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In This Edition |
  Follow @Uncle-Ernie Visit me on Face Book Remember The Golden Rule! He who has the gold, makes the rules. By Ernest Stewart "Now it is time to turn the page, to unite, to heal." ~~~ Joe Biden "Climate skeptics have argued that global warming projections are unreliable because they depend on faulty supercomputer models. While these criticisms are unwarranted, they underscore the need for independent and different approaches to predicting future warming," ~~~ Bruno Tremblay ~ a professor in the department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at McGill University. "How is the money that we invest now going to help us best to get jobs back and get people employed? And I can't tell you that sending another check out is gonna do that to a person that's already got a check." ~~~ Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.)
Help me if you can, I'm feeling down
Think that can't happen? Remember when we elected Barry on the grounds of stopping the wars and bringing the Crime Family Bush and their stooges to justice? And once elected Barry said, no we must look forward not backward, which told Lying Donald he was free to do as he pleased because Wall Street Joe would do the same thing that Barry did, i.e., nothing! So if you're beginning to have a deja vu all over again, you're right to do so! Remember Joe says he wants to "unite us," which is politicians talk for letting the criminals get away with it. Which is why starting next week I will no longer write a political column as nothing has really changed in the 50 or so years that I have been studying politics, in fact little has changed in the last 5,000 years in politics and religion except that the women no longer control it! Henceforth, I will concentrate my efforts writing about global warming and only touch on politics as it relates to global warming! Compared to the threat of global warming Lying Donald treason was nothing. Sure his incompetence will kill half a million American's but global warming, if unchecked, will surely kill us all! For those of you who need their "political fix" there will still be dozens of other authors writing weekly on the subject! Just remember the "golden rule," America, "He who has the gold, makes the rules!" In Other News I see where 2020 capped off Earth's hottest recorded decade and tied with 2016 for the hottest year, according to data released Saturday by the Copernicus Climate Change Service, a program of the European Commission. Average global temperatures were about 2.25 degrees F (1.25 degrees C) above the preindustrial average. That 2020 tied 2016 alarmed climate scientists because the 2016 high was fuelled in part by a largely natural El Nino cycle, which features above-average equatorial sea surface temperatures across the Pacific and adds more heat to the atmosphere, while 2020 featured a cooling La Nina cycle. What this means is that human-caused global warming overwhelmed the planet's natural cooling cycle. "I'm not sure how extreme things have to get for the message to get across that we're heading into a climate emergency unless we take some ambitious and immediate action to control global climate change," said Sue Natali, a climate researcher who directs the Arctic program at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, told The Washington Post. NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will each issue their year-end global temperature data Jan. 14 and are expected to rank 2020 as either the first or second-warmest based on slight differences in measuring. The Washington Post said: If one pictures global warming as a car rolling down a hill, El Nino acts as a gas pedal, speeding the descent, whereas La Nina serves as a modest application of the brakes.How long do we have before it may become irreversible? According to a new report the threshold for dangerous global warming will likely be crossed between 2027 and 2042, research indicates. That's a much narrower window than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's estimate of between now and 2052. In a study published in Climate Dynamics, researchers introduce a new and more precise way to project the Earth's temperature. Based on historical data, it considerably reduces uncertainties compared to previous approaches. "Our new approach to projecting the Earth's temperature is based on historical climate data, rather than the theoretical relationships that are imperfectly captured by the GCMs. Our approach allows climate sensitivity and its uncertainty to be estimated from direct observations with few assumptions," says coauthor Raphael Hebert of the Alfred-Wegener-Institut in Potsdam, Germany. 20 years ago we had nothing to worry about until the year 2100. 5 years later it had dropped to 2075. 5 years after that it was 2050. Now it's as little as 6 years before it hits the fan! And Finally I see where Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) is worth more than $7 million. While 70% of WV households would qualify for $2,000 checks. 40% of West Virginians are dealing with food insecurity. The number of people in WV who say they often don't have food to eat has increased 70% during the pandemic, and Joe says no. I guess starving would be good for them, hey, Joe? I wonder how many meals Joe has ever missed? Joe, who is, as you've probably guessed by now, a little to the right of Darth Vader and couldn't give a rats ass about the folks back home. Why should he care? He's riding high on the hog and since the folks back home keep on electing him why bother with helping them if he can force them to work slave labor jobs for nothing, if they are lucky enough to find work for which Joe's corporate masters keeping sending him the swag for doing so! So Joe wins this week's Vidkun Quisling Award! Editors Note: This will be the last Vidkun Quisling Award. I also will no longer write the political opening but will concentrate my writing on the world's greatest danger, global warming. Keepin' On
If you think that what we do is important and would like to see us keep on, keeping on, please send us whatever you can, whenever you can, and we'll keep telling you the truth!
 12-29-1939 ~ 01-08-2020 Thanks for the music and film!
 02-18-1962 ~ 01-10-2020 Thanks for the film!
 08-24-1933 ~ 01-11-2020 Burn Baby Burn!
 08-22-1944 ~ 01-13-2020 Thanks for the music!
(c) 2021 Ernest Stewart a.k.a. Uncle Ernie is an unabashed radical, philosopher, author, stand-up comic, DJ, actor, political pundit and managing editor and publisher of Issues & Alibis magazine. Visit me on Facebook. and like us when you do. Follow me on Twitter. |
 Denouncing Republican Evils Can't Do Much For The Biden Presidency Without Demanding Progressive Policies By Norman Solomon The Republican plunge into Trumpism has made the party especially unhinged and dangerous, but its basic ideology has long been a shameless assault on minimal standards of human decency. Now -- while Democratic leaders and most corporate media outlets are suitably condemning the fascist tendencies of Trump and his followers -- deeper analysis and stepped-up progressive organizing are urgently needed. Economic injustice -- disproportionately harming people of color -- constantly propels U.S. society in a downward spiral. Poverty, economic insecurity and political disempowerment go together. Systemic racism continues to thrive, enmeshed with the predatory routines of corporate power. After becoming a member of Congress last week, Cori Bush wrote in the Washington Post: "Many have said that what transpired on Wednesday was not America. They are wrong. This is the America that Black people know. To declare that this is not America is to deny the reality that Republican members of the U.S. House and Senate incited this coup by treasonously working to overturn the results of the presidential election." And, Bush added, "what my Republican colleagues call 'fraud' actually refers to the valid votes of Black, brown and Indigenous voters across this country who, in the midst of a pandemic that disproportionately kills us, overcame voter suppression in all of its forms to deliver an election victory for Joe Biden and Kamala D. Harris." Yet that election victory -- which was a huge blow to right-wing forces and a triumph for the progressive forces that made it possible -- assures us of little. The same establishment-oriented corporate and militaristic mindsets that reigned supreme in the executive branch during the Obama administration are being reconfigured for the Biden administration. Similar mentalities at the top of the Democratic Party a decade ago are replicated today. But, at the grassroots, progressive outlooks are much more prevalent than a decade ago -- and left-leaning forces are much better positioned. There's far less naivete about Joe Biden on the verge of his presidency than there was a dozen years ago on the verge of Barack Obama's. And much stronger communication and organizing capacities are in place for progressive individuals and groups in 2021 than was true in 2009. In short, as Biden prepares to move into the White House, progressives are in much better shape to put up a fight -- not only against the right wing but also against corporate Democratic elites, who are uninterested in delivering the kind of broad-based economic uplift that could undermine the pseudo-populist propaganda coming from the Republican Party. A day after the orchestrated mob assault at the Capitol, Bernie Sanders appeared on CNN and provided a cogent summary of what must be done to effectively push back against the Republicans. In contrast to standard-issue Democratic Party talking points, what he had to say went to the core of key economic and political realities. While countless Democratic politicians and pundits were taking the easy route of only condemning Trump and his acolytes, Sanders went far deeper. "We must not lose sight of the unprecedented pain and desperation felt by working people across the country as the pandemic surges and the economy declines," Sanders wrote to supporters on Sunday. "We must, immediately, address those needs." Sanders pointed out that "right now, hunger is at the highest levels in decades in this country and the family that couldn't afford to put food on the table last week still cannot afford to put food on the table this week, and they need our help." Among the ongoing realities he cited were these: ** "The 500,000 Americans who were homeless and the 30 million more facing eviction last week are still worried about keeping a roof over their heads this week, and they need our help."Such help will not come from merely denouncing the villainy of Trump and other Republicans. And it won't come from reflexively deferring to the Biden administration. On the contrary, it can come from insisting that there must be no honeymoon for the incoming administration if we want to meet the crying needs of working-class people. Some progressives believe that we should give Biden a break as his presidency gets underway. But in early 1993, we were told to give President Clinton a break. Wall Streeters went into the Cabinet, NAFTA soon followed -- and, in 1994, Republicans roared back and took Congress. Later came cruel "welfare reform," deregulation of the banking industry, and much more. In early 2009, we were told to give a break to President Obama. Wall Streeters went into the Cabinet, big banks were bailed out while people with their houses under water lost their homes -- and, in 2010, Republicans roared back and took Congress. Later came economic policies that undermined support and turnout from the Democratic Party base, helping Trump win four years ago. As Bernie Sanders says, "The old way of thinking is what brought us Donald Trump." The Sanders prescriptions for antidotes to right-wing poisons are absolutely correct. Along with ending Trump's toxic political career, Sanders wrote four days after the Capitol events, "we must also start passing an aggressive agenda that speaks to the needs of the working class in this country: income and wealth inequality, health care, climate change, education, racial justice, immigration and so many other vitally important issues. We must lift people out of poverty, revitalize American democracy, end the collapse of the middle class, and make certain our children and grandchildren are able to enjoy a quality of life that brings them health, prosperity, security and joy." Sound impossible? It isn't. But to make such a future possible will require not only crushing the Republican Party but also dislodging the current Democratic Party leadership to make way for truly progressive elected Democrats -- like Cori Bush, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Ro Khanna and others -- who understand that they must be part of transformative social movements that are our only hope. (c) 2021 Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death"and "Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America's Warfare State." |
 Can Justice Finally Overtake Trump, Its Most Defiant Fugitive? By Ralph Nader Despite the many crimes Donald Trump regularly committed over four years, it took his blatant incitement of the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to put him on the road to prison. (See: Letter to vice President Mike Pence Re: Invocation of Amendment 25). What transpired on Wednesday in the shadows of the Washington Monument was a pure violent street crime that resulted in five fatalities, property smashed and damaged, and many assaults by hundreds of rioters who broke into or were allowed into the Capitol. The current prosecutor is Acting United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, Michael R. Sherwin. USA TODAY reported that Mr. Sherwin said: "'We're looking at all actors here and anyone that had a role and, if the evidence fits the elements of the crime, they're going to be charged,' Sherwin said these words after he was asked by a reporter if investigators are looking at the role the president played." From Day One in 2017, several people foresaw the signs of an emerging sociopath, using violent rhetoric to encourage illegal behavior. It wasn't only professional psychologists who declared Trump to be severely unstable. Each day he created and disseminated dangerous fantasies. This egomaniacal wannabee monarch could not stop lying in a dangerous manner, making false accusations or delusionally bragging. Reporters, commentators, litigants, and elected representatives who were documenting Trump's trail of political and public insanity were overwhelmed by his doubling down on his flailing and wrongdoing in plain sight. But they mostly declined to draw the enforcement conclusions arising from their convictions, further enabling Trump's use of the power of the bully pulpit to intimidate or threaten his critics. Remember, Trump, said, "I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president." He recklessly kept doing just that. The Republicans supported him and covered for him, while the Democrats huffed and puffed in place. The Democrats refused to file eleven well-documented articles of impeachment and instead only went with the Ukraine matter. (See: December 18, 2019, Congressional Record, H-12197) Meanwhile, in dozens of ways, Trump emboldened the most extreme of his supporters. Recall his outcry "liberate Wisconsin." Trump's support for the armed invasion of the Michigan state capitol with impunity, and his many signals, and inactions showed the white supremacists in the streets that the President and William Barr's Justice Department would overlook hateful racist mischief and mayhem. He even encouraged one of these groups by repeating their militant mantra verbatim. Published warnings about Trump's interest in insurrection were largely unheeded by the mass media and even by the independent progressive media. They were too satisfied with reporting on his outrageous behavior and tweets, and too pleased with how easy a subject Trump was for derision. We and others would invoke specific criminal statutes he violated frequently, such as the Hatch Act (using federal property and personnel for political campaign objectives) or the Anti-Deficiency Acts (spending much money strictly not appropriated by Congress) and other grave flouting of statutory and regulatory, mandates, scores of congressional subpoenas and major constitutional provisions. The news media did not regard Trump's deep lawlessness as worthy of much reporting or editorializing. The excuse was "Trump is just being Trump." Both the media and members of Congress, without paying attention to legal penalties, allowed Trump to keep pushing the envelope on lawbreaking until his invasion of the very Congress that let him get away with so much. It took lawmakers scrambling for their lives through Congressional tunnels to wake them up beyond their rhetoric or perfidy. There are severe consequences for ignoring the law's non-enforcement and when the media and elected officials become too jaded to challenge a president who doesn't respect the rule of law or constitutional restraints. This assault may not be Trump's last act before January 20th. For sure he will increase the presidential pardons for his friends, family, and quite possibly the rioters and himself. Nobody knows what this "Mad Dog" Trump will try to do on his way out. However, it is reassuring that neither the courts nor the military have met his expectations of supporting and shielding him from his adversaries. These two institutions affirmatively refused to sanction dictatorial rule. The mounting calls for Trump's resignation, or prosecution, or removal by impeachment conviction or the exercise of the 25th Amendment are coming from all sides - Democrats, Republicans, bi-partisan declarations of retired military and civilian officials from past Administrations, and even business groups such as the National Association of Manufacturers. Their immediate urging would be to stop further mayhem and upheavals by a cornered, rampaging commander-in-chief who knows that, in one of his favorite phrases, "this is our last chance." Maybe merely advancing these acts of enforcement and evictions, rooted in our constitution and law, will be a deterrence and persuade Trump to quietly go right away to Mar-a-Largo, as suggested today on NPR by Jeh Johnson, former Secretary of Homeland Security. That kind of finale has not been his MO, whether as a failed gambling czar, choosing corporate bankruptcy as an exit strategy, or as a president who doesn't show remorse, admit mistakes, or that he ever "did anything wrong." If there is anything Trump dislikes more than being a loser (the election), it is being a two-time loser. Perhaps he will back down, play the victim again, and with the help of a stable of defense attorneys, hope that he can wear a pin-striped suit instead of an orange jumpsuit while wistfully watching Fox News behind bars. (See our new book, Wrecking America: How Trump's Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All) (c) 2021 Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His latest book is The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future. Other recent books include, The Seventeen Traditions: Lessons from an American Childhood, Getting Steamed to Overcome Corporatism: Build It Together to Win, and "Only The Super-Rich Can Save Us" (a novel). |
 White Settler Uprising At The Capitol By Glen Ford Last week's assault on the Capitol was essentially a race riot, the product of white racial grievance. "If it can happen in the United States, it can happen anywhere," wrote New York Times Berlin bureau chief Katrin Bennhold, purporting to sum up world leaders' reaction to the white nationalist assault on the U.S. Capitol. The truth is precisely the opposite: mob violence by white people aggrieved at perceived threats to their political hegemony due to the growing influence or presence of the Other - most often, Blacks - is trademark Americana, an historically repetitive phenomena that is, to varying degrees, also characteristic of other white settler states that share the U.S.'s genocidal history. It cannot "happen anywhere," because similar conditions and histories do not exist everywhere. Bennhold's interpretation of global sentiment is pure American exceptionalist propaganda - an erasure of U.S. history to project a false view of the present. (In fact, the only world semi-notable who mouthed words similar to Bennhold's was former Romanian prime minister Dacian Cioloş.) White mobs and armed groups have been inflicting violence against the non-white presence in their colonial settler state ever since their ancestors arrived on these shores. The Puritans - a colony-in-arms - had all but completed the mission of racially "purifying" New England within a century of setting foot at Plymouth Rock. Far more Native Americans were killed by massed, armed settler civilians than by uniformed armies of the British Crown or the young U.S. republic. Whites in the slave states of the U.S. South were a people perpetually in arms in "defense" against slave rebellions, with every able-bodied white man obligated to aid in suppressing real or threatened Black revolts. Hundreds of Blacks were massacred in the wake of Nat Turner's 1831 rebellion. Northern white mobs also rejected the Black presence in their cities in the pre-Civil War era. Racists attempted to drive Black people out of Cincinnati, Ohio, three times: in 1829, 1836 and 1841. (In 1853 and 1855, white Cincinnati nativists also fought with German immigrants who had been influenced by revolutionary trends in Europe.) After the Civil War, white mobs and racist armies spent 30 years subduing Black Reconstruction, from the New Orleans massacre of 1866 to the armed overthrow of the Black Republican-white Populist government in Wilmington, North Carolina's largest city, in 1898. During this period tens of thousands were killed - far more than the four thousand-plus Black lynching victims recorded by the great journalist/organizer Ida B. Wells. White civilians annihilated the remaining natives of California in the gold and land rushes, and terrorized and forced the mass expulsion of Chinese from the state. For the first 160 years of the U.S. republic's life, the term "race riot" applied almost exclusively to white mob attacks on non-whites. Every boxing victory won by Black heavyweight champion Jack Johnson set off lethal rampages by northern and southern whites in the early years of the 20th century. The "Red Summer" of 1919, dubbed such by the Black public intellectual and activist James Weldon Johnson, saw white "race riots" in dozens of cities and the massacre of hundreds of Blacks in rural areas around Elaine, Arkansas. In Washington, DC, however, Blacks fought back, killing 15 white attackers while losing 38 to the mob. Heartened by the Black resistance to armed racist assault, Black poet and activist Claude McKay wrote the poem, If We Must Die: "... O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!Just as the current president is blamed for inciting the white mob in Washington, President Woodrow Wilson was viewed as a prime instigator of mass racist violence during his terms in the White House, including the East St. Louis riot that claimed the lives of hundreds of Black people in 1917. An arch- segregationist who introduced Jim Crow to the federal civil service, Wilson endorsed the Ku Klux Klan-glorifying film Birth of a Nation as "History written in lighting," in 1915. The presidentially-endorsed movie ushered in a "gilded age for the Klan. In the summer of 1925, 30,000 hooded terrorists paraded in a show of force in Washington, DC. The term "race riot" was synonymous with white mob attacks against people of color until 1935, when an estimated 4,000 Blacks in Harlem, New York, took to the streets against police brutality. Harlem exploded again in 1943, for the same reasons, establishing the modern pattern of police repression/Black urban resistance. (The "Zoot Suit" riot by white servicemen and cops against Latinos in 1943 Los Angeles was a mixture of both old and new patterns of white domestic aggression.) Police repression/Black urban resistance has become such a part of the modern American experience that white mob violence is often not characterized as a "race riot" - especially if the rioters are cops. Race has been as central to Donald Trump's presidency as it was to Woodrow Wilson's, a century ago. Last week's assault on the Capitol was essentially a race riot, the product of white racial grievance. Since 1968, the Republicans have successfully sought to position themselves as the White Man's Party. Not since 1964 has a majority of whites voted for a Democratic presidential candidate, and Donald Trump won 57 percent of white votes last November. Having feasted on Trump's racist "red meat" rhetoric for the past five years, the most volatile elements of the white hordes mounted an assault on the "nigger lovers," as they used to describe people perceived as allies of Blacks, on Capitol Hill. Of course, the U.S. Capitol is no stronghold of Black Power - the Congressional Black Caucus voted overwhelmingly to make police a protected class, in 2018, and to continue the Pentagon's militarization of local cops, in 2014. But racists are cognitively challenged; they see phenomena that doesn't exist, and are blind to what's right in front of their eyes. The denizens of white settler colonies, worldwide, have always perceived their states as precarious outposts of "civilization" - a worldview that justifies any and all atrocities against the natives and imported "lesser" humans, including genocide. Given the mass murderous record of every white settler colony on the planet - which includes all the nations of the Americas, with the possible exception of the Caribbean countries -- it was surprising to find that only one recent book on Latin American white settler states turns up in a Google search engine. Richard Gott's Latin America as a White Settler Society, published in 2007 by the Bulletin of Latin American Research, can be read at JSTOR. Gott sees race as central to understanding the white settler mentality, even many generations after settler arrival on foreign shores.: "A recognizable feature of all 'settler colonial' states is the ingrained racist fear and hatred of the white settlers, alarmed by the continuing presence of the expropriated underclass. It is built-in to the history of the European colonial states in Africa as well as that of the antipodean colonies of Australia and New Zealand. Yet the race hatred of the settlers has only had a minor part in our traditional understanding of the drama of Latin American history and contemporary society. It is often underplayed or ignored - as it is too in the USA - and even politicians and historians of the Left have preferred to discuss class rather than race."In the case of the United States, American exceptionalism erases actual history and denies U.S. commonality with any other nation. New York Times reporter Katrin Bennhold can get away with pretending that the United States is both unique and a bell-weather for "democracy" everywhere on the planet - which is ridiculous on its face. The events at the Capitol are absolutely consistent with racist white mob behavior throughout U.S. history, and totally understandable in the white colonial settler context. Outside of that context, these events make far less sense. The U.S. is best understood as the first of the planet's white colonial settler states - a species of state that includes most of the rest of the western hemisphere, Australia, New Zealand, and the last of the settler breed, Israel. In clinging to the exceptionalist fallacy that the U.S. is a model of democracy and unique in the world, rather than the end-product of colonial white settler predation, the Democrats reveal that they share much the same delusions as the flagpole-wielding Trumpsters they revile. (c) 2020 Glen Ford is the Black Agenda Report executive editor. He can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com |
 Is More Technology The Answer To Too Much Technology? By Jim Hightower We humans have got to get a whole lot smarter, says Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla automobiles and CEO of SpaceX rockets. Musk is not merely reacting to humanity's recent tendency to elect lunatics to lead our countries. Rather, he's trying to warn us about the rapid rise of a radical new technology: Artificial intelligence. In common parlance, he's referring to robots, but these are not the clunky, somewhat cute machines performing rote tasks. AI essentially has evolved to become an electronic brain - a web of evermore-complex super-computers interacting as one cognitive unit that can program itself, make decisions, and act independently of the humans who're creating them. These thinking machines are rapidly increasing in number and geometrically advancing their IQ, prompting Musk and others to view AI technologies in apocalyptic terms. As algorithms and systems inevitably grow more sophisticated, he says, "digital intelligence will exceed biological intelligence by a substantial margin." In graphic terms, Musk warns that profiteering humans are "summoning the devil" by creating a new superior species of beings that will end up dominating humanity, becoming "an immortal dictator from which we would never escape." What's weird is not his dystopian prognosis (other experts confirm that runaway bot intelligence is a real threat), but his solution. The way for us human beings to compete with AI says Musk, is to merge with it - not a corporate transaction, but a literal merger: Surgically implant AI devices in human brains with "a bunch of tiny wires" that would fuse people with super intelligence. Uh-huh... and what could go wrong with that? It's good to have technological geniuses alert us to looming dangers, but maybe the larger community of humanists ought to lead the search for answers. "Musk: humans must merge with machines," Washington Post, November 26, 2018. (c) 2021 Jim Hightower's latest book, "If The Gods Had Meant Us To Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates,"is available in a fully revised and updated paperback edition. Jim writes The Hightower Lowdown, a monthly newsletter chronicling the ongoing fights by America's ordinary people against rule by plutocratic elites. Sign up at HightowerLowdown.org. |
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Susan Collins, the GOP Senator from Maine who just won her sixth term despite having all the integrity of a weathervane in a tornado, thought the nation of Iran was attacking the Capitol building on Wednesday. Only when a law enforcement officer explained the situation from a podium did she realize that it was Trump supporters (read: Republican voters) who were battering down the doors.
Collins is a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Leave aside the fact that a person in her position actually thinks Iran has the capacity to sack the Capitol, and is willing to admit so in the public prints. Perhaps worse, no one appears to have seen fit to warn her or her committee members that the president of the United States had spent weeks inviting his band of wreckers to show up in Washington, D.C., and trash the joint on that day.
Collins, along with stalwarts like Mitch McConnell, Chuck Grassley, Mitt Romney and John Thune, represent the "establishment" wing of the GOP. They are not in the same spots on the radical right spectrum - Collins is a "moderate," don't cha know, wink wink - but they and their allies have all taken part in building the army that came for them last week with hanging ropes and zip ties.
Wednesday's thoroughly predictable and publicly planned presidential disgrace has seemingly caused a tectonic shift in the positioning of the Republican right. At 9 am tomorrow, one week since the mayhem came calling, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will formally open impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump for the second time. Trump has until then to resign or face the 25th Amendment, but after he and Mike Pence buddied it up yesterday, neither scenario seems at all likely.
With impeachment the sole remaining option, it is apparent a significant number of House Republicans will vote with the Democrats. The numbers are fluid, with some estimates as high as 20 defections, but whatever it turns out to be will be more than the none who voted with Pelosi the last time this circus came calling.
One thing seems clear: This will not be the same desultory affair that opened 2020. Pelosi is pissed, because now it's actually personal, and she is going to spend the hours between now and then leaning hard into every House member who wondered last week if they would get out of the building alive. Three House members - two Democrats and a Republican - were infected with COVID during the Capitol lockdown. This story gets worse by the hour.
The major right-wing media outlets that grew wealthy and powerful stoking these flames are facing their own "establishment vs. Trump fringe" crisis. Fox News, which is getting outflanked by Trump-loving upstarts like Newsmax and OANN, has chosen to double down on the president who tried to have his vice president killed.
In contrast, Cumulus Media - mothership of the radio giant Westwood One and home to some of the most radical right voices on the airwaves - has informed its people to cool it immediately on the stolen election blather or face termination. "We need to help induce national calm NOW," wrote Cumulus executive vice president Brian Philips in an internal company memo. "If you transgress this policy, you can expect to separate from the company immediately."
This is far more than inside baseball within big media. Ever since Rupert Murdoch made his network the propaganda launcher for the GOP, that party has come to rely on all of right-wing media to march in lock step, and for decades, they largely have. If that cohesion crumbles, as it clearly seems to be, we will have Trump Republicans screaming at establishment Republicans on these once-friendly networks, and whichever side prevails will likely set the course for the future of the entire GOP.
The various far-right white supremacist organizations that turned the Capitol into a felony murder crime scene are also cracking apart online, but in far more sinister fashion. With bans from Twitter and Facebook, and with Parler going dark, all of a sudden there is no single room for these people to gather (though sites like Gab have quickly emerged as alternatives). This is not necessarily a uniformly good thing, as many have moved their planning and communications to encrypted platforms that are far more difficult to monitor, so warnings of future violence could be more difficult to raise.
"Adding to the muddle, when Twitter and Facebook kicked Mr. Trump off their platforms last week, they made it harder for organizers to rally around a singular voice," reports The New York Times. "The result is an unexpected side effect of the expulsions from mainstream social media platforms: Attempts at disruption could be harder to predict and could stretch for days - and not just in Washington, D.C."
And as for the man at the center of it all? In the aftermath of the riot he incited, Donald Trump's world looks to be falling apart around his ears. He is on the verge of becoming the first president to be impeached twice, an astonishing feat for a guy who only managed a single term. Many of his close White House allies have made for the exits. His Mar-a-Lago neighbors are preparing to bar him at the door if he tries to live there, and if he attempts to return to New York, the city will give him no peace. Forever and ever, he will be the one-term Republican president who lost the House, Senate, White House and the state of Georgia, and he knows it, and it scalds.
The PGA has taken away a major tournament at Trump's Bedminster golf course. Salesforce, the platform that runs his millions-strong email list has frozen that account to keep him or the GOP from using "our services in any way that could lead to violence." The Trump online store is gone. Thanks to him, a parade of major business donors have cut off the Republican Party entirely. Deutsche Bank and Signature Bank, two of his largest (publicly known) lenders have broken ties with him, and he has more than a half billion dollars in debts coming due in the next few years. As ever, the Manhattan district attorney and New York State attorney general are lurking, lurking, waiting for his badly abused presidential veil of protection to be stripped away by the hurricane winds of change.
As bad as all this is for Trump, his street fighters are still committed. They are vowing to follow through on their violent threats and become a separatist group marauding the land. This would create continued fissures in the GOP, and conflict for Trump personally, as he has been advised by lawyers that he could face both criminal and civil liability for his actions last week. But according to his followers, those actions have only begun.
How much of this Trump really knows or is even aware of remains an open question. Only yesterday, he was telling his remaining staff in the White House that "antifa people" were responsible for sacking the Capitol and murdering a law enforcement officer. Yet this morning, he told the press that impeaching him could lead to violence. Also, he's saying it's the Democrats' fault. He remains a vivid menace to the nation, and will be so until the day they wind him in his shroud.
Trump is traveling to Alamo, Texas, today. At long last, it seems a preponderance of the Republican Party would like him to stay there. Too late, folks: You dance with them what brung ya, even if they take you right over a cliff.
Meanwhile, it's vital for all to remember that turmoil for the Republican Party does not necessarily equal safety for the rest of us. In fact, all of these fissures and conflicts are sharpening the teeth of some of the most extreme elements of the far right. Trump's diehard followers are not going away. Even as we cheer the GOP's internal distress, we must remain watchful, recognizing that, in the words of acclaimed sociologist Walden Bello, "I think you should be expecting more street warfare being waged by the right in the United States at this point in time.... If they can't win electorally, they'll win through trying to control the streets."
(c) 2021 William Rivers Pitt is a senior editor and lead columnist at Truthout. He is also a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of three books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know, The Greatest Sedition Is Silence and House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America's Ravaged Reputation. His fourth book, The Mass Destruction of Iraq: Why It Is Happening, and Who Is Responsible, co_written with Dahr Jamail, is available now on Amazon. He lives and works in New Hampshire.
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The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. preached a gospel inspired by the teachings of the abolitionist pastor Theodore Parker, who observed in an 1853 sermon: "Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice."
King focused the language into a call for faith and perseverance that told the civil rights marchers of the following century, "We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice."
Those words inspired hope. But they also raised a question among Americans who were impatient for the arrival of the daybreak of freedom that had been so long deferred. How might this bending be measured? When might we see the transformational change that was not just promised but desperately needed?
History teaches us that there are many measures. But few will be more profound than the election to the United States Senate of the senior pastor of historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, the spiritual home of King, US Representative John Lewis, and so many of the movements to which those iconic Americans devoted their lives.
The Rev. Raphael Warnock, a 51-year-old progressive with a long record of preaching, marching, and organizing for economic, social, and racial justice, who will in short order be the first Black senator from the Deep South state of Georgia, claimed his victory in a January 5 runoff election with references to King and Lewis and to his 82-year-old mother, who "as a teenager growing up in Waycross, Georgia, used to pick somebody's else's cotton."
"Today, because this is America, the 82-year-old hands that used to pick somebody else's cotton went to the polls and picked her youngest son to be a United States Senator," the newly elected senator declared. "So, I stand before you as a man who knows that the improbable journey that led me to this place in this historic moment in America could only happen here."
That it happened in Georgia represents a vital turn in American politics. "We were told we couldn't win this election, but tonight we proved that, with hope, hard work, and the people by our side, anything is possible," said Warnock. He was right, and his fellow Senate Democrats would do well to embrace that sense of possibility, as it has transformed their party's circumstance.
Runoff victories by two Democrats-Warnock and Jon Ossoff, a 33-year-old former aide to Lewis-will give President-elect Joe Biden governing majorities in both houses of Congress. It also gives Democrats reason to believe that Stacey Abrams, the architect of so many of the voter registration and voter mobilization strategies that elected Warnock and Ossoff, will win the governorship of Georgia in 2022.
A state that was once part of the Confederacy and that well into the mid-20th century was sending arch segregationists to the Congress will now be represented by the first Black Democrat elected to the Senate from a southern state, and by the first Jewish senator from the south since the direct election of senators began with the ratification of the 17th Amendment in 1913.
This bending of the arc has been a long time coming. One year before Warnock was born, Maynard Jackson was inspired by the assassinations of King and Senator Robert F. Kennedy to mount a 1968 Democratic primary challenge to segregationist Senator Herman Talmadge. It was an audacious move by a 30-year-old Black lawyer who was taking on the former governor and veteran senator of a state where one of the South's crudest foes of the civil rights movement, Lester Maddox, was serving as the governor-and where voters would that same year back the presidential candidacy of George Wallace, the Alabama governor who had "stood in the schoolhouse door" to block integration.
Maynard Jackson lost that race but built the momentum for change that would eventually lead to his election in 1973 as the first Black mayor of Atlanta. He also pointed to the prospect that, one day, a Southern state would elect a progressive Democrat inspired by King to the Senate. The question, Jackson assured us, was not a matter of if but when.
Only two years earlier, the first Black senator of the modern era had been elected: Edward Brooke, a Republican from Massachusetts.
Brooke was featured on magazine covers, and his win was hailed as a harbinger of the change that was surely coming to the United States. However, it would not be until 1992 that another Black senator, Illinois Democrat Carol Moseley Braun, would be elected. And even now, Warnock will serve as one of just three Black senators in the new Senate. With the departure of California Senator Kamala Harris to serve as vice president, Warnock joins New Jersey Democrat Cory Booker and South Carolina Republican Tim Scott.
Warnock's win, and that of Ossoff, resulted from hard work over many years to build what Abrams has described as "a multiracial, multiethnic coalition of urban, suburban, and rural voters."
Warnock addressed that coalition in his victory speech on election night:
Ufot explained last Wednesday:
To lock in progress, Democrats must use their newfound power to address the voter suppression that still haunts electoral politics in states across this country. They must also be prepared to challenge the cruel strategies that were on display as the campaign of Ossoff's Republican rival, Senator David Perdue, employed anti-Semitic images in ads targeting the Democrat. And when the Republican whom Warnock beat, Senator Kelly Loeffler, attacked the pastor as a "socialist" and a "radical," and deliberately misinterpreted the Democrat's sermons so frequently that he finally declared during their last debate, "She's lied, not only on me, but on Jesus."
Loeffler made a bad mistake in attacking Warnock's faith in the power and potential of a social justice gospel. The Democrat's moral clarity was his great strength as a first-time candidate for statewide office. He did not shy away from taking progressive positions, reminding voters that he grew up in a public housing project and explaining, "I've been fighting for access to affordable health care, I've been fighting for voting rights, I've been fighting for essential workers, ordinary people, because I know what it's like to be an ordinary person." And he did not shy away from the history that he, and the voters of Georgia, were making for their state and for their country.
"In this moment in American history, Washington has a choice to make, we all have a choice to make," Warnock explained as he claimed his victory. "Will we continue to divide, distract, and dishonor one another or will we love our neighbors as we love ourselves? Will we play political games while real people suffer or will we win righteous fights together, standing shoulder to shoulder, for the good of Georgia, for the good of our country? Will we seek to destroy one another as enemies or heed the call towards the common good, building together what Dr. King called 'the beloved community.'"
Warnock answered his own questions with an expression of the bend-the-arc faith that King championed.
"I know we can beat this pandemic with science and common sense," he declared. "I know we can rebuild a fairer economy by respecting the dignity of work and the workers who do it. An economy that honors those whom we now call 'essential workers' by paying them an essential wage, providing them essential benefits. I know we can move closer to justice with empathy and understanding, passion, and purpose."
(c) 2021 John Nichols writes about politics for The Capitol Times. His book on protests and politics, Uprising: How Wisconsin Renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street, is published by Nation Books. Follow John Nichols on Twitter @NicholsUprising.
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During the years when scientists were warning us about the "greenhouse effect" of carbon dioxide from the mass burning of carbon based fuels, it was also theorized that if the heating Earth caused the Arctic ice to melt there would also be a huge release of methane gas entrapped in the ice that would intensify the problem.
While the media has rarely been reporting it, the worst scenario imaginable is now happening as the Arctic ice is, indeed, disappearing at an alarming rate. The methane which has been trapped in that ice and deep below the ocean for millions of years was found to be releasing at "a staggering rate" according to Arctic News. This has world scientists and researchers alarmed, but to date, except for a short video titled "Last Hours," the danger has not been making headlines.
Why are scientists and the media staying silent about this looming catastrophe? Writer Dorsi Lynn Diaz, in a report in the on-line publication Examiner said: "At this point, and the critical state we are in, I think they know we are in such a major crisis that they really can't make this headline news. They are dancing around the subject trying to figure out what to do and how to proceed with a situation that is blowing all their projections out of the water."
Diaz also wrote that this is "something that is so huge, so frightening and so mind boggling that if people were to wrap their minds around this there would be a mass uprising and mass panic. So we are left in the dark about the potential extinction of our species because certain special interest groups want to continue to profit from the use of fossil fuels and certain governing agencies do not want to create mass panic."
Dennis Hayes, founder of Earth Day Network said: "As Last Hours makes clear, humankind must choose to rein in its carbon emissions now, or Nature will rein them in for us."
In an apparent effort to curtail any public alarm, some news reports by alleged "reliable researchers" are suggesting that the danger has been exaggerated and that all of this methane is not really escaping into the atmosphere. If this is true, where else is it going?
Why is the release of so much methane considered dangerous? A report in Arctic Times notes that methane has an immediate global warming potential of 120 times that of carbon dioxide. Thus 20 picograms of methane would have an initial greenhouse effect equaling over 2,400 picograms of carbon dioxide.
Once methane gas gets into the atmosphere, it slowly begins to break down into carbon dioxide but the report says that a large release, like that occurring in portions of the Arctic region, "could cause hydroxyl depletion in the atmosphere, extending the lifetime of methane to decades."
A pictogram, which measures this gas at the rate of a portion of one-trillionth of a gram, seems to be such a small amount that it should not concern us. But there already exists a certain level of methane gas in the world's atmosphere, and much more is being steadily released from the Earth each day.
Environmental researchers at Columbia University estimate that a release of 1,250 parts per billion per day is a "livable level." But the USGS readings show that the release now occurring in the Arctic is now above 1,950 parts per billion daily.
So how will all of this additional methane affect our world and our lives? A report in Above Top Secret noted: "The seas, lakes and oceans are now pluming deadly hydrogen sulfide and suffocating methane. Hydrogen sulfide is a highly toxic water-soluble heavier-than-air gas and will accumulate in low-lying areas. Methane is slightly more buoyant than normal air so it will tend to contaminate our atmosphere from the top down.
"These gases are sickening and killing oxygen-using life all around the world, including human life, as our atmosphere is increasingly poisoned. Because both gases are highly flammable and because our entire civilization is built around fire and flammable fuels, this is leading to more fires and explosions."
The writer suggested in a series of articles that the increased mixture of methane in the air may be the cause of the unexplained "booms," large balls of lights and explosions occurring in the sky at various places around the world, sinkholes, increased volcanism, increased heat waves and increasingly intense storms. Could the latest rash of violent forest fires be linked as well?
(c) 2021 James L. Donahue is a retired newspaper reporter, editor and columnist with more than 40 years of experience in professional writing. He is the published author of five books, all dealing with Michigan history, and several magazine articles.
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In the past 150 years, U.S. presidents have lied, cheated, stolen, warmongered, incited hatred and violence, driven inequality and corruption through the roof, taken over major powers from the Congress and abused them, gained the power of nuclear war and abused it through numerous threats, accelerated the destruction of the earth's environment, failed to protect the basic rights of people, pardoned their cronies for outrageous crimes, committed thousands of specific, open, public, and indisputable impeachable offenses, and been impeached for only two things.
The first was lying under oath and obstructing a critically important investigation into consensual oral sex.
The other was obstructing an out-of-control propaganda operation about Russia, and pressuring the government of Ukraine by withholding deadly weapons from its Nazi-aligned war-making government.
Both impeached presidents were acquitted, came out of the process with stronger support than they'd had before, and had zero penalties imposed on them.
This is roughly what most of the U.S. public knows about impeachment, which is why this critical tool of public accountability is in danger of being dismissed by the public.
This is not, in reality, the full story. The U.S. House has impeached 20 officials, including President Andrew Johnson. Eight of them have been convicted in the Senate, three more resigned before they could be, and another was expelled by the Senate and the trial dropped. That's 12 out of 20 effectively dealt with.
Even this is not, in reality, any more than scratching the surface of the full story. The vast majority of impeachment efforts have led to resignations or firings, court rulings, or governmental actions that have resolved to some extent the offenses at issue, prior to achieving an impeachment, much less a conviction. An attorney general like Alberto Gonzales, for example, will typically be forced to resign before impeachment hearings can inform the public about all of his outrages, or about the power of impeachment. But that doesn't mean Gonzales would ever have left without the activist sliver of the public demanding his impeachment.
Even with presidents, the popular story only scratches the surface of what's actually happened. Richard Nixon only left because he was about to be impeached. Harry Truman only lost the power to take over factories because pressure was building to impeach him. John Nichols' book, The Genius of Impeachment, tells some of this history. But Nixon was quite a few years back now. Anybody paying attention knows that every president since could have been impeached for numerous outrages, and that both Clinton and Trump were not impeached for their worst abuses of power.
George W. Bush, who, according to CNN this week, merely "lived through the war on Iraq" (unlike, I would note, over a million of his victims) was a prime candidate for impeachment, as was his vice president. I organized dozens of experts to draft dozens of articles of Bush impeachment for Congressman Dennis Kucinich, who actually introduced a fraction of them (35) into Congress. But Speaker Nancy Pelosi blocked as unimportant an effort that we proponents called preventative, that we swore was about precedent, and that we grimly promised would see similar abuses of power in subsequent presidencies if not acted on.
Barack Obama and Donald Trump predictably expanded on numerous Bush power abuses. But only delusional, racist, rightwing impeachment efforts against Obama got much media attention. Advocates for Trump's impeachment since his inauguration day have long since compiled highlight lists of the most critical articles of impeachment being ignored by the Congress. To take just one topic, Trump has instigated violence against various groups since before his inauguration, including immigrants, blacks, leftists, etc. For Congress to suddenly care only when that violence reaches the halls of Congress is a serious problem, and should tell us all a great deal about who Congress "represents." But it is much better than nothing.
I think finally impeaching a president for a legitimate reason, for a public undisputed act, and for an act that the public wants him impeached for, could seriously help restore the status of impeachment in many people's minds, which could be very good for the future of U.S. government. It could also strip impeachment of numerous slanderous misconceptions. For decades we've been told that any impeachment would take months. The time and work supposedly involved has been a chief argument against numerous impeachments. In vain we have argued back that a vote could be held in 1 day. Now, suddenly, there's been an admission that we were right all along.
Of course, Congress has run screaming from public indisputable actions, in favor of dubious allegations. That has assisted the stalling tactics and evasion of which claims about long impeachments have been part. Trump has openly profited from office, incited violence, interfered with voting rights, discriminated on the basis of religion, waged illegal wars, blown people up with missiles, threatened nuclear wars, pardoned criminals, politicized prosecutions, abused immigrants, neglected those in need, intentionally and openly exacerbated climate collapse, instructed subordinates to break laws, supported coup attempts (in other countries), illegally torn up disarmament treaties, etc., etc., and Congress has preferred unproven allegations about Russia and Ukraine. To finally, at long last, impeach Trump for something he indisputably did would wipe away generations of pretense that an impeachment must be a long obscure investigation, while open power abuses are perfectly permissible.
So, it actually matters that right now we not let Congress get by with just rhetoric or with just the delusional passing of the buck to Mike Pence, or with merely finding some other means of barring Trump from holding future public office. It matters that Pelosi not be allowed to run out the clock on this impeachment. (Pushing the Senate trial into the next Congress and even the next presidency would be fine, and Pelosi fans may feel free to declare it the Genius of Pelosi, but no single person has done more to evade, stall, and sabotage the power of impeachment for decades, so wariness of her delays is always merited.) It matters because a precedent has to be set for presidents who try to overturn elections through fraudulent actions, dishonest demagoguery, and the instigation of violence. It matters because Trump may pardon everyone involved, because he may commit new outrages - even much worse ones, because his successors certainly will if he is given a pass, because if the Biden presidency doesn't start with a serious approach to turning the page it will not deliver anything the world needs, because Trump must be effectively barred from running for office again, because the nonviolent rule of law must reclaim respect now being gained by the increased use of military force in U.S. streets, and for numerous other reasons. But one key reason to impeach is to save the important tool of impeachment from being thrown in the trash.
(c) 2021 David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson's books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. He is a 2015 and 2016 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook.
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 Rediscovering Our Place In Nature By David Suzuki The following is adapted from The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature (Greystone Books), a book I wrote with Amanda McConnell in 1997 and updated in 2007. It seems as relevant today as when we wrote it, if not more so. I hope you enjoy it and that the year ahead brings new ways of seeing and thinking about the world so that we can finally find ways to live in harmony with each other and the natural systems that keep us alive and healthy. For thousands of years, small communities of people ensured relative tranquillity while providing for the social needs of their members. The explosive rate at which our species has been converted to an urban creature has been accompanied by a deterioration of the social fabric that held people together. The 20th century witnessed an unprecedented shift from predominantly rural community living to big city living. In cities, distanced from nature and the primary means of production like agriculture, fishing, logging and even manufacturing, we accept that it is the economy that provides our needs. Technology has enabled us to travel rapidly and communicate over vast distances, while television, computers and portable entertainment devices sever the shared activities with neighbours and communities. Consumerism has taken the place of citizenship as the chief way we contribute to the health of our society. Economic rather than social goals drive government and corporate policies. The resulting high levels of unemployment produce stress, illness, and family and community breakdown. Stable communities and neighbourhoods are a prerequisite for happiness, for productive and rewarding lives, for a crucial sense of security and belonging. They are a bottom line for the health and happiness of human beings. It is not economics that creates community but love, compassion and co-operation. Those qualities exist in individuals and are expressed between people. And they cannot be fully expressed in isolation, without context, cut off from their place in time and space, their source in the natural world. The stability of family - whatever its form - within a community provides an environment within which a child develops curiosity, responsibility and inventiveness. Ecological degradation - deforestation, topsoil loss, pollution, climate change and so on - destabilizes society by eroding the underpinnings of sustainability. This consequence was graphically illustrated in 1992, when all commercial fishing of northern cod in the Canadian province of Newfoundland was suspended. Overnight, 40,000 jobs were lost as the foundation of that society for five centuries vanished. All across Canada, towns boomed as forests were clearcut around them, only to crash when the trees were gone. The coast of British Columbia is dotted with villages that once supported fishing fleets and canneries but were abandoned as salmon populations declined. Ecological health is essential for full community health. War, terrorism, discrimination, injustice and poverty mitigate against that social stability that is so important. Chronically high levels of unemployment, such as those found in the Atlantic provinces in Canada, on American Indian reservations or in Australian Aboriginal communities today, result in despair, alcoholism, illness, even death. The need for meaningful employment is critical to the well-being not only of family but of community. Besides the economic benefits to government and individuals, there are compelling reasons to seek full employment as a social goal. An economy was once created to serve people and their communities. Today economic rationalists contend that people must sacrifice and give up social services for the economy. As we reflect on our fundamental needs as social animals, it is clear that families and communities assured of biodiversity, full employment, justice and security constitute the real non-negotiable starting point in the delineation of a sustainable future. From family to neighbourhood, from neighbourhood to nation, out into the commonwealth of our species - the connection seems to attenuate as it becomes more inclusive. But as we explore the continuum of relationships in any human life we start to see that the circle of inclusion extends further still; the "continent" of which we are each a part encompasses the Earth. The "law of love" is as fundamental, and as universal, as any other physical law. It is written everywhere we look, and it maps our intimate connection with the rest of the living world. (c) 2021 Dr. David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author, and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. |
 I'm Not Listening To Any Calls For 'Unity' From The People Who Fueled This Republicans grabbed the wolf by the ears and now they can't let go. By Charles P. Pierce You must not dare, for shame, to talk of mercy; For your own reasons turn into your bosoms, As dogs upon their masters, worrying you. -Shakespeare, Henry V, Act II, Scene 2 You have to admire them for their speed. Not 48 hours after elements of their political base ransacked the Capitol in what now appears to have been at least in part a very well-organized lynch mob, they've gotten their followers ginned up about the fact that large private American corporations at long last have come to the realization that being vehicles for armed sedition against the United States is bad for business. They've explained that they are the real victims of their own looting and pillaging. And, since both terrified congressional staffers and the guys who erected a damn gallows on the National Mall have been equally traumatized by the events of last week, it's time for us to move on, in unity, lest the tender fee-fees of the MAGA Ostrogoths once again drive them to insurrection. And this is not coming from the criminals themselves, or from their lawyers, who could be expected to promote such unmitigated horseshit. It's coming from the elected leadership of the Republican Party in Congress, people who work in the very building that was so profaned on January 6. From The Hill: House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on Friday released a statement calling for unity and a smooth transition of power.The electric Twitter machine came alive with Republican calls for "unity" in the face of the terrorism their own actions inspired, and many of those calls were approximately as heartfelt as a ransom call. This, from Ted Cruz, palace eunuch at Camp Runamuck, is fairly typical. Really sad. At a time of deep national division, President-elect Biden's choice to call his political opponents literal Nazis does nothing to bring us together or promote healing. This kind of vicious partisan rhetoric only tears our country apart.And here, from Rep. Kevin Brady, the ranking Republican member of the House Ways and Means Committee, is quite clear that the opposition to removing this criminal president* has behind it the threat of further mob action. Those calling for impeachment or invoking the 25th Amendment in response to President Trump's rhetoric this week are themselves engaging in intemperate and inflammatory language and calling for action that is equally irresponsible and could well incite further violence...They are placing a desire for vengeance above the best interests of the country. President-elect Joe Biden is right to reject calls to go down this dangerous path which will only further divide the country.The gall. The sheer, unmitigated, steel-belted, gold-plated gall it takes for these people to make this argument, not a week after five people died in the worst battle in the U.S. Capitol since the Royal Marines blew town, can only be attributed to politicians who are confident that the forces of unreason and violence have their backs. And Republican conservatives have been playing footsie with those forces for decades.  The "unity" squad should sit down. So, no, I'm not listening to calls for "unity" from these people, and I'm hoping that Democratic politicians do not give in to this subtle coercion. ("Nice Congress you have here. Be a shame if anything happened to it. Again.") I am looking for investigations, arrests, trials, and buses on their way to various federal facilities. Were I in Congress, there are a number of people I would vote to expel. And I want televised hearings with no executive sessions. We need to look at ourselves in the mirror of these most remarkable events. We need to accept what we see. (c) 2021 Charles P. Pierce has been a working journalist since 1976. He is the author of four books, most recently 'Idiot America.' He lives near Boston with his wife but no longer his three children.
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 Yes It Was Attempted By Wingnuts, But It Was A Coup Attempt Just The Same Over 140 Republican congressmen and 8 senators joined the attempt to overturn the election even after the mob tried to kill or kidnap them. By Juan Cole Wednesday 1/6 was clearly an attempted coup on Trump's part. There is some controversy about this, depending on how analysts define a "coup." It was of course not a successful coup d'etat inasmuch as it failed to overturn the government or even to permanently install an elected president as an emperor for life. But that it was an attempted coup seems to me clear. Trump had a three prong strategy to overturn the election of Biden. Part 1 was a propaganda campaign maintaining that he had won the election and it was stolen from him by irregularities in the swing states of Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia. In all those states, minorities, coded by Trump and Trumpies as not real Americans, provided the margin of victory to Biden. The claim of electoral fraud was therefore in part a racist dog whistle. Trump spread around his propaganda that Biden actually lost with his vast and effective communications machine. He reached his 70 million myrmidons on Twitter directly and frequently. He gave televised speeches carried on mass media like CNN in which he said he had won by a landslide. CNN tried to contextualize the lie, but video of a president speaking is more powerful than the tut-tutting of television reporters. The fascist media put in his service by the billionaires whose taxes he cut- Breitbart, Newsmax, Fox News, OAN all cast doubt on Biden's legitimacy. Much of the Republican Party state and national leadership adopted Trump's Big Lie, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and over 140 members of Congress. Even non-crazy Republicans adopted the mantra of irregularities, as in Pennsylvania, questioning the ruling of that state's Supreme Court. You can argue the court made a bad ruling. You can't argue that its ruling is not the law of the land. The propaganda campaign was so successful that half of Republicans believe the big lie, some 23 million people, nearly the population of all of Australia. It is a terrifying success, that Trump could hypnotize a population the size of the fifth continent into fervently believing a rank falsehood without a shred of truth to it. Part II of the coup was to threaten, browbeat, and menace Republican officials in the four swing states into refusing to certify the Biden win. Monica Palmer and William Hartman, the two Republican canvassers for Wayne County in Michigan, initially refused to certify the results, in accordance with Trump's wish, threatening to hold up the declaration of Biden's win there. Only a massive public outcry made them back down. Trump then called Republicans from the Michigan state legislature to the White House for consultations, urging them to refuse to certify Biden. Trump repeatedly called the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, and other officials in that state, using organized-crime code words to intimate that something bad would happen to them if they didn't "find" the 11,000-some votes he needed to beat Biden. Raffensperger, to protect himself from any Trump retaliation, made and released a tape of the threatening conversation. When the Republican state officials and legislators defied Trump and certified Biden's election, Trump turned his attention to Congress. He worked the phones like a maniac, cajoling and threatening. He menaced any senators or congressmen who refused to vote against certifying the state tallies in the four swing states with being primaried. He told Kelly Loeffler, a Republican candidate for the senate in Georgia, that he would "do a number on her" if she didn't reject Biden's win in her state. Trump's scenario appears to have been this: Enough Republicans in the House and the Senate would reject the results in the four swing states to raise serious questions about a Biden win. Then Mike Pence, the president of the senate, would use this substantial dissent about the results to cast doubt on the results. Trump crony Michael Flynn suggested that Trump at that point use the military to "rerun the election," according to the NYT. It became clear to Trump, however, that Pence would not play ball, and that he could only count on twelve Republican senators to try to overturn Biden's election. He needed some way of applying even more pressure or of sowing enough turmoil to create an opening for some sort of decisive action on his part. Part 3 of the coup attempt was to put pressure on Congress to challenge the Biden win through a massive rally of the far Right before the Capitol on January 6. Trump called for the rally, and came to address it in the late morning. Although he urged them to be peaceful, he did say "We fight like hell, and if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore." Trump had done a dry run for this mob action in Michigan. When, last spring, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer imposed an economic lockdown to combat the rapid spread of the coronavirus, Trump tweeted out "LIBERATE MICHIGAN." In response, an assemblage of white supremacists, conspiracy theorists, gun nuts and restaurateurs (!?) showed up at the state capitol in Lansing. Guess what? They invaded the statehouse and the lawmakers had to suspend their work that day. Trump's attacks on Whitmer also had the effect of encouraging a far right domestic terror cell to make a plan to kidnap and possibly kill her. With the Michigan example before him, it is impossible that Trump was unaware that his dog whistles to the far right, his demonization of leaders who defied him, could produce violence. The mob of black shirts he assembled was intended to intimidate Pence and the legislators and to create chaos, of which he clearly thought he could take advantage. He used them to make clear to the Republican senators and representatives that the party faithful (the QAnon/ white supremacist mob) would not put up with anything else and that not only their careers but their very lives hung in the balance. Hence his glee when the Capitol was invaded. Elements of the mob who invaded the Capitol were chanting "Hang Mike Pence," and others wanted to get Nancy Pelosi. The politicians were in real danger, and it was only the efficiency of the Capitol police in whisking them away to safe rooms or the basement that saved their lives. Had Pence or Pelosi been kidnapped, wounded or killed, it would have halted the Biden certification process for some time, giving Trump the opportunity to find a way to remain in office. It is not that Trump himself urged or planned the breach of the Capitol or the infliction of harm on the legislators, it is that he was attempting to create an unnamed chaos, which he viewed as advantageous to his efforts to remain in office. The unusual lightness of the police presence in DC compared to all the other demonstrations held in the past year raises questions about whether Trump's security officials were attempting to make sure the mob was not interfered with. Gov. Larry Hogan said that it took 90 minutes for the Pentagon to give him permission to send in the Maryland National Guard once he asked. This was at a time when thugs were roaming the Capitol chanting "Hang Mike Pence." An hour and a half response time seems a little slow under the circumstances. It was a coup attempt of sorts. It reminds me of the much more successful 1953 CIA coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran. CIA field officer Kermit Roosevelt bought mobs with millions of dollars in the capital to intimidate parliament and encourage anti-democratic forces to depose the prime minister. Trump's was a crackpot conspiracy-theory coup attempt, though. It was never plausible except in very fevered minds like those of Trump, Alex Jones and other exotic flora and fauna. But over 140 congressmen and 8 senators did join the attempt to overturn the election even after the mob tried to kill or kidnap them, which means it wasn't as implausible as I wish it was. And the buy-in Trump has in the Republican Party for this coup attempt signals severe trouble ahead. (c) 2021 Juan R.I. Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. He has written extensively on modern Islamic movements in Egypt, the Persian Gulf and South Asia and has given numerous media interviews on the war on terrorism and the Iraq War. He lived in various parts of the Muslim world for nearly 10 years and continues to travel widely there. He speaks Arabic, Farsi and Urdu. |
 Joe gives the corporate salute!
Dear Uberfuhrer Manchin, Congratulations, you have just been awarded the "Vidkun Quisling Award!" Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, George Stephanopoulos, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Prescott Bush, Sam Bush, Fredo Bush, Kate Bush, Kyle Busch, Anheuser Busch, Vidkun Quisling, and last year's winner Volksjudge Samuel (Sammy the con) Alito. Without your lock step calling for the repeal of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, your attempted blocking of a $2000 covid relief bill, Yemen, Syria, Iran and those many other profitable oil wars to come would have been impossible! With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Rethuglican Whores" you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account! Along with this award you will be given the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds presented by our glorious Fuhrer, Herr Trump at a gala celebration at "der Fuhrer Bunker," formally the "White House," on 01-19-2021. We salute you herr Manchin, seig heil!
Signed by, Heil Trump |
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Call me old-fashioned, but when the president of the United States encourages armed insurgents to breach the Capitol and threaten the physical safety of Congress, in order to remain in power, I call it an attempted coup.
Last week' rampage left five dead, including a Capitol Hill police officer who was killed when he tangled with the pro-Trump mob. We're fortunate the carnage wasn't greater.
That the attempted coup failed shouldn't blind us to its significance or the stain it has left on America. Nor to the importance of holding those responsible fully accountable.
Trump's culpability is beyond dispute. "There's no question the president formed the mob, the president incited the mob, the president addressed the mob. He lit the flame," said Rep. Elizabeth Cheney, the third-highest ranking Republican in the House.
He should be impeached, convicted, and removed from office - immediately.
To let the clock run out on his presidency and allow Trump to seek the presidency again would signal that attempted coups are part of the American system. If Senate Republicans can install a new Supreme Court justice in eight days, Trump can be removed from office within ten.
He should then be arrested and tried for inciting violence and sedition (along with Trump Jr. and Rudy "trial-by-combat" Giuliani).
Those who attacked the Capitol should also be prosecuted. They have no First Amendment right to try to overthrow the U.S. government.
Trump's accomplices on Capitol Hill, most notably Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, should be forced to resign. Knowing Trump's allegations of voting fraud were false, Cruz and Hawley nonetheless led an attempt to exclude Biden electors, even after the storming of the Capitol.
The United States Constitution says that "no Person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress" who "shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against" the Constitution, "or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof."
Both Cruz and Hawley are eyeing runs for the presidency in 2024. They should be barred from running.
Other abettors are now trying to distance themselves, but their conversions come too late.
Senator Lindsey Graham now says Trump must "understand that his actions were the problem, not the solution," and criticizes the White House for making "accusations that cannot be proven."
Graham had been one of Trump's key attack dogs, even bullying state election officials to change voting tallies. If Graham is not forced to resign, he should at least be censured and stripped of his ranking membership on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Vice President Michael Pence finally broke with Trump, but only after remaining mute as Trump lied and bullied his way through the last eight weeks, thereby signaling agreement with his preposterous claims.
McConnell should also resign or be censured and stripped of committee assignments. Pence should be barred from any future public office.
Some administration officials have already resigned in response to the attempted coup. Transportation secretary Elaine Chao said it was "entirely avoidable," and education secretary Betsy DeVos told Trump there was "no mistake the impact your rhetoric had." Other Trumpers are reportedly jumping ship, too.
Yet before Wednesday most of them defended Trump's antics, lavished him with praise, and willingly did his dirty work. Their complicity should forever haunt their reputations and consciences.
Other accessories are Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, and Sundar Pichai,CEO of Alphabet, YouTube's parent company.
For four years, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have functioned as Trump's megaphones, amplifying his every lie and rant. When pressured to remove Trump's fabrications about the election, they labeled them "disputed."
Twitter has now permanently suspended Trump, preventing him from sending messages to his more than 88 million followers "due to the risk of further incitement for violence." Facebook has banned him indefinitely. YouTube should be next.
But why did it take an attempted coup for them to act?
Many business leaders who are now denouncing the violence enthusiastically bankrolled Trump's re-election campaign, knowing full well who he was and what he was capable of doing. And they've had no qualms about advertising on his largest megaphones, including Fox News. All are complicit because they knew Trump would stop at nothing.
Fox News's mendacious hosts and producers have no excuse. After repeatedly telling Trump supporters the election was stolen, they're now saying the attempted coup was "understandable" because Trump supporters believed the election was stolen. Morally, if not legally, they share responsibility for this travesty.
All are all part of the ecosystem that led to Trump's sedition. That ecosystem is still in place.
Those who say we should "look forward" to a new administration and forget or dismiss what occurred last week are delusional. Unless all who participated in or abetted the attempted overthrow of the United States government are held accountable, it will happen again. Next time it may succeed.
(c) 2021 Robert B. Reich has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. His latest book is "Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few." His web site is www.robertreich.org.
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 I Showed Raffensperger Evidence Of Wrongful Voter Purges. He Ignored It by Greg Palast Atlanta - Georgia's Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is no hero. Since the release of the tape in which Raffensperger is heard resisting Donald Trump's bullying attempts to overturn Joe Biden's victory, the Georgia politician has been portrayed as a defender of democracy. The record says otherwise. Republican Raffensperger did all he could leading up to the election to suppress the rights of legitimate voters - including his overzealous, error-filled purge of more than 198,000 Georgians from the voter rolls before this year's elections. This wholesale attack on the right to vote was called out in a report issued in September by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Georgia. As principal investigator and author of the report, I can tell you I was stunned at the breadth of his office's vote suppression tactics. Indeed, Raffensperger has ducked and stalled to avoid a federal court's admonition to correct the voter rolls and restore these Georgians' rights. And where did Trump get his ridiculous claim that Georgians were voting twice? This chestnut of disinformation came from Raffensperger himself. The GOP politician made this wild accusation of voter fraud two months before the November election, stating, Joe McCarthy-style, that he had proof that, "There are a thousand people who actually double voted" in the primaries. How many did the state ultimately name and arrest for this felony crime? Exactly none - zero. Just a month ago, his office issued a rule that would allow counties to reject a new voter's registration if the voter did not also have a car registered in Georgia. No car, no vote. Really? This "emergency" rule was ostensibly proposed to prevent out-of-state residents from claiming a voting address in Georgia. But luckily, the NAACP got wind of this new trick - snuck in on a Sunday afternoon - and denounced it for what it was: a naked attempt to disenfranchise the "car-less," students and the poor. Hide and Seek With Voter Rolls On December 2, Black Voters Matter, the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition and the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project sued Raffensperger to re-enfranchise more than 198,000 Georgians he'd removed from the voter rolls identified in the ACLU report. A federal court requested the State meet with our team of experts to correct the "discrepancies" in Raffensperger's purge list. That kicked off a game of hide-and-seek as the secretary of state ducked and stalled, effectively preventing these voters from casting a ballot in this do-or-die Senate run-off. The game verged on the tragicomic. Two weeks ago, with the election looming, a team of the nation's top civil rights attorneys joined LaTosha Brown of Black Voters Matter, announcing on the State Capitol steps that they were going to the secretary of state's office for that meeting expected by the court. Television cameras rolling, the attorneys marched past the busy governor's office, past the Confederate statues, to Raffensperger's office - which was locked, dark, with the shutters closed, with a phone number taped to the door. The number sent us to an answering machine. On a hunch, the legal team, cameras in tow, set off on a hunt and found Raffensperger's director of elections in another building. He simply refused to meet, or even set a meeting, knowing full well that the stall would keep tens of thousands of Georgians from casting their vote this Tuesday. More troubling was the cause of the "error" that wrongly removed 198,351 voters from the rolls. They were removed on the grounds they had moved their residence out of their county or out of Georgia entirely. That sounds fair: If you don't live in Georgia, you shouldn't vote there. But there was a problem: The state never checked the ultimate expert on where you live, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). Confirming an address change with the post office is not just common sense - it's the law. The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 says voters cannot be purged from voter rolls for moving without checking with one of the official USPS licensees who have access to the postal computers. We gave Raffenperger's "movers" list to three USPS licensees and they all came back with the same answer: 198,000 of these Georgians had never moved. And we contacted hundreds by phone, and videotaped many in the homes from which they supposedly had moved, including Ishver Diaz, Michael Watson and, in a prior purge, Christine Jordan, who is 94 years old. I met Jordan at the house from which she'd supposedly moved where she had a photo of herself and her cousin, Martin Luther King Jr., having dinner. Despite being provided the names and addresses of the wrongfully purged, even video tape, Raffensperger refused to restore their rights before the run-off. For this resistance, rife with the scent of Jim Crow, Atlanta attorney Gerald Griggs dubbed him, "The Suppressor-in-Chief." It is troubling that, when confronted with his failure to check his movers list with the postal service, Raffensperger's office claimed they had, in fact, obtained the list from an authorized licensee, Anchor Corp., one of only a couple dozen specialist mailing companies allowed to access the Postal Service computers. But there is no record of their hiring Anchor. And I know they could not have, because my foundation, the Palast Investigative Fund, hired Anchor, one of three postal licensees that identified the wrongly purged. Do "heroes" play games with federal courts to bend the outcome of an election? Before we lavish hosannas on partisan voting officials, let's check the facts. (c) 2021 Greg Palast is author of the New York Times bestseller, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic, named Book of the Year 2012 on BBC Newsnight Review.
~~~ Nate Beeler ~~~  |
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Parting Shots-
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