Mob storms Capitol

If you want to learn about how everybody with the power to prevent Jan 6 ignored or was prevented from seeing the evidence of the threat... I recommend listening to Fresh Air from today. Trump’s administration was instrumental in preventing agencies from responding to the threat. There is no question he wanted the mob to storm the Capitol and made sure there wouldn’t be enough security to prevent it. He should be in prison until his death for treason.

 
Hey, Supreme Court, can you put a stay on the Texas abortion ban that has no exceptions for rape… so that women can still get abortions while you decide the case? SCOTUS: NOPE!

Hey, appeals court, can you put a stay on this order for Trump to release documents relating to a mob storming the Capitol? COURT: Yep!!!


Tells you a lot about our justice system, I think.
 
Getting real sick of hearing about Trump’s never-ending stream of challenges. Trump will seemingly never suffer any consequences for his actions. He games the legal system, and it’s really just a waste of money because even if he confessed to being a financially and morally bankrupt criminal tomorrow, his base would still see him as a victim of the left.

He seems impervious to karma. I’m sure the committee will eventually get the documents and records, but then what? It’s not like it will sway any minds. Their subpoenas have no teeth when a criminal lowlife drunk like Steve Bannon - no different than you or I as far as a congressional subpoena is concerned - just ignores it.
 
UK(IP)'s majorest dirtbag interviews CFEFWSG, there were grunts

Individual-ONE:
Well, you know, I didn't have — that was a rally that was there … and if you look, it was a massive rally with hundreds of hundreds of thousands of people. I think it was the largest crowd I've ever spoken before … but if you would've looked at the crowd's size — nobody wants to talk about that. I believe it was the biggest and most people I ever — and I've spoken to very big crowds. I have never spoken in front of a crowd that size — nobody ever talks about that. … And then, unfortunately, some bad things happened. But also, the other side had some bad things happen.

Nobody gives him enough credit for how iuge a crowd of anti-democracy terrorists he drew.



note: link is to RawStory, which has horrible formatting
 
UK(IP)'s majorest dirtbag interviews CFEFWSG, there were grunts

Individual-ONE:​
Well, you know, I didn't have — that was a rally that was there … and if you look, it was a massive rally with hundreds of hundreds of thousands of people. I think it was the largest crowd I've ever spoken before … but if you would've looked at the crowd's size — nobody wants to talk about that. I believe it was the biggest and most people I ever — and I've spoken to very big crowds. I have never spoken in front of a crowd that size — nobody ever talks about that. … And then, unfortunately, some bad things happened. But also, the other side had some bad things happen.

Nobody gives him enough credit for how iuge a crowd of anti-democracy terrorists he drew.



note: link is to RawStory, which has horrible formatting
Is there even a sentence out of that word salad?
 
Is there even a sentence out of that word salad?

Only elitist liberals form complete sentences and they do it so they can look down on hard-working Americans who don't have the time or the ivy league education to form or comprehend complete sentences.

I just insulted Trump supporters with that sentence. Not with the content, but with the fact that it is a sentence. I just did it again just now. I'll...like, you know...because, stop.
 

Suing to block a subpoena? How does discovery work in an action like that?
 

Suing to block a subpoena? How does discovery work in an action like that?

Yeah, that was my first thought. He can be deposed, and the defendants can add counterclaims so that the scope of that deposition would be exactly what he’s trying to avoid. This must be an attempt to run out the clock.
 
Trump lost his appeal to hide documents related to the Jan 6 insurrection. The next step would be the Supreme Court. I wonder if his 3 appointees will protect him. Legally, it seems unlikely that he would prevail. However, this court seems quite disinterested with the law lately.

 
Still waiting for the Republican Party's megadonors to snap out of it and understand what they underwrote. Business as usual seems to have resumed after an initial declaration of corporations that they'd no longer donate to the party. Clearly --as many pundits had predicted-- what they meant by that was that they wouldn't kick in any money during the then current quarter.

Shameless, and another indicator that yes it's K-street calling the shots. So that makes K-street complicit in my book. What I'm really waiting for is for someone to make a compelling case that corporate monies have been and still are supporting sedition. It's time for the SCOTUS Citizens United 2010 decision to be reviewed, not by the courts but by the Congress, while the Dems still have a chance to legislate some qualifiers on the idea that a corporation has the rights of a person, including the right to buy all the free speech they can afford. How about the right to go to jail for seditious behavior, is that in there somewhere?
 
With this SCotUS, it will not be long before there is a ruling demonstrating that a person's constitutional rights may not be allowed to interfere with the privileges of a corporation.

Well we're already pretty much there with the godforsaken gun lobby, forever still wrapping "privilege" in the gown of a constitutionally guaranteed right, And corporations in whose interests eminent domain seizure is deployed by government might still have to work harder than the gun lobby does any more to prove that their gig is also (if incidentally) in the public interest, but somehow it still does happen.

But sure, we're almost there also via a vocal and well funded minority of citizens practicing other special interest advocacy, e.g. those now clamoring for the overthrow of Roe v Wade. That's louder even since the 5-4 lean of the court today regarding the Texas SB-8 case. Chief Justice Roberts has again tried to slow down somewhat an actual overturn of Roe v Wade, but Trump's newer appointees aren't going along with him. The court today declined even to ditch the absurd private-citizen aspect of the Texas law's enforcement provision, although it didn't close the door on the plaintiff's right to try again to make the case to the state. It did narrow the options in terms of targets who could be sued.

As far as how corporate money fits into this: some of the right wing money behind the push to overturn Roe is interested primarily not in the abortion issue per se, but simply in keeping those particular one-issue voters electing Republicans to office.

This tactic works to advance the donors' own interests, which can then continue to reside off radar of both press and public, not out there on hot-button protest lines. It's still respectable to donate money to the anti-choice cause, because it is still carefully called Pro Life by the right.

Pro Life... has a nice ring to it, yes? This tag has stuck, regardless of the facts and figures about rising maternal mortality rates due to lack of prenatal care at women's health clinics now shuttered, and the irrefutable fact that Republicans' protective interest in the life, health and development of a child born to a single mother wanes rapidly, and in direct proportion to the advancing age of the child.

And... it's not like some of the big money behind political candidates sworn to work at overturning Roe v Wade would hesitate to procure an individual's abortion when it might seem medically necessary or even expedient --either a legal procedure or otherwise, at a convenient location or half a world away. These guys are essentially libertarians, not "conservatives" in the traditional sense. But hypocrisy counts for nothing.

Their corporate interests are just as single-minded as those of the wedges of the American electorate to which the campaigns they fund are meant to appeal. But for them it's simply about deterring impediments to regulation and taxation of industrial revenues. In the USA, it still takes votes to put lawmakers into office. So investing in political campaigns is seen as a reasonable investment. Buy all the votes you can... on either side of the aisle or both sides of the aisle, what the hey.

Does anyone sit around in a CFO's office adding up the special interests being supported in that manner and go "wait a mo, aren't we just more or less buying gridlock here?"

Sure, but gridlock has its appeal to corporations. They know where they stand and are likely to stay. They might like things to be different but they can work around what they know: there's always the annual appropriations bill to sneak a couple lines of de-reg into here and there.
 
I sometimes get tired of making myself continue to read the long pieces still being written about January 6th, the ones that dig into the data gradually being revealed about those who participated in the insurrection. That's especially true sometimes when the perceived value of the piece for me might be buried pretty far down, well past a lot of the color and flare that come from quoting some fascinatingly off-the-rail exemplars of either particpants or people purporting to have insight into their motives.

I understand a magazine has to draw a reader in. Sometimes I just think OK well get on with it already, I'm here.

Anyway I dutifully and then with more interest started through the Atlantic's latest piece on the incursion. Here's the money quote for me and I'm not even done reading the thing yet. But I'm not tired any more, at least not tired of reading this piece.

Pape’s team mapped the insurgents by home county and ran statistical analyses looking for patterns that might help explain their behavior. The findings were counterintuitive. Counties won by Trump in the 2020 election were less likely than counties won by Biden to send an insurrectionist to the Capitol. The higher Trump’s share of votes in a county, in fact, the lower the probability that insurgents lived there. Why would that be? Likewise, the more rural the county, the fewer the insurgents. The researchers tried a hypothesis: Insurgents might be more likely to come from counties where white household income was dropping. Not so. Household income made no difference at all.

Only one meaningful correlation emerged. Other things being equal, insurgents were much more likely to come from a county where the white share of the population was in decline. For every one-point drop in a county’s percentage of non-Hispanic whites from 2015 to 2019, the likelihood of an insurgent hailing from that county increased by 25 percent. This was a strong link, and it held up in every state.

So it's all about the fears of white supremacists. What a surprise... but in a way, it is a surprise. A surprise that the data fits the vibe so well.

The article is online in the upcoming January edition of The Atlantic:


As I noted earlier, I haven't finished reading the piece. Not sure I buy some of what's asserted, but this is one article about the insurrection that I'm not sorry for taking the time to read.

(Still pondering whether I should ever apologize to The Atlantic's current masthead, for once having mailed them a letter that ran to "I think I liked you better when you published more fiction and hadn't moved out of New England yet," Gonna keep that decision on ice for awhile.)
 
I sometimes get tired of making myself continue to read the long pieces still being written about January 6th, the ones that dig into the data gradually being revealed about those who participated in the insurrection. That's especially true sometimes when the perceived value of the piece for me might be buried pretty far down, well past a lot of the color and flare that come from quoting some fascinatingly off-the-rail exemplars of either particpants or people purporting to have insight into their motives.

I understand a magazine has to draw a reader in. Sometimes I just think OK well get on with it already, I'm here.

Anyway I dutifully and then with more interest started through the Atlantic's latest piece on the incursion. Here's the money quote for me and I'm not even done reading the thing yet. But I'm not tired any more, at least not tired of reading this piece.



So it's all about the fears of white supremacists. What a surprise... but in a way, it is a surprise. A surprise that the data fits the vibe so well.

The article is online in the upcoming January edition of The Atlantic:


As I noted earlier, I haven't finished reading the piece. Not sure I buy some of what's asserted, but this is one article about the insurrection that I'm not sorry for taking the time to read.

(Still pondering whether I should ever apologize to The Atlantic's current masthead, for once having mailed them a letter that ran to "I think I liked you better when you published more fiction and hadn't moved out of New England yet," Gonna keep that decision on ice for awhile.)
I finished the piece. One thing I found interesting about the “main character” in the story is that he was admittedly a C student, not a standout in anything. But whenever he was passed over for a job, he automatically assumed it was because they hired a woman or a black person to meet diversity goals… not that a woman or black person might have actually done well in school or have been a better candidate than him.
 
I finished the piece. One thing I found interesting about the “main character” in the story is that he was admittedly a C student, not a standout in anything. But whenever he was passed over for a job, he automatically assumed it was because they hired a woman or a black person to meet diversity goals… not that a woman or black person might have actually done well in school or have been a better candidate than him.
Yeah, that’s a hell of a way to lead your life. It’s everyone else’s fault. Works for Trump.
 
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