Harry Enten at CNN looks at the Hispanic vote over 30 years and discovers that there’s a pattern in which incumbents of both parties always seem to benefit. I don’t pretend to understand the psychology that might make this happen but it seems indisputable that there’s something to it since it’s been the case for 30 years now:
Hispanic voters were one of President Joe Biden’s biggest weaknesses in the 2020 election. Although sources differ on his exact margin, Biden’s advantage with Hispanics was the worst for a Democratic presidential nominee since 2004 — even as he had the strongest performance overall for a Democrat since 2008.
A look at recent history and polling reveals, however, that Biden may be primed for a comeback among Hispanics for a simple reason: He’s now the incumbent.Take a look at Gallup polling during the Biden presidency. Aggregating all the polls it has conducted so far (in order to get a large sample size), Biden’s approval rating with Hispanics stands at 72% compared to a 55% overall approval rating.
That 72% is a clear improvement from how Biden did in the election with Hispanics. Biden won 65% of Hispanics, according to the network exit polls. An estimate from the Democratic firm Catalist (which lines up well with what we saw in pre-election polls) had Biden taking 61% of Hispanics. So this Gallup data suggests Biden’s support may be up anywhere from 7 to 11 points from the election.
Biden is doing better overall now than he did in the election. His approval rating is at 55% in the Gallup data we’re using here. Even controlling for a higher approval rating overall, Biden has had a disproportionate rise in support from Hispanics. He’s now doing 17 points better with Hispanics than overall, while he was doing 10 to 14 points better with them in the 2020 election.Keep in mind, too, that unlike in an election, there are undecideds allowed in a poll. If we allocate undecideds equally between approval and disapproval for both Hispanics and overall, Biden’s approval rating is about 20 points higher with Hispanics than overall in Gallup polling. (An average of recent CNN/SSRS, Fox News, Marist College and Quinnipiac University polls compared to their pre-election equivalent finds that Biden has had a similar disproportionate rise with Hispanics.)
This 20-point gap between how Hispanics and adults overall feel about Biden is wider than the last Democratic president saw in his first months on the job.In aggregated Gallup data with undecideds allocated, Barack Obama’s approval rating was 17 points higher with Hispanics than overall in the first four months of his presidency. In the 2008 election, Obama did 14 points better in the exit polls with Hispanics than overall.
Obama saw an improvement with Hispanics relative to his overall performance, but not to the same extent that Biden may be getting.The fact that both Biden and Obama saw more of a boost with Hispanics than they did overall should not be surprising based upon history.
Recent incumbents seem to see their support among Hispanics rise in their reelection bids. In fact, the last five incumbents since George H.W. Bush did better with Hispanics than they did when they were elected to their first term.
Maybe it’s a sense that it’s better to go with what you know than something new? I don’t know. But it’s hopefully good news for the Dems in 2022 and 2024. They will need every vote they can get.
Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) was elected to office the day before supporters of former President Donald Trump attacked the U.S. Capitol to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s presidential win.
Warnock, the first Black senator from Georgia, was born while his state was still represented by segregationists. He won in a runoff election system that racists created during the Jim Crow era, and he’s currently supporting voting rights legislation blocked by a Senate procedure long used to stop the advancement of civil rights in the United States.
On Friday, moments after Senate Republicans used their first filibuster of Biden’s presidency to block debate on a bill to establish a bipartisan commission to investigate the Jan. 6 attack, Warnock stood off the floor of the Senate and reflected on the moment. Standing in a Senate hallway not far from where a mob of Trump supporters chased Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman up the stairs after they smashed out windows of the Capitol and broke into the building, Warnock said he worried his colleagues may have grown cynical and prioritized short-term political gains at a time when the future of American democracy is on the line.
“Sometimes we’re standing in the midst of a defining historical moment, and we miss the magnitude of it all,” said Warnock, the pastor of the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. grew up listening to his father preach.
“I think there were some people who slept through the civil rights movement, quite frankly, who didn’t understand that in a real sense it was a fight to save the country. Not just the South, not just Black people, but the country,” Warnock said. “We are in a renewed, 21st-century fight to defend our democracy so that we might pass on a future that’s worthy of all our children.”
Warnock said the country is in the middle of a “historic abandonment” of the “basic democratic framework” in statehouses across the country, as supporters of former President Trump move to pass restrictive voting laws because of his election lies. Jan. 6 was not only a violent physical attack on the U.S. Capitol, Warnock said, it was “an attack on the votes of the people of Georgia and people all across this country.” But most Republican senators, Warnock said, have decided they are unwilling to do the right thing to stand up for American democracy.
“All of us are here as representatives of a democracy that folks on the other side have decided they’re not willing to defend. Some things ought to be bigger than politics. This is about truth,” Warnock said.
“It’s ironic that this would happen [on Memorial Day] weekend, because all of us will go back to our home districts, and we will celebrate great patriots who paid the ultimate price to defend our democracy on bloody battlefields, and we have politicians who are not even willing to stand up on the Senate floor for what’s obviously right,” he added.
Jan. 6, Warnock said, “was an unabashed exercise in attempted disenfranchisement, and now we have seen that attack metastasize to state capitals all across the country” as Trump-supporting legislatures throughout the country pass legislation that will make it more difficult to vote because their supporters believe the former president’s lies about a stolen election.
“This is a defining moment. Somebody’s got to stand up and defend our democracy,” Warnock said.
“The integrity of the democracy is at stake,” Warnock said. “Let’s have the arguments about the size of government, let’s have the arguments about health care, taxes, education, infrastructure. But what has made this country work, with all of those challenges, is that we have a general framework in which those arguments take place, and what we are witnessing in this moment is a historic abandonment of that basic democratic framework.”
Can it finally be true that Bibi Netanyahu is out? Looks like it:
A diverse coalition of Israeli opposition parties said Sunday that they have the votes to form a unity government to unseat Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving leader and its dominant political figure for more than a decade.
Under their agreement, reached after weeks of negotiations spearheaded by centrist opposition leader Yair Lapid, former Netanyahu defense minister and ally Naftali Bennett will lead a power-sharing government.
“We could go to fifth elections, sixth elections, until our home falls upon us, or we could stop the madness and take responsibility,” Bennett said in a televised statement Sunday evening. “Today, I would like to announce that I intend to join my friend Yair Lapid in forming a unity government.”
Netanyahu has been struggling to hold onto power after four inconclusive elections in the past two years while facing an ongoing corruption trial. Bennett is one of several former loyalists who have flirted with joining the so-called change coalition, a collection of parties that span the political spectrum but share a desire to end Netanyahu’s 12-year tenure.
Their announcement follows the 11-day conflict between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip this month, which some analysts speculated would help bolster the embattled Netanyahu. At the outset of the fighting, Bennett, a former Netanyahu protege who had been poised to join a unity government with Lapid, said the military operation, which killed more than 250 Palestinians and 12 Israelis, had ended his interest in joining with the anti-Netanyahu coalition, which has the support of left-leaning and Arab parties.
I’m far from an expert on Israeli politics but I do know that Netanyahu is a malevolent presence and needs to be gone. I understand that Bennett is no prize and may possibly carry out many of the same policies which is bad. But Netanyahu is a singular personality and any break with him is going to have to be a first step to needed change.
I don’t think this is absolutely in the bag yet. Anything could still happen. But it appears that even the right wing in Israel has decided that Bibi is no longer useful. Finally.
The only “problem” Texas Republicans “fixed” with their new vote suppression bills is the problem of too many eligible, legal voters in the big cities voting for Democrats. That’s it. There was no fraud and they know it.
In the course of several hours Saturday and early Sunday, Senate Republicans hurtled to move forward on a sweeping voting bill negotiated behind closed doors where it doubled in length and grew to include voting law changes that weren’t previously considered.
Over Democrats’ objections, they suspended the chamber’s own rules to narrow the window lawmakers had to review the new massive piece of legislation before giving it final approval ahead of the end of Monday’s end to the legislative session. This culminated in an overnight debate and party line vote early Sunday to sign off on a raft of new voting restrictions and changes to elections and get it one step closer to the governor’s desk.
Senate Bill 7, the GOP’s priority voting bill, emerged Saturday from a conference committee as an expansive bill that would touch nearly the entire voting process, including provisions to limit early voting hours, curtail local voting options and further tighten voting-by-mail, among several other provisions. It was negotiated behind closed doors over the last week after the House and Senate passed significantly different versions of the legislation and pulled from each chamber’s version of the bill. The bill also came back with a series of additional voting rule changes, including a new ID requirement for mail-in ballots, that weren’t part of previous debates on the bill.
But instead of giving senators the 24 hours required under the chamber’s rules to go over the committee’s report, including those new additions, state Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, moved to ignore that mandate so the Senate could debate and eventually vote on the final version of the bill just hours after it was filed.
Around 6 p.m. Saturday, Hughes acknowledged the Senate would consider the report “earlier than usual” but tried to argue he was giving senators “more time” by alerting them about his plan to debate the final version of SB 7 at 10 p.m.
“That’s a nice spin,” state Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, shot back.
The Legislature is up against a Sunday night deadline to approve conference committee reports, like the compromise version of SB 7. Had the Senate waited until later Sunday to consider it, it could have left it in reach of a filibuster that could’ve killed the bill. The House is expected to vote on the final version of the bill later today.
Senate Democrats raised concerns that they had not had sufficient time to review the 180-page conference committee report, including a 67-page bill and a lengthy analysis of the negotiated changes. Roughly 12 pages of the bill contained additions that hadn’t been previously considered as part of the legislation and were added by the committee out of the public eye. The truncated schedule also left them without the opportunity to check in with local election officials in their districts or voting rights groups monitoring its passage, they said.
After Senate Republicans voted to suspend the rules, Hughes opened debate on a resolution to approve those 12 pages of additional changes, with Democrats questioning the origin of those changes and the lack of public input in tacking them onto the bill.
“I couldn’t in good faith vote to pass a bill the size of this one, that will affect the voting rights of every single Texan of voting age, when they’ve been deprived of the opportunity to voice their opinions on the final package of this bill,” state Sen. Beverly Powell, D-Burleson, said.
Throughout the debate, Hughes argued SB 7 was striving for “common sense” solutions that secured elections from wrongdoing and fraud.
“We want elections to be secure and accessible,” he said.
That’s the kind of unctuous double speak that makes me want to scream. The gall! There was no fraud!!!!!
The new provisions include language from separate Republican bills that failed to pass that would set a new voter ID rule for mail-in ballots, requiring voters to provide their driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number, if they have one, on their applications for those ballots. For their votes to be counted, voters will be required to include matching information on the envelopes used to return their ballots.
Other changes, including a new window of 1 to 9 p.m. for early voting on Sundays, hadn’t come up until they were added to the conference committee report outside of public view. State Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, raised the possibility that change could hamper “souls to the polls” efforts meant to turn out voters after church services and questioned the justification for 1 p.m. start time.
There is no justification for any of it. They just want to make it harder, in any way they can, for people to vote.
I have to say, though, that they may not realize they are shooting themselves in the foot. They obviously believe that by making voting more complicated and arduous they are suppressing the Democratic vote because Democrats are more lazy and stupid than Republicans.
Are they really so sure about that? Have they been to a MAGA rally?
Update: I have been unable to determine if the late added provision allowing a judge to overturn the election results if some wingnut claims they have “a preponderance of the evidence” that there was voter fraud. For some reason the news reports I’ve seen don’t spell that out. I’ll update when it’s cleared up.
All the vote suppression stuff is horrible, undemocratic, Jim Crow bullshit. But these new laws that allow Republicans to simply steal elections legally is really, really scary. Texas was the first to propose something like this:
Texas Republicans just released the text of its voter suppression bill, SB7
Votes will be held before midnight Sunday
The bill includes a NEW PROVISION that allows judges to OVERTURN AN ELECTION “WITHOUT DETERMINING HOW INDIVIDUAL VOTERS VOTED”
Follow along if interested
This section appears to validate Trump’s claims that he won various states because a certain number of people voted “illegally” without any other details
Now people like Guiliani can take these absurd allegations to court and, with a sympathetic judge, OVERTURN AN ELECTION
3. Texas is poised to adopt this unprecedented and radical legal provision without ANY DEBATE IN EITHER CHAMBER
It was negotiated in a secret conference committee and released on a Saturday of a holiday weekend
This is another NEW PROVISION of the law straight from the right-wing fever swamp. It requires the Texas Secretary of State to ensure no county has more registered voters than people eligible to vote.
This is a favorite tactic of far-right orgs alleging voter fraud
Since the number of voters in a given county who are eligible is constantly changing, right-wing groups like to point to counties with “too many registered voters” as “proof” of voter fraud
Under the bill, this can be used to force counties to engage in voter purges etc
I think this provision about “too many registered voters” should be read along with the provision allowing judges to overturn the election
It opens the possibility to judges overturning the election based on flawed data on how many voters were eligible to vote
He took the MAGA faithful for a ride, stole their money and made them look like fools. And they love him for it:
Steve Bannon has a new MAGA megaphone, and Republicans eager to shine in a party still tethered to former President Donald Trump know it.
Bannon, the former Breitbart News executive and one of the architects of Trump’s Make America Great Again movement, has increasingly leveraged his “War Room: Pandemic” podcast into a kind of proxy primary. Ambitious Republicans are flocking there for the chance to demonstrate loyalty to Bannon’s former boss and pitch themselves to Trump’s voters — and, more indirectly, to Trump himself.
With Fox News losing favor among Trump’s most diehard fans, “War Room” appears to be gaining steam as a safe space for the far right. It’s routinely among the most popular podcasts on Apple’s platform and streams live twice each weekday and once every Saturday through the Real America’s Voice network.
On this show, Joe Biden is not the real president, and the theory that Covid-19 leaked from a Wuhan, China, lab has been a hot topic for more than a year. Bannon encourages skepticism about vaccines one minute and peddles zinc and Vitamin D pills the next.
In an interview with NBC News, Bannon said candidates who appear will be pushed first and foremost on what he called “a litmus test” for the GOP: challenging the outcome of the 2020 election.
“So Nov. 3 is not going to go away,” Bannon said. “There will not be a Republican that wins a primary for 2022 — not one — that doesn’t take the pledge to get to the bottom of Nov. 3.”
YouTube has banned Bannon’s podcast channel, citing concerns about the spread of false claims about election fraud. Nevertheless, Bannon has had little trouble booking guests, from MAGA celebrities such as the MyPillow creator to veteran lawmakers and candidates. They’re often reaching out to him, Bannon said, aware if they want to reach the Trump base, it’s a must-visit.
“We pride ourselves on being the most populist, most economic nationalist wing of this movement,” Bannon said.
The podcast is a home for the most ardent Trump backers. Bannon said he’s jokingly told some, “We’re with the dead-enders now,” a reference to those who believe what Democrats and some Republicans term “the big lie” — that the election was stolen.
“And we pride ourselves on that,” he said, making no secret that he views the last election similarly. “I think politicians see that need to reach that audience.”
Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., dropped by this month as she worked to unseat Trump critic Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., as chair of the House Republican Conference. Eric Greitens, the former Missouri governor who resigned over a sexual misconduct allegation and is now running for Senate, is a frequent guest. And Bannon has taken a particular interest in Pennsylvania and Ohio, two states where next year’s primaries for governor and Senate are shaping up as big Trump loyalty tests.
Jason Miller, a Trump adviser who co-hosted with Bannon in the show’s early days, compared his sway to the late Rush Limbaugh, who helped grow the conservative movement in the 1990s. Miller said the former president — often referred to as an “audience of one” for those who wish to please him on TV and radio — is familiar with “War Room.”
“We present him with clips,” Miller said of Trump. “I frequently update him on who’s on the show and who’s doing what.” The former president, he added, “definitely has an appreciation for the work that Bannon and the show are doing.”
Some of the GOP’s most polarizing figures are frequent guests. Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., continues to appear amid a federal sex trafficking investigation that is in part focused on whether he had a sexual relationship with a minor. (Gaetz has not been charged with a crime and has repeatedly denied wrongdoing.) A day after House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., condemned her for equating pandemic safety measures with the Holocaust, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., returned to the “War Room” for a sympathetic ear.
Mike Lindell, the MAGA-famous conspiracy theorist and businessman whose MyPillow products Bannon advertises, is another regular. After Lindell told Bannon on air last week that he planned to confront Govs. Doug Ducey of Arizona and Brian Kemp of Georgia over their acceptance of Biden’s victory in their states, the Republican Governors Association barred him from entering a members-only event.
Along with the election, cancel culture comes up often. So does critical race theory, the academic term meant to recognize how systemic racism is inherent in American life. Republicans have made it a catchall for anti-racism and anti-diversity lessons they don’t want taught in schools — and a new front in the GOP culture wars.
Republicans don’t care if they are marks. All they care about is being told the bedtime stories that make them feel good about being hateful and mean and convince them that the vast majority of Americans (except the bad you-know-whats) agree with them. They yearn to be subjects. They love to be lied to.
“Trumpism” now appears in the Collins dictionary under British English. Everywhere else, it is a matter of time.
Watch carefully for the last pieces to fall into place. When do Republicans go full authoritarian, move to abolish elections altogether, and declare Donald J. Trump president for life and Republicans the forever victors? It’s what Trump wants. It’s what Trump expects.
Texas Republicans are working hard to meet Dear Leader’s expectations (Washington Post; emphasis mine):
The Texas legislature on Saturday moved closer to enacting dozens of new restrictions on the voting process, as Republican lawmakers reached a deal that imposes a raft of hurdles on casting ballots by mail and enhances civil and criminal penalties for election administrators, voters and those seeking to assist them.
The measure would make it illegal for election officials to send out unsolicited mail ballot applications, empower partisan poll watchers and ban practices such as drop boxes and drive-through voting that were popularized in heavily Democratic Harris County last year, according to a final draft distributed by legislative staff to voting right advocates Saturday morning.
In a last-minute addition, language was inserted in the bill making it easier to overturn an election, no longer requiring evidence that fraud actually altered an outcome of a race — but rather only that enough ballots were illegally cast that could have made a difference.
It’s all about ensuring that “fraud does not undermine the public confidence in the electoral process” that the GOP and its agents have spent decades undermining expressly to justify them fixing it.
Naturally, “the reforms to the election laws of this state made by this Act are not intended to impair the right of free suffrage guaranteed to the people of Texas by the United States and Texas Constitutions, but are enacted solely to prevent fraud in the electoral process and ensure that all legally cast ballots are counted.” It is in the eye of the Republican-controlled legislature which ballots are legally cast. All votes cast in wrong-leaning districts are presumptively illegal until proven otherwise. Especially if the vote is close. Extra-especially if the Republican loses.
Gov. Greg Abbott (R) will sign this with a flourish when it lands on his desk. Voting rights groups will see him in court.
The bill would broadly prohibit local election officials from altering election procedures without express legislative permission — a direct hit against Harris County, home of Houston, where election officials implemented various expansions last year to help voters cast ballots during the pandemic. It also specifically targets some of those expansions, explicitly banning drive-through voting locations, temporary polling places in tents and 24-hour or late-night voting marathons.
The proposed new voting hurdles come after the state logged record turnout in the 2020 election, including huge surges in early voting in cities including Austin and Houston.
A couple of these provisions are new, at least to me:
● Allow signatures on mail ballot applications to be compared to any signature on record, eliminating protections that the signature on file must be recent and that the application signature must be compared to at least two others on file to prevent the arbitrary rejection of ballots;
● And require individuals to fill out a form if they plan to transport more than two non-relatives to the polls, and expand the requirement that those assisting voters who need help must sign an oath attesting under penalty of perjury that the person they’re helping is eligible for assistance because of a disability and that they will not suggest whom to vote for.
Recognizing that signatures change over time, my state scans signatures every time a voter signs an affidavit or voting-related form so there is a historical record. Signatures are matched against the most recent version(s).
Republicans have for years harassed activists who ferry Black voters to the polls. They’ll get in their faces, claim what they’re doing is wrong somehow, and take photos of their license tags. There would be one pissed-off Black woman if North Carolina Republicans tried that “fill out a form” shit here to discourage driving voters to the polls. Boys and girls, you do not want to piss off Ms. Elinor.
The other day, some idiot in Nashville mocked Covid vaccines and the Holocaust by selling yellow stars of David with “NOT VACCINATED” on them. (No, I’m not providing a link.) A name that lives in infamy attaches to the political party that first created those patches.
The Collins English Dictionary already incudes “Trumpism” among its entries, but only as British English. “Policies advocated by Donald Trump” elides specifying the authoritarian, antidemocratic nature of the movement Trump leads even in exile. It is just a matter of time before that term sees broader use. Trumpism and Trumpist will attach to his political party and cult that under the guise of election integrity laid waste to the American republic and dispensed with democracy altogether. Because if it is not stopped, it is just a matter of time before creeping Trumpism does just that.
LAS VEGAS (AP) — A federal appeals court said Friday can be held liable for negligence by a man who spent almost a year in solitary confinement at a southern Nevada facility without ever seeing a judge on marijuana-related charges.
The 9th U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco said a jury can hear Rudy Rivera’s lawsuit claiming that CoreCivic Inc. employees failed to tell the U.S. Marshals Service while Rivera languished in custody from November 2015 to October 2016 at the Nevada Southern Detention Center outside Las Vegas.
MIstakes were made. Or were they? Because CoreCivic got paid for every day it kept its bed filled with Rudy Rivera for almost a year and Rivera finally got out of solitary, so win-win.
John Scott-Railton has more on Twitter sourced from the 9th Circuit:
CoreCivic, which is publicly traded and was formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America, secured its first federal contract in 1983. Nearly $400 million worth of U.S. Marshals Service business accounted for 21% of company revenues in 2020, according to the company’s annual Securities and Exchange Commission report.
Like Philip Morris is now Altria. Blackwater mercenaries now work for Academi (which for a stretch was Xe Services).
Conservatives look askance at government. Especially at programs that help people. Give the Left a chance and they just grow the government and take more tax money out of Real Americans’ ™ pockets for people who don’t deserve it. The taxes-are-theft (and no-free-lunch) bunch then sold Americans on the notion they could get the same services for less by unleashing the private sector.
New highway? Public-private-partnmership! More prisons? Privatize ’em. Incentivize ’em to keep prison beds filled and revenues up. Maybe even bribe judges. Taxes: bad. User fees: good.
Ask Mr. Rivera how the miracle of the marketplace worked out for him.
When you read this I want you the ask yourself what would be happeneing to these people if their names were Moustaffa Ali and Ahmad Bashir:
Hours before Senate Republicans killed an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6th siege, federal prosecutors disclosed communications about how Oath Keepers allegedly plotted to storm Washington, D.C. with guns by boat by way of the Potomac River.
Those discussions became public in a filing seeking to maintain the strict pretrial release conditions of Oath Keepers member Thomas Caldwell, whom prosecutors allege organized a group of militia members on “standby with guns in a hotel across the river.” In the brief, prosecutors also alleged that a message from the militia’s leader described a “worst case scenario” where former President Donald Trump “calls us up as part of the militia to to assist him inside DC.”
Pulling a line from one of the immortal verses of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the extremist group’s Florida chapter leader Kelly Meggs allegedly imagined the militia members as the modern day equivalent of their American colonial forebears.ADVERTISING
“1 if by land,” Meggs allegedly wrote in an encrypted message on the group’s Signal channel, quoting Longfellow’s 1861 poem “Paul Revere’s Ride.”
“North side of Lincoln Memorial,” Meggs’s message continued, according to the government. “2 if by sea[,] Corner of west basin and Ohio is a water transport landing !!”
The alleged Oath Keepers plot to ferry heavy weapons across the Potomac River on a boat was previously reported by the New York Times in February, but prosecutors first made new evidence supporting that claim public on the day Trump’s Republican Party blocked independent scrutiny into the attack.
According to the government’s eight-page brief, the 65-year-old Caldwell allegedly answered Meggs’s call by asking a member of another militia group about procuring a boat for their so-called “quick reaction force,” or QRF.
The lengthy message states:
Can’t believe I just thought of this: how many people either in the militia or not (who are still supportive of our efforts to save the Republic) have a boat on a trailer that could handle a Potomac crossing? If we had someone standing by at a dock ramp (one near the Pentagon for sure) we could have our Quick Response Team with the heavy weapons standing by, quickly load them and ferry them across the river to our waiting arms. I’m not talking about a bass boat. Anyone who would be interested in supporting the team this way? I will buy the fuel. More or less be hanging around sipping coffee and maybe scooting on the river a bit and pretending to fish, then if it all went to shit, our guy loads our weps AND Blue Ridge Militia weps and ferries them across. Dude! If we had 2 boats, we could ferry across and never drive into D.C. at all!!!! Then get picked up. Is there a way to PLEASE pass the word among folks you know and see if someone would jump in the middle of this to help. I am spreading the word, too. Genius if someone is willing and hasn’t put their boat away for the winter.
Prosecutors claim there is evidence that the quick reaction force members had guns.
“On January 4, Person One posted to the Oath Keepers website, ‘As we have done on all recent DC Ops, we will also have well armed and equipped QRF teams on standby, outside DC, in the event of a worst case scenario, where the President calls us up as part of the militia to to assist him inside DC,” the government’s memo states.
In prior briefings, prosecutors identified “Person One” as Oath Keepers founder and leader Stewart Rhodes, who has not been charged with any wrongdoing.
On the morning of Jan. 6, Rhodes allegedly wrote in the “DC OP: Jan 6 21” Signal chat: “We will have several well equipped QRFs outside DC. And there are many, many others, from other groups, who will be watching and waiting on the outside in case of worst case scenarios,” according to the filing.
You may think this was just some yahoo spouting off at the end of the bar. But think about how many American Muslims are in jail today because they were entrapped by FBI agents and confidential informants into making threats like that. Imagine if they stormed the US Capitol. They would be in jail for decades. These guys? I doubt it.
After nearly three dozen GOP members joined Democrats in the House last week to approve the proposed commission, the former president issued a statement blasting those “35 wayward Republicans” and warning of “consequences to being ineffective and weak.”
Their counterparts in the Senate got the message. Republicans quake at the thought of doing anything that might cause Mt. Trump to erupt.
But there is an even darker reason to explain why they appear less concerned about paying a price for failing to reckon with what happened on Jan. 6, which was also an assault on the integrity of this country’s democratic processes.
The more dangerous truth is that a not-insignificant portion of the GOP’s Trumpian base actually appears to believe that the violent mob was justified in its effort to disrupt Congress as it conducted its pro forma tally of the electoral votes that made Joe Biden the 46th president.
These are the people who have bought into Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and who share at least some of the unhinged theories that fuel the QAnon movement.
A new poll released by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute and the Interfaith Youth Core shows that these dangerous and conspiratorial beliefs are not confined to the country’s dank backwaters.
Fully 20 percent of more than 5,500 adults questioned in all 50 states — and 28 percent of Republicans among them — said they agreed with the statement that “there is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders.”
Even more worrisome were the 15 percent overall — and, again, 28 percent of Republicans — who were of the opinion that because “things have gotten so off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”
What Republicans made clear with their vote on Friday is that they would rather allow this thinking to fester within their base, and hope that it works to their electoral advantage, than to stand up to it.
McConnell may be right that dodging and delaying accountability for what happened on Jan. 6 could help Republicans win back power in Congress. But by standing in the way of a reckoning with the poisonous forces that are growing within the ranks of their own party, they are doing a disservice to the country — one for which democracy itself will ultimately pay a price.
I think it’s important that Tumulty and other members of the establishment press are willing to call this out. It wasn’t long ago that they would have been very reluctant to even see this much less admit it. But I will go a step further. They are traitors. There’s no longer any doubt about that. And these traitors are more than willing to play with the fire that Donald Trump lit.
Expect more violence. And expect these people to excuse it — or embrace it. They have crossed that rubicon and I don’t expect them to turn around and go back.
Feeling hopeful today? I thought not, but just in case:
…just one in five Republicans fully rejected the premises of the QAnon conspiracy theory. For Democrats, 58 percent were flat-out QAnon rejecters.
Mr. Jones said he was struck by the prevalence of QAnon’s adherents. Overlaying the share of poll respondents who expressed belief in its core principles over the country’s total population, “that’s more than 30 million people,” he said.
“Thinking about QAnon, if it were a religion, it would be as big as all white evangelical Protestants, or all white mainline Protestants,” he added. “So it lines up there with a major religious group.”
He also noted the correlation between belief in QAnon’s fictions and the conviction that armed conflict would be necessary. “It’s one thing to say that most Americans laugh off these outlandish beliefs, but when you take into consideration that these beliefs are linked to a kind of apocalyptic thinking and violence, then it becomes something quite different,” he said.
Put another way, more than 30 million Americans, believe, or at least think it’s plausible, that “the levers of power are controlled by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles” — and many of them are prepared to kill in the name of this belief. This raises an important question:
Are there senior discounts on one way tickets to Mars yet?
