USA Politics (redux)

[Karl Henning]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/michigan-secretary-state-says-armed-035400636.html

Michigan secretary of state says armed protesters gathered outside her home

So, just like any election year, really....

[Karl Henning]

Conservative nonprofit group challenging election results around the country has tie to Trump legal adviser Jenna Ellis

[T. D.]

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/07/trump-federal-media-agency-ceo-plots-final-purge-before-biden-arrives.html

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/trump-adviser-navarro-accused-of-using-post-to-sway-2020-race

President Donald Trump's trade adviser, Peter Navarro, willfully broke the law by engaging in political activity in his official capacity, the latest member of the administration accused of such violations, according to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel.
Navarro used media appearances and social media in an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2020 presidential contest, in violation of the Hatch Act, according to a report released Monday by the government agency. He continued to flout the law even after being told he was being investigated for doing so, the report said.
...
The Hatch Act generally is intended to prevent the use of government power for partisan political purposes. Violations can be punished with both civil penalties -- like fines or suspension from work -- and criminal penalties.
If White House employees violate the Hatch Act, Trump would be the one who would have to penalize them. Trump hasn't acted on previous allegations of Hatch Act violations, including after the OSC recommended he fire Senior Adviser Kellyanne Conway for repeatedly breaking it.

Oh, so Cheeto gets to penalize him? I guess it'll be a far cry from the death penalty...

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/trump-cementing-death-penalty-legacy-biden-inaugural-74579070

Trump ratchets up pace of executions before Biden inaugural
As Donald Trump's presidency winds down, his administration is ratcheting up the pace of federal executions despite a surge of coronavirus cases in prisons

[drogulus]

     Undocumented Immigrants Are Half as Likely to Be Arrested for Violent Crimes as U.S.-Born Citizens

The new study aligns with other research suggesting that immigration-reducing policies do not prevent crime. After the federal government introduced the Secure Communities program, which requires local law enforcement to work with federal immigration officials as a means to expel individuals "who present the most significant threats to public safety," deportations increased, but crime did not drop. Likewise Kubrin and her colleagues found that when California became a sanctuary state in 2017—limiting state and local police cooperation with federal immigration authorities—crime rates did not rise. "The reality is that immigration policy is not a solution to curb crime," she says.

     

[Todd]

AP sources: Biden picks Lloyd Austin as secretary of defense


Flournoy didn't get it.  A general did.  I seem to recall something of a hubbub about Trump picking Mattis.  I wonder how many Dems will embrace Austin because of his D affiliation.  Kudos to the failing New York Times, as one of its op-ed states he should not lead DOD.  Maybe an op-ed pro-con statistical analysis can be thrown together in 30-90 days to see which way the wind blows.

[drogulus]

     Armed Mexicans Were Smuggled In to Guard Border Wall, Whistle-Blowers Say

S.L.S., a primary builder of Mr. Trump's wall, has been awarded contracts worth more than $1.4 billion for work on multiple parts of the border. With those funds, the company is said to have allowed its subcontractor, Ultimate Concrete, to hire armed Mexicans and facilitate illegal border crossings that the president has worked to shut down.

Ultimate Concrete "constructed a dirt road that would allow access from the Mexican side of the border into the United States," the whistle-blowers said in the complaint. "This U.C.-constructed road was apparently the route by which the armed Mexican nationals were unlawfully crossing into the United States."

An S.L.S. project manager then pressured one of the whistle-blowers in July 2019 to not include information about the Mexican security guards in reports required to be submitted to the Army Corps of Engineers.

     

[T. D.]

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/08/supreme-court-rejects-trump-allys-push-to-overturn-biden-win-in-pennsylvania.html

The Supreme Court on Tuesday turned back an effort by Republicans to reverse President-elect Joe Biden's victory in Pennsylvania.

The top court rejected a petition from Trump ally Rep. Mike Kelly, a Pennsylvania Republican, who argued that virtually all of the state's mail-in ballots were unlawful.

The decision was announced in an order with no noted dissents.

This is breaking news. Please check back for updates.

[Karl Henning]

Just like Hillary did four years ago, right?

Trump asks Pennsylvania House speaker for help overturning election results, personally intervening in a third state

[SimonNZ]

     Armed Mexicans Were Smuggled In to Guard Border Wall, Whistle-Blowers Say

S.L.S., a primary builder of Mr. Trump's wall, has been awarded contracts worth more than $1.4 billion for work on multiple parts of the border. With those funds, the company is said to have allowed its subcontractor, Ultimate Concrete, to hire armed Mexicans and facilitate illegal border crossings that the president has worked to shut down.

Ultimate Concrete "constructed a dirt road that would allow access from the Mexican side of the border into the United States," the whistle-blowers said in the complaint. "This U.C.-constructed road was apparently the route by which the armed Mexican nationals were unlawfully crossing into the United States."

An S.L.S. project manager then pressured one of the whistle-blowers in July 2019 to not include information about the Mexican security guards in reports required to be submitted to the Army Corps of Engineers.

     

Reminds me of a Doonesbury strip I can't locate right now where Roland asks a speaker for the Trump border wall where they're going to find workers willing to work long hours for little money in the searing heat, and the official answers vaguely "they're around".

[T. D.]

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/09/trump-to-join-texas-in-supreme-court-bid-to-undo-biden-win.html

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/09/states-tell-supreme-court-they-support-texas-bid-to-reverse-biden-win.html

Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh, whose state overwhelmingly voted for Biden over Trump, said in a scornful tweet that Maryland would not join Paxton's case after someone on Twitter suggested he do so.

"The suit is a cesspool of disproved charges, wild speculation, insupportable arguments and silly gibberish," Frosh tweeted.

"Joe Biden is the President-Elect."

Trump earlier Wednesday said he wanted to join Paxton's legal effort at the Supreme Court, which the defendants have dismissed as a political stunt by the Republican attorney general. The Supreme Court has yet to rule on Paxton's request.

Paxton, a Republican who remains under indictment for state felony securities fraud charges, is asking the high court for permission to sue the four states to block their certification of Biden's wins in them.

[Karl Henning]

Worth quoting in full:

Trumpism Triumphant

Even in defeat, the GOP surrenders to the nutcases.

Mona Charen

Off and on, for 25 years, I participated in National Review cruises as a speaker. I met lots of wonderful people who were intelligent, curious, and great company—but there were always cranks and conspiracy theorists too. Once, during the Clinton administration, people at my dinner table were repeating the story that Hillary had killed Vince Foster. I choked down my bite of chicken Kiev and responded, as equably as possible, "Well, for that to be true, she would also have had to transport his body to Fort Marcy Park without the Secret Service or anyone else noticing." Several people at the table blinked back at me. Yeah? So?

It was a tell, though I didn't know it at the time. In later years, I noticed that cruisers weren't citing mainstream publications for their information. They weren't even citing National Review (which a fair percentage of the cruisers didn't even read, I learned). They were getting their news from email lists and subscription newsletters. I noticed the same thing when speaking to conservative audiences. Someone was always buttonholing me and thrusting some obscure publication into my hands.

These people were not hard up. They hadn't been displaced from their union jobs by outsourcing. The ladies wore designer dresses and the men sported pinky diamonds. In 2020, people earning more than $100,000 voted for Trump over Biden by 11 points, whereas Biden earned the support of those earning less than $50,000 by 15 points.

There's a theory that people have rallied to Trump and alternative news sources because they feel disrespected by the mainstream, liberal-leaning press. They bristle at the condescension of liberals who, they believe, despise country music, guns, and Cracker Barrel. There is some truth in this, but my experience with conservatives makes me skeptical of that as a complete explanation. Sure, the urban/rural divide is real—and not limited to the United States—but resentment of elites has always been with us. From suspicion of the First Bank of the United States among the Jeffersonians to the populist movement of the 1890s, "coastal elites" have always been despised by some. But it didn't drive people into abject lunacy in the past, or at least, not on the scale we see today.

The resentment motive can't account for our volume of crazy. A theme that unified these conspiracy-minded people was a sense of superiority—not inferiority. They felt that they had access to the hidden truth that the deluded masses didn't understand. It was a key feature of Rush Limbaugh's appeal. He frequently suggested that he understood that real story beneath the official version, and could penetrate the opaque Washington drama by stripping away the polite fictions to reveal the ugly realities beneath.

After decades of this diet, and with an enormous turbo-charge from Trump, the conspiracists are in the driver's seat of the Republican party. Today, the glazed-eyed-Hillary-murdered-Vince Foster-Republicans are, if not the majority, at least a plurality of the Republican party. This is profoundly worrying, because, let's face it, they've suspended their critical faculties. Trump spent months saying mail-in ballots were ripe for fraud. He openly declared that he would not accept the legitimacy of any election he lost. He pressured friendly state legislatures, like Pennsylvania's, not to count mail ballots until election day so that he could weave a story of victory if he did well with in-person voting on Election night, knowing that the count for mail ballots would take longer.

Now consider the average Republican voter. If anyone of their personal acquaintance had said, about an upcoming company baseball game, or their kid's weekend soccer match, that the refs were all corrupt and that the other team always cheats, and then after losing the game, claimed that it was all rigged, they'd roll their eyes and say, "That guy is a little cracked."

Trump is more than a little cracked. What Peter Wehner calls his "disordered personality" has been on vivid display for years. The peevishness, the pettiness, the colossal narcissism—to say nothing of his larger faults. But the normal, ordinary evaluations of character and credibility are suspended in Trump's case.

His legal challenges to the results have been so absurd that if they'd been filed by anyone other than the president of the United States, they might have been thrown out as "frivolous." They have lost 49 of the 50 suits they've filed, and not just lost, but lost with blistering smackdowns from the judges, including those appointed by Trump. "Voters, not lawyers, choose the president," wrote Stephanos Bibas, a judge on the Third Circuit. Another judge wrote:

This Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence. In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state. Our people, laws, and institutions demand more.

In case you missed it, the Republican party of Arizona is actually asking Republicans to "fight and die" for Trump's stolen election lie. Retweeting Trumpist Ali Akbar who said "I am willing to give my life for this fight," the Arizona GOP replied "He is. Are you?" (The account has since deleted the tweets.)

Eric Metaxas, who wrote a well-received biography of William Wilberforce in 2007 but has tumbled all the way down the rabbit hole into Trump cultism, released a video testament telling Trump, "I'd be happy to die in this fight. This is a fight for everything. God is with us." Former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn is calling for a military coup. One of the president's lawyers called for an official who oversaw election cybersecurity to be shot at dawn.

Even more disturbing than the crackpot statements of hard-core cultists are the Republican elected officials who are behaving like automatons stamped out of a brain-removal factory. The Washington Post contacted all of the Republicans serving in the House and Senate to ask who won the election. Two said Trump, 27 said Biden, and the other 220 declined to say. Ted Cruz, Mr. "Constitutional Conservative," is volunteering to argue Trump's utterly fraudulent stolen election case before the Supreme Court. The Court has other ideas.

A Republican Georgia election official pleaded with the president and others to behave with minimal decency. Noting that people simply doing their jobs—along with their family members—had received explicit rape and death threats, Gabriel Sterling got emotional, predicting, "Someone is going to get shot. Someone is going to get killed," if the president and his henchmen continue the incitement. Within hours of that plea, dozens of armed people gathered outside the home of the Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson as she was decorating a Christmas tree with her four-year-old son. "Stop the steal," they chanted, and "you're murderers."

And then there are the polls showing that shocking numbers of rank-and-file Republicans are buying this big lie. A YouGov/Economist poll found that 73 percent of Republicans had little or no confidence that the election was conducted fairly. A Morning Consult/Politico survey found that 67 percent of Republicans said the election was probably or definitely not free and fair. And a Monmouth University poll found that 75 percent of Republicans were "not too confident" or "not at all confident" that the 2020 election was conducted fairly and accurately. Sixty-four Republican members of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives have signed a letter asking that members of Congress throw out Pennsylvania's slate of electors.

We have now reached the stage where it isn't just that Republicans fail to rebuke Trump. It isn't just that Republicans are frightened into silence by fear of the base. We are now at the stage when a critical mass of the Republican party has adopted Trump's disordered personality for its own. The Republican party is, in this iteration, a danger to American democracy. Our urgent task is, to borrow a phrase, to repeal and replace it.

[Karl Henning]

It's whackjobs all the way down.

[Herman]

Lindsay Graham predicts Trump will function as a sort of Shadow President during the Biden years, where he will continue his destructive behavior and keep the GOP legislators in a vise of fealty and fear of retaliation.

[Todd]

Graham's prediction is about as meaningful as predictions that Trump would steal the election and serve three or four terms.

[BasilValentine]

Graham's prediction is about as meaningful as predictions that Trump would steal the election and serve three or four terms.

The predictions, correct ones, were that Trump would try to steal the election and it was Trump himself who suggested the possibility of three or four terms. Graham's prediction is an equally correct assessment of Trump's intentions, because Trump can't live without the attention.   

[Karl Henning]

Tim Miller on the Clown Coup.

"People should be pissed about this."

[Karl Henning]

Yep, just like 2016:

- Trump is still tweeting out bizarre calls to "overturn" the election, while pressuring fellow Republicans to stay in line.

- The Texas lawsuit to nullify the election results in four states is a clownish legal stunt. Seriously, it's way dumber than you think.

- Nevertheless the GOP attorneys general in 17 states are backing the suit.

- A congressional floor challenge to the Electoral College vote on January 6 now seems a near-certainty.

- As Mona Charen writes, "We are now at the stage when a critical mass of the Republican party has adopted Trump's disordered personality for its own."

- On Wednesday, 3,054 Americans died of COVID-19. The president made no comment.

[71 dB]

- On Wednesday, 3,054 Americans died of COVID-19. The president made no comment.

That's because Rudy "corona farts" Ghouliani wasn't one of them thanks to the first rate care normal Americans can't even dream about.

[SimonNZ]

Speaking of Rachel Maddow....I learned just yesterday that she's developed her podcast on Spiro Agnew called The Bag Man into a full length book. There was an interview with her about it on the latest episode of Pod Save America.

[Karl Henning]

"NEW: FBI agents delivered at least one federal subpoena to the Texas Attorney General's office Wednesday for information in an ongoing investigation involving AG Ken Paxton, three sources confirm, indicating the seriousness with which they are taking allegations against Paxton."