elections. Only the law can do that, even if it’s inconvenient.
I am very, very nervous that the Democrats are going to try to sweep all this under the rug under the misapprehension that they are only empowered to talk about “kitchen table issues” and believe that this is not something they need to worry about since Joe Biden will be in the White House and that’s all that matters. It. Is. Not.
Something very bad is happening and if they put their heads in the sand again we are in big trouble. We have seen how easy it is for these Republicans to activate a propaganda machine that will brainwash their voters and we now know that doing so empowers these anti-democratic would-be authoritarians to degrade and destroy the norms that previously held the system together. We cannot pretend that that we don’t know this because they will not pretend they don’t know this. They are acting on this knowledge as we speak:
I know that Biden wants to “heal the country” and that’s a worthwhile goal, for sure. But we cannot heal while this festering injury to democracy goes untreated. There has to be accountability. The wound must be cauterized. We simply can’t let this go on:
I hope he was just speaking specifically of the idea of impeaching Trump over the Georgia phone call. But he needs to think before he uses that phrase. It makes him a collaborator in right wing radicalism.
There is a popular website for Trump voters called thedonald.win. Here’s a sampling of what they’re saying today in response to that tweet:
I particularly like the evocation of General Custer as a “fantastic spirit.”
These people do seem nice. I can understand why everyone says we must reach out and try to understand their pain. I’m sure their violent fantasies about killing me are are all in good fun.