Politics Random, Random

[ti-amie]

Seth Abramson via @sethabramson

WASHINGTON POST (1/19): Federal Law Enforcement Uncovers Massive Early-January Plot to Murder All of Congress; Plotters with Military Backgrounds, Who Had Trained to "Storm the Capitol," Planned to Gas Members of Congress in the Tunnels Beneath the Capitol washingtonpost.com/local/legal-is…

1/ While some members of the criminal conspiracy just uncovered wanted to execute "arrests" for "treason"—defined by the plotters as any meeting to certify Biden's victory—others clearly sought murder, planning to "seal" members of Congress underground and then "turn on the gas."

2/ "A ring of dozens coordinated their movements as they 'stormed the castle' to disrupt the confirmation of President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral college victory."

According to the Washington Post, as many as 30 or 40 plotters may have been involved in the January 6 operation.
3/ Don't be confused by these pro-Trump plotters' willingness to kill all of Congress—their goal was to ensure that Biden was not certified as president, and that the Trump presidency continued. Eliminating Congress would allegedly have given Trump grounds to enact martial law.

4/ It's articles like this one that remind me that we should be very, very wary when Republicans say we already know all we need to know to have a second impeachment trial of Donald Trump. The truth is that every day we are learning more about what January 6 was really all about.

5/ Not only did these pro-Trump plotters claim that they'd specifically trained for their storming of the Capitol, but they were in touch with one another through radio communications during their assault on January 6.

These people had a very clear plan they intended to execute.

6/ Rep. Jason Crow made an absolutely critical point today, which is that while Trump's January 6 speech will be critical to his second impeachment trial, his and his agents' acts of incitement following the election were near-daily, and helped produce the January 6 insurrection.

7/ Arguably it might've benefited Trump to have a quick trial focused just on January 6. As it is, by mid-February House managers will be able to put together a historically damning case about everything Trump and his agents did after the November election he lost in a landslide.

8/ With each day, Trump and Giuliani's *coordinated effort* to ensure the attack on the Capitol could go on as long as possible without interruption by the Guard or a statement from the White House is looking more and more suspicious. It's hard to believe they didn't want mayhem.

9/ I understand why this story got buried; it came out hours before Biden became the nation's 46th president, and media—for that matter, America—understandably wanted to experience a moment of good cheer. But now we have to talk about the terrifying truth behind the insurrection.

10/ We must know why Boebert was giving tours to potential insurrectionists the day before the insurrection. We must know why the QAnon Shaman was at Trump's January 4 Georgia rally. And why Trump's political director spoke to Mo Brooks the day before Brooks incited insurrection.

11/ We have to know why "Stop the Steal" activist Ali Alexander says he has info on private Trump calls to Arizona GOP officials—and why the Arizona GOP asked Republicans if they were ready to "die" for Trump. We must know if Stone was in contact with Proud Boys pre-insurrection.

12/ We have to know why Michael Flynn's brother Charles—who is not in the chain of command on January 6—was in the room on that day when the Pentagon refused to send the National Guard to the Capitol to rescue Congress. We have to know who Michael Flynn spoke to pre-insurrection.

13/ We have to know why Rudy Giuliani told the mob on January 6 that he needed them to buy Trump time to gather evidence of election fraud—then called Senator Tuberville in mid-insurrection and asked him to fraudulently challenge *10* states as a strategy to cause a longer delay.

14/ We must know why, as he watched the Capitol be attacked on January 6—threatening Congress and his vice president—Donald Trump was, per various media reports, "pleased," "delighted," "excited," "a little bit happy" and "borderline enthusiastic." What did he think would happen?

15/ In England they still remember the Gunpowder Plot of November 5, 1605—415 years ago. A gang of insurrectionists planned to kill the King and every member of Parliament.

For how long should America remember a plot to kill all of Congress and the vice president at the Capitol?

[ti-amie]

Mitch McConnell’s latest sabotage effort is a scam. He already showed us how.

Opinion by
Greg Sargent
Columnist
Jan. 25, 2021 at 10:54 a.m. EST

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is refusing to allow Democrats to take control of the Senate; in so doing, the minority leader is banking on a twisted convention of political reporting that he knows will play to his advantage.

Specifically, McConnell has calculated that the press will place the onus of achieving bipartisan cooperation on President Biden, while allowing Republicans to cast their own withholding of bipartisan cooperation as proof of Biden’s failure to achieve it.

We know this because we have already seen McConnell operate from this playbook. He has been quite open about how it works. And this fact should shift the way the entire public discussion about McConnell’s strategy proceeds.

McConnell is employing a simple but deceptive scam that has hoodwinked a lot of people for a long time. The central ruse is that McConnell piously holds up the filibuster as a tool for securing bipartisan cooperation.

In reality, however, McConnell himself uses the filibuster in precisely the opposite way: to facilitate the partisan withholding of cooperation to an extraordinary extent, for largely instrumental ends.

McConnell is now locked in a standoff with Senate Democrats. He is demanding that they commit in advance to keeping the legislative filibuster in place as his extortion price for allowing an agreement on the Senate’s operating rules.

Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) has rejected this demand. While it’s unlikely Democrats will end the filibuster as long as moderates such as Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.V.) oppose it, they won’t commit to this up front: They want to preserve this option if McConnell obstructs everything on Biden’s agenda.

The result is that the Senate has largely ground to a halt. Committees remain in GOP control, and the Biden agenda remains to some degree in limbo, with the fate of more controversial nominees and his proposed new economic rescue package remaining uncertain.

The Post has some new reporting on McConnell’s thinking:

The calculations for McConnell, according to Republicans, are simple. Not only is preserving the filibuster a matter that Republicans can unify around, it is something that potentially divides Democrats, who are under enormous pressure to discard it to advance their governing agenda.
“Republicans very much appreciate the consistency and the rock-solid fidelity to the norms and rules that make the Senate a moderating force in policymaking,” said Scott Jennings, a former McConnell aide. “The legislative filibuster is the last rule driving bipartisanship in Washington.”

As it happens, this hasn’t yet “divided” Democrats, who appear united behind the idea that they cannot allow McConnell to bluff them into forgoing their main point of leverage over him.

But if Democrats do need fortifying in this regard, here’s a place to start. When McConnell’s spinners claim that he wants to keep the filibuster to facilitate bipartisanship and moderation, it’s knee-slappingly laughable. McConnell himself has shown us otherwise.

In an interview with journalist Joshua Green in 2011, McConnell explained exactly why he was expanding use of the filibuster and other procedural tactics against even noncontroversial aspects of President Barack Obama’s agenda. He said:

“We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of these proposals,” McConnell says. “Because we thought — correctly, I think — that the only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan. When you hang the ‘bipartisan’ tag on something, the perception is that differences have been worked out, and there’s a broad agreement that that’s the way forward.”

This deserves renewed attention in the current context. McConnell’s core insight was that there would be a major downside for Republicans if even a handful of GOP senators reached compromises with a Democratic president — even if the Democratic president made meaningful concessions to them in the process.

That’s because it would bolster the notion that the Democratic president had successfully bridged disagreement with Republicans. McConnell wanted to avoid that outcome, regardless of whether the compromises reached were reasonable or salutary ones by the lights of the crossover Republicans themselves.

In McConnell’s wielding, then, the filibuster facilitated the prevention of outbreaks of bipartisanship. It isn’t just that in many cases it blocked Senate Democrats from governing despite having the majority. It also set up standoffs in which refusing to reach compromises with a Democratic president fulfilled the instrumental goal of casting him as a failed leader.

There is very little doubt that McConnell intends to do the same to Biden wherever possible. In fact, as Brian Beutler suggests, by holding Senate action hostage right now — all to leverage Democrats into unilateral disarmament in the face of future filibustering — McConnell is already doing this.

Indeed, you can see this reflected in the media coverage, which is already demonstrating the success of this strategy and the correctness of the McConnell calculation underlying it. Press accounts regularly describe the current standoff in the Senate as casting doubt solely on Biden’s ability to achieve bipartisan cooperation.

McConnell is not obliged to support a Democratic president’s agenda, of course. And to some degree, Republican opposition to Biden’s agenda will understandably reflect principled disagreement.

But we are not obliged to sugarcoat the full range of McConnell’s motives here, or to pretend that there’s any legitimacy to his saintly insistence that he only wants to keep the filibuster in order to facilitate bipartisanship. He demonstrated the contrary to us himself, in his own words.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... tisanship/

[ponchi101]

Excluding the obvious person, he is the most dangerous politician in the USA. He simply could not care less about the well being of the country.

[Togtdyalttai]

Excluding the obvious person, he is the most dangerous politician in the USA. He simply could not care less about the well being of the country.

But at least he's not entirely selfish. Everything he does is for the benefit of the Republican Party as opposed to himself and occasionally his family.

[ti-amie]

Excluding the obvious person, he is the most dangerous politician in the USA. He simply could not care less about the well being of the country.

But at least he's not entirely selfish. Everything he does is for the benefit of the Republican Party as opposed to himself and occasionally his family.

I think his wife and her family handle the grifting. They're into shipping and apparently her father gave Mitch a nice cash gift.

[ponchi101]

But at least he's not entirely selfish. Everything he does is for the benefit of the Republican Party as opposed to himself and occasionally his family.

That is an interesting take. Could you see that from the perspective that as long as he does all this, he remains in charge of the republican party, and the selfishness is recursive?
Splitting hairs, I know. You view is highly probable.

[ti-amie]

[ti-amie]

More wolves in sheep's clothing.

[ponchi101]

Who are the wolves here? There are three tweets imbedded.

[ti-amie]

Who are the wolves here? There are three tweets imbedded.

These folks explain it better than I can.



NYU Primatology
@nyuprimatology
Replying to @CantlonLab
Life is a living hell for tenured Harvard full-professor heavily-published millionaire Steven Pinker.



Bryan Campen @bryancampen
I can’t get over the fact that they blame Black people in the very first sentence. Talk about not keeping your powder dry.

Dr. Gordon B Schmidt
@iopsychologyReplying to @CantlonLab and @Ivuoma
Worth noting is that he set that post to only "People he follows or mentioned can reply." So just the 64 he followed can even respond.

Xeni Jardin @xeni
Replying to
@CantlonLab
Jeffrey Epstein’s friend and defender.

[ponchi101]

Wow. I find it hard to go against Pinker.
And, all the replies are about him being a Harvard Professor OR his lifestyle, not the subject.
Will look a bit more into it, before forming an opinion.

[ponchi101]

I will stay out of this subject in particular. Way to biased to write a proper opinion.
counterweight.

[dryrunguy]

Sidebar: We all knew this already, but Sarah Huckabee Sanders has officially announced her candidacy for the governor of Arkansas.

[dryrunguy]

Now, about Pinker.

No one is perfect. Including Pinker. Dawkins has his well-documented issues. Sam Harris is riddled with all sorts of problems. We can admire these big brains for what they get right while also raising our eyebrows when they say something like this. No one should be put on an unquestionable pedestal, and when they step far outside of their realm of expertise, such as this case, we most certainly should not greet their words with deference on a bended knee. They have earned our respect, but they haven't earned that.

[Suliso]

Now, about Pinker.

No one is perfect. Including Pinker. Dawkins has his well-documented issues. Sam Harris is riddled with all sorts of problems. We can admire these big brains for what they get right while also raising our eyebrows when they say something like this. No one should be put on an unquestionable pedestal, and when they step far outside of their realm of expertise, such as this case, we most certainly should not greet their words with deference on a bended knee. They have earned our respect, but they haven't earned that.

Could I endorse that 2x?