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Month: January 2021

Pence does not have the power

Published by digby on January 5, 2021

The “lawyer” who is telling him that is full of shit. Logically, this would mean that any sitting Vice President who lost a presidential election could just give himself the presidency.

As far as “fraudulently chosen electors”, that would be determined in a court of law. There have been around 60 cases brought to court and all but one has been rejected by the courts. I think this says it all about that:

Gosh, I wonder why Lou?

The intention of the writers of the constitution was clear:

In light of tomorrow’s congressional session to record the electoral votes, and for conservatives and Republicans who claim to look for guidance to the Founders, a short thread from Federalist #68:

It was desirable that the sense of the people should operate in the choice of the person to whom so important a trust was to be confided. This end will be answered by committing the right of making it, not to any pre-established body but to men chosen by the people for the special purpose, and at the particular conjuncture.

It was also peculiarly desirable to afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder. But the precautions which have been so happily concerted in the system under consideration promise an effectual security against this mischief. As the electors, chosen in each state, are to assemble and vote in the state in which they are chosen, this detached and divided situation will expose them much less to heats and ferments, which might be communicated from them to the people, than if they were all to be convened at one time, in one place.

Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption.

They have not made the appointment of the president to depend on any pre-existing bodies of men who might be tampered with beforehand to prostitute their votes; but they have referred it in the first instance to the immediate act of the people of America to be exerted in the choice of persons for temporary and sole purpose of making the appointment.

And they have excluded from eligibility to this trust all those who from situation might be suspected of too great devotion to the president in office. No senator representative, or other person holding a place of trust or profit under the United States can be of the number of the electors.

Another and no less important desideratum was that the executive should be independent for his continuance in office on all but the people themselves. This advantage will also be secured, by making his re-election to depend on a special body of representatives, deputed by the society for the special purpose of making the important choice.

Originally tweeted by Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) on January 5, 2021.

I think the electoral college is an abomination but if you’re going to hang your re-election on it, you need to at least follow those rules. It was never intended that the Vice President would decide who the next president would be, nor the congress. There were some early glitches, and in 1876, there was a real mess in which some states didn’t send electors to be counted and they jerry-rigged a system that ended up disenfranchising Black Americans for almost another hundred years in return for the presidency. I’m sure Trump would be thrilled to make that deal again. In fact, in many ways, that’s exactly what they are attempting to do.

This election was smooth and the votes were properly counted and then the whiny, little man-child who can’t admit he lost was given the opportunity to litigate many cases in the courts, all of which were denied him because he has no evidence.

It’s done.

But the Republicans have decided it’s to their advantage to blow up our democratic system and assert that no election is valid unless they win it. That’s where we are today (and sadly, it’s likely where we will be tomorrow in the state of Georgia.)

FYI: this is how it’s normally done:

Here’s one in which the VP had good cause to be angry:

Here’s how Vice President Joe Biden handled objections to Donald Trump’s election in 2016:

Objections happe. It’s not a big deal. What is a big deal is if they actually turn the process into such a circus that people believe the election was stolen on the basis of absolutely no evidence. Unfortunately, that ship has already sailed.

There are so many rabbit holes

Published by digby on January 5, 2021

We haven’t heard much about the Christmas day Nashville bomber in the national news since a few days after the incident. There was some speculation that he was a conspiracy nut but no real follow up that I’m aware of. I came across this from a local news source:

A man who knew Christmas bomber Anthony Warner got a disturbing surprise in his mailbox on New Year’s Day when he received a package from the bomber.

The non-descript package was postmarked December 23rd, two days before investigators say Warner killed himself in the bombing.

Sources tell NewsChannel 5 Investigates that Warner mailed similar packages to other individuals.

The package, which contained at least nine typed pages and two Samsung thumb drives, was immediately turned over to the FBI.

The envelope does not have a return address, but the rambling pages inside left no doubt it was from Warner.

“Hey Dude,” the cover letter starts, “You will never believe what I found in the park.”

“The knowledge I have gained is immeasurable. I now understand everything, and I mean everything from who/what we really are, to what the known universe really is.”

The cover letter was signed by “Julio,” a name Warner’s friends say he often used when sending them e-mails.

A source tells NewsChannel 5 Investigates that Warner also had a dog named Julio.

The letter urged the friend to watch some internet videos he included on two Samsung thumb drives.

On another page Warner wrote about 9-11 conspiracy theories, ending with the statement “The moon landing and 9-11 have so many anomalies they are hard to count.”

Warner later wrote that “September 2011 was supposed to be the end game for the planet,” because that is when he believed that aliens and UFO’s began launching attacks on earth.

He wrote that the media was covering up those attacks.

But Warner’s writings grow even more bizarre when he wrote about reptilians and lizard people that he believed control the earth and had tweaked human DNA.

“They put a switch into the human brain so they could walk among us and appear human,” Warner wrote.

While Warner’s writings cover a variety of bizarre theories, he never mentions AT&T or anything else that appears to suggest a motive in the Nashville bombing.

Warner did write extensively about “perception,” adding that “Everything is an illusion” and “there is no such thing as death.”

Then there was this disturbing story:

A pharmacist who was arrested on charges that he intentionally sabotaged more than 500 doses of the Covid-19 vaccine at a Wisconsin hospital was “an admitted conspiracy theorist” who believed the vaccine could harm people and “change their DNA,” according to the police in Grafton, Wis., where the man was employed.

The police said Steven Brandenburg, 46, who worked the night shift at the Aurora Medical Center in Grafton, Wis., had twice removed a box of vials of the Moderna vaccine from the refrigerator for periods of 12 hours, rendering them “useless.”

“Brandenburg admitted to doing this intentionally, knowing that it would diminish the effects of the vaccine,” the police said.

[…]

Last month Mr. Brandenburg told his wife, who is in the process of divorcing him, that “the world is crashing down around us,” according to a motion she filed last week asking for sole custody of the couple’s two daughters, 4 and 6, after she learned he was under investigation in the incident at the hospital. She said she feared his reaction if he lost his job.

And how about this?

A man suspected of placing a hoax bomb that evacuated a mall in Queens, New York, on Monday morning is a right-wing conspiracy theorist who was arrested and accused of arson last week and has been under investigation by police for at least a week.

Law enforcement officials said they are looking for the man, Louis Shenker, 22, after New York City firefighters discovered a stolen car with wire, cans and electrical wiring in the form of a hoax bomb device on top of the car’s trunk. No explosives were found in the vehicle — a Tesla with Nevada plates parked on a spiral ramp between parking garage levels at the Queens Place mall — but police rescued a husky dog from inside it.

The car had pro-Black Lives Matter movement signage, raising questions of whether the signs were intended to discredit the movement, three senior law enforcement officials said.

Law enforcement officials say that police were already investigating Shenker and that they have arrested him twice in connection with other disruptive stunts. On Wednesday, he was arrested and charged with criminal mischief and two counts of low-level arson, accused of burning a poster affixed to a New York Police Department barricade, according to the Manhattan district attorney’s office. Authorities said Shenker repeatedly engaged in a variety of similar stunts, including anti-mask actions, which he documented on Instagram.

Shenker has repeatedly tweeted at Nick Fuentes, a prominent figure in the far-right Groyper movement, which seeks to turn the racist and homophobic trolling culture of the extremist forum 4chan into real life action. His Twitter account has been suspended.

Shenker appeared on an InfoWars online conspiracy webcast last month, when he pushed false conspiracy theories about the election, the coronavirus and a plot to take over the world. He implored “100,000 people at minimum to come to New York City” to protest a litany of causes outside Mayor Bill de Blasio’s residence, including the false conspiracy theory that “Donald John Trump is the rightful winner of this election.”

He also falsely pushed internet rumors about coronavirus vaccines, including an elaborate plot featuring the Chinese government, Bill Gates, George Soros, the Clintons and Dr. Anthony Fauci.

A review of an Instagram account, confirmed to belong to Shenker by three senior law enforcement officials briefed about the investigation, shows Shenker burning a photo of George Floyd with a caption that refers profanely to Floyd and insults the Black Lives Matter movement.

This country is awash in conspiracy theories and it’s getting worse. I recommend that you read this rather chilling article by Ben Collins who follows these stories for NBC. He doesn’t know what to do about it but he does know that we should take it seriously. There are a LOT of people falling down these rabbit holes.

Bad faith and dishonesty

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 5, 2021

Republicans have not only decided Democratic victories are illegitimate, they have assembled a playbook for prosecuting their case.

Jamelle Bouie reminds NYT readers this morning how this playbook has developed over the last 30 years:

It’s a story of escalation, from the relentless obstruction of the Gingrich era to the effort to impeach Bill Clinton to the attempt to nullify the presidency of Barack Obama and on to the struggle, however doomed, to keep Joe Biden from ever sitting in the White House as president. It also goes beyond national politics. In 2016, after a Democrat, Roy Cooper, defeated the Republican incumbent Pat McCrory for the governorship of North Carolina, the state’s Republican legislature promptly stripped the office of power and authority. Wisconsin Republicans did the same in 2018 after Tony Evers unseated Scott Walker in his bid for a third term. And Michigan Republicans took similar steps against another Democrat, Gretchen Whitmer, after her successful race for the governor’s mansion.

Considered in the context of a 30-year assault on the legitimacy of Democratic leaders and Democratic constituencies (of which Republican-led voter suppression is an important part), the present attempt to disrupt and derail the certification of electoral votes is but the next step, in which Republicans say, outright, that a Democrat has no right to hold power and try to make that reality. The next Democrat to win the White House — whether it’s Biden getting re-elected or someone else winning for the first time — will almost certainly face the same flood of accusations, challenges and lawsuits, on the same false grounds of “fraud.”

The “bad faith and dishonesty on display” is stunning. “The issue for Republicans,” Bouie continues, “is not election integrity, it’s the fact that Democratic votes count at all.”

Except 30 years is perhaps too narrow a time frame for charting the Republican erosion of faith in the flag in which they wrap themselves.

So long as women remained barefoot, pregnant, and in their kitchens, all was right with their world.

So long as their god was God and everybody knew it, they felt secure of their place in the next.

So long as Black poeple knew their places, and homosexuals and others remained closeted, society was ordered as it should be with white conservatives at its apex.

So long as America was the preeminent power in the world and the U.S.S R. was its principle adversay in a Cold War played by an unwritten but established set of rules, they knew where they stood.

But the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts helped change that and turned Jim Crow Democrats into Reagan Republicans. For the last half century, America pursued and Republicans supported economic opportunities and new technologies that simultaneously enriched them and eroded the status quo that existed when the world was a smaller, more parochial place more to their liking. The ground shifted, revealing just how empty was the American faith they proclaimed so loudly and proudly, just as Jesus cautioned them not to.

“Even as they criticize an attempted power grab, they echo the idea that one side has legitimate voters and the other does not,” Bouie writes.

Patriotism, values, and principles have all turned to ashes in their mouths. Still, they will condemn one-party states even while trying to establish one for Real Americans™, proving themselves anything but.

Doomed to repeat our mistakes

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 5, 2021
Damage on the U.S. Capitol Dome (2013).

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-N.Y.) warned us a year ago in prosecuting the impeachment of President Donald J. Trump before the U.S. Senate:

No constitution can protect us if right doesn’t matter anymore. And you know you can’t trust this president to do what’s right for this country. You can trust he will do what’s right for Donald Trump. He’ll do it now. He’s done it before. He’ll do it for the next several months. He’ll do it in the election if he’s allowed to.

And Trump did. He continues to. His enablers in Congress, those who voted to allow him to remain in office, enable Trump even now, with few exceptions. Even after a recording from last weekend showed Trump attempting to coerce the chief elections official in Georgia to falsify election results counted thrice and certified.

Although Trump deserves it, with his term expiring on Jan. 20, Democrats have little time or appetitie for attempting to impeach Trump again, even to make a moral statement. But justice demands judgment against Trump and the criminal actions he has taken in violation of his oath of office. If he walks away unpunished except by loss of his office, others will emulate him. Count on it.

“If Trump’s Republican Party isn’t checked,” writes Michele Goldberg, “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.” The U.S. is already well down that road.

The problem with holding Trump to account, Goldberg observes, is “the psychopath’s advantage.” Mens rea makes it tough to prosecute someone insane enough to believe the law does not apoply to him and dumb enough to believe misinformation circulated by “QAnon followers, 8kun posters, and a random Twitter guy.” Practical politics, Goldberg continues, make it doubly difficult to prosecute a president voters have already thrown out of office:

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.

In a 2004 interview with “The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart, former President Bill Clinton explained why Republicans keep deploying the politics of personal destruction:

Clinton: They had a calling operation in South Carolina in the primary in 2010 about how John McCain had a black baby, and they didn’t want the white voters to forget it.

[banter]

Stewart: Do you believe that politics has gotten so dirty … that these kinds of tactics become so prevalent that this is the reason half the country doesn’t vote? Or this is the reason that we don’t get, maybe, the officials that we deserve?
Clinton: No, I think people do it because they think it works.
Stewart: That’s it? Simply a strategy?
Clinton: Absolutely. And as soon as it doesn’t work, they’ll stop doing it.

Except no one has stopped them. Neither Democrats nor a once-watchdog press. Federal prosecution of white-collar criminals is the lowest level on record. Meaning actual criminal behavior by elites in and out of public office goes unpunished as well.

It did not stop with Pres. Richard Nixon; Pres. Gerald Ford pardoned him for Watergate. It did not stop after Iran-Contra; Pres. George H.W. Bush pardoned the high-level players and Pres. Ronald Reagan never faced serious sanction. It did not stop after officials in the George W. Bush administration sanctioned the torture of prisoners, or after Wall Street moguls brought the world economy to its knees peddling fraudulent financial products; Pres. Barack Obama’s administration preferred to “look forward, not back” and neither group faced prosecution.

David Atkins wrote here in 2013, “Unfortunately, that also makes us easy targets to relive the horrors of the past again and again while learning almost nothing from them.”

Trump must face punishment. Or at least a public accounting. In some fashion. In some way that matters. Even if it’s inconvenient. We’ve seen this movie too many times in half a century.

They are all complicit

Published by digby on January 4, 2021

These final days are worse than I thought they were going to be. This piece by Jonathan Chait lays the responsibility where it belongs: on the GOP.

On November 7, former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed headlined “If He Loses, Trump Will Concede Gracefully.” The very question, Mulvaney insisted, insulted the president and his supporters. “Most of the inquirers,” he sneered, “are the same people who still don’t understand why nearly half the country voted for Mr. Trump.” The delusional belief that Trump would refuse to accept defeat was, to Mulvaney, yet more evidence Trump’s critics remained out of touch with the real Americans who supported him.

Republican behavior in the Trump era has often followed a pattern: First, Donald Trump floats a wild notion into the atmosphere. Then Republicans dismiss the possibility that he would do it. Then he does it. Then they justify it.

This mode of response began when Trump first ran for president, prompting Republican officials to indignantly dismiss the prospect he could win as an insult to their party. Now we have reached the point where a dozen Republican senators, and well over a hundred members of the House, are joining his demands to discard the clear result of the election and hand him an unelected second term.

As is the case with nearly every bad thing in the world, this one has produced a range of responses, some of which exaggerate its severity or immediacy. So it should be reiterated that Trump’s bid to overturn the election is not going to succeed, and has been doomed since at least the time Mulvaney’s column ran. Had the election results been just a couple tenths of a percent closer, Republicans would have had the opportunity to challenge the results, perhaps by persuading the Supreme Court to discard mail ballots that arrived after Election Day.

But while the Republican attempt to overturn the election does not pose an imminent threat to the Republic — Joe Biden will be sworn in January 20, regardless — it is hardly meaningless. We are watching yet another iterative stage in the party’s long evolution into authoritarianism.

Donald Trump’s authoritarianism is a combination of his unique sociopathy and sub-ideological worship for authoritarians and a broader tendency to accept it in his party. The Democratic Party as it currently exists could not produce a Trump. Nor could have the old Republican Party — until it crossed some threshold, perhaps during the 1990s.

Conservatives who find themselves astonished at their party’s willingness to support Trump, and inclined to lay the blame entirely on a lone madman president, should mull over the fact that their two most respected leaders from a quarter-century ago, Newt Gingrich and Kenneth Starr, have both thrown themselves enthusiastically behind Trump’s abuses of power. Gingrich has called Biden’s victory a “corrupt and stolen election,” and Starr has described it as “horribly lawless.”

In their own ways, Gingrich and Starr represented in embryonic form a will to power that grew into the current Trumpist form. After leading House Republicans to power in the 1994 midterm elections, Gingrich proclaimed his party to be the sole legitimate representative of the public will, and shut down the federal government repeatedly in an effort to compel Bill Clinton to accept the Republican plan to cut capital gains taxes and social spending. After that failed, Starr led a moralistic crusade to impeach Clinton for perjury after Starr maneuvered him into being asked under oath about a secret affair with his intern. Conservative elites hailed both as principled defenders of constitutionalism and the rule of law.

A more clear-eyed assessment is that they each carried out, in different ways, extraordinary new political methods borne of a refusal to accept the legitimacy of a Democratic Party–held presidency. Which is more plausible: that both Gingrich and Starr used to be principled conservatives, but then both lost their minds and fell in with Trump? Or that both men were reactionary extremists all along?

To be sure, Trump has not secured the cooperation of the entire Republican elite. The final stage of his effort to cancel the election has been so clumsy that he has driven away many of the conservatives who have defended him until now. (Senator Tom Cotton’s public dissent from the campaign to challenge the electoral votes in Congress is a notable and stinging dissent from one of Trump’s heretofore most loyal servants.)

And while it is nice that so many Republicans have finally decided to hop off the Trump train just before it crashes, they don’t seem to have learned any important lessons from the experience. The Journal editorial page, which spent years mocking concerns about Trump’s authoritarianism, is scolding the president for his autogolpe. But the Journal’s argument is that Trump is merely doing to Democrats what they did to him:

Democrats in 2016 abused the FBI to push the Russia collusion myth and refused to accept Donald Trump’s legitimacy. Hillary Clinton still doesn’t. Now some Republicans are returning the disfavor by challenging the ritual counting of the Electoral College votes by the new Congress this week.

The only problems with this equivalence are that (1) Trump’s campaign cooperation with Russia was very real, (2) the investigation was directed by (Republican) FBI officials, not “Democrats,” and (3) Hillary Clinton publicly conceded to Trump the morning after the election, and said he deserves an “open mind.” Other than that, sure, Trump is just doing the same thing Democrats did to him.

Trump has spent his entire presidency battering away at democratic norms. He has been previewing his intention to deny the legitimacy of the election since before the 2016 election, which he relentlessly dismissed as rigged. He has been hinting at his intention to stay in office beyond his constitutionally allotted term since at least 2019, when he began saying “the people” would “demand” he stay in office “longer” than eight years.

To support Trump’s reelection was always to endorse an attack on democracy. The chief divide between the party was between those Republicans who denied Trump’s clearly signaled intent to attack the democratic system, and those who reveled in it.

Those who’ve read this blog over the years know that I’ve been screeching about the GOP radicals forever. The signs were definitely there as far back as the 90s and even before. I mean, Richard Nixon was not an anomaly no matter how hard they tried to reinvent “conservatism” in guise of Ronald Reagan.

But it has been getting progressively more transparently undemocratic, conspiratorial and frankly, stupid, particularly since they established their own media bubble with which to brainwash their tribal affiliates. The full radicalization arrived with their total servility to a man of such low character as Donald Trump. Their behavior in these final days — and I mean all of them, not just the dirty dozen Senators and the House miscreants — shows that they have learned that there is no limit to how far they can go.

They will go farther, you can bet on it. They always do.

Trump leaving the country?

Published by digby on January 4, 2021

Looks like he might be, at least for a while:

US President Donald Trump could be planning a trip to Scotland to avoid attending his successor Joe Biden’s inauguration, according to aviation sources.

Prestwick airport has been told to expect the arrival of a US military Boeing 757 aircraft, that is occasionally used by Trump, on January 19 – the day before his Democratic rival takes charge at the White House.

Speculation surrounding Trump’s plans has been fuelled by the activity of US Army aircraft, which were based at Prestwick airport for a week and said to be carrying out 3D reconnaissance of the president’s Turnberry resort.

Sources at Prestwick said two US military surveillance aircraft were circling Turnberry in November, using the Ayrshire aviation hub as a base.

US media has reported that Trump will break with tradition and snub the inauguration of President Joe Biden on January 20, instead announcing a re-election bid on Air Force One. […]

Air traffic controllers receive details of the arrival of a plane with a US special call sign weeks in advance but are not told exactly which plane when the booking is made. The source at Prestwick airport, who asked to remain anonymous, said: “There is a booking for an American military version of the Boeing 757 on January 19, the day before the inauguration. That’s one that’s normally used by the Vice-President but often used by the First Lady. Presidential flights tend to get booked far in advance, because of the work that has to be done around it.”

Airport sources said surveillance planes appeared to lay the groundwork for Trump’s arrival in November. An MC-12W Liberty – a US Air Force version of the King Air 350ER, which is modified for the Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) role – landed at Prestwick on November 12. It made a number of flights over Trump Turnberry.

Another US Army aircraft that visited the airport on November 12 also carried out surveillance flights over Trump Turnberry.

A source said: “The survey aircraft was based at Prestwick for about a week. It is usually a sign Trump is going to be somewhere for an extended period.”

I would speculate that he is planning to stay there except for the fact that they won’t have him.

But I do love the idea that he’ll announce his intention to run for 2024 from Air Force One. Lol.

An exasperated fact check

Published by digby on January 4, 2021

This fellow came out and rebutted every one of Trump’s stupid, conspiracy addled claims today.

He went on for some time…

He was also clearly trying to get stupid, conspiracy addled Trump voters to reject their Dear Leader and come out to vote for Loeffler and Perdue tomorrow. Fuggedaboudit. They are unable to deal with such dissonance. Dear Leader can do no wrong. The only thing that will matter is if he tells them to go out to vote even though the vote is rigged. And frankly, I think it’s clear that he would love for them to lose — so that he can “prove” Georgia’s system in irrevocably flawed which further shows that he wuz robbed.

Meanwhile, I wonder what this was about? I’m guessing he was either asked to do something illegal and he quit or the president actually fired him in order to get someone more amenable to his illegality. Perhaps he was asked to indict Raffensperger and his General Counsel. I wonder if Acting AG Rosen had anything to do with it?

In the call yesterday, they were very anxious to get hold of some information that the law doesn’t allow them to have. Maybe they’ve found a US Attorney who was willing?

Consorting with Authoritarians

Published by digby on January 4, 2021

The UK has denied the extradition of Julian Assange on humanitarian grounds. Apparently, he is suicidal. Marcy Wheeler believes this is a just outcome:

This outcome was always the most likely way Assange would be able to avoid extradition, and in many ways it is the most just. It means that the good things that Assange has done — in helping expose American human rights abuses — were also the reason he avoided extradition.

I have been agnostic on the possible extradition and prosecution of Julian Assange, not because I don’t believe it would be dangerous to journalism, which it would, and I’m obviously against that. But Wheeler has also laid out a good argument as to why Assange went beyond his role as neutral publisher of secret information which complicates the question substantially.

With Trump’s pardon of the Blackwater thugs who murdered civilians, it has struck me as unforgivable that Assange would have helped the monster Trump the way he did in 2016 and I can’t get past that. I don’t need to see him in jail but I don’t care if I ever hear anything from him again.

I was reminded of all that by this

You do have to wonder who was the “we” to whom he referred.

In case you were wondering how Russian state TV has been looking at this, Julia Davis, who follows it for The Daily Beast had this a couple of weeks ago:

On Tuesday, the Kremlin finally acknowledged that U.S. President Donald J. Trump has been defeated by President-elect Joe Biden, by sending an official congratulatory message to the incoming American president. Russian state media immediately noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin was the last leader of the G20 to recognize Biden’s indisputable victory.

Russian state TV hosts, pundits and lawmakers were also quick to point out the unusually dry language of Putin’s greetings, noting that—unlike his prior telegrams to Trump and Obama—Putin didn’t express any hope that U.S.-Russia relations might improve in the near future. “There are no hopes expressed in Putin’s letter to Biden, none whatsoever,” noted Olga Skabeeva, the co-host of Russia’s state TV program 60 Minutes. She added: “We’re disappointed in Americans.”

Describing American president as “our candidate Trump,” “our friend Donald,” “our Grandpa” and “poor, poor Trump,” Kremlin-controlled state TV shows conceded that Trump’s days in the Oval Office are numbered. While the doom and gloom in Russian state media inevitably surrounded most discussions acknowledging Trump’s electoral defeat, pundits and experts celebrated the bright side of their favored candidate’s four-year reign. “Mission accomplished,” rejoiced Karen Shakhnazarov, CEO of Mosfilm Studio and an ever-present pundit on Russian state TV news talk shows.

Appearing on state TV program The Evening with Vladimir Soloviev, Shakhnazarov opined that Trump’s mission was to destroy the political system of the United States, and he successfully did exactly that.

In 2016, anticipating Trump’s loss in the presidential election, Russian state media toed the Kremlin’s line by laying the groundwork to assert that their favorite candidate lost solely because American elections are fraudulent and the entire system is rigged. These claims were cast aside, since Trump was elected—even after losing the popular vote. In 2020, Trump and the GOP provided the Kremlin with priceless agitprop by making and supporting the same baseless allegations, voiced from the highest podium in the world: the White House.

Political expert Alexei Martynov, director of the International Institute of the Newly Established States, surmised during the broadcast of 60 Minutes: “They burned the reputation of U.S. institutions during these elections.” Political commentator Sergey Strokan concurred: “He [Trump] is discrediting the American electoral system.”

Evgeny Popov, the host of 60 Minutes, grinned like a Cheshire cat: “Let’s be glad about that.” Deputy of the Russian Duma Alexei Zhuravlyov agreed: “I certainly am.” He cheerfully concluded: “The worse for them, the better for us.” During the same broadcast, Popov pointed at the map of states supporting Trump’s desperate plight of overturning election results: “Just look at this map, this is a real beauty. Exactly half of the country, divided. America is divided!”

The Kremlin’s mouthpieces came to recognize the Republican party as their unusual bedfellows in helping to mar the crown jewel of the American democratic system and divide the society. Russian pundits inferred that they perceive the Republicans as fellow racists, who snapped into action to support Trump’s attempts to remain in power, motivated by Biden appointing “non-white people” to serve within his administration.

Dmitry Mikheev, a former Soviet political refugee who worked as a researcher at the Hudson Institute, but later returned to Russia, claimed to be well familiar with American conservatives and their values. Appearing on 60 Minutes, Mikheev alleged that the Republicans were unsettled and spurred into action by the inclusion of minorities as Biden’s top-level appointees: “The whites aren’t being allowed in there. They [the GOP] got scared.” The host, Popov, added: “And the head of the Department of Defense is Black. What is this? That must have been the red line.”

Continuing the theme of alleged oppression of white people in America during the following day’s broadcast of 60 Minutes, co-host Olga Skabeeva repeatedly used offensive terms to describe African-Americans and later acknowledged: “This is some sort of a racist show.” Stoking racial tensions has long been one of the Kremlin’s favored methods of sowing discord in American society, as confirmed in the Mueller report, noted by U.S. intelligence officials and concluded by the U.S. Senate.

The GOP’s silent approval, while President Trump insulted minorities and vilified immigrants, worked even better than the Kremlin’s most successful disinformation operations. The calls prompting further divisions and even violence were coming from inside the house—the White House.

Once the electoral votes came in and the Kremlin finally acknowledged the outcome, state media pundits predicted that the GOP would shortly follow suit. With all respect due to the party that abandoned its own values in favor of the cult of personality and the pursuit of power at the expense of democracy, Russian International Affairs Council expert Alexey Naumov described Russian President Vladimir Putin as “the owner of Donald Trump” and “the main Republican.”

Mocking the GOP, host Evgeny Popov, added: “Republicans, it’s time to give up. Your owner recognized the outcome.” Naumov added: “Your leader [Putin] already recognized Biden’s victory—what are you, dog, waiting for?” There is a grain of truth in every joke, since Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell finally congratulated President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris—so late in the game that his belated acknowledgement came after the congratulations from Vladimir Putin.

This is just embarrassing. But perhaps we deserve it for electing a fool like Trump in the first place.

The US has many faults which are catalogued every second on social media by Americans of all political stripes. Many people apparently agree with the Russian media’s take on the election and are thrilled to see the US get taken down many pegs. That’s the privilege of living in a free society.

But I’m not willing to say that the authoritarian Russian government is better. Please. Vladimir Putin is a dictatorial thug and I will never understand how people who claim to be liberal or progressive can brush that off or compare him to American leaders, even Donald Trump, who is an amateur compared to him. I don’t like authoritarian thugs, no matter who they are.

And yes, I know there is a tradition of left authoritarianism just as there is on the right (although they never admit it…) I’m not an adherent of that tradition. So, if Julian Assange is allowed to go free, that’s fine with me. But the fact that he aligned himself with authoritarians Putin and Trump means that he no longer has any credibility and everything he says has to be judged through that lens.

Presidential Medal of Trump

Published by digby on January 4, 2021

Trump has mostly been giving the medal to sports stars he likes and big donors. It was gross but essentially harmless. Presidents often give the medal to entertainers as well as leaders in science, academia, politics etc. Then Trump gave it to Rush Limbaugh, which was outrageous. But Limbaugh is dying and I guess we all shrugged since it was Trump and the wingnuts really do revere the obnoxious ass.

Now he has made it completely worthless and anyone getting it in the future who will know that it’s been forever tainted by this:

He’s reportedly going to give it to Jim Jordan next week. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him hand it out to Ghislaine Maxwell on the way out the door.

As Rick Wilson said, “everything he touches dies.” He’s killed the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

“I just need 11,000 votes, fellas”

Published by digby on January 4, 2021

President Donald Trump, like Richard Nixon before him, has gotten himself into the biggest trouble of his presidency because of his big mouth. Nixon was ultimately driven from office because he was caught on tape ordering his henchmen to commit crimes. Trump was impeached — less than a year ago — over a phone call he made to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in which he tried to convince him to publicly announce a bogus corruption investigation into political rival Joe Biden and threatened to hold up vital military aid unless Zelensky did his bidding.

Trump himself released the transcript of that call, for reasons I don’t think has ever been clearly understood, but it revealed that he wields his power like a gangster. On Sunday, we obtained more proof of that approach when the Washington Post published a taped conversation from over the weekend between Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and the president in which Trump cajoled, wheedled, prodded and threatened Raffensperger, trying to get him to overturn the election results in the state.Advertisement:

The tape is disturbing, to say the least. Trump rambles on about conspiracy theories that NBC’s Ben Collins, whose beat is right-wing extremist movements, explained derived from “the QAnon social media pipeline”:

Raffensperger apparently released the tape after Trump took to Twitter to announce that they’d spoken and complain that the Georgia Republican “has no clue!” about the various election fraud fantasies Trump was pushing. The tape shows that Raffensperger and his lawyer, Ryan Germany, knew all about them and said they had already investigated to find that none of them are true.

Raffensperger apparently released the tape after Trump took to Twitter to announce that they’d spoken and complain that the Georgia Republican “has no clue!” about the various election fraud fantasies Trump was pushing. The tape shows that Raffensperger and his lawyer, Ryan Germany, knew all about them and said they had already investigated to find that none of them are true.

Whether Trump actually believes any of this unknown and irrelevant. What is relevant is that he made it very clear what he wants from Raffensperger and he threatened him:

… it is more illegal for you than it is for them because, you know, what they did and you’re not reporting it. That’s a criminal, that’s a criminal offense. And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. And that’s a big risk. But they are shredding ballots, in my opinion, based on what I’ve heard. And they are removing machinery, and they’re moving it as fast as they can, both of which are criminal finds. And you can’t let it happen, and you are letting it happen. You know, I mean, I’m notifying you that you’re letting it happen.

So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.

Trump brings up the 11,000 votes over and over again during the conversation, finally ending with this:

So what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break. You know, we have that in spades already.

This is the way a movie mob boss issues a threat.

It’s unclear exactly how Trump thinks this is going to result in the election being overturned but we have to assume that he is seriously trying to do that. After all, it’s so late in the game that if he were simply trying to craft a narrative that he can use for his ongoing grift, there would be no need to have private calls with Georgia politicians. He could just rant on Twitter and give interviews and send out fundraising emails whining about how they stole the election. Why even bother talking to Raffensperger if he doesn’t really believe he can coerce him to deliver those 11,000 votes?

As Collins reported, the conspiracy theories are just tumbling out one after the other without any real sense of how this grand conspiracy is supposed to have worked. But since even Trump knows that if Raffensperger was willing and able to do his bidding (and the electors hadn’t already voted) it still wouldn’t be enough to change the electoral college results in his favor, one has to assume he’s having similar talks with Republicans in other states as well.

He’s certainly been talking to members of the House and Senate and he’s got a number of them ready to object to certifying the electoral college results on Wednesday. But, why not? Trump has told his followers to descend on D.C. that day promising that it will be “wild.” As many as 140 GOP Representatives are said to planning to object, along with around a dozen Republican Senators, which means that they plan to turn this pro-forma congressional ritual into a circus sideshow. Senator Josh Hawley, R-Mo, was the first to jump in and offer to object in the Senate based upon the idea that because so many people have been convinced the election was stolen, they need to actually steal it in order to restore people’s faith in democracy. Unfortunately for Hawley, he was quickly shoved aside by Ted Cruz, R-Tx, who gathered a handful of servile accomplices to join in the fun and came up with a truly odious plan:

FYI: this election is nothing like the “dispute” of 1876, thank goodness, which was predicated on terrorist violence against Black people and ended up sanctioning Jim Crow. It’s outrageous that Cruz would even bring this up but considering that Trump’s main conspiracy theory seems to be based upon the idea that the election was supposedly stolen from him in cities with large Black populations — but maybe it isn’t all that surprising.

And if that doesn’t work, it sounds as if Trump may think he has a fallback:

https://twitter.com/ParkerMolloy/status/1345568564296691713

Oddly enough, White House advisor Peter Navarro is wrong and Judge Jeanine Pirro is right. The inauguration date is in the Constitution and if Biden is somehow not sworn in, Nancy Pelosi would simply become the acting president. Of course, Trump is the man who insisted publicly many times that he should be able to serve more than two terms and suggested that we delay the election until conditions were more favorable for him. Adherence to the Constitution isn’t something he and his collaborators have ever been particularly concerned with.

Oddly enough, White House advisor Peter Navarro is wrong and Judge Jeanine Pirro is right. The inauguration date is in the Constitution and if Biden is somehow not sworn in, Nancy Pelosi would simply become the acting president. Of course, Trump is the man who insisted publicly many times that he should be able to serve more than two terms and suggested that we delay the election until conditions were more favorable for him. Adherence to the Constitution isn’t something he and his collaborators have ever been particularly concerned with.

Luckily, there are enough congressional representatives and senators on record saying they will vote to certify the results on Wednesday so unless Trump really does refuse to vacate the White House, it’s going to be over on that day. But Trump is fomenting tremendous anger among his followers that may very well boil over. What happens then is anybody’s guess. But you can be sure that if Trump is as steeped in right-wing conspiracy theories as deeply as it appears he is, he’s well aware of the danger. One can’t help but suspect he sees that as a feature, not a bug.