This evening, the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol issued subpoenas to four key figures in the Trump White House who either were working with or had communications with the White House in the days surrounding the January 6 insurrection: former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, former White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications Daniel Scavino, former Defense Department official Kashyap Patel, and former Trump advisor Stephen Bannon.
While reading this, I can't help but think of all the time, effort and funds being spent to both to perpetuate and stop the 'Big Lie' while our world crumbles down around us due to climate change and the people dying due to the inability to work together in an effort to control this epidemic. There are certainly some in power intent on destruction.
“ . . . Patel prevented Pentagon officials from talking to the Biden team during the transition, keeping it from receiving intelligence briefings for the weeks before January 6.“
This has always deeply concerned me. Am I correct in believing Patel’s obstruction amounts to treason?
The machinations of Trump’s Big Lie remind me of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. The Lost Cause mythology trumpeted that the Civil War was heroic, just, and not contended over slavery. This Big Lie was sustained over generations to justify white domination and racism throughout the South.
Regional support for the Southern Big Lie was of a greater magnitude than the “26% of Americans [who] now believe the ‘2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.’” The southern Big Lie grievously wounded our country for generations. Unless we can shatter Trump’s Hitler-like Big Lie, our country will suffer grievously in coming years.
The temptation to believe that I am watching a really bad, reality-TV-style version of "Wag the Dog", or better yet "King Lear" is great, until I remember that if not for the integrity of our top military leaders and some select secretaries of state, we would have a strong-man style dictatorship in this country right now. I saw an article yesterday stating that 5 or 6 of the top lawyers tasked with defending Trump in his various (very serious) legal troubles are either resigning or being fired. I would take this as a sign that Trump-world is falling apart, except that it always seems to be falling apart. Trumpism remains a powerful force, even as the relevance of Trump himself is waning. Whomever takes up the mantle of Trumpism next (Abbott? DeSantis? ? ?) will not have his ADHD tendencies or his antisocial personality disorder (people with personality disorders are easily manipulated by the people around them - Trump certainly was/is). A Trump World not handicapped by Trump is what REALLY scares me.
" “[u]se of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency.” " is idiotic on the face of it. Who would use "force" against who? It is analogous to the idea that "liberals want to take guns away from people". Who would do the leg work of such an enterprise and who would turn over their guns? Actually, the only force that can restore Donald Trump to the presidency is his re-election. By the time of the next election he will have traveled down a path of so many lies, frauds, and felonious actions that he will be declared unfit to hold public office by criminal convictions and vast public contempt. In fact, at this moment, he is just shooting off his mouth to make money. The tragedy is the mass media is helping him do it for their own profit and to the detriment of our democracy and society. In a sense, Trump is the true virus raging through our country. The only vaccine to use against him is indifference, sadly not everybody is inoculated.
“… 26% of Americans now believe that “[t]he 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president,” and 8% believe that “[u]se of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency.””
In my experience, one cannot reason with the unreasonable. Biden and Democratic lawmakers tried using the carrot. Now it’s time to use the stick.
"All of these subpoenas focus on Trump’s role in the January 6 insurrection. They are a significant ratcheting up of the investigation."
That was a significant birthday present for me yesterday. It appeared as though all these wheels were taking far too long to turn and reveal what we all know to be true: that 45 and his pack of treasonous Aldrich Ameses belong behind bars. We just don't know all the how's, whys, and wherefores! Thank you, dear Prof. for spelling out their dirty roles and filthy deeds.
These guys are amazing. How they, in our faces, commit treason and incite another insurrection. Who is this Mitch McConnell and what does Trump or Putin have on him? Why won’t he and all republican elected officials stand up for our constitution?
“According to a new poll by NORC at the University of Chicago, 26% of Americans now believe that “[t]he 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president,” and 8% believe that “[u]se of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency.”
And that means that some 74% of those surveyed believe Biden won property and some 92% are against the use of force.
Decent, intelligent, well informed people are clearly in the majority.
That conviction will come in handy in 2022, but I wonder if the former president isn’t stoking it for a more immediate reason.
As Brad Parscale told Woodward and Cost: "I don't think he sees it as a comeback. He sees it as vengeance."
I always get a laugh out of the fact that the best radio interview I ever did for one of my books was for "The Bridgebusters: the True Story of the Catch-22 Bomb Wing." The interviewer had definitely read it all, he must have underlined the scenes he really liked, and he was genuinely enthusiastic when he told the listeners it was one of the best books he'd ever read.
That was Steve Bannon, six weeks before Trump hired him in 2016.
Again and again, I lay blame on the block of American voters who swallowed the Big Lie. The gullibility meter is off the charts. It's much bigger than McCarthyism. There is an increasing inability of some to distinguish truth from lies--or, worse yet, they know in their guts that Trump is lying but political expediency supersedes their moral character. As a nation, we are losing our souls.
“… 26% of Americans now believe that “[t]he 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president,” and 8% believe that “[u]se of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency.””
The technical term for this situation is "pre-insurrectional."
It is past time to continue to soft pedal what happened leading up to and on January 6. The DOJ needs to bring charges against all involved, including the crime boss Tя☭mp, head of this whole scheme, for conspiracy to commit a coup. I do not care that Republicans will claim it is political persecution. The retort should be, “No, it’s prosecution, and warranted based on the facts of the cases.”
More about the NORC poll on theconversation.com link: First, NORC pulls together a panel of 40,000 people, called AmeriSpeak, who are representative of the entire U.S. population on dozens of characteristics, such as age, race, income, location of residence and religion. From that representative sample, NORC drew a random sample – in our case, 1,070 people.
And immediately a headline follows about what AMERICANS believe. This to me is shockingly wrong, incendiary, downright depressing reporting and I don’t care how pollsters twist themselves into knots saying it is legit. Please HCR, can you add poll sample numbers prominently to your reporting and help us lower our blood pressure and stop making repubs feel like they are so powerful. 80 million eligible people did not even vote. Actually around 500 repubs were in the survey. Tulsi Gabbard and others know how to get into poll samples. It’s not so holy.
I hear the drums rolling in the distance. This is the warning sign that the bipartisan Select Committee is coming to “git” those sorry-ass hateful fools. Adam Schiff reported that if they disobey a federal order to appear, there are other means that can be used to persuade them. Whips? Chains? Oh sorry…I got carried away! Hopefully Schiff meant that they will be arrested for failure to comply. Let’s get this show on the road and get to the bottom as to why they are protecting Fake 45.
A group of young men in Jacksonville, Florida, arranged to celebrate Lincoln’s birthday in 1900. My brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, and I decided to write a song to be sung at the exercises. I wrote the words and he wrote the music. Our New York publisher, Edward B. Marks, made mimeographed copies for us, and the song was taught to and sung by a chorus of five hundred colored school children.
Shortly afterwards my brother and I moved away from Jacksonville to New York, and the song passed out of our minds. But the school children of Jacksonville kept singing it; they went off to other schools and sang it; they became teachers and taught it to other children. Within twenty years it was being sung over the South and in some other parts of the country. Today the song, popularly known as the Negro National Hymn, is quite generally used.
The lines of this song repay me in an elation, almost of exquisite anguish, whenever I hear them sung by Negro children.
Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us.
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.
Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.
God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who hast by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
While reading this, I can't help but think of all the time, effort and funds being spent to both to perpetuate and stop the 'Big Lie' while our world crumbles down around us due to climate change and the people dying due to the inability to work together in an effort to control this epidemic. There are certainly some in power intent on destruction.
“ . . . Patel prevented Pentagon officials from talking to the Biden team during the transition, keeping it from receiving intelligence briefings for the weeks before January 6.“
This has always deeply concerned me. Am I correct in believing Patel’s obstruction amounts to treason?
The machinations of Trump’s Big Lie remind me of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. The Lost Cause mythology trumpeted that the Civil War was heroic, just, and not contended over slavery. This Big Lie was sustained over generations to justify white domination and racism throughout the South.
Regional support for the Southern Big Lie was of a greater magnitude than the “26% of Americans [who] now believe the ‘2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.’” The southern Big Lie grievously wounded our country for generations. Unless we can shatter Trump’s Hitler-like Big Lie, our country will suffer grievously in coming years.
The temptation to believe that I am watching a really bad, reality-TV-style version of "Wag the Dog", or better yet "King Lear" is great, until I remember that if not for the integrity of our top military leaders and some select secretaries of state, we would have a strong-man style dictatorship in this country right now. I saw an article yesterday stating that 5 or 6 of the top lawyers tasked with defending Trump in his various (very serious) legal troubles are either resigning or being fired. I would take this as a sign that Trump-world is falling apart, except that it always seems to be falling apart. Trumpism remains a powerful force, even as the relevance of Trump himself is waning. Whomever takes up the mantle of Trumpism next (Abbott? DeSantis? ? ?) will not have his ADHD tendencies or his antisocial personality disorder (people with personality disorders are easily manipulated by the people around them - Trump certainly was/is). A Trump World not handicapped by Trump is what REALLY scares me.
" “[u]se of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency.” " is idiotic on the face of it. Who would use "force" against who? It is analogous to the idea that "liberals want to take guns away from people". Who would do the leg work of such an enterprise and who would turn over their guns? Actually, the only force that can restore Donald Trump to the presidency is his re-election. By the time of the next election he will have traveled down a path of so many lies, frauds, and felonious actions that he will be declared unfit to hold public office by criminal convictions and vast public contempt. In fact, at this moment, he is just shooting off his mouth to make money. The tragedy is the mass media is helping him do it for their own profit and to the detriment of our democracy and society. In a sense, Trump is the true virus raging through our country. The only vaccine to use against him is indifference, sadly not everybody is inoculated.
“… 26% of Americans now believe that “[t]he 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president,” and 8% believe that “[u]se of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency.””
In my experience, one cannot reason with the unreasonable. Biden and Democratic lawmakers tried using the carrot. Now it’s time to use the stick.
"All of these subpoenas focus on Trump’s role in the January 6 insurrection. They are a significant ratcheting up of the investigation."
That was a significant birthday present for me yesterday. It appeared as though all these wheels were taking far too long to turn and reveal what we all know to be true: that 45 and his pack of treasonous Aldrich Ameses belong behind bars. We just don't know all the how's, whys, and wherefores! Thank you, dear Prof. for spelling out their dirty roles and filthy deeds.
These guys are amazing. How they, in our faces, commit treason and incite another insurrection. Who is this Mitch McConnell and what does Trump or Putin have on him? Why won’t he and all republican elected officials stand up for our constitution?
“According to a new poll by NORC at the University of Chicago, 26% of Americans now believe that “[t]he 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president,” and 8% believe that “[u]se of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency.”
And that means that some 74% of those surveyed believe Biden won property and some 92% are against the use of force.
Decent, intelligent, well informed people are clearly in the majority.
Come midterms, they must
VOTE, VOTE, VOTE.
There is no other solution.
None.
That conviction will come in handy in 2022, but I wonder if the former president isn’t stoking it for a more immediate reason.
As Brad Parscale told Woodward and Cost: "I don't think he sees it as a comeback. He sees it as vengeance."
I always get a laugh out of the fact that the best radio interview I ever did for one of my books was for "The Bridgebusters: the True Story of the Catch-22 Bomb Wing." The interviewer had definitely read it all, he must have underlined the scenes he really liked, and he was genuinely enthusiastic when he told the listeners it was one of the best books he'd ever read.
That was Steve Bannon, six weeks before Trump hired him in 2016.
Again and again, I lay blame on the block of American voters who swallowed the Big Lie. The gullibility meter is off the charts. It's much bigger than McCarthyism. There is an increasing inability of some to distinguish truth from lies--or, worse yet, they know in their guts that Trump is lying but political expediency supersedes their moral character. As a nation, we are losing our souls.
“… 26% of Americans now believe that “[t]he 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president,” and 8% believe that “[u]se of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency.””
The technical term for this situation is "pre-insurrectional."
It is past time to continue to soft pedal what happened leading up to and on January 6. The DOJ needs to bring charges against all involved, including the crime boss Tя☭mp, head of this whole scheme, for conspiracy to commit a coup. I do not care that Republicans will claim it is political persecution. The retort should be, “No, it’s prosecution, and warranted based on the facts of the cases.”
More about the NORC poll on theconversation.com link: First, NORC pulls together a panel of 40,000 people, called AmeriSpeak, who are representative of the entire U.S. population on dozens of characteristics, such as age, race, income, location of residence and religion. From that representative sample, NORC drew a random sample – in our case, 1,070 people.
And immediately a headline follows about what AMERICANS believe. This to me is shockingly wrong, incendiary, downright depressing reporting and I don’t care how pollsters twist themselves into knots saying it is legit. Please HCR, can you add poll sample numbers prominently to your reporting and help us lower our blood pressure and stop making repubs feel like they are so powerful. 80 million eligible people did not even vote. Actually around 500 repubs were in the survey. Tulsi Gabbard and others know how to get into poll samples. It’s not so holy.
I hear the drums rolling in the distance. This is the warning sign that the bipartisan Select Committee is coming to “git” those sorry-ass hateful fools. Adam Schiff reported that if they disobey a federal order to appear, there are other means that can be used to persuade them. Whips? Chains? Oh sorry…I got carried away! Hopefully Schiff meant that they will be arrested for failure to comply. Let’s get this show on the road and get to the bottom as to why they are protecting Fake 45.
Lift Every Voice and Sing
BY JAMES WELDON JOHNSON
A group of young men in Jacksonville, Florida, arranged to celebrate Lincoln’s birthday in 1900. My brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, and I decided to write a song to be sung at the exercises. I wrote the words and he wrote the music. Our New York publisher, Edward B. Marks, made mimeographed copies for us, and the song was taught to and sung by a chorus of five hundred colored school children.
Shortly afterwards my brother and I moved away from Jacksonville to New York, and the song passed out of our minds. But the school children of Jacksonville kept singing it; they went off to other schools and sang it; they became teachers and taught it to other children. Within twenty years it was being sung over the South and in some other parts of the country. Today the song, popularly known as the Negro National Hymn, is quite generally used.
The lines of this song repay me in an elation, almost of exquisite anguish, whenever I hear them sung by Negro children.
Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us.
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.
Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.
God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who hast by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand.
True to our God,
True to our native land.
Source: Complete Poems (2000)