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Clay Higgins is on the case

Brandi Buchman’s offering was the first thing that popped up on the hellsite this a.m. Clearly, former Louisiana lawman Rep. Clay Higgins, perpetually in high dudgeon (I love that phrase), is enjoying his moment in Lara Logan’s Truth in Media spotlight.

“The Cajun John Wayne,” the man who accused the FBI of sending “ghost busses” filled with agents to Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6 to impersonate Trump supporters and spark the riot, has “done his research.” Again. Higgins insists that the Biden administration has weaponized the government (MAGAs love that phrase) to track Trump supporters.

Higgins is gonna gear up, lock and load, expose ’em, flush ’em out, nip it in the bud:

“I’m telling you, we’re in uncharted waters as it relates to the weaponization of our government against the American people. I am not frightened of these people. I’ve spent my life serving others, and I love my country. This thing is not going to just slip away. They’re not going to take us without a fight. I’m going to fight legally and peacefully and within the parameters of the constitution that I’ve sworn to serve. But they’re going down. These men and their high perch and their position of power and authority that are walking upon our entire history, our deepest core principles. They’re not going to get away with it.”

Ok Clay https://t.co/8AzqZFI4Wj

— Brandi Buchman (@Brandi_Buchman) December 15, 2023

Higgins gets too little attention for his skill at generating word salad like: “You millennial leftists who never lived one day under nuclear threat can now reflect upon your woke sky. You made quite a non-binary fuss to save the world from intercontinental ballistic tweets.”

And gems like this that it took Jeff Sharlet to translate:

“President Trump said he has been summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM. This is a perimeter probe from the oppressors. Hold. rPOTUS has this. Buckle up. 1/50K know your bridges. Rock steady calm. That is all.”

How about the sanction Higgins drew over a Facebook post:

The beauty of Facebook posts is that screenshots allow preservation of the impulsive madness of posters. Higgins, R-Lafayette, posted a picture of Black men carrying assault-style rifles and other tactical gear. Higgins said that anyone arriving in the state “aggressively natured and armed” would have a “one way ticket.”

“I’d drop any 10 of you where you stand,” said the post, which was removed not long after appearing on Higgins’ official campaign account. “Nothing personal. We just eliminate the threat. We don’t care what color you are. We don’t care if you’re left or right. if you show up like this, if We recognize threat … you won’t walk away.”

Facebook removed the post for breaking the company’s “Violence and Incitement” policies, a company spokesperson confirmed late Tuesday.

Higgins will be the first to let you know when the revolution is here:

“America is being manipulated into a new era of government control. Your liberty is threatened from within. Welcome to the front lines, Ladies and Gentlemen. I suggest you get your mind right. I’ll advise when it’s time gear up, mount up, and roll out.”

Mount up, Pilgrims.

Update: Adding this from about 10:30 ET on the hellsite.

It’s Happy Hollandaise Time! You help keep lit this beacon of sanity.

The president-in-exile holds court

You read something like this and automatically think that this group of crackpots, losers, grifters and fools are just a silly sideshow and should not be taken seriously. Why are we even talking about this?

But this is where the undisputed leader of the GOP holds court and runs the Republican party, which is in position to take back the majority in the fall and possibly re-install the Orange Napoleon back in the White House two years later. You can’t ignore them as much as you might like to.

But let’s just say that the GOP is not sending their best:

On a warm evening in May, a small galaxy of MAGA stars in tuxedos and floor length sparkling gowns stood around a pool sipping cocktails, eating plates of risotto and clinking champagne glasses under perfect palm trees.

They had gathered there, at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, not for a campaign fundraiser or a holiday affair; but, rather, for a glitzy film premiere.

Dinesh D’Souza, the conservative provocateur, was releasing his documentary, “2000 Mules,” the most recent addition to the cannon of right wing conspiracy flicks questioning the well-established outcome of the 2020 election. And for the first formal viewing, he had chosen the site dubbed by the 45th president as the “Winter White House.” In doing so, D’Souza joined a growing list of those dabbling in MAGA film noir to turn to Mar-a-Lago for their coming out party.

Trump’s private club has become the Grauman’s Chinese Theater for the Hollywood-hating crowd. Just weeks before D’Souza’s debut, a slew of Trump allies, friends, and conservative figures flew down to Palm Beach estate for the showing of a documentary, “Rigged,” on the 2020 election. The film starred Trump himself, and was produced by David Bossie, the president of the conservative group Citizens United. Shortly after, Matt Schlapp, chair of the American Conservative Union, debuted his own documentary, “Culture Killers: the Woke Wars” on cancel culture poolside at Trump’s club.

[…]

The transformation of a Palm Beach club into a MAGA movie destination is yet another way in which Trump has managed to keep himself at the epicenter of modern conservatism. Barack Obama may have joined Netflix to help produce documentaries about climate change and the planet. Trump is convincing the documentarians to cover his election gripes and to come to him.

It’s not just movies. Almost every night at Mar-a-Lago, there’s a new event — fundraisers, book party, or social confab — usually marked by Trump descending from a stairwell, or through grand double doors, to be met with cheers.

The steady parade of events earns the president’s club some cash; though how much it costs to premiere a movie there is unclear and the Trump Organization did not respond to a question about the cost of these private events.

On a larger level, it also underscores how Trumpism itself is the fusion of politics and culture. Whereas Trump once promoted steaks and wines and neck ties as symbols of business status, he now touts social media platforms, picture books, documentary films and streaming services as demonstrations of one’s — for lack of a better term — MAGA-ness. And nothing demonstrates that quite like being there, in the flesh, at Mar-a-Lago.

“I think a lot of people on the right felt like they had to keep their voices and opinions quiet and Trump allowed them to know they’re not alone and they have others that support them,” said Sean Spicer, Trump’s first press secretary turned Newsmax host, who was invited to the event but unable to attend in person.

For the “2000 Mules” premiere, there was a sea of famous faces: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) chatted with former Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis, holding an American flag-bedazzled clutch. Conservative commentator Dan Bongino huddled with Devin Nunes, the CEO of Truth Social. A few yards away Kyle Rittenhouse, the teen-turned-conservative icon who was acquitted for killing two men during 2020 protests, was circled by excited guests, among them former 60 Minutes correspondent turned ousted Fox News contributor Lara Logan.

Several of the other VIPs in attendance have been subpoenaed by the House Committee investigating Jan. 6, including former Trump adviser turned QAnon conspiracy folk hero Michael Flynn, former NYPD police commissioner Bernie Kerik, and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who smiled for selfies with fans.

They grabbed food from a steaming mini-buffet of hors d’oeuvres and sipped on their drinks. At one point a blonde guest exclaimed, “She was in a movie!” as a woman walked by the red carpet. It was in fact a real life actress, Kristy Swanson, who is most famous for starring in the 1992 “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” flick and has since spoken out about anti-conservative bias in Hollywood.

Another 90s star, Kevin Sorbo, who played Hercules on TV, was given a prime spot for the screening behind the faces of D’Souza’s documentary, Dennis Prager and Sebastian Gorka.

Guests mingled before Trump was ushered from one chandeliered ballroom, where he posed for photos with VIPS, to the next. When he finally walked into the room, they craned their necks and held out their phones to take photos. Lee Greenwood’s “I’m Proud to Be an American” blasted over speakers.

Inside the club’s largest ballroom, where gold chairs were set up in neat rows for the screening, Trump spoke to the crowd, ticking off a list of false claims about the election, bashing his former vice president, criticizing President Joe Biden and rattling off his thoughts on the latest culture war battles. At one point Trump called out the New York Times, after hearing a reporter was in the room and pointed to an empty, roped off group of seats where no reporters sat. Guests sat in rapture, and munched on popcorn in theater style red and white boxes.

Trump, it appears, loves the movie, and has played a central role in promoting it in statements, interviews and at MAGA rallies. Its dubious claims have become a main talking point among those on the right who continue to claim the election wasn’t lost but “stolen.”

It’s pathetic to anyone still connected to reality. But these people are living in the delusional bizarroworld Trump thinks he can force to make real just through sheer force of repetition. And I’m not sure it isn’t going to work.

I have to laugh at this, though:

“Typically in my earlier films, people would stand up and clap at the end. But in this one I think the reaction is more sober, it’s an emotionally different tone, and a documentary is really aimed at throwing light on something, not resolving issues,” he said.

Uhm… maybe that’s why they didn’t stand up and clap. Maybe not.

Many of you who are old timers will remember this little episode, right?

In an effort reportedly intended to repair relations with the White House in the aftermath of CBS’ publication of unauthenticated memos concerning President Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard, CBS president Andrew Heyward met with then-White House communications director Dan Bartlett in January 2005. According to Broadcasting and Cable magazine: “Heyward was ‘working overtime to convince Bartlett that neither CBS News nor Rather had a vendetta against the White House,’ our source says, ‘and from here on out would do everything it could to be fair and balanced.’ “

And then there was this:

CBS News chairman and ’60 Minutes’ EP Jeff Fager held a meeting with CBS News staff on Tuesday and took questions about the fate of Lara Logan and Max McClellan, the journalists currently on a leave of absence in the wake of the controversial ’60 Minutes’ report on Benghazi, POLITICO has learned.

In the meeting, held with ‘CBS This Morning’ staffers, Fager said he did not know how long Logan and her producer would be on leave, and made no indication that they would be asked to resign in the wake of the now-retracted report, according to sources familiar with the meeting. Those sources said that Fager defended Logan as a valuable member of the ’60 Minutes’ team even as he acknowledged the erroneous nature of the report.

Because of those stories and others, I wasn’t all that surprised to see them hire former Tea Partyer and Trump White House Chief of staff/ Budget director Mick Mulvaney. Of course they did. It’s been how they roll for a long time.

Margaret Sullivan takes them apart:

When word came the other day that a former top Trump aide, Mick Mulvaney, was joining CBS News as a paid pundit, the move was met with a fair amount of disgust — both inside and outside the network.

Why hire this partisan, the White House acting chief of staff for a time, who had such an execrable record of enabling his boss’s corruption and reinforcing his lies? What journalistic purpose could this possibly serve?

It was hard to understand until my colleague Jeremy Barr got hold of a recording of a CBS staff meeting that answered the question.

“If you look at some of the people that we’ve been hiring on a contributor basis, being able to make sure that we are getting access to both sides of the aisle is a priority, because we know the Republicans are going to take over, most likely, in the midterms,” Neeraj Khemlani, the news division’s co-president, told the staff of the network’s morning show.

“A lot of the people that we’re bringing in are helping us in terms of access to that side of the equation.”

And there it was: access.

That’s not necessarily a dirty word. Every beat reporter knows that access is crucial in journalism. You can’t cover your subject area if the inside people won’t talk to you — whether you’re a White House correspondent prying information out of sources within the administration or a local police reporter who needs comment from the top cop and a steady supply of story tips from the rank and file.

Access is the fertile soil in which scoops are grown and watered.

But the question arises here: access to what? To those who will spout the “big lie” about the 2020 election? To those who will excuse and arrange for corrupt behavior?

Let’s recall, for a moment, some of Mick Mulvaney’s greatest hits.

There was the time he defended President Donald Trump’s withholding nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine, freely admitting that it had to do with his boss’s insistence that Ukraine investigate Hunter Biden to serve his own political ends. “Get over it,” Mulvaney told the press corps who questioned the “quid pro quo” nature of the demand. “There’s going to be political influence in foreign policy.” (Mulvaney later tried to walk it back, denying that he had described a “quid pro quo.”)

In fact, Mulvaney was deeply involved behind the scenes in the infamous phone call on July 25, 2019, between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. You might recall that national security adviser John Bolton refused to get involved in “whatever drug deal [Ambassador to the European Union Gordon] Sondland and Mulvaney are cooking up” on behalf of Trump.

That was the call in which Trump uttered the impeachment-worthy line, “I would like you to do us a favor, though.”Advertisement

Later, in early 2020, Mulvaney slammed press coverage of the burgeoning coronavirus pandemic as little more than an effort to hurt Trump politically.

“The reason you’re seeing so much attention to it today is that they think this is going to be the thing that brings down the president,” Mulvaney said at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “That’s what this is all about.” Since then, 979,000 Americans have died of the virus that Trump downplayed and denied for so long.

Then, just before the 2020 presidential election, Mulvaney showed the world what an astute pundit he could one day become when he predicted in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece that his former boss would act like a statesman if he lost the election to Joe Biden.

“If He Loses, Trump Will Concede Gracefully,” read the headline. Instead, we got a violent insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, and an endless democracy-damaging effort, led by Trump, to deny the legitimate election results. And, of course, a second impeachment.

In other words, Mulvaney has been on the wrong side — the deeply, undemocratically wrong side — of America’s most important political issues in recent years.

The larger issue here,though, is the news media’s blind and relentless pandering to the outdated notion that both sides of the aisle are pretty much equal these days — that they’re similar, just with different governing philosophies.

That’s simply not the case.

“We have a two-party system and one of the two is anti-democratic,” as NYU professor and press critic Jay Rosen put it. This basic asymmetry, he noted, “fries the circuits” of the mainstream media, which largely refuses to recognize it or do anything about it in their coverage.

Media executives are in a defensive crouch, fearfully reacting to bad-faith criticism from the right that accuses them of leftist bias and of repeating Democrats’ talking points. Above all, they want to look fair, even if that performative fairness does American citizens real harm.

In this context, CBS’s decision to hire Mulvaney makes total sense. “Both sides of the aisle,” and all that.

No matter that Mulvaney has been up to his neck in the very issues that have American democracy teetering on the brink.

CBS has been flirting with a sort of soft Fox-ism for a long time. They consistently position themselves as a center right alternative to the other networks. This is par for the course.

These anti-vaxxers are something else:

A hodgepodge of Trumpworld superfans, disillusioned Democrats, far-right extremists, self-identifying independents, and street preachers assembled Sunday morning to rally against equal parts COVID-19 vaccines and mandates.

The event started at the Washington Monument, with attendees making the trek to Lincoln Memorial to hear from many anti-vax superstars, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., controversial virologist Dr. Robert Malone, and Fox Nation’s Lara Logan, who has been ghosted by her employer.

Ahead of the march to the Lincoln Memorial, attendees gathered to speak with each other and hold sporadic demonstrations, including dancing and chanting to anti-vax rap songs.

Far-right fanatics were out in full force, from the extremist members of the hate group Proud Boy to rank-and-file supporters who consume everything that conspiracy theorist Alex Jones utters.

John Kopel, a staunch advocate against COVID-19 vaccines and an InfoWars loyalist, told The Daily Beast ahead of the rally he is a “fan of Alex Jones.” Carrying a sign that promoted Jones’ media entity and claimed “[Dr. Anthony] Fauci is a mass murderer,” Kopel said that he remains upset with former President Trump’s initial push of what he calls the “bio-weapon.” The rally-goer added that Trump’s endorsement of the vaccine is a “serious issue.” “We are for medical freedom,” he continued before suggesting that Trump might have been “corrupted.”

But it wasn’t only right-wingers in attendance, as many self-identifying Democrats and others also showed up to the event.

Clare Tobin, a lifelong Democratic voter from Chicago, voiced her frustrations with politicians pushing mandates and vaccines. “I don’t trust the vaccine,” she said. “You can’t even trust the Democrats, either. They all have the same message. They all had the same agenda.”

Then there was the straight-up bizarre, which included one attendee dressing up as Uncle Sam with a vaccine going through his top hat.

Elliot Crown, from New York, who dressed in garb resembling Uncle Sam, told The Daily Beast he was there to protest Americans’ “rights being curtailed,” citing the pandemic as a “fraud.” “They [both Democrats and Republicans] are taking orders, it is a global thing. They all use the same phrase ‘Build Back Better.’”

Along the march route, attendees were also enticed to buy Trump paraphernalia, given religious books, and encouraged to take a free nasal spray that promises to cure anyone of the coronavirus if they are infected. Xlear CEO Nathan Jones, whose company sells the spray and has been sued by the FTC, was in attendance and baselessly claimed to The Daily Beast that his nasal solution “works” on COVID-19, adding that “just using saltwater [will] stop the spread of COVID-19 in the lungs.”

[…]

During the event, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made a bonkers Holocaust analogy, a theme from the day’s activists as attendees brought comparable messaging along with them on signs. “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could hide in the attic like Anne Frank did,” he told the crowd.

Not satisfied with just vaccine disinformation, RFK Jr launches into a riff about satellites and 5G being used by global elites to control the world’s population and cut off food supplies. pic.twitter.com/QSzhVCKxPn

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) January 23, 2022

I have often compared the Trump phenomenon to a Grateful Dead concert as a way to illustrate that it’s more of a tribal gathering than just a place to see your idols. I think this from the anti-vax crowd yesterday is more on the nose than I anticipated. (Of course, some of those people would actually be at a Grateful Dead concert, if they still had them — they aren’t all right wingers.)

Musical entertainment at the anti-vax rally in DC. From @FordFischer pic.twitter.com/Q1Jpsd16bJ

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) January 23, 2022

Last week a federal court agreed to schedule Steve Bannon’s contempt of Congress criminal trial for July of next year — just as the fall campaigns go into full swing. He must be very pleased. Bannon would like nothing more than to have a big show trial at that moment and be carted off to jail where he can write his Great Replacement manifesto.

With the news that there was a PowerPoint presentation called “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for JAN 6”, reported here by Brett Bachman, Bannon’s revolutionary proclamations on his Jan. 5th podcast have become clearer. Recall what he said:

“Mitch McConnell’s got to start taking care and focusing on these senators — because this is going to be very controversial. We are going into uncharted waters. We’re going into something that’s never happened before in American history. Tomorrow it’s going — we’re pulling the trigger on something that’s going to be, it’s going to be minute by minute, hour by hour, what happens. The stakes couldn’t be higher right now.”

“It’s not going to happen like you think it’s going to happen …Okay, it’s going to be quite extraordinarily different. All I can say is, strap in. … You made this happen and tomorrow it’s game day. So strap in. Let’s get ready…It’s all converging, and now we’re on the point of attack tomorrow.”

It’s understandable that people would suspect that he was talking about the violence that took place when Trump incited his crowd to converge on the Capitol and he may very well have been. He and the others who were plotting at the Willard Hotel in the days before the insurrection were very close to groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, who had an outsized role in the attack.

But it’s clear now that Bannon was also talking about the plans laid out in that PowerPoint presentation which included some of what we knew but also reveals some rather chilling recommendations that add more detail to what was undeniably a coup attempt. When he said, “We are going into uncharted waters. We’re going into something that’s never happened before in American history,” he wasn’t kidding.

The presentation indicated that Mike Pence had more than one way to overturn the election. As vice president, he could seat alternate Republican electors (which Rudy Giuliani and the boys were working feverishly to round up), he could reject the electoral votes of the states Donald Trump was disputing (with no evidence) or he could delay by refusing to certify until there was a recount of all paper ballots. That last coincidentally tracks with the fatuous proposal by Senator Ted Cruz, R-Tx, and 11 other senators who planned to delay the count in order to conduct an “emergency audit” in the states Donald Trump was disputing in order to “restore trust in the electoral system.” Finally, Pence could just throw up his hands and say there was no way to ever know the real outcome and throw it to the House of Representatives which would vote as if it were a tie and Trump would win under the rules that each state delegation has one vote.

None of those recommendations were remotely constitutional.

Meanwhile, the PowerPoint also recommended that Trump brief Congress on alleged foreign interference in the election, deem all electronic voting in the states invalid, declare a National Security Emergency and put the National Guard on standby. (Politico reported that Chief of Staff Mark Meadows did order the guard to be available to “protect pro-Trump people.”) Here’s a little flavor of what they had in mind:

https://twitter.com/BetsyStover/status/1470250917668605956?s=20

The PowerPoint also features some of the looniest conspiracy theories hatched in the wake of the election. One slide states that a “key Issue” is that “critical infrastructure control was utilized as part of ongoing globalist/socialist operation to subvert the will of United States Voters and install a China ally leading to another one advising the president to say the Chinese government interfered in the election as a pretext to declaring all the electronic votes invalid.

This presentation was released by the January 6th Commission because it turned up in former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’ documents which he voluntarily turned over the committee. It took a day or so before the person who circulated it was identified — a former Army Colonel by the name of Phil Waldron, who told the Washington Post that he worked with Trump’s lawyers to put it together. Waldron said he contributed the stuff about foreign interference and he claims that he met with Meadows 8-10 times and helped to brief members of Congress before January 6th on what they had in mind, telling the Post that the presentation’s recommendations were “constitutional, legal, feasible, acceptable and suitable courses of action.” And he’s right — if you are plotting a coup in a banana republic.

Not one of the people who read this disgraceful betrayal of American democracy blew the whistle. Well, except for Lara Logan, the Fox News personality who recently compared Dr. Anthony Fauci to infamous Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele. She tweeted out a version of the PowerPoint on January 5th but nobody paid any attention because she has no credibility. And yes, it was reported in Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s book “Peril” that Senators Mike Lee of Utah and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina “vetted” the fraud claims and determined that it wouldn’t be prudent to overturn the election. I’m sure others clutched their pearls in the Senate cloak room, worrying about how risky the whole thing was as well. Not that they said anything publicly, of course.

We knew that Trump had many different plans to overturn the election. The memos prepared by right-wing lawyer John Eastman, Trump telling Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen “just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican Congressmen” and threatening to replace him with a toady, Jeffrey Clark, if he refused were just a few examples. All of this was grossly unethical.

But this PowerPoint emphasizes just how desperate they were.

They threw everything at the wall in the hope that something would stick, that enough Republicans in Congress would grab on to one of the rationales they offered and agree to at least delay the certification or overturn it outright. When Vice President Mike Pence refused to go along, Trump tried one last gambit. He sent the angry mob he’d just whipped up to march to the Capitol to give the “weak” reluctant Republicans the “pride and boldness” they needed to stop the certification. It’s why he sat on his hands for hours as his supporters stormed the Capitol.

“There are very few things you can count on in this world, but one thing you can, with the consistency of a Swiss watch, is that at any given moment Donald Trump and his inner circle will be doing something both deeply corrupt and extremely stupid,” writes Bess Levin at Vanity Fair.

To wit, a 38-page PowerPoint document entitled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN” was among the documents the Jan. 6 investigation received from former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows. The presentation included a string of Trump’s options for delaying certification of the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden. Including declaring a national security emergency to stay in power.

It is, however, unclear that Trump aides prepared the document. A similar document circulated online on Thursday. The New York Times confirmed it was simlar to the document turned over to the House Jan. 6 committee. Business Insider found other versions had circulated online before, “including by Fox News’s Lara Logan on January 5 and other proponents of challenges to the 2020 election.”

The PowerPoint titled “Election fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN” and dated Jan. 5 came up in an email Meadows gave to Jan. 6 committee about a briefing that was to be provided “on the hill”

— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) December 9, 2021

The New York Times dug into the document’s origins:

Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel and an influential voice in the movement to challenge the election, said on Friday from a bar he owns outside Austin, Texas, that he had circulated the document — titled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN” — among Mr. Trump’s allies and on Capitol Hill before the attack. Mr. Waldron said that he did not personally send the document to Mr. Meadows, but that it was possible someone on his team had passed it along to the former chief of staff.

It is unclear who prepared the PowerPoint, but it is similar to a 36-page document available online, and it appears to be based on the theories of Jovan Hutton Pulitzer, a Texas entrepreneur and self-described inventor who has appeared with Mr. Waldron on podcasts discussing election fraud.

Waldron and his associates briefed a group of sentors on Jan. 4. The next day, he himself briefed several House members, including on the (debunked) theory that foreign powers had gained control over the vote tallies.

The document also outlined means by which Vice President Mike Pence might delay or overturn the results, the Guardian adds:

Pence could pursue one of three options, the PowerPoint said: seat Trump slates of electors over the objections of Democrats in key states, reject the Biden slates of electors, or delay the certification to allow for a “vetting” and counting of only “legal paper ballots”.

The final option for Pence is similar to an option that was simultaneously being advanced on 4 and 5 January by Trump lieutenants – led by lawyers Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, as well as Trump strategist Steve Bannon – working from the Willard hotel in Washington DC.

The Willard Hotel war rooms were bound to turn up here. Meadows’ posession of the document makes it a stretch for him to claim he was unaware such plans were under consideration.

Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee, has cited the 38-page PowerPoint as among the reasons he wants to question Mr. Meadows under oath.

Before coming to loggerheads with the panel, Mr. Meadows had provided some useful information to the committee, including a November email that discussed appointing an alternate slate of electors to keep Mr. Trump in power and a Jan. 5 message about putting the National Guard on standby. Mr. Meadows also turned over his text messages with a member of Congress in which the lawmaker acknowledged that a plan to object to Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory would be “highly controversial,” to which Mr. Meadows responded, “I love it.”

Like the smell of napalm in the morning, eh?

Fox host Lara Logan says that people tell her that Dr. Fauci doesn't represent science, but represents Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor known as the "Angel of Death" for performing medical experiments at Auschwitz: "I am talking about people all across the world are saying this" pic.twitter.com/fF2DAWfG7d

— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) November 30, 2021

She is nuts:

Lara Logan, once a lauded foreign correspondent for CBS News’s “60 Minutes” and now a boundary-pushing Fox News guest commentator and streaming show host, drew fierce condemnation for on-air comments Monday night comparing the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, Anthony S. Fauci, to Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.

Her comments came during a segment in which Fox host Pete Hegseth, a frequent critic of coronavirus vaccine mandates and masking politics, accused the Biden administration of overhyping the new omicron variant.

Logan’s response, though, went well beyond.

“What you see on Dr. Fauci — this is what people say to me: that he doesn’t represent science to them. He represents Josef Mengele,” she said. “Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who did experiments on Jews during the Second World War and in the concentration camps. And I am talking about people all across the world are saying this, because the response from covid, what it has done to countries everywhere, what it has done to civil liberties, the suicide rates, the poverty, it has obliterated economies. The level of suffering that has been created because of this disease is now being seen in the cold light of day.”

It was the latest and arguably the most inflammatory in a series of comments from Logan that have stunned viewers who remember her days as an impartial news reporter and star correspondent for the respected newsmagazine show

But Hegseth, who guest-hosted Fox’s 7 p.m. opinion show Monday, showed little reaction while Logan spoke and did not contradict or push back on her statements. Before going to a commercial break, he promoted Logan’s show on the Fox Nation streaming service. (His other guest, Fox host Will Cain, called Fauci a “would-be authoritarian.”)

Known as “the angel of death,” Mengele performed “a broad range of agonizing and often lethal experiments with Jewish and Roma twins, most of them children,” while serving as a physician at the Auschwitz concentration camp, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Here she is a couple of days before that:

Guest goes on rant claiming if they keep testing for COVID strains we’re going to be locked down forever because her doctor told her there are hundreds of coronaviruses in bones. It ends up going off the rails pic.twitter.com/5Ku3Ktlbrx

— Acyn (@Acyn) November 28, 2021

Totally batshit crazy.

CNN’s Brian Stelter reports:

Right-wing media has made a shift from “pro-Trump” to “pro-Trump-supporter.” This week the talk shows are all about sympathizing with the voters, who are generally depicted as downcast and discriminated against. “Right now in America it is hard to be a Trump supporter, and it is getting harder, a lot harder,” Newsmax’s Greg Kelly said Tuesday night. His message was that “we have nothing to be ashamed of, and we should be proud.” His colleague Rob Schmitt said “the left wants to rip the soul out of anyone who supported Donald Trump over the last four years.”

On Fox Wednesday night, Tucker Carlson made a similar argument while attacking Mitch McConnell. Carlson said McConnell should not be focused on the future of Trump — who he described on his show as “elderly and retiring” — but instead “the tens of millions” of Trump voters. Carlson claimed Trump voters have been “redefined as domestic terrorists” in the past week. He straight up said he doesn’t care about Trump: “What I care about are his voters.” Later in the evening, Laura Ingraham said impeachment was actually an attempt to “impeach the Americans who support his policies,” which is obviously not true. One of her first guests, Ben Domenech, said that voting for impeachment was akin to telling Trump voters, “CNN’s right about you.” Later in the hour, guest Lara Logan imagined a new “war on terror” targeting Trump supporters.

“Fox News purports to be a news channel, not a right-wing talk network. But Fox opted to stick with its normal programming throughout the day, instead of having its lead political anchors, Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, lead a special report. When the House had the votes to impeach Trump, it fell to 4pm anchor Neil Cavuto to deliver the news to the network’s viewers. Less than an hour later, Fox had already moved on, doing a typical ‘The Five’ segment about supposed media bias…”

 >> As I pointed out on Twitter, One America News didn’t even cover the vote live…

Many Trump fans are still on board

So what are those voters hearing from their favorite media sources? Well, there’s an increasing amount of 1/6 denialism on the airwaves. At 7pm on Newsmax, Kelly said Wednesday that there’s “overwhelming” evidence that Trump “did nothing wrong” on the day of the attack. At 8pm on OAN, host Dan Ball said the Republicans who spoke out against the “political theater” of impeachment were “brave patriots.” At 9pm on Fox, Sean Hannity bashed the “ten swamp Republicans” that “went along with the stunt.” Oh, and QAnon-promoting congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene said on Newsmax that she will file articles of impeachment against Biden on January 21.

My point: Trump’s brand is NOT in tatters on the channels and websites that his die-hard fans trust. Sure, some of the shine is off, but the MAGA media is much closer to Kevin McCarthy‘s position than Liz Cheney‘s. I just heard Mike Huckabee, on Fox, say that “this was a lynching of Donald Trump.” Some Trump voters are embarrassed by the past week’s events, but many are still fully on board the cliched “Trump train.” Don’t underestimate that…

They are fine with what happened because they are determined to convince themselves that attacking a joint session of congress to overturn an election is less threatening than burning a Wendy’s. (Also, many of them are just too ignorant to understand the gravity of an armed insurrection.)

They aren’t going to change as long as they are addicted to this right wing lies, Trump or no Trump. I don’t know how we are going to break that spell. Deplatforming is, at best, an emergency measure and it won’t solve the problem. The real issue is that the Republican Party has several full-fledged propaganda networks, along with various online outlets and talk radio. Social media is just a part of it, and the people who are looking for conspiracy theories will find them, even if they aren’t on Facebook.

I don’t know what to do about this. But this problem lies at the heart of our civic, cultural problem. Trump is just one of the consequences of it.

Benghazi will never die

by digby

Oh fergawdsakes:

In a letter he sent to Benghazi Select Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy today, Assistant Secretary of Defense Stephen Hedger lists a litany of abuses that have taken place during the course of the investigation of the 2012 attack.

Among these abuses, Hedger reports, is that the committee is requesting that the Defense Department track down callers to Sean Hannity’s radio show in order to call them as witnesses:

The Committee has requested to interview an individual identified as ‘John from Iowa’ who described himself as a Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) camera operator on a talk radio show, where he described what he allegedly saw in the video feed from the night of the attack. The Department has expended significant resources to locate anyone who might match the description of this person, to no avail. The Committee staff then expanded this initial request to include all RPA pilots and RPA sensor operators who operated in the region that night.

The May 2013 call to Hannity’s program was subsequently reported on by other conservative outlets, including Glenn Beck’s The Blaze.

Your tax dollars at work folks.

More at Right Wing Watch.

Update: Yep

Wayne Simmons, who presented himself as a national security expert and was a part of the conservative media push for a congressional investigation of the Benghazi attack, has pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges.

In an April 29 press release the Department of Justice noted that Simmons “falsely claimed he spent 27 years working for the Central Intelligence Agency” and had pleaded guilty “to major fraud against the government, wire fraud, and a firearms offense.”

The release further noted, “Simmons admitted he defrauded the government in 2008 when he obtained work as a team leader in the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain Systems program, and again in 2010 when he was deployed to Afghanistan as a senior intelligence advisor on the International Security Assistance Force’s Counterinsurgency Advisory and Assistance Team.”

Dana J. Boente, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, said, “Simmons admitted he attempted to con his way into a position where he would have been called on to give real intelligence advice in a war zone. His fraud cost the government money, could have put American lives at risk, and was an insult to the real men and women of the intelligence community who provide tireless service to this country.”

Simmons was a frequent guest on Fox News, appearing on the network dozens of times purporting to be a former CIA operative. In those appearances, Simmons regularly criticized Democrats on foreign policy and national security issues. In one instance, he said, “If the Democrats come into power in the United States and re-employ their vision of defense for this country, we will have 9-1-1s unabated.”

Lara Logan’s still got a job on CBS though so that’s good.

You’ll find Dan Rather on Axe TV.

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Scalps

by digby

Andrew O’Hehir has a nice piece today at Salon about Rathergate and the new movie about it. His thesis is that it introduced a new era in wingnut conspiracy mongering and I think he might be right:

Whether Rathergate actually won that election for Bush is debatable; in the great Democratic middle-road milquetoast tradition of Al Gore and Michael Dukakis, the dithery, soporific Kerry campaign did everything it could to ensure defeat. But that whole episode clearly boosted Republican morale and made Rove and his minions feel that they were in control of the narrative and had the power to transform any possible negative into a positive. Rathergate was certainly not the first counterfactual counterattack strategy in American political history, and was not quite the birth of the right-wing blogosphere (which had surfaced, in embryonic form, during the Clinton years), but it marked a crucial evolution on both fronts. From 2004 flowed many blessings, at least for those who sought to control political discourse and popular perception and in so doing alter the nature of reality.

Suddenly all things were possible, and America became an endless episode of “The X-Files,” brought to you by faceless men in nice suits who are eager to warn you about the ravages of government and the duplicity of the “liberal media.” Every delirious resistance hypothesis previously promulgated by retired pharmacists who hand out mimeographed screeds in the mall now became a conduit for sowing widespread bewilderment and disempowerment. Climate-change denialism and birth-certificate trutherism. Death panels. Benghazi and Planned Parenthood. Every single aspect of what was once Tea Party ideology and has now become Republican orthodoxy, especially the upside-down economics in which high taxes (which are at historic lows) and social spending (which has been slashed) are reducing Americans to poverty and misery, rather than, let’s just say, a pointless $4 trillion war or the intensifying concentration of wealth at the very top of the pyramid.

I cannot help but contrast that with this story:

There was very little about Dylan Davies’ eyewitness account of the 2012 Benghazi attacks that seemed plausible. Sure, he had the proper credentials – he was a security contractor responsible for training the guard force at the diplomatic compound, and was in Benghazi the night of the attacks – but his story was outlandish and conspicuously difficult to corroborate.

According to Davies, after the attacks began he and a Libyan associate drove into Benghazi and sneaked into the Benghazi Medical Center, where he was the first person to identify the body of Ambassador Chris Stevens. Consumed by rage and a determination to save anyone who might still be alive, Davies set off on foot through the city, scaled the walls of the compound, and sneaked past dozens of militiamen until he was standing just feet from the burning villa where Stevens had lost his life. There, confronted by an armed guard, he bashed the terrorist’s face in with his rifle butt.

After sneaking back out of the compound, Davies decamped for his home in Wales where a detachment of FBI agents and State Department officials came to interview him and, according to Davies, were moved to tears by his heroism.

Every word of Davies’ account was a fabrication, contradicted by the official record and by Davies’ own after-action report. It was so far beyond the realm of plausibility that anyone but the most credulous sap would have regarded it with extreme skepticism. CBS News’ Lara Logan made it the centerpiece of her now-discredited bombshell “60 Minutes” Benghazi investigation last October.

In a just and equitable world, a journalist’s complicity in such gross and opportunistic fraud would be met with consequences. CBS News apparently has other ideas. Lara Logan, after a six-month leave of absence, is coming back to “60 Minutes.”

No harm no foul. Why is that?

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