You’re too late

Arizona has certified that Joe Biden won the state. So has Wisconsin. The nasty guy’s lawyers don’t seem to be done. Their arguments aren’t getting any better. Reps. Mike Kelly and SeanParnell tried to get the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to overturn the vote by mail law and invalidate 6.9 million ballots. Lauren Floyd of Daily Kos reported the court said you’re too late. If you really thought the law was unconstitutional you should have filed the suit before mailed-in ballots helped you win your primary. Marissa Higgins of Kos suggests that to become a better ally one should remove ableist language from what they say and write. Ableist language discriminates based on disability. We use it because we’re used to using it.

What can that look like? For example, think about how often you use these words or phrases: crazy, lame, crippled, paralyzed, schizophrenic, bipolar, OCD, obsessive-compulsive, dumb, stupid, blind spot, blind reading, falling on deaf ears, moronic, insane, or psycho. That list is far from exhaustive, too. ... You might be wondering: Well, what can I say instead? Try being more specific. If you say you’re “paralyzed,” for example, you might be referring to a feeling of being trapped, of being afraid, of being stuck, or so on. You can just say you feel stuck. If you feel that someone’s behavior is erratic or difficult to understand, you can simply say that, instead of describing it as psychotic or attributing it to a specific mental health condition. People’s conditions do not make them bad, evil, or a burden.

In another post Higgins took on another language issue. There are a lot of reasons to criticize the nasty guy and I’ve discussed many of them over the last four years. But too many people go the easy route and criticize his weight.

Criticizing someone’s weight is easy. It takes almost no effort or mental gymnastics to pull it off. It’s almost certain to get you some ‘likes’ on Twitter. Why? Because fatphobia is very, very ingrained in our collective understanding of humor. But it doesn’t have to be. A hard, but important, truth: Trump—and anyone else—would not be a better leader (or person) if he were thinner. He would not be a kinder person if he were thinner. He would not make better policy decisions. He would not care more about the American people. You get the idea.

In addition, the nasty guy isn’t going to be reading your tweets. But the real people in your life will. And those are the people your comments will hurt. And that might change how comfortable they feel around you. So call out policies and actions and be clear about it. But leave out the fatphobia.

One cannot engage in barbarous action without becoming a barbarian

Walter Einenkel of Daily Kos discussed a recent document from the General Accounting Office on the millions of Americans whose low wages mean they use federal assistance to get by. Conservatives like to blame poverty on laziness, but 70% of those on federal assistance also work full time. Most work in the private sector – for the “job creators.” A Washington Post discussion of the GAO report notes (as Einenkel wrote):

Walmart and McDonald’s are at the top of list of employers with business models that rely on the American taxpayer to pay for their workers’ health, food, and housing. … A reminder here is that these are the Americans who work all of the jobs Americans rely on, so that we can use drive-thrus and eat things, walk into stores and buy things, and rush oneself or one’s kids into public bathrooms that have been cleaned. Not coincidentally, these are all of the companies run by some of the wealthiest people in our country and the world. Besides Walmart and McDonalds, “Dollar Tree, Dollar General, Amazon, Burger King and FedEx” also relied on underpaying large swaths of their workforce.

Dartagnan of the Kos community wrote about one aspect of the nasty guy’s claims of election fraud. These claims of fraud have focused on black cities such as Detroit and Philadelphia. The nasty guy did a little bit better, certainly no worse, in these cities than he did in 2016. But he did significantly worse in the white suburbs surrounding those cities. Dartagnan wrote that we won’t hear the nasty guy accuse the suburbs of fraud.

Because they don’t fit the narrative he’s fed to his credulous, susceptible voting base. The fact that people wealthier, more educated, and worst of all (to them)—mostly of the same race as that base—flushed Trump’s hopes of reelection down the proverbial toilet is just too inconvenient for Trump to face.

These voters would have to admit the nasty guy’s claims of voter fraud are fraudulent. And that would bring the nasty guy’s con job crashing down. Meteor Blades, in his Saturday Snippets column for Kos wrote summarized an article in Bloomberg discussing the nasty guy’s efforts to sell oil leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve before he leaves office. Thankfully, it isn’t going well. Oil companies would need the price of oil to be $80 a barrel or higher for this to make sense. Prices are currently $46 a barrel and won’t get back up to $80 anytime soon. Oil companies have an option of getting financing from banks, but environmentalist and Alaska Native tribes have persuaded lenders – including five top banks – that oil investments are a risk because of climate change. Activists have also sent the same message to the top insurance companies. A quote for the day:

A pre-emptive war in 'defense' of freedom would surely destroy freedom, because one simply cannot engage in barbarous action without becoming a barbarian, because one cannot defend human values by calculated and unprovoked violence without doing mortal damage to the values one is trying to defend. ~~Sen. J. William Fullbright, The Arrogance of Power (1967)

This particular item has been in my browser tabs for about two months (even restored when I lost the tabs) so I don’t remember how I came across it – probably spotted it on my way to finding something else. Michael Sandel is a political philosophy professor at Harvard University. He wrote the book The Tyranny of Merit. Sandel was the guest of Robin Young for NPR’s Here & Now. The website summarizes the book with this:

Those with advantages like money and education have been taught that they succeed on their own merit, while those without advantages and support are raised to believe that their struggles are borne of their own failings. And for those among the minority of Americans who do attend a four-year college, claiming superiority is among the country's last acceptable prejudices.

I didn’t listen to the audio. Instead, I read the first chapter of the book on the Here & Now page. This chapter is titled “Winners and Losers” and here are my thoughts: The populist protest that brought the nasty guy to the White House four years ago is real, but its source is usually described incorrectly. It isn’t just racism and a reaction to immigrants supposedly taking their jobs. It isn’t just job losses in a global economy. The nasty guy tapped into both of those ideas to get elected. The first explanation is this is racism, that white male working-class voters see a growing racial, ethnic, and gender diversity and feel they will become a minority in “their” country, “strangers in their own land.” They feel they are the ones most victimized by discrimination. They second explanation is they can’t, or don’t want to, adapt to an economic world where a job for life is no longer the norm. Jobs and skills need to be renewed frequently. They lash out at the global economy, which cannot be changed. Their anger would be best addressed by job-training programs. While both explanations are true, they aren’t the whole truth. And missing the rest of the truth allows elites, which created these conditions, to avoid responsibility. Two faults of the elites are behind the rest of the truth. There is a technocratic concept of politics bound up in the faith that market mechanisms are the primary instruments for achieving public good. It is technocratic in that it drains public discourse of moral arguments. But this brought growing inequality and blurred national identities. The political divided came to be between closed borders, meaning closed-minded and tribal, or open-minded and global. The technocratic approach meant that governing required technocrats – issues couldn’t be understood by mere citizens. This was embraced by both the left and the right. The policies enacted by this model by both presidents Reagan and Clinton had benefits that flowed up. Democrats did little to address widening inequality and taming capitalism. Obama spoke of progressive politics that included moral and spiritual purpose. But he didn’t govern that way. Anger over the Wall Street bailout fueled populist protest creating both the Occupy movement and the Tea Party movement. Democrats need to rethink (I think a better word is drop) their market-oriented approach to governing. The second fault has to do with the social recognition and esteem. It isn’t just the explosion of inequality. Politicians on the left and right have called for greater equality of opportunity.

This rhetoric of opportunity is summed up in the slogan that those who work hard and play by the rules should be able to rise “as far as their talents will take them.”

But this rings hollow. It’s not easy to rise. And it is at odds with our faith that mobility is the answer to inequality. But the ability to rise depends on access to education, health care, and resources to equip people for work. And those resources no longer seem available. The rhetoric of opportunity no longer inspires. We can’t just help people scramble up a ladder whose rungs grow farther apart. There are moral problems with meritocracy. First, central to meritocracy is that factors beyond our control should make no difference. But they clearly do. Second, why should a talented person deserve greater rewards than a person who works equally hard? Third, meritocracy generates hubris among the winners and humiliation among the losers. It is the belief that those at the top deserve their fate. And those at the bottom do too. Humility – There, but for the grace of God, or the accident of fortune, go I.” – is banished because meritocracy banishes grace. We no longer feel we share a common fate. The belief that those at the bottom deserve their fate also leads to humiliation. The populist complaint is against the tyranny of merit. And it is justified. Alas, that is the end of the excerpt. The working man has been given a choice between Democrats who do nothing about inequality and Republicans who actively increase inequality as they exploit worker’s anger. Workers see Republicans are at least acknowledging their anger.

Honesty over unity and justice over peace

I downloaded the Michigan coronavirus data today as I’ve done for many Saturdays since summer. There’s a downturn in cases per day over the last ten days. However, I don’t yet trust it as real. First, because Thanksgiving Day disrupted record gathering. Second, a peak about 2½ weeks ago has risen from 9,500 new cases to 10,000 as cases are assigned to the day symptoms first appeared, not the day reported. If a day 2½ weeks ago was adjusted I’m pretty sure days since then will be too. I noticed a new feature on the state website – a slide deck giving all sorts of data on the virus in Michigan. The deck was created on November 24 based on data up to November 21, so about a week old. There were comparisons to other states, comparisons amongst cities in the state, data on testing, on numbers of cases, and deaths. I’m glad my personal charting program shows lines that match those in the state charts. The data also has data on cases by age, race, and ethnicity. A chart shows the likely places of contact – assisted living, K-12 schools, and manufacturing are at the top of the chart. Another shows cases by region of the state – around Grand Rapids and the Upper Peninsula are hotspots. A chart shows rate of ICU use and another shows data on contact tracing. I got it all here. I found it interesting, though know it might be more data than you want. I read through another episode of Gaslit Nation hosted by Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa. This episode is titled The Breitbart Senate. Chalupa reminded us we can all do something to get two Democrats elected in the Georgia runoff on January 5th. If they win they will boot Moscow Mitch from the job of Senate Majority Leader. So do what you can! Back to the coup. It’s not over yet, though we seem to be in a quiet time. Though none of the predicted tactics have worked there are still plenty the nasty guy can do. There are still attempts at litigation to get a case before the Supreme Court where his lackeys, Kavanaugh and Barrett, can grant a second term. Kendzior wrote:

Trump and his backers may also turn to actual violence, threats of violence that function as intimidation, continued bureaucratic obstruction or creating a national emergency as a pretext to invoke the military. This is worth considering given all the strange hirings and firings at the DoD over the last month. These are just a few possible measures. Trump may also be cutting a deal behind the scenes so that he is not prosecuted for his long litany of crimes, which would be disastrous for our nation.

Kendzior repeats her call for prosecution of the nasty guy, and also of the elite criminals that back him. She is afraid that Joe Biden’s calls for unity and the end of demonization mean he might wimp out on prosecuting administration crimes.

For what would actually unite the United States is an end to elite criminal impunity. For four decades, we have not only seen the exact same crimes carried out, but the same criminals committing or enabling them for decades on end, Manafort, Stone, Barr, the Trump and Kushner families and so on. The US operates according to mafia dynasty politics where entire families are deemed above the law—like the mass murdering Sackler family, for example—and child traffickers immersed in massive espionage plots like Jeffrey Epstein or Ghislaine Maxwell now have more of a voice in US politics than the everyday citizen. This is a vile and unsustainable situation and ignoring it is what led us to this point to begin with. The point of cracking down on Trump and his crime cult is not about revenge, and it is certainly not about partisanship; it is about preventing these crimes from occurring again and protecting the American people from dangerous criminal elites who have stolen our livelihoods and opportunities.

Chalupa reminded us that the relief when Obama became president meant people stopped paying attention. That resulted in heavy GOP gerrymandering in 2011 and the party becoming more obstructionist, leading to the nasty guy. So even if the nasty guy isn’t lying to us on the news every day the threat is not gone. President Biden is buying us time to allow us to dismantle the systems that allowed the rise of the nasty guy. How can we have unity with people intent on dehumanizing us? Unity with people stuck in Big Tech information silos? The GOP senators appear to be in one of those information silos, in a conservative Breitbart echo chamber. How can we have unity while disinformation flourishes? Yeah, Biden may be making adult decisions, but there will be a rabid backlash. Chalupa said the backlash won’t end until Facebook is broken up, it’s head Mark Zuckerberg is removed, and there are laws against harmful disinformation. Kendzior added that calls for unity seem facile because they never say on what premise. Should we just trust our institutions? We have plenty of evidence that we can’t – see William Barr, head of the Department of No Justice. Kendzior said:

So I think what we need to emphasize here—and this goes for the Biden administration as well—is honesty over unity and justice over peace. I think whatever unity flows from that will be a true unity, and that is the reason that I emphasized going after elite criminal impunity. … I think disillusionment is the main mood of this country and that disillusionment stems from things like elite criminal impunity, from watching for decades on end wealthy people getting away with whatever they want, whatever brutal action, that does trickle down to us as ordinary people. … The thing is, is that the corrosion, the rot, it is systemic. It is everywhere and that means it's within the Democratic Party, it's within a bunch of institutions that are supposed to be neutral. It's the whole thing. With the election of Biden, we get a second chance. We would not have had this second chance had Trump stayed in for a second term. Then it would have been the end. It would have been the end of the American experiment. We're in for tough times anyway, but we finally have a chance to kind of dig deep and root out elite criminal impunity, kleptocracy, corruption in the tech industries, the use of surveillance by them, very long rooted problems like poverty, income inequality.

The Biden administration will not be able to pursue their policies …

when you have a nexus of white collar crime and organized crime breathing down your throats, inhibiting your movements, pulling you away from the People and into a vortex of dark money. That is what the result will be if they do not pursue, at the least, rigorous investigations of what's transpired and share that truth with the American public.

Chalupa listed some of the things on Biden’s agenda. It will still be many months before the virus is contained. Lots of people are hurting because of lost family and lost jobs. Beyond those with recent loss are the millions of people in poverty in a rich nation. There is the huge profitable prison system. There is a lot we have to do. Stay grounded in empathy. Chalupa listed a couple historical examples. One was Ulysses Grant, president a few years after the Civil War. Chalupa mentioned it because there is a new miniseries of Grant now out. He gets praise because he was the first civil rights president. He was a KKK hunter, sending the army to squash them. Only after Grant listened to idiot pundits who accused him of acting like a dictator did he stop – which was the end of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow. The other is from the PBS series The Rise of Hitler. It describes how fragile democracy can be. Chalupa mentioned Josef Hartinger. He investigated the first deaths at Dachau. The soldiers said the four men were trying to escape. But Hartinger saw they were Jews and that they were beaten and shot at close range – murdered – and their bodies piled together. In the six months Hartinger was allowed to investigate there were no more murders at Dachau. But when the Nazis shut him down, murders resumed and spread. Chalupa talked about the nasty guy’s family separation policy, which constitutes torture. She said:

How can you treat human beings that way? That is the question we must always scream and be hysterical and alarmist over. We must risk our careers and reputations when lives are at stake. We can never normalize these threats, even in the face of cultish worship and fascist machinery or indifference. Seeing the murder of four human beings or seeing children separated from their families, it's the same ideology of hate and dehumanization that allows that to happen. We must always be outraged by that and get in its face. That's the Hartinger Law. His investigation was killed, but it was used years later in the Nuremberg trials. The Hartinger Law demands that we fight, even if the only way left for us to fight is to bear witness. This is important to talk about because the relief so many are feeling can be misinterpreted as the danger being over. Trump created a cult and the cult is still with us, fueled by rampant disinformation, powered by consolidated far-right media, big tech and American oligarchs like the Mercer family and Mark Zuckerberg, and a mainstream media populated by mostly white people who are not on the front lines of the worst dangers of this cult and its machinations.

The Nazi terror had an inspiration – race laws in the American South. Chalupa said:

For all those white people who are going to tune out, who are going to just go back to normal: there was never a normal to begin with for people of color in America. Understand that it's a fascist, mass murdering ideology that's at the root of it and it mutates and it gaslights, and it uses pretty language and pretty people to try to button it up and seem respectable and palpable. That threat is still with us and none of us should be comfortable yet. We still have a long way to go to dismantle these systems.

Kendzior said the nasty guy has committed many crimes, but there are two that are the worst because they are crimes against humanity. One is the family separation policy. These families can’t be reunited because no records were kept of where they are. The other is his response to the coronavirus, with a quarter million dead. Instead of preventing it, he tried to profit from it. Investigations into these crimes must be rigorous to make sure people like the pandemic prince and Stephen Miller are included. We must prosecute these crimes so a slicker GOP candidate in 2024 can’t repeat them. So with those crimes against humanity (plus others like conflict of interest and obstruction of justice) how can pundits say “Move on!” and still live with themselves? Chalupa and Kendzior review Biden’s cabinet picks. I won’t go into detail on each one (and in some cases they go into quite a bit of explanation). Antony Blinken as Secretary of State – they’re thrilled. With the nasty guy, a Kremlin asset, in the White House America got a taste of Putin’s aggression. We know better what we’re up against and we better understand what Putin has been doing in Ukraine and other countries. A Kremlin asset in the White House is another reason why we must have full investigation and prosecution. The nasty guy is leaving with a great deal of classified information. That’s an ongoing national security crisis. Alejandro Mayorkas, a Cuban immigrant, for Homeland Security. This department has such a history of abuse and brutality it is in desperate need of reform. Whether Mayorkas is up to that task is not clear. Chalupa said:

If you build that strong social fabric, you're building immunity to the fake populism of Trump. When people are hurting, when people are desperate, they want to bash something. They want to bash the system, so they either don't vote—because what difference will it make?—or they vote for some raging anger cathartic vehicle like Trump. The way we protect ourselves from that is by truly, truly building back better. That's not going to happen without free universal healthcare, free college. We've got to build up the minds of our citizens, one of our greatest resources. That's how they're seen in countries like Denmark, where they have free schools, because the minds of the citizens are a national natural resource to develop and you get paid back as a society with more engaged citizens, stronger systems, creativity, innovation, all of it. America really, really needs to Trump-proof our democracy by taking care of the most vulnerable. I just don't want us to just celebrate the fact that we're no longer soon going to be under this constant threat of a Kremlin asset. I want us to really, really Trump-proof our democracy.

Janet Yellen at Treasury – During the Obama years the Kremlin infiltrated the Treasury. They may still be there. One reason for gutting career bureaucrats is to allow the lackeys to carry out massive crimes. We need someone to clean out the corruption and we need a full report of what happened. Is Yellen up to the task? Maybe. Yellen has the support of Elizabeth Warren, whose main issue is corruption. But it is likely a problem too big for one person. We’ll need a commission. At least Yellen doesn’t have a Wall Street background. John Kerry for Special Envoy for Climate. Good that Biden is taking the threat seriously. Kerry has a famous name (having been Sec. of State), which will draw top people to the table for serious work. Though Kerry and Biden might lessen the damage, a considerable amount of damage to the climate has already been done so part of the job will be learning how to live with the wreckage – the rising seas, the stronger hurricanes, the fires, the refugee camps. More takes on cabinet nominees as they are announced.

The zombie election

Matthew Schwartz of NPR reported that the top Iranian scientist believed to help develop the country’s nuclear bomb program has been assassinated. Iranian officials believe Israel played a central role. Iran promised to retaliate. This act may turn American troops into targets in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East. Schwartz quoted Trita Parsi, founder of the National Iranian American Council, who tweeted that there is no down side for Israel right now. If Iran lashes out and sparks a broader conflict it sucks in the US. Netanyahu of Israel has long sought a US-Iran confrontation. Leah McElrath provides a bit of context. Netanyahu secretly flew to Saudi Arabia earlier this week to meet with the Crown Prince and US Sec. of State Mike Pompeo. McElrath included a quote of a tweet from Senator Chris Murphy:

Every time America or an ally assassinates a foreign leader outside a declaration of war, we normalize the tactic as a tool of statecraft. The risk is that the security benefit can be very short lived.

A couple days ago McElrath quoted a bit from Barak Ravid on Axios then commented on it:

“The Israeli govt instructed the IDF to undertake the preparations not because of any intelligence or assessment that Trump will order such a strike, but because senior Israeli officials anticipate ‘very sensitive period’ ahead of Biden's inauguration...” The Discard Phase. I actually don’t think Trump is particularly focused on Iran—mainly because Iran is allied with Russia. However, I do think he is itching to start a war and/or to use nuclear weapons while a) he still can and b) he is feeling a combination of powerlessness AND annihilatory rage. … It is a weakness of our system that a lame duck office holder is allowed unilateral control over our military and our nuclear arsenal especially.

The Discard Phase is when a malignant narcissist (as in the nasty guy) sours on a relationship and works to annihilate the one who rejected him. Ben Franklin tweeted in response to McElrath saying she didn’t think the nasty guy was focused on Iran because of Iran’s ties with Russia:

The Middle East is a special place where everyone is allied with everyone and simultaneously enemies with everyone at the same time. Nothing there makes sense in a traditional way.

Garry Kasparov tweeted:

Putin is in no hurry to acknowledge Biden’s victory because there’s no benefit. But showing loyalty to Trump, like a Godfather to a foot soldier, still bears fruit and likely will even after Jan 20. Easy to picture Putin inviting Trump to conferences in St Petersburg to join him in condemning the “hoax” of US democracy, the “warmongering” Biden and NATO, etc. They’ve been aligned on so many issues all along, so why not? Or the next step of Putin offering Trump a job, the way he hired Germany’s ex-chancellor Schroeder at Gazprom and as propagandist. Trump’s debts disappear and he barely has to change his message at all! Correct to worry about Trump’s demagoguery and attacks on US institutions at home, but he will also join the axis of nationalists and xenophobes like Le Pen, Farage, & AfD with the anti-EU, anti-NATO message Putin invests so much in.

Some good foreign relations news. Olga Lautman, who studies relations between Ukraine, Russia, and the US, tweeted:

Svetlana Tsikhanovskaya, exiled Belarusian and real winner of elections, received an invitation to meet w Biden according to an exclusive interview. Lukashenko's regime w Putin's help have launched a war on innocent Belarusians. The world must act.

Laura Clawson of Kos reported the nasty guy won’t concede the election, but yesterday he did say that if the Electoral College confirms Biden’s win he will leave the White House. He doesn’t want the drama of a president being dragged out the front door. However, he added that if the EC confirms Biden “they’ve made a big mistake.” And then he gave another rant on the rigged election. Since I read that I’ve heard (though haven’t found online sources) that the nasty guy has started piling up conditions. One of them is that Biden must “prove” he got 80 million votes. Yeah, this from a guy who has been unable to prove that Biden didn’t. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo had set up guidelines saying if a region is hot with the coronavirus, a red zone, religious institutions should have no more than 10 people at a service. In an orange zone there should be no more than 24. There are currently no red zones in New York. Laura Clawson reported that somebody sued and the case went to the Supremes. This is the third such case. In the previous two Chief Justice Roberts sided with the then living Ruth Bader Ginsburg and other progressives to say local officials “should not be subject to second-guessing by an unelected federal judiciary, which lacks the background, competence and expertise to assess public health and is not accountable to the people.” But Ginsburg is gone and Barrett is there. This time they sided with the religious groups and against health officials. Clawson concluded:

That’s how it’s going to go: The Trump court puts the right of churches to hold large services above the right of everyone else to live safely. This court is going to be as bad as we thought. At the cost of lives. How apt that Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court career kicked off with a superspreader event and she dove right in with this case.

In response to the ruling Herb4Change tweeted:

Justice Barrett’s first 2 votes were to kill people.

So much for a pro-life stance. Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup of Kos, quoted an Associated Press article:

The 2020 presidential race is turning into the zombie election that Trump just won’t let die. Despite dozens of legal and procedural setbacks, his campaign keeps filing new challenges that have little hope of succeeding and making fresh, unfounded claims of fraud. But that’s the point. Trump’s strategy, his allies concede in private, wasn’t to change the outcome, but to create a host of phantom claims about the 2020 presidential race that would infect the nation with doubt and keep his base loyal, even though the winner — Biden — was clear and there has been no evidence of mass voter fraud.

And a quote from Miti Sathe and Will Levitt of Politio:

It was weak strategy, based on bad polling information and poor decisions from the national party that left Democratic candidates in swing districts—and candidates of color in particular—unable to hold their own in the face of a massive, and massively underestimated, Republican voter surge. The fact is: If you’re going to win a campaign, you’ve got to campaign, which means getting in front of voters and meeting them where they are. And that was the one thing that Democrats running for Congress could not do this year, upon orders from the party’s campaign arm in Washington.

Endless, chest-ripping sobs of sadness, anger, relief, and joy

I had a quiet Thanksgiving Day. I left the house only for a walk around the neighborhood. No one came to visit. My turkey came from the carving station at an upscale grocery store and their dressing is quite tasty. Alas, no gravy. I has a salad from a bag and added dressing to it. I have enough for a meal tomorrow. A news articles I read said the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade would be in the morning on NBC. But the NBC station in Detroit showed the Detroit parade. I didn’t watch it. I was able to see the Macy’s Parade this afternoon. I don’t watch much TV, so was amazed at how much time was taken by commercials. Muting a stream is very easy. The route of the pandemic parade wasn’t very long. The various floats pulled up in front of the Macy’s store. The people onboard did their thing and the float pulled away. That was it. Several big balloons were there, pulled in front of the store, then gone again. This year they were guided by carts or small jeeps instead of 80 or so people and the cameras were careful not to show them (though did once). For songs from Broadway shows they went to another site for a pre-recorded scene. I rarely watch either parade because on most Thanksgiving Days I’m driving to visit family. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Daily Kos has a great and long list of things he is thankful for this year. I echo his choices. And here are a few of my own: I am alive and well and physically active. I have so far avoided the virus. I was able to do some traveling this year, coming home just before lockdown. I don’t face financial issues or housing issues. My retirement income allowed me to donate generously to a variety of causes. I’ve had plenty of time for my composing and my genealogy work. Phones and email allow me to keep up with siblings and cousins. The transition to Joe Biden as president has – so far – been without violence. My performance bell choir met for a month and my church bell choir is able to continue to meet. COVID vaccines have been announced, so this time of isolation has an end in sight, even if still several months away. Mark Sumner of Kos wrote something hopeful – that since this Thanksgiving was such a mess because of the pandemic we should have another National Day of Thanksgiving to mark the end of the pandemic, whenever that is.

Second Thanksgiving should be, like the first one, official. Joe Biden should haul out a proper, non-Sharpie pen and affix his name to an order setting aside a date for Americans to remember the hundreds of thousands who fell, recall the shared hardships of the pandemic, and celebrate the triumph of medical science and reason in restoring the nation. Naturally, none of this should happen immediately upon the release of the first vaccine. But it also shouldn’t wait for COVID-19 to be declared extinct. For a number of reasons, unlike smallpox, the SARS-CoV-2 virus is likely to be around for the foreseeable future. The date should be set at a point where the cases of COVID-19 are not just declining, but where it’s clearly not just a pause before another surge; a point where vaccines are readily available to the general public, and when testing shows that the disease has genuinely been pressed into a corner. … Whenever it happens—and it will happen—we need to be there. Second Thanksgiving. And we need to do it right—with parades, a lot of flag waving, and tears … endless, chest-ripping sobs of sadness, anger, relief, and joy. And we need to eat, dammit. Every good holiday deserves a meal. … Start planning now for how you’re going to decorate. What you’re going to fix. How you’re going to mourn. How you’re going to praise. How you’re going to sing. And don’t forget the pie.

John Constable was an English painter in the Romantic Era (the 19th Century). Someone using his name is tweeting images of paintings of that era and into the 20th Century. Even better, these are paintings I haven’t seen. This makes a nice mental health break. On to interesting things from the news. Brad Raffensperger has become famous in the last month. He is the GOP Georgia Secretary of State, so in charge of the election. He certified the state’s vote tally for Joe Biden. The nasty guy got upset. Raffensperger wrote an editorial in USAToday which included, “my family voted for him, donated to him and are now being thrown under the bus by him.” Stonekettle responded:

Sometimes you HAVE to get thrown under the goddamn bus, because that's the ONLY way you seem to be able to learn. This is the lesson of Tyrants: everyone is disposable. This is the lesson of dictators: sooner or later, EVERYBODY is the enemy. Everybody.

A tyrant is extreme in his need to be seen as better than everyone else. The first targets are the easy ones, the people the rest of the society puts at the bottom of the social hierarchy. But after those are eliminated the tyrant keeps working away at every level of the social hierarchy. Even when down to the last few the tyrant has to show himself better than them as well. So they are targeted. Until he’s alone. Jason Overstreet tweeted:

"We can disagree and still love each other. Unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.” — James Baldwin

David Neiwert of Kos reported that gun-rights fanatics had such a great time during their rally in Richmond, VA last January (and for 20 Januarys before then) they agreed to do it again this January. Last week, when they tried to get a permit for their rally, the only open time slots were 6 am or 6 pm. Permits for all the other time periods had already been issued to gun-control groups. The gun-rights groups cried “Conspiracy!” When it was just a concerted effort by the gun-control crowd. That won’t stop the gun-rights groups. They’ll still come to town with their intimidation. Philip Van Cleave, one of their leaders talked to the Washington Post about the day. Wrote Neiwert:

“All of them will be decked out with flags and magnet signs. We’ll probably have buses leading the caravan,” he told The Post—adding that participants will be able to keep warm and dry in their vehicles, and they can keep their guns with them too. “And it doesn’t mean you can’t get out and walk around Richmond while you’re there,” he added.

Nate Silver of Fivethirtyeight tweeted about somebody who didn’t explain to his satisfaction the mechanisms of how the election could be stolen. MsPackyetti was quite annoyed with that cluelessness and tweeted a thread about voter suppression, which is not new, though has gotten more sophisticated. No authority on elections should downplay it. Though the nasty guy’s attempts to steal the election have been unsuccessful, doesn’t mean there weren’t attempts – and that doesn’t include his clownish three dozen cases before the courts.

You’re telling me you WATCHED Brian Kemp run his OWN election, Stacey Abrams’ race get stolen, READ the reports that 200K GA voters were wrongly purged in that race, and SEE the #ProGeorgia table of organizers fight tooth and nail and still think elections don’t get stolen?! You’re telling me you WATCHED Ron DeSantis turn over the will of Floridians and make 1.4 million formerly incarcerated folks pay restitution before they could vote, FRRC raise MILLIONS of dollars to pay a damn poll tax, and still think there are no “mechanisms” for theft? You mean to tell me you watched Allie Young have to lead entire caravans on HORSEBACK in Arizona because there are TEN MILES for some Indigenous folks between their homes and their polling places and still think there’s no suppression?! You’re actually going to fix your fingers to say there was no “mechanism” for theft when JUST THIS PAST PRIMARY, Milwaukee went down to ONE polling place in a Pandemic? You watched Greg Abbott try to pull a similar stunt in Harris County and still have the nerve to say that?? You have the unmitigated gall to call warnings about election theft an “underwear gnome” like Trump didn’t file a bunch of lawsuits in the BLACKEST CITIES AND COUNTIES IN AMERICA because he couldn’t understand for the LIFE of him how we overcame their robbery attempts? You really gonna look John Lewis’ ghost in the face and say this was never real when Mitch McConnell let the Voting Rights Restoration Act named for Mr. Lewis sit and get dusty on his desk?!? In the year of our Lord 2020 you’re going to act like Trump didn’t hire his homeboy Louis DeJoy to try to shut down the damn postal service, the sorting machines, and the infrastructure needed for a pandemic election?! You’re gonna get on Beyoncé’s internet and not act like Cambridge Analytica never existed, disinformation ain’t running rampant and Black and LatinX communities were never targeted? You’re gonna take the day the Lord has made and use it to pretend Trump hasn’t attempted to undermine the validity of our elections since the SECOND he was afraid he was going to lose with lie after lie??? ... If there is no monster underneath your bed, it’s not because it never existed: it’s because all the Black and Brown and Indigenous people you don’t bother taking seriously killed it for you. ... Any American electoral commentary, predictions or work that lack a clear analysis of racist voter suppression is not worth the paper it’s printed on or the app it’s posted on.

Southpaw responded to the same Nate Silver tweet. Southpaw wrote about the sabotaged postal service, the Pennsylvania plan to allow processing mail ballots, so they would be counted last so the nasty guy could declare victory based on the in-person ballots. The plan was explained ahead of time (by the opposition) and was put into actual practice.

There was a concerted, multifaceted, well-documented effort to subvert this election, the president was an organizing force, he and much of his party actively participated, and it has caused real damage. The attempts to write all that off are deeply unworthy.

I didn't have the strength to continue

I finished the book Southern. Gay. Teacher. A Memoir by Randy Fair. He is as described in the title. He started teaching high school English in the Atlanta school system in the late 1980s and was still teaching when he finished the book. It came out this year. For much of the time it was a balance to make sure LGBTQ students were not harassed by other students or even teachers and administrators while also not saying he was gay. For much of his career he didn’t dare come out. Though officially closeted he demonstrated he was a progressive and the gay students would find him and confide in him because they knew they would be safe around him. The first school where he taught had quite a race problem. The students were rather evenly split between black and white. A few times one side rioted because of what the other side had done. Fair got along better with the black students because he knew oppression. After a few years he transferred to a second school. The mood towards gay people varied, better when Clinton was President, worse when Bush II was. He was quite an advocate. He knew the law and would use it to prompt or threaten the administration to do something, such as start a Gay Straight Alliance. Though when the group was started he willingly let straight teachers sponsor it so people wouldn’t question his orientation. He started a gay teacher alliance chapter in Atlanta and did a few great things with it. He let another guy take over. Then the national alliance demanded more money and it collapsed. Through the book Fair talked about the LGBTQ students he encountered and helped. A transgender student helped him understand what that meant. At this second school he felt he had to be careful about what he said or he would be fired. He began to see how homophobic much of the staff was. He transferred to a third school just three years before he could retire. This school was the dream job. He could be out. The LGBTQ students could be out. The students were multi racial and had no problems. He saw how welcoming they were when he gave an analogy using football and one young man said, “I didn’t get that analogy. Could you rephrase it in terms of hair and makeup?” The students laughed, but it wasn’t a malicious laugh. I had one issue with the book. It seemed distant, like he was holding back. I have two primary examples. In one, a student asked if a particular character in Canterbury Tales was gay. Fair said he did research to show the character was not gay. But he didn’t share the research with the reader. In the other, he was at a conference (one he set up through the gay teacher alliance) and a student speaker brought many in the audience to tears. But he didn’t tell us what the student said. I felt this sort of thing through much of the book. Overall, a good book documenting what it was like to be a gay teacher in the conservative South. Joan McCarter of Daily Kos discussed that the Moscow Mitch led Senate and the nasty guy administration have been doing nothing to help Americans through the pandemic, especially with many relief programs ending in a month. As part of that she quoted former ICU nurse Janet Campbell-Vincent. McCarter wrote:

Here's what she'd tell McConnell on his Thanksgiving vacation: "I wish medical workers could take vacation days, too. I ran out of those months ago, when I contracted Covid-19 treating patients in the ICU. I'm exhausted. I'm angry. I'm sick of watching patients die. I'm tired of comforting families feeling guilty over the birthday party that cost their loved one's life." She just quit her job providing direct patient care because, she writes, "Without sufficient personal protective equipment and staffed hospital beds, a national plan for testing and sufficient relief for those hardest hit by the virus, including hospitals, I didn't have the strength to continue." She speculates that her colleagues are reaching that breaking point as well, and warns of a "mass exodus" from nursing. "Our leaders have left it up to medical workers to save American lives, but they've denied us the resources to do so," she writes. "I can't fathom why they're on vacation when there is so much work to do."

A “mass exodus” from nursing? That will be a huge and deadly problem. Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Kos quoted Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post. Robinson noted that when the nasty guy won in 2016 there was a high interest in what nasty guy voters thought with reports seemingly from every diner where men wore overalls.

Never mind that nearly 3 million more of us voted against Trump four years ago; no one seemed terribly interested in our inner lives, our hopes and dreams. This time, however, the gap is too big to ignore — Biden, the president-elect, beat Trump by more than 6 million votes and counting. He won back the heartland of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. He won Georgia, for heaven’s sake. Logically, then, we should put aside those dog-eared copies of J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” and subject “the Biden voter” to the same kind of microscopic scrutiny. Venture out of your bubble, Trump supporters, and try to understand how most of America thinks.

Jake Tapper of CNN tweeted:

Let’s take a moment to acknowledge 4 Republican officials who despite pressure from the president and his party remained allegiant to facts and truth and democracy and integrity... and math: @Commish_Schmidt @GaSecofState @CISAKrebs Aaron Van Langevelde

The last one is the GOP member of the Michigan State Board of Canvassers who voted yes to certify Michigan’s election results.

The system worked only because conservatives like Aaron Van Langevelde in Michigan and U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann in PA had more integrity than most GOP Officials in Washington DC combined. There will be an attempt at revisionism. The news media cannot let that happen.

Laura Clawson of Kos reported that a month ago the nasty guy signed an executive order allowing him to purge nonpartisan civil service workers in the government. I wrote about it when it happened. The reason for the purge is, of course, so he can replace them with people loyal to him, not the government. Russel Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, has determined that 88% of his department, or 425 workers, can be shifted to the designation that would allow the nasty guy to purge them. This risks doing great damage to the function of government, as the nasty guy no doubt intends. If there are lots of hires before Joe Biden is sworn in, it could be difficult to remove them – the new people would claim protections that were taken away from the old people. It is another part of the nasty guy’s efforts to trash the entire federal government on his way out the door. In another post Clawson discussed a report from the Brookings Institute that shows several companies whose profits soared since the start of the pandemic and who have not shared those profits with their workers. In many cases they also eliminated hazard pay. One example:

The bottom line is this, according to the report: “Amazon and Walmart could have quadrupled the hazard pay they gave their frontline workers and still earned more profit than the previous year.” They didn’t.

Just over a week ago I discussed musings by Kos of Kos. He proposed the idea that the people who voted for the nasty guy who didn’t show up in polls aren’t really Republican or conservative. Instead, they are people, mostly white, who have been left out of the system. They see in the nasty guy someone who will burn it all down to pull everyone else to their level. Kos wrote about an article that supports his theory with a bit of explanation. The article is by Daniel Cox of the American Enterprise Institute. A survey had looked at the strength of social networks. Of those surveyed 17% reported having no one they were close to. That’s a big jump from 2013. Those disconnected people were far more likely to vote for the nasty guy.

Isolation isn’t an absolute. You can’t turn it on and off. It’s a scale, and it’s easy to see how the further on the isolation scale someone is, the less likely they are to properly interact with society and its institutions … that is, until a Trump emerges speaking to their pain and anger. It certainly explains our own bewilderment that Trump got 10 million more votes than last time. Of course we don’t see these people. No one sees these people. That’s the point.

Why are they so angry they want to burn it all down? They’re lonely. How do we change them? Seek them out and, as unpleasant as they may be to be around, help them join the community. I didn’t say this was easy. Patience. McCarter of Kos reported Dr. Fauci counsels patience. Yeah, the first vaccine will be available by the end of the year. But that doesn’t mean it will be available to me or you. It takes a while to ramp up production of the vaccine and the first doses go to healthcare workers, then to such agencies as the Bureau of Prisons and State Department. The general public might begin to get the vaccine in April. But getting it widely distributed to the public will take a while because state and local governments don’t yet have the funding to make it happen. And funding depends on Moscow Mitch. Even with proper funding all of our existing pandemic protections, such as masks and indoor gatherings, must be maintained until about 75% of the population is vaccinated. And that could take until next fall. While the vaccine makers show the vaccine will prevent a person from getting sick, they didn’t test whether a vaccinated person could spread the virus to others. So don’t plan on any big gatherings until 2022. Patience. We’ve come this far. Don’t give up or give in now.

Don’t traumatize your people

A little dark humor to start – click to see what cartoonist Nick Anderson of Daily Kos has to say about the presidential transition. Today the Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court threw out five challenges to the election in one decision. The nasty guy’s team has now lost 35 of these cases. Shortly after that Pennsylvania certified Joe Biden’s win. Nevada will certify soon. Biden has enough Electoral College votes. And that’s before Arizona and Wisconsin certify next week. I had mentioned that Carl Bernstein has identified 21 GOP senators who are contemptuous of the nasty guy. Investigative journalist Marcus Baram tweeted in response:

Every congressional reporter needs to track down these senators and persist in asking them a simple question: “Why are you so scared of President Trump that you can’t go public with your thoughts?” And the key thing is to keep asking that question, even after they bob and weave and avoid answering it. Follow up until they answer it.

Karla Monterroso tweeted about what it’s like to be sick with COVID. Her fever cycled up and down several times. She was hopeful every time it fell, then her hopes were crushed when the fever rose yet again. The disease also crushed her family. The rising fever broke her mother’s heart each time. Her mother argued to come take care of her, but doing so would be deadly. Her brother wanted a text when she awoke every day and when she slept extra hours he would worry whether she was still alive. When the fever finally left and didn’t come back she was too weak to care for herself.

You traumatize your people. And you hate it. The project of keeping you alive consumes you and them. And they can’t even be with you. Because the act of being with you could put them in the same position. It is maddening. So that’s my pitch. Do everything you can to keep from traumatizing your people. From breaking them and yourself so continuously that it gives you PTSD to just watch an episode of Grey’s Anatomy. Do everything you can to keep them from traumatizing you. Stay home. Be safe.

Ebony Elizabeth Thomas tweeted another reason why I’ll be alone at Thanksgiving:

Another thing people don't realize is that even if you and your loved ones don't get COVID-19, even if no one you know does... even if you're that lucky… ...the surge will mean that once again *all other health care services will be overtaxed & many will be inaccessible.* More than 25 million people in this country have asthma. I'm one of them. Access to an ER can mean the difference between living and breathing, or a different outcome. But ERs are full. What about heart attacks? Strokes? Aneurysms? Gunshot wounds? Hell, even acute appendicitis? It's not just COVID-19. It will be the horror atop horror when you and your loved ones can't access any kind of health care. Please stay home.

A lot of the virus relief programs Congress enacted last May expire the day after Christmas. Have a happy holiday! As for another relief package, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted:

If you want to know why COVID relief is tied up in Congress, one key reason is that Republicans are demanding legal immunity for corporations so they can expose their workers to COVID without repercussions. Dems don’t want you to die for a check. That’s what we’re fighting over.

Joe Biden tweeted:

The election is over. It’s time to put aside the partisanship and the rhetoric designed to demonize one another. We have to come together.

Sarah Kendzior responded:

You know what would actually unite this country? An end to elite criminal impunity. I'm serious. This is a unifying issue. (Except for, of course, the criminal elites.) We're not only seeing the same crimes, we're seeing the *exact same criminals and enablers* getting away with them again and again due to our failed and corrupt institutions. Elite criminal impunity is truly a non-partisan crisis. No one wanted to see child rape traffickers Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell roam free; or the mass murdering Sackler family get a slap on the wrist. People want to be protected from their crimes. And we want the truth. Trump is a symptom of the broader disease of elite criminal impunity. The lines between corporate crime, organized crime, and state crime have blurred -- and ordinary Americans suffer as a result. There must be a gutting of endemic corruption for the US to truly move forward.

Jonathan Smucker wrote a book about political organizing on the left. He tweeted:

FDR famously said to the labor movement, "Make me do it." That's the job of our movements right now in relation to Biden and Dems in Congress. When you say, "They'll never do anything for us," what you're really saying is, "Our movements are too weak to make them deliver." Focus on our part of the equation, which is to build & wield the power of working people to push for change. How do we build collective power? - Join a people's organization - Contribute time & money - Learn organizing & campaigning skills that add to our collective capacity The Dem Establishment has more money and resources than us, but that's only part of why our movements aren't winning more. Another important part is that we're at the end of a 40-year period of decline of left infrastructure (e.g., unions & organizations). We have to rebuild.

Bringing the country off the ledge

The Michigan State Board of Canvassers met to combine the 83 certified county votes into a certified statewide vote. It affects all races that are more than one county, such as president, senator, reps to Congress, and state legislature seats. All 83 counties certified their votes. So, as some have said, this is only math. Add them up and vote to certify. But this isn’t a normal year. One of the two GOP canvassers said before today’s meeting he would vote against certifying. Thankfully, the second GOP member voted to certify. So Joe Biden has officially won Michigan, as has Senator Gary Peters. This meeting is normally under the radar. Newspapers will usually print a short article saying the Board met, they certified, all done. This time the Detroit Free Press had a full page article about the Board, what it does, who is on it, what the law is, and why this is an issue this year, and what happens if they don’t certify. I saw there was a rally in Lansing today (though not in time for me to find out if it was worth attending). I got an email explaining how I might contribute public comment to the process and another explaining how I can watch the meeting live online. This year the meeting is big news. With Michigan now certified and Georgia and Arizona already certified, Emily Murphy, head of the General Services administration, has finally signed the letter authorizing the Biden transition team to have access to needed government resources. It is good she is finally doing this and not waiting for whatever else the nasty guy has in store. However, previous people in that job did it as soon as news organizations call the race – which happened two weeks ago. The GOP Senate rushed Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court so she could rule on election fraud cases (which are not the same as voter fraud cases – the GOP is claiming voter fraud happened while it commits election fraud). But, as Joan McCarter of Daily Kos reports, the nasty guy’s legal team has been so inept (they didn’t bring the best minds to the task) and lost so many cases so badly that none of them are headed to the Supremes. Lauren Floyd of Kos reported journalist Carl Bernstein named 21 GOP senators who have said to various people they have extreme contempt for the nasty guy and his fitness to be president. That’s good to hear. Now why didn’t they say anything last February during the impeachment trial? They could have secured the vote for removal. Perhaps, as Floyd wrote, it is this:

The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist said Republicans know what Trump has done “to undermine confidence in our institution.” They are living through a pandemic, witnessing Trump’s “homicidal negligence” that is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans,” he said. “McConnell knows what’s going on,” Bernstein said. “And finally I’m told in the last 24/48 hours, I believe he and some others are attempting to find a way to somehow bring the country off the ledge that we are on because of the mad king and what he is doing.”

President-Elect Joe Biden has named a few cabinet positions. Laura Clawson of Kos lists some of them. For Secretary of State Antony Blinken got the nomination. He served as deputy under Hillary Clinton, which puts it 8-12 years ago. There is also Janet Yellen as the first woman at Treasury (she had been the first woman to chair the Federal Reserve). Alejandro Mayorkas, who had created the DACA program, is the first Latino and first immigrant to head Homeland Security. Avril Haines as the first woman as director of national intelligence. Clawson included a video of Blinken, while deputy secretary, going on Sesame Street and explaining the United Nations and refugees to Grover. That’s a win right there.

A comedy or a horror?

Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos reviewed the recent election history. The result in court cases was 2-33. Appellate lawyer Raffi Melkonian described it this way:

Non-lawyer followers: this litigation (in all the states) is truly blowing my mind. It's as if you're playing chess and your opponent lets off a whoopie cushion, throws a Zebra Cake on the board, and then runs off without pants and says they won. I don't know what else to say.

The next step, according to Eleveld:

So just as soon as their string of legal losses was coming to a close, Giuliani and Co. ran to the mics where they could lie with abandon. And lie they did.

I had described the press conference featuring Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell. Powell’s big moment, described by Eleveld:

Powell’s most convincing coup was mustering up the trappings of raw emotion, including hints of a quiver in her voice, as she declared the imaginary fraud "stunning, heartbreaking, infuriating, and the most unpatriotic acts I can even imagine for people in this country to have participated in."

Finally Eleveld turned to the GOP, who have mostly been standing by as the nasty guy trashes the nation on his way out the door. Their silence is just as treasonous. David Neiwert of Kos reported the eliminationist hate speech coming from the far right has become a flood since the nasty guy has refused to concede. Eliminationist means the speaker wants to do more than defeat their enemy, they want to eliminate their enemy. Neiwert includes a few quotes of this kind of speech. Some of it is so intense it can be hard to read. And a great deal of it is projection – accusing Democrats and Liberals of hating the country and having committed treason. Things they are planning to do. They proclaim the punishment of treason is death. Which they proclaim they are willing to dish out, whether or not there is a trial to determine guilt. So far this flood of talk hasn’t turned to action. Yet. Mark Sumner of Kos has empathy for reporters. Are they supposed to cover the post-election events as a comedy or a horror? Losing 33 lawsuits is ridiculous. Confusing the Four Seasons Hotel with Four Seasons Total Landscaping is hilarious. But what the nasty guy is after – subverting democracy and starting fires at home and abroad – as he does these comical things is a horror. That balance will be hard to get right. And media will need to walk that fine line at least for another two months. Sumner reported that three GOP senators – Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Mitt Romney of Utah – have signaled they might revolt from the rest of the party and approve Joe Biden’s cabinet nominees. But Murkowski said words similar to Moscow Mitch, that she’ll approve folks that are “within the mainstream.” Sumner wrote:

The idea that the “Uneasy Three” will step out to moderate the worst McConnell will do is interesting. It may even be hopeful. However, what’s clear is that it’s a move mostly designed to benefit the senators in question and to make leaving Republicans in charge of the Senate seem just a little bit less awful. This is a long, long way from reaching the point where this splinter group threatens to dislodge McConnell by conferencing with Democrats.

Yeah, there is still vote counting going on in some states. As of a few days ago Kyle Griffin tweeted:

Joe Biden now has more than 79.5 million votes. His popular vote lead over Trump is more than 5.9 million votes.

Leila Fadel of NPR talked to Jason Stanley who wrote the book How Fascism Works: The Politics Of Us and Them. I worked from the transcript. Fadel asked for a definition of fascism. Stanley said:

So fascism is a cult of the leader who promises national restoration in the face of supposed humiliation by minorities, liberals and immigrants. He represents the cities as corrupt, filled with foreigners and disease, and the heartland as the true nation that he represents. And then he takes over a political party, transforms them into a cult of the leader and says only he can deal with the problem. So we're - we've seen his election campaign focus on Black Lives Matter, on a minority social justice movement. We've seen him promise patriotic education in a second term - all sorts of tactics that we ideologically associate with far-right ultranationalism, i.e., fascism. … The heart of fascist politics is the destruction of truth. Fascist politics is based on a friend/enemy distinction where your enemy's not a legitimate opponent. Your enemy is hiding terrible crimes, and you can't treat them as any kind of normal opponent. And this is the purpose of conspiracy theories like QAnon. … [Conspiracy theories] persist because that's the core of representing politics as militarized. Fascist politics transforms politics into a battlefield. And in the battlefield, like, you don't care if your opponent is speaking truth or not. They're the enemy. They want to kill you. So the goal is to represent politics as a battlefield. If your leader says false things, it doesn't matter. He's trying to win the battle, win the war for you. So that's the structure.

Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Talia Lavin of The Cut on the future of the GOP. She wrote about Madison Cawthorn, age 25, heading to Congress. Alas the excerpt doesn’t say where Cawthorn is from.

Cawthorn is a young man who’s demonstrated racist views and been accused of misogynist behavior — and hasn’t let either stop him in his quest for power. Add in a photogenic set of cheekbones and a marked tendency to pose with girth-y rifles, and you arrive at the message the GOP has imprinted on its rising stars: one of instinctual cruelty and little else. It’s hard not to arrive at the conclusion that this is the future of the Republican Party, and the main of what it has to offer.

Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale. One of his books is On Tyranny. He tweeted a thread. Excerpts:

Democracy is undone from within rather than from without. The occasion to undo democracy is often an election. The mechanism to undo democracy is usually a fake emergency, a claim that internal enemies have done something outrageous.

Apparently that something outrageous was to vote.

Coups are defeated quickly or not at all. While they take place we are meant to look away, as many of us are doing. When they are complete we are powerless. ... In an authoritarian situation, the election is only round one. You don't win by winning round one. Peaceful demonstrations after elections are necessary for transitions away from authoritarianism, as in Poland in 1989, Serbia in 1999, or Belarus right now. It is up to civil society, organized citizens, to defend the vote and to peacefully defend democracy.

Chris Hayes of MSNBC tweeted:

Apropos of nothing, the Confederacy's refusal to actually accept defeat and instead embrace a Lost Cause narrative of betrayal was a key aspect of its successful efforts to wrench back one-party totalitarian control of the South, which it did both through violence and propaganda.

How to bend them, how to break them, how to bribe them

When I get to episodes of Gaslit Nation during the weekend after the transcript is available I occasionally think what they said on Wednesday might be out of date by the time I see it. Or not. This episode is titled Actual Nazis and the hosts are the usual Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa. Kendzior started with describing where we’re at. It has been two weeks since Joe Biden has been declared the winner of the election. The nasty guy is still raising money off his refusal to conceded. He is backed by the GOP.

That is an attempted coup. You should not sugarcoat it. You should not parse it into very narrow definitions that require identical formations to what you may have seen in coups in other regions, in other times of history. Every attempted coup is different. It reflects its own political and cultural context. So, you need to view this in the light of American history, and of course, in the light of how Trump has "governed" for the last four years, which has been turning the United States into a mafia state.

First, Chalupa has a history lesson. Hitler and his Nazi Party attempted to overthrow the German government in 1923. It is known as the Beer Hall Putsch. Hitler was tried and convicted of high treason. Because Hitler claimed to have acted out of sincere patriotic motives he was given a light sentence of five years in a minimum security prison. He served eight months. During that time he wrote Mein Kampf. That time taught Hitler that the way to his goals was to subvert the system from within. He worked to come to power by a popular vote. He succeeded in 1933 and immediately started destroying democracy and building the first concentration camp. Which sounds like what the nasty guy has been doing. Chalupa said:

In 2020, Trump lost the election, but Trumpism is here to stay until we dismantle the systems that allowed it to flourish. Hitler regrouped after his trial and 10 years later was in power. Where will the Trump crime family be 10 years from now? They can be back in power, destroying our country from within even faster now that they know who they need to get rid of first, who they need to buy off immediately, how swiftly they need to move and where. If you don't believe this, then look at the 70 million plus who voted for Trump. Look at the nurse in South Dakota who said people died in denial screaming and angry from a virus they died believing was a hoax. This nurse's name is Jodi Doering. Thank you, Jodi, for doing this.

To Trump-proof our democracy we need to: Require at least 15 years of tax returns. Demand your state uses only hand-marked paper ballots with mandatory audits. Demand your state join the National Popular Vote Bill. Once states with a combined 270 Electoral College votes enact Popular Vote (we’re at 196), the state’s EC votes are split according to its popular vote, avoiding winner-take-all. Kendzior said:

One of the things I want to emphasize, when we're talking about the fragility of the system is how much it relies on individual actors and on the ability of those actors to be manipulated, to be bribed, to be blackmailed, to be threatened into complicity, or simply cultivated as enablers.

Two years ago Johnny McEntee was hustled out of the White House because a security clearance showed a prolific habit for online gambling. He was rehired just after the impeachment trial and given full control of personnel changes. That’s one reason why there are a huge number of firings from the administration right now. McEntee’s crusade of purging the disloyal is reaching his goal. To find the disloyal he has a series of questions. An example is: What do you think of pulling troops out of Afghanistan. Employees at the EPA were puzzled by that question. Kendzior said:

So, we're at this point where we have to ask, will Trump threaten people into giving him a second illegal term? The answer is yes, he will threaten them. I don't know if he'll succeed, but he is doing that, because he works for a crime syndicate, and the US under Trump is a mafia state.

Kendzior lists several people who have been threatened by the nasty guy over the last four years. Even with the nasty guy out of the White House, his threats will continue. He or his subsidiaries will target Biden and his agenda, such as implementing a widely available coronavirus vaccine or environmental policies. The mafia state will still be there, linked to oligarchs and plutocrats with vast amounts of money and power. The target of those threats won’t just be Democrats and progressives. It will be anyone who deviates from the loyalty oath. An example is the GOP Secretary of State in Georgia who certified Biden’s win. Kendzior said:

And as the clock ticks down here toward late January, Trump is keenly aware that his chances of getting that illegal second term rest often on individuals, and how to bend them, how to break them, how to bribe them. That is what he will continually seek to do.

And deeply corrupt people are easily blackmailed, easily manipulated. So how many of the GOP have been blackmailed or corrupted already? If Lindsay Graham has threatened Georgia …

and we know about them, where else are they happening? Where have they happened successfully already? Have there been other states where the Secretary of State threw out legal ballots, say, for example, South Carolina? Who else has already been intimidated into silence, and what kind of protections are available for people who do want to speak out and protect our democracy?

We know there was massive voter suppression in this election. But we don’t yet know how massive. Kendzior and Chalupa list several people and groups they call actual Nazis. Last weekend the Proud Boys, a white supremacist group, held a march in Washington. It turned violent. The police let it go on too long, in contrast to the excessive force they use on black people. A black woman was knocked out. The Proud Boys told the police that Black Lives Matter people started the violence, a lie the police repeated to the media. A goal of these violent groups is to make sure if people go to the streets in counter protest they will know they put themselves at risk. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg allowed white supremacists to plan the event in Kenosha that attracted underage Kyle Rittenhouse who shot three people, killing two. Chalupa said of Zuckerberg, “Blood Money is a hell of a drug.” Then external threats. The nasty guy appears to be wanting a war with Iran. Several people were fired from the Department of Defense and conspiracy theorists were installed. Warmonger and Sec. State Mike Pompeo has been meeting with fellow warmonger Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. The nasty guy approved massive arms sales. He fired leaders at three agencies that oversee nuclear weapons. For now, the vice nasty and Pompeo have talked the nasty guy out of bombing Iran. Well, that’s according to an article from the New York Times. Kendzior doesn’t believe the article because so many warmongers were listed. If such a war happened it would not be for the benefit of America, but to benefit the international crime syndicate that the nasty guy is a part of and has control of him. If it happened, they would be starting a war to be able to dump it on Biden to handle. It won’t easily be reversed. Kendzior talked about something Robert Mueller said way back in 2011:

The lines between white collar crime, state corruption, and organized crime have blurred, and those elite actors–those oligarchs and plutocrats and billionaires–wield power at such an extent that our traditional ways of representative government, our own voice in our country's affairs, has nearly been silenced. And that's the voice that we need to get back. In order for it to be heard, we need to root out the most corrupt actors and just identify them, be very honest, have an honest conversation about what's happening. I don't see that right now, and I think it's in part because Biden is being cautious, because when he gets into office, he's going to have to deal with the coronavirus, with the economy, he's going to have to try to bring back a level of trust broadly from the entire American public for a vaccine, for example, to be successful. He's walking a very fine line, and I understand that. But nonetheless, there are a lot of just destructive, vicious actors who are going to take advantage of that sense of caution and restraint. They're not going to have some sort of good faith bargain. They don't care who dies. They don't have a traditional conception of life or a loss. You see that with Donald Trump. He's a sadistic sociopath, and there are others just like him who have immense positions of power, and no one should underestimate that.

The saga in Michigan continues. Lee Chatfield and Mike Shirkey, leaders of the Michigan legislature visited the nasty guy yesterday. It seems obvious to many observers that the nasty guy would talk to them about having the legislature overturn the will of the people and vote to seat GOP electors. That talk would be followed by a threat that if Chatfield and Shirkey didn’t comply they would be thrown to the wolves, otherwise known as the thugs loyal to the nasty guy. After the meeting Chatfield and Shirkey said there was nothing to worry about. They weren’t going to overthrow democracy. They had faith in the process. They didn’t talk about the election with the nasty guy. This morning Michigan Radio reported that the legislature would not overturn the election. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos says what happened next was strange: Chatfield and Shirkey celebrated at the Trump Hotel in DC, drinking champagne until midnight, then sleeping in rooms at the hotel. A big question: Who paid for the champagne and rooms? Then today, Sumner reported, the chair of the Michigan GOP has demanded the state board of canvassers not certify the vote on Monday, but adjourn for 14 days so they can address “credible reports of procedural irregularities” – reports that aren’t credible because the don’t exist. Along with that effort in Michigan Rep. Mike Kelly of the Pennsylvania legislature filed a suit that claimed the law allowing mail in ballots is unconstitutional and all mail in ballots must be thrown out. That would be 2.5 million ballots, 1.6 million of them for Biden. Just a reminder, American deaths from COVID-19 have passed a quarter million. Wear a mask. Mark Sumner reviewed two studies that show masks are effective. I looked at Michigan’s coronavirus data today. The news said there were over 10,000 new cases in a day. The case count did go up by that amount in 24 hours, but the cases weren’t all assigned to the same day. Michigan assigns them to the day symptoms started, which changes data up to three weeks back. However, there was a day, about ten days ago, where there are almost 9,500 new cases. That’s now four times the peak at the start of April. Deaths are hovering around 60 per day, a much lower death rate than we saw in April.

Or they resist him and are thrown to the wolves

Three days ago I forgot to mark the anniversary of this blog. I started it on November 17, 2007. I’ve now been at it 13 years. This is post 4481. It has been a way for me to refine my political thinking. Now I understand that to mean a great deal of what goes on in this country is in support of supremacy of one sort or another – supremacy of race, gender, religion, ability, sexuality, and many more. In the last nine months I have written about the coronavirus 123 times. That’s the fastest rise of any topic I’ve written about. It is now 22 in the most frequently discussed topics. A few months after I started using the coronavirus tag I saw that it was coming close to the tag for Rigged Elections. Then that tag rose steadily in the rankings as well. I’ve now written about it 132 times and it is 20th in the standings, though I don’t remember what the count was at the start of the year. I’m sure the most discussed topics this year are the nasty guy (5th most written about) and the GOP (top most written about at 697 times). In five years (including his campaign) I talked about the nasty guy 339 times. In nine years I discussed Barack Obama only 217 times. The second most written about issue is gay marriage – marriage equality at 689 times. About halfway through my writings I switched to the more inclusive tag. There was a press conference yesterday led by Rudy Giuliani. But the important bit was said by Sidney Powell. She spouted a conspiracy theory. Then said “The entire election, frankly, in all the swing states should be overturned and the legislatures should make sure that the electors are selected for Trump.” In reporting this Mark Sumner of Daily Kos discussed what several GOP leaders have been saying – let’s give the nasty guy a few days. One of them, interviewed by the Washington Post a week ago, said:

What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change. He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20. He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave.

Mark Sumner responded:

What harm can “a little bit of time” do? That’s how long it’s taken to get from “no one seriously thinks the results will change” to Trump’s legal team openly calling for the election results to be overturned, regardless of courts, certifications, or evidence.

Jen Hayden of Kos brought up a detail of Giuliani’s performance at that press conference – he had streaks of hair dye running down his cheeks. Hayden showed a picture of Giuliani and three people behind him, then asked Twitter “What is the name of this band? Wrong answers only.” Twitter obliged. Some of the names they came up with “Rage Against the Voting Machine,” “Rudy and the Blowfish,” and “The Four Treasons.” Jeff Sharlet included a reference to Parler, the conservative alternative to Twitter when he tweeted:

On twitter right now Rudy clips are playing to laughter; on Parler, for the same clips, it's salutes and sieg heils.

Joan McCarter of Kos reviewed the status of the latest nasty guy’s legal challenges. Their lawsuits now stand at 2-31. And they lost the recount in Georgia. In another post McCarter reviewed that the nasty guy lawyers – including Giuliani – are now saying they are not trying to prove the election was stolen. McCarter wrote:

This isn't about the courts anymore. It's about riling up the deplorables and pressuring elected Republicans into participating in this coup. And it's starting to work.

In another post Sumner discussed the meeting of Michigan’s GOP legislature leaders at the White House today. This wasn’t news of how that meeting went (I haven’t heard), but what those leaders will be facing.

What Giuliani and Powell do in court doesn’t matter. It’s only their ability to stir up anger among Trump’s base and terrify Republican legislators into becoming participants. Trump doesn’t have to persuade Republican legislators in Michigan that he won. They know he didn’t. He only has to convince them that they will suffer more for not joining his coup than they will from signing over the soul of the nation. Republican legislators in several states have been doing their best to hide. They’ve given vague statements that could be read as either supporting Trump or simply supporting the process, and attempted to hunker down until the vote certifications are done. Trump is not going to allow them to hide. He’s going to make it clear in Michigan, and in Pennsylvania, and in Wisconsin, and in Arizona, and in Georgia, that any Republican who is not for overturning democracy and seating Trump electors will become the target of the Trump-supporting mob. And in Michigan, the real nature of that threat is blindingly clear. … Republicans may have thought that all they had to do was sit back, wait out Trump’s ego-storm, and carry on as if they had been good little agents of democracy all along. It’s not working out that way. Trump is going to bring them in, one group at a time, and show them a future where they help him and get to enjoy the spoils of a victorious coup, or they resist him and are thrown to the wolves. What happens today with Lee Chatfield and Mike Shirkey won’t be the end of it … but it will be critical. If they say no to Trump, his coup is in serious trouble. If they fold, the slope from there to president-for-life is going to be extremely slippery.

Chatfield and Shirkey are the GOP leaders in the Michigan legislature. As for the wolves … David Neiwert of Kos reported that according to documents filed with the Michigan Attorney General’s office, the plan to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (thankfully foiled) wasn’t the first plan considered. I think that was somewhere around Plan C. Plan A was to storm the Capitol with 200 “patriots” while it was in session and hold the legislature hostage, then televise the execution of each legislator. Plan B was to storm the Capitol, block all the exits, and burn the place to the ground. The settled on kidnapping the governor after they had doubts about the logistics of plans A and B. But those people are in custody and the threat has passed! Right? In several close states the people who are to certify the election are receiving death threats. This is being driven by the nasty guy and by conservative media. Kos of Kos thinks there is a split between Fox News and other conservative outlets. I’ll let you read his reasoning. What caught my attention is at the top of his post. It is the election map as perpetrated by “news” site OANN. It shows the nasty guy with 333 electoral votes on his way to 410 with Biden getting only 128. We know it is fiction because it even has California as solidly red while Indiana is merely dark pink. But this is what these sites are feeding their viewers. It is what these viewers believe is the truth. It is what these people, willing to commit violence, want to defend. That effect on viewers can be measured. Leah McElrath tweeted a poll from the Economist/YouGov. Those that say Biden legitimately won the election: All voters: 57%, Biden voters 98%, Trump voters 12% Those that say Biden did not legitimately win: All voters 43%, Biden voters 2%, Trump voters 88%. Though mainstream media will report an accurate election map, they still aren’t honest with their readers and viewers, according to Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii. He tweeted:

Media, the word you are avoiding is “coup.” I’m not saying they will succeed - they will not. But they are trying to overturn a free, fair election and this deserves at least as much attention as the full week you devoted to Sarah Sanders being refused service at a restaurant.

Nick Cohen of the Observer included a video of Sidney Powell’s words (mentioned above) in his tweet:

It's only the memory of what the USA once was that stops the rest of the world saying that an attempt at a coup is underway. If this were Africa or the Balkans we would have no hesitation in saying that the ruling clique was using electoral fraud to maintain its power.

Kerry Eleveld of Kos discussed one strange effect of this effort to reverse the election. Joe Biden’s agenda – who he is picking for his cabinet, his plans once he takes office – cannot be critiqued by conservative media. There can be no counter-message. Any mentions of anything Joe Biden is doing gets attacked. Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Kos, wrote:

However unlikely, Trump is attempting a coup. That’s the point, not that he’ll fail. You need to carry two thoughts in your head at once 1. Trump is actually trying to steal the election, however ineptly. 2. He'll fail. But that doesn't make 1. any better or less bad.

Dworkin quoted Erick Erickson’s tweet:

I feel very sorry for the people who believe the bulls--- we just heard. There are a lot of broken people who are being lied to and many of them want to believe the lie because their religion has become politics and they cannot believe their god is abandoning them.

Set so many fires

Yesterday I mentioned the GOP members of the Board of Canvassers in Wayne County, Michigan who refused to certify the election results in Detroit. They are William Hartmann and Monica Palmer. After being harangued for two hours on Zoom (lots of Detroit residents took the opportunity to tell them off), the relented and signed. The compromise was that the Detroit results would be audited. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos has round three of the saga. The nasty guy contacted Hartmann and Palmer directly with gratitude for their support. Also, the Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said audits aren’t done after certification. So the two signed an affidavit saying they rescind their certification. Benson had an answer for that as well – you signed, everything has been turned over to me, there’s no legal mechanism to unsign, we’re done. The fun and games … uh, election subversion … continues into another round. Dartagnan of Kos discussed an article in the New York Times that reported the nasty guy has invited Michigan’s GOP legislative leadership to the White House on Friday. No doubt to twist arms. Dartagnan wrote this is sedition or “‘conduct or speech’ calculated to incite rebellion against our Constitutional process” and is grounds for impeachment. Not that anyone is going to bother. Thankfully, Mike Shirkey has already stated replacing the state’s Electoral College Biden electors with a GOP slate is “not going to happen.” Olga Lautman monitors activities between Russia, Ukraine, and America. She tweeted that Chris Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and his deputy Matthew Travis, have been fired by the nasty guy.

Trump is really intent on leaving our infrastructure, hospitals, and govt agencies open to cyber attacks. Part of his plan along w providing US sources and methods to the Kremlin. Everyone who allows this are traitors. … This is the chaos I have been worried about. Trump will use the next few months to attempt to destroy our agencies and purge federal employees in key positions. Trump shouldn't be allowed to serve out his term w intent to destroy America.

Ben Collins, a reporter for NBC News, tweeted a link to an article in CNN about the nasty guy administration, and included a quote:

A second official tells CNN their goal is to set so many [foreign policy] fires that it will be hard for the Biden administration to put them all out.

Mark Sumner of Kos added a few details. Yeah, there is the chaos of the pandemic on the home front. Sumner wrote and also …

As CNN notes, creating hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths may seem like a pretty big fire, but it’s not the only one that Trump intends to set. Trump is making moves in Afghanistan, and Iraq, and potentially in Iran, not out of an intention to deliver increased national security, but to intentionally create instability. Trump has ordered the latest acting defense secretary to engage in cyber warfare with China. He’s looking to make new terrorist designations that would hogtie future diplomatic actions. And, of course, he’s rushing through massive arms sales to the UAE and Saudi Arabia that could completely upset the balance in a region that’s been notoriously fragile. All of this reflects something that Trump did immediately after the 2016 election—he began running for 2020. That’s exactly what Trump is doing again. Except this time he is using his ability to wreck the government to position himself for a run in 2024. Trump’s plan breaks down to: try to destroy democracy now, but if that doesn’t work, make sure the nation is so broken that you can destroy democracy next time. How Republicans will handle this is best summed up by what the Senate did in its last hours before going on a break—completely shatter past traditions by continuing to hand lifetime appointments to unqualified judicial nominees put forward by the loser of the national election. Trump is doing everything he can to leave Joe Biden a nation that is sick and divided at home, weak and besieged abroad. And he’s doing it for the same reason he decided to not engage in a serious attempt to stop COVID-19. He believes that a little death and disaster will be good political strategy.

Marissa Higgins of Kos reported an interesting possibility for Joe Biden’s cabinet, in particular the Department of the Interior. This department handles federal land, including oil and gas rights on land and offshore. It also handles environmental issues, including endangered species preservation, and it handles the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Bureau of Indian Education. It’s easy to guess what a nasty guy crony has been doing as the head of this department. But that’s not what this post is about. The rumor is that a Native American is being considered for the job. Yeah, an Indian to head the Bureau of Indian Affairs – what a concept! And about time. The particular person is Deb Haaland, Representative from New Mexico, and a member of Laguna Pueblo. She was elected in 2018 as one of the first two Native women elected to Congress. Related to that, Moscow Mitch and several other GOP senators have said that they would not confirm any cabinet picks that are liberal. Proposing Sen. Bernie Sanders for Labor Secretary got a laugh and a no. Which makes it all the more important that we win the two runoff races in Georgia. SemDem of the Kos community lays out ways the court system, including the Supreme Court, can be rebalanced, even if membership can’t be expanded. SemDem first lays out the need, including the number of judges that are being quickly pushed onto the court – something occupying Moscow Mitch even in this lame duck season. Then come the suggestions: Investigate and remove judges who committee perjury. There have been several who allegedly lied during confirmation hearings – including Supreme justice Brett Kavanaugh. A citizens brigade could observe judges and fill out a complaint of judicial misconduct when a judge makes overly partisan statements. Write legislation to require unanimous, or nearly so, decisions if they come before a court. Congress can also eliminate judicial review for some federal actions or require it go through state courts. Defy the court – at least the hyperpartisan rulings. That’s being done now. Establish an inter-branch disputes court, a non-partisan body to handle conflicts between Congress and the President. And, of course, try to expand the courts.