Taking a knee is also something that’s done when a player on the field is being attended to by medics. It’s a rule around here in kids’ soccer, and I’ve seen it happen in pro sports (but not as a rule).
I’m sure this is in no way the meaning of the phrase in the quote but it’s kinda funny to think they’re taking a knee because democracy is injured.
I mean not funny ha-ha. Funny sad.
I’m hoping the authorities lay low on some of the “election fraud” bullshit for another 33 days or so. Let these morons think that filing false affidavits under oath is no big deal, pretend to shrug it off.
Then drop the hammer once Trump and his pardon power have exited the White House, and come down hard.
I’m guessing that they don’t want to do it because they haven’t been doing their jobs. In some cases they don’t even know what their jobs are or how to do them and in other cases they’ve been actively blocked from doing them.
I doubt they’ve prepared the briefing books that every federal agency is supposed to provide to the new administration and I doubt that they are prepared to answer their questions. They are probably all embarrassed af at how woefully unprepared they are and how little they’ve been doing.
They may even realize they have a lot of stuff to try and cover up in the next 30+ days. I’m looking forward to February, when we find out the extent of the criminality that’s been covered up. Based on the handful of whistleblower reports that weren’t suppressed, I think they’re going to find a lot of illegalities.
Me, too. If they’re as inept at covering up crimes as they were at committing them, we should be in for a treat.
Sadly Asahi, I agree with basically everything you’ve posted since Nov 3rd. A few years ago I used to tell my coworkers that I believed that you (IANA American) are in the middle of a cold civil war. I too believe that this has the potential to get really ugly (or much uglier).
This seems likely to me. And putting off (or “putting off”) meetings with the Biden people ensures that there are no Biden people around to question the sound of shredders working 'round the clock. And no Biden people around who might be cornered in a restroom by a nervous whistleblower with a tale to tell. And no Biden people around who might notice something on a computer screen that shouldn’t be there (and I don’t mean visiting shopping sites while at work).
That’s what Jared is for.
I agree completely. They feel the election was stolen - that Trump is the true winner and Biden only gets labeled the winner because of widespread fraud. And if that were true, it would be legitimate to fight the result getting ratified and enacted.
So they feel justified taking bolder and bolder steps to defend the “true winner” and “democracy” in the face of a government that is “failing” to protect them from the “fraud”. And the more their grievance grows, the more justified they will feel in taking even bolder steps. Including outright revolution.
This needs to happen. The legal profession needs to get involved in reining in this nonsense. It’s one thing to rant and rave on twitter about fraud without evidence, but to file suit after suit with NOTHING to go on is an insult to the legal system and to lawyers everywhere. You’re supposed to be a profession, right? Doesn’t that mean standards?
This isn’t politics - this is fundamental dismantling of the standards for legal justification. If the only standard is “Someone paid me to do it,” we are in for a world of hurt.
Georgia’s elections and its aftermath will be something to watch closely. On one hand, it would appear that Trump’s antics could end up driving down the vote there and helping his Democratic opponents, which would seem like a good thing the for the party. If we were living in more ‘normal’ times, I’d agree.
The problem is, Trump’s antics may end up reinforcing the narrative that there is a widespread growing conspiracy against the Trump-supporting voter. There are Georgian voters who may not vote, convinced that Democrats have rigged the system. Democrats may win the election, but what people should be concerned about is what happens if Republicans stop believing in liberal democracy completely and encourage right wing power grabs.
You’re already hearing some openly call for Trump to declare martial law. Yes, that might seem totally absurd and far-fetched. But what if the modify that call to action a little and call for local sheriffs and law enforcement to unite in defiance of federal authority, and take politics in their own hands. What if they begin forming voter intimidation squads? What if they begin harassing local democratic activists with the threat of arrest? Sure, the feds in the civil rights division can go after them one by one, but that becomes more complicated the more widespread the problem is, particularly if this ‘movement’ has local popular support of ordinary citizens and ‘grass roots’ groups.
He’ll just up his efforts to fleece his supporters, and they will comply.
Wait, you have fewer than two dozen meetings, but that is overwhelming your staff? Make up your mind on which excuse you are going to use before you blurt it out.
See this:
That’s right, the software company most dominant on monitoring computer networks had a server with the password “solarwinds123”.
From the CNN article above:
Yep, part of Trump’s downsizing of the government.
The Sovereign Citizen model gains traction with the Trump lunacy faction. Heavens to Murgatroid!
That will be Heavens to Senegoid! if you don’t mind. I’ll have a little joinder here, thank you.
Heavens to Murgatroyd!
Yep, I’ve said it a couple times already, but I’m going to say it again, because the media at least does seem to be pushing a complacency angle at this point. They just repeat “Biden will be the president”. And mock Trump’s dumbass lawsuits and spectacles like 4STL.
The truth is, a lot of people, including senators, are saying a lot of crazy shit right now (yes, even by their standards), and tens of millions of people have drunk the kool aid, and so will support whatever hard line they take. I still think chances are that Trump will fuck off to his golf course and the whole thing will gradually dissolve.
But I’m not going to sleep soundly while there’s so much dynamite in the house.
Tales from the Dark Side Dept:
What “they” are saying is that the discontinuation of Biden’s Pentagon briefings is not due to overwork or even the security breach – it’s that Biden is under investigation for corruption and he’ll be brought to justice any day now. Clearly they can’t be passing sensitive information over to an obvious criminal!
Exactly.
And let’s not forget that Biden and Harris will inherit one hell of a damn mess on their hands, and depending on those Senate races, they may not have the ability to do much about it.
I, for one, hope that Biden abandons the idea of being a truly bipartisan candidate – he can and should offer opportunities for the opposition to join him but he should not let filibusters get in his way. FDR was an institutionalist like Biden, but what made him arguably one of our top five leaders in our country’s history was his willingness to fight and confront corrupt institutional power using whatever means he could muster, including threats of court packing.
Personally, I think our political system will always make us vulnerable to the autocrat problem, though. I don’t like presidential democracies and would much rather have a parliamentarian democracy such as the one in your home country, the UK. Not to say that parliaments can’t be corrupted, but victories from one election to the next make popular intentions much less debatable and confusing. And you avoid the concentration of power in a separate political institution that is as powerful as congress. Our system reflects thinking about humanity that is two centuries old, and it shows.
Good point. Ethics and morality are required, and now it seems we are going to have to put up more guardrails for many that run the country.
The Framers valued political stability. Based on the very limited amount of data about democratic regimes throughout history that they had at that time, they believed that the best way to achieve stability was to acknowledge that human nature has certain inherent flaws, that we are inherently selfish, ambitious, competitive creatures, and that the best way to maintain stability with this awareness is to create a system in which ambitious people fight each other and achieve only marginal incremental power over the other. It worked for a while, I guess.
But the post-WWII period has shown that there might be a better alternative, one in which there is a clearer democratic winner through popular elections. The winner, moreover, need not worry about vetoes or filibusters; they just need to build coalitions and survive confidence votes. It’s also a system that the average voter can relate to and is encouraged to invest more of their civic commitment in.
By contrast, what we have is a complicated system that confuses voters, and it’s also one in which one of two major parties deliberately tries to drive down voter participation to remain in power. It’s not just this election, folks; Republicans have always had doubts about free and fair elections. It’s just that they are now actively trying to destroy the system.
The reason why I’ve been telling you all that things really are this bad - and probably worse than you imagine - is that America has a deepening conflict over its values. And again, using history as the guide, that is often something that leads to outright open contempt, hostility, conflict, violence, oppression.
As one side has as one of its core values the recognition of the use of cooperation and compromise, and the other side has as as its singular value that of individualism and selfishness, there is little to be had in the future other than
We are, fairly rightly, called suckers for trying to work with those who refuse to work with us, those who will ask for compromise on our part, while offering none on their own.
Unfortunately, if we do not do so, if we do not at least try to work with those who have different goals and priorities, then we abandon our own values.
I figure it takes 100 people to build something that it takes only one person to destroy. If the overwhelming vast majority of people are not dedicated to building rather than destroying, then we can never advance, never work to achieve our goals.
There are a lot of people out there that want to destroy what we have built, what has been built by millions of people over decades of hard work. We can’t work with them, that’s the antithesis of their core value. All we can do is try to convince people of the value of cooperation and compromise, to assure them that we can do better working together than by fighting one another.
How we do that is left as an exercise to the reader. If one can get as much satisfaction and fulfillment by burning down a house as by building one, then it’s not that hard to understand that the former is a whole lot less work That will be what people gravitate towards, if they do not have a reason to value construction over destruction.
Anyway, as I’ve said before, we are having our Tower of Babel moment. No civilization has lasted forever, and it very well may be our time. We can get through this, but only with the cooperation of the people, and it is exactly that that is being refused, it is exactly the understanding and ability to work together that is threatened.
This is not the first time that we Americans have been in this position, and as we’ve discussed, those were very violent times - including the American Civil War and the period between 1870 and 1935, when there were waves of violent labor and economic unrest. I’m not even counting the racial unrest that was, to some degree, intertwined with economic unrest but also a fight over social standing and class.
The Civil War resolved our first values conflict – 4 years and 600,000 dead Americans later.
The second great conflict was resolved but not until a majority of households in this country was economically distressed, and an overwhelming majority of eligible voters put their faith behind a single party – that and World War Two’s mass mobilization of the economy.
On the subject of the New Deal, though, keep in mind that part of the New Deal meant the exclusion of Blacks. Many of the reforms that the country’s dominant socioeconomic and political class were not shared until after the 1960s. So that in some ways is what made it easier to achieve the New Deal: by a white moderate government giving into the demands of a white majoritarian society during times of economic distress.
Fast forward to now: we’re observing the country backsliding in terms of economic inequality to the times of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Not only that, but we’re in danger of running out of stimulus, which would put actual living standards in danger of falling to levels not seen since the 1930s. It’s a situation that is ripe for racial strife if you can follow my meaning.
We could be in a situation in which a white majority that feels “endangered” backslides to hardships not seen and felt since the age of their grandparents and great grandparents. It would be nice if we could unify for the common good, but an influential majoritarian politician is going to argue the exact opposite: that there is scarcity, and that we’re in a fight for survival, and that the strong survive and the weak, die. The message will be simple: “Who are your tribe? Who do you defend? Who defends you? Look around you. Don’t live in fear; I will help you vanquish your enemies and restore America’s rightful order, where you belong at the top of its hierarchy”
Maggie Haberman reports now that Trump is asking his advisors about the feasability of declaring martial law and cancelling the election results.
I just saw a few interesting things mentioned in this article in the NYT (sorry, it is paywalled) -
Trump Discussed Naming Sidney Powell as Special Counsel on Election Fraud
Interesting parts of the article include:
President Trump on Friday discussed making Sidney Powell, who as a lawyer for his campaign team unleashed a series of conspiracy theories about a Venezuelan plot to rig voting machines in the United States, a special counsel investigating voter fraud, according to two people briefed on the discussion.
It was unclear if Mr. Trump will move ahead with such a plan.
Most of his advisers opposed the idea, two of the people briefed on the discussion said, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, who in recent days sought to have the Department of Homeland Security join the campaign’s efforts to overturn Mr. Trump’s loss in the election.
…the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, pushed back on the ideas being proposed.
Ms. Powell accused other Trump advisers of being quitters, according to the people briefed.
Part of the White House meeting on Friday night was a discussion about an executive order to take control of voting machines to examine them, according to one of the people briefed.
Mr. Giuliani has separately pressed the Department of Homeland Security to seize possession of voting machines as part of a push to overturn the results of the election, three people familiar with the discussion said. Mr. Giuliani was told the department does not have the authority to do such a thing.
It seems there is still a lot of nonsense being discussed. Seizing the voting machines would be interesting. Appointing Powell as a special counsel to look into voter fraud is completely batshit crazy.