...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Monday, November 30, 2020
Meeting of the Coup Clucks Clan interrupted by Covid
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Hello?
In case you missed it, Noem is the governor of the state that brought you the great motorcycle rally covid superspreader event and who doesn't want to impose any restrictions (including masks) on the people of South Dakota. Next time she makes another stupid proclamation, you don't need to ask, "Are you high?"
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
It's dawning on him
Yes, you're the only one. A "down-ballot" vote means that you were at the top of the very same ballots on which winning votes were cast for other Republians, stable genius. So sad.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
UPDATE: From the LtGov of PA:
Jared is going to Saudi Arabia
Whatever they're doing (and turning up the heat in Iran will be one of the things), Jared is going to be shoring up his personal financial arrangements with the Saudis on the taxpayers' dime while he still can.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
UPDATE: Another angle...
Somebody else asked if he had a one-way ticket.
Do NOT go back to normal
Already have been.Boring, reassuring, normal – these are Biden’s great strengths. But he needs to be careful. They could also be his great weaknesses.
That’s because any return to “normal” would be disastrous for America.
Normal led to Trump. Normal led to the coronavirus.
Normal is four decades of stagnant wages and widening inequality when almost all economic gains went to the top. Normal is 40 years of shredded safety nets, and the most expensive but least adequate healthcare system in the modern world.
Normal is also growing corruption of politics by big money – an economic system rigged by and for the wealthy.
Normal is worsening police brutality.
Normal is climate change now verging on catastrophe.
Normal is a GOP that for years has been actively suppressing minority votes and embracing white supremacists. Normal is a Democratic party that for years has been abandoning the working class.
Given the road we were on, Trump and Covid were not aberrations. They were inevitabilities.
[...]
If the underlying trends don’t change, after Biden we could have Trumps as far as the eye can see.
[...]
Hence the paradox. America wants to return to a reassuring normal, but Biden can’t allow it. Complacency would be deadly. He has to both calm the waters and stir the pot.
It’s a mistake to see this challenge as placating the progressive wing of the Democratic party. It’s about dealing with problems that have worsened for decades and if left unattended much longer will be enormously destructive.
Robert Reich @ The Guardian
Robert Reich is one Clinton-Obama official I would be happy to see returned to government. I don't expect to see it happen.
Trump’s boorish attack on traditional pieties understandably makes Washington traditions seem like comfort food after a hangover. The darker truth this response conceals is that generations of foreign policy mistakes both preceded and precipitated Trump – who often went on to continue them anyway. The record of Washington’s “wise men”, who coddled dictators, militarised the globe, and entrenched economic unfairness at home and abroad, opened an extraordinary opportunity for any Trump-like demagogue – making his ascendancy less a matter of atavism than another form of the blowback to mistakes that America perpetually made abroad. If his presence shamed US foreign policy elites, it was because they helped make him possible.
There is no doubt that Trump altered national security policy in a host of ways. But the idea that the old international order was actually rules-based is a fiction that is impossible to sustain – especially regarding the US, which bent or broke the rules across the world throughout the cold war, fearful of its Soviet adversary. After September 11, the US crafted its own version of international law, shaped in its own interests – under both George W Bush and Barack Obama, and against much resistance from others across the world.
[...]
For decades after the second world war, the system allowed other governments considerable room for manoeuvre in their economic policies. But then the US helped to impose a draconian neoliberal order that persists to the present day, including through international financial institutions it dominated.
[...]
Trump became the latest president to condemn “dumb” US wars – as Obama did before him – while building a bigger military, and ordering even more drone strikes and special forces missions. Still, he not only reversed Obama’s incursions deep into parts of Africa but continued the shift away from heavy-footprint wars to light- and no-footprint modes across Central Asia and the Middle East, facing the “resistance” of the military for trying to pull troops from Afghanistan and Iraq in his final days for doing so. Biden will rightly restore the Iran deal if he can, and re-enter the Paris climate accords. He and his staff will talk more about the importance of standard parts of US foreign policy of the past, from human rights to multilateralism and from Nato to the United Nations. He will offer slightly less support for Israel’s rightwing leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Saudi Arabia’s Prince Mohammed bin Salman (though still a lot). But the transformation will likely halt there, for there is little further evidence that Biden understands the need to deal with America’s belligerent traditions.
[...]
[Biden] needs to be held to his promise of ceasing US support for the calamitous Saudi war in Yemen, which Obama enabled and Trump has continued with a vengeance. Unfortunately, however, a more cautious approach to US military power may only come in exchange for restoring enmity with Russia, and continuing the path to a cold war with China that Trump blazed.
The chance Biden will end the misbegotten “war on terror” is vanishingly small – and not merely in Afghanistan and Iraq. Antony Blinken, Biden’s pick for secretary of state, will undo much of the damage Trump did to America’s foreign service and international reputation. But as he explained on a recent podcast, the new administration will ratify the shift away from the “large-scale” to the microscopic and visible to invisible strategies that Bush and Obama pioneered, as if the problem were just that Trump used them with even more gusto.
[...]
While the wars of the future are hard to predict, a better indicator of whether Biden intends a restoration or a renovation will be his economic policy. In spite of campaign promises to restore US manufacturing, Biden has a long record of supporting free trade in America’s foreign relations, as a diehard supporter of Nafta and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (before the latter became politically controversial). Biden has been cagey about whether he will join the latest such agreement. Either way, how he will balance the benefits of free trade with its grievous results for inequality and stagnation remains to be seen.
[...]
[I]f Biden’s presidency stands for little more than nostalgia for a lost foreign policy, it will not only miss a historic opportunity for a US reboot. Reviving old mistakes will only lead some new rough beast to slouch toward Washington, promising to save America from them.
Samuel Moyn @ The Guardian
Sunday, November 29, 2020
And won't it be nice?
All of these people are women.
I only have heard Symone Sanders (good choice, I think) and have come across Jen Psaki as one of Obama's State Department spokespersons. It wasn't a good story.
I'm really starting to feel we're just going back to Obama days, and I wasn't a fan.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
No, Joe, No
Stop pulling from the old Hillary Clinton-associated Democrats.
Oh, HELL no.
We remember Neera from 2016.
Other emails show Tanden arguing that Libyans should be forced to turn over large portions of their oil revenues to repay the U.S. for the costs incurred in bombing Libya, on the grounds that Americans will support future wars only if they see that the countries attacked by the U.S. pay for the invasions.
Intercept
UPDATE:[Likely Hillary Clinton presidential chief of staff Neera] Tanden made up a story about her not being at the DNC platform hearings for “any discussions” of the Israel/Palestine conflict. She made up that story when there was publicly available and easily accessible evidence to the contrary. When she was challenged about her made-up story, she doubled down. She suggested that the edited video gave a misleading impression about her presence there. She accused me of being a liar and demanded that I retract my lie. She never once admitted that it was she, not me, who was not telling the truth. She never once apologized to me for claiming to her 25,000 followers that I was lying.
[...]
If Tanden can act this way in the face of verifiable evidence that’s plain as day, and there for everyone to see, when the stakes are so low, is it completely implausible that she would act in a roughly similar fashion when the evidence is not so publicly available and not so easily accessible and when the stakes are much higher? When she has an even stronger and more self-interested reason for covering her tracks?
[...]
When someone commented on Facebook that they couldn’t understand why a powerful player in DC would be so obsessively monitoring her mentions on Twitter, particularly in response to a not terribly important person like me, Astra [Taylor, a documentary film maker,] made a shrewd observation:
This election has really shown the people who feel entitled to rule the country to be deeply narcissistic and not busy doing anything of actual importance — this is the liberal version of Trump reading all his press/mentions every morning and sending “corrected” copies back to the journalists.Exactly. Never underestimate the narcissism—or amateurishness—of America’s ruling classes. While people like Tanden are in meetings with other important people, where God knows what or whose fate gets decided, they’re keeping their eye on their Twitter mentions, making sure no one’s looking at them cross-eyed, making sure they’re someone whom you don’t want to cross.
Corey Robbin
In a tweet, [ spokesperson for Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas)] Drew Brandewie said that Center for American Progress head Neera Tanden's past history of "disparaging comments about the Republican Senators' whose votes she’ll need" made her confirmation highly unlikely.
[...]
[Tanden] has led the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, since 2010. During the 2016 election, Tanden was a top ally of the Democratic Party's then-nominee, Hillary Clinton, and was seen at the time as a likely candidate for a White House role.
The Hill
Do not feel sorry for Bill Barr
Also...
Why aren't HIS lawyers and HIS judges fixing things for him? !
And Kemp! WTF? He was bought, doesn't he know that?
Old execution methods are new again
It's also quietly executing a rush of people before Trump leaves.The outgoing administration of President Donald Trump is paving the way for additional methods of executing prisoners who have been sentenced to death in the United States.
The Justice Department is quietly amending its execution protocols, no longer requiring federal death sentences to be carried out by lethal injection and clearing the way to use other methods like firing squads and poison gas.
alJazeera
Actually, lethal injection is a horror story. It's not humane, it just spares the killers' and audience's sensitivities. It's expensive, too. Perhaps that's why the DOJ is approving firing squads and poison gas.
Firing squads is a very good idea. It portrays the killers' actions for what they are and forces the audience to confront what's actually happening: state sanctioned murder. And it's cheap.
Gassing, on the other hand, could cause some unwanted comparisons to Nazi methods of getting rid of unwanted people.
This will be a tough choice.
I bet they continue with the lethal injections.A spokesperson for Biden told the AP earlier this month that the president-elect “opposes the death penalty now and in the future” and would work to end its use.
But he did not say whether executions would be paused immediately once Biden takes office.
[...]
This year, the Justice Department has put to death more people than during the previous half-century, despite waning public support from both Democrats and Republicans for its use.
[...]
Attorney General William Barr restarted federal executions this year after a 17-year hiatus.
[...]
It remains unclear whether the Justice Department will seek to use any methods other than lethal injection for executions in the future.
The rule – which goes into effect on December 24 – comes as the Justice Department has scheduled five executions during the lame-duck period, including three just days before President-elect Joe Biden takes office.
[...]
The official said two executions scheduled in December would be done by lethal injection but did not provide information about three others scheduled in January.
I'm guessing that last one isn't a popular choice.In some states, inmates can choose the method of their execution.
In Florida, for example, an inmate can specifically ask to be put to death by electrocution and in Washington state, inmates can ask to be put to death by hanging.
Personally, that would be my choice. Quick. Probably painless. If they aim well. Although heroin overdose might be a good option.In Utah, prisoners sentenced before May 2004 can choose to be put to death by firing squad.
Choose your state for death penalty crimes carefully.In 2014, following a botched state execution in Oklahoma, President Barack Obama directed the Justice Department to conduct a broad review of capital punishment and issues surrounding lethal injection drugs.
Barr said in July 2019 the review had been completed, allowing executions to resume and approved a new procedure for lethal injections that replaced the three-drug combination previously used in federal executions with one drug, pentobarbital.
The one-drug protocol is similar to the procedure used in several states, including Georgia, Missouri and Texas.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Obama's latest memoir
This review is an unvarnished look at Obama's new book. (For which he was paid along with his wife's memoir $65 million.) I haven't read either. I'm not intending to. But this review rings true with what I've seen and read about Obama's time as president, and I can't help but wonder who the hell thought "A Promised Land" was a good idea for a title, given the historic association of the term.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Yet another court loss for the coup crew
Pennsylvania’s highest court has thrown out a lower court’s order that was preventing the state from certifying dozens of contests from the 3 November election.
In the latest Republican lawsuit attempting to thwart president-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the battleground state, the state supreme court unanimously threw out the three-day-old order, saying the underlying lawsuit was filed months after the law allowed for challenges to Pennsylvania’s year-old mail-in voting law.
Justices also remarked on the lawsuit’s staggering demand that an entire election be overturned retroactively. “They have failed to allege that even a single mail-in ballot was fraudulently cast or counted,” justice David Wecht wrote in a concurring opinion.
[...]
Republican plaintiffs had sought to either throw out the 2.5m mail-in ballots submitted under the law – most of them by Democrats – or to wipe out the election results and direct the state’s Republican-controlled legislature to pick Pennsylvania’s presidential electors.
[...]
On Wednesday, commonwealth court judge Patricia McCullough, elected as a Republican in 2009, had issued the order to halt certification of any remaining contests, including apparently contests for Congress.
A day earlier, Democratic governor Tom Wolf said he had certified Joe Biden as the winner of the presidential election in Pennsylvania. Biden beat president Donald Trump by more than 80,000 votes in Pennsylvania, a state Trump had won in 2016.
Wolf had appealed McCullough’s decision to the state supreme court, saying there was no “conceivable justification” for it.
Guardian
Saturday, November 28, 2020
Huge, if it works
We desperately need this.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.Pyrolysis [...] also be used to turn old plastic products into new plastic products – not just grocery bags, but also medical supplies and car parts. It’s all part of an emerging concept called the circular economy, which can radically change how we reuse scarce resources and put an end to waste altogether.
[...]
A groundbreaking project in Indiana could be a solution to this significant problem. A chemical recycling plant under construction near Fort Wayne plans to turn all sorts of plastics including Styrofoam, children’s toys, milk cartons and of course even those difficult to recycle plastic bags into fuel for cars and trucks.
Brightmark Energy is behind the first-of-its-kind project in the U.S. that aims to collect plastic waste from nearby cities such as Indianapolis and Chicago and transform them into ultra-low sulfur diesel fuel and other products.
[...]
A groundbreaking project in Indiana could be a solution to this significant problem. A chemical recycling plant under construction near Fort Wayne plans to turn all sorts of plastics including Styrofoam, children’s toys, milk cartons and of course even those difficult to recycle plastic bags into fuel for cars and trucks.
Brightmark Energy is behind the first-of-its-kind project in the U.S. that aims to collect plastic waste from nearby cities such as Indianapolis and Chicago and transform them into ultra-low sulfur diesel fuel and other products.
The plant will use a low-emissions process called pyrolysis, which uses high temperatures and low oxygen levels to break down a wide range of plastic products and transform them into key hydrocarbon mixtures that can be used as fuel or as a raw material to make base petrochemicals such as ethylene, propylene, butadiene, benzene, toluene and xylene.
The plant will be able to accommodate almost any type of plastic whether it’s recyclable, or not.
The plant is under construction and expected to be completed next year.
[...]
“It will be 93% efficient and will only have a small bit of unusable output — in the form of a non-toxic powder — that can be sent to the landfill,” according to the Indianapolis Star.
Brightmark said it aims to build more of its chemical recycling plants around the U.S.
Imagine That
What might Trump be doing during Biden's inaugural address?
First of all, he gets a pass if there's no in-person address. And even if there is, it will be sparsely attended because of Covid, so we know Trump will make disparaging remarks about Biden's attendance numbers forever.
He'll do SOMEthing to call attention to himself that day.Donald Trump is discussing different ways to disrupt the impending Joe Biden era, chief among them by announcing another run against him.
According to three people familiar with the conversations, the president, who refuses to acknowledge he lost the 2020 election as he clearly did, has not just talked to close advisers and confidants about a potential 2024 run to reclaim the White House but about the specifics of a campaign launch. The conversations have explored, among other things, how Trump could best time his announcement so as to keep the Republican Party behind him for the next four years. Two of these knowledgeable sources said the president has, in the past two weeks, even floated the idea of doing a 2024-related event during Biden’s inauguration week, possibly on Inauguration Day.
Daily Beast
Hitch your wagon to a batshit crazy loser. Sounds like a great plan.The president and some of his closest associates have already started surveying prominent donors to get a sense of who would be with him, or perhaps against him, if he chose to run in the 2024 election. Some top Trump allies have told The Daily Beast that they are doing what they can to stay in the president’s good graces, calculating that doing so will help ensure a seat at the table and a future in the party—in the event he runs again.
Oh, I bet Mike Pence isn't. He'll be wanting to run on his own. And I wouldn't be surprised if Mike Pompeo wants to do the same.According to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter, the president has privately bragged that he’d still remain in the spotlight, even if Biden is in the Oval Office, in part because the news media will keep regularly covering him since—as Trump has assessed—he gets the news outlets ratings and those same outlets find Biden “boring.”
[...]
On Thursday, Bloomberg reported that during an Oval Office meeting earlier this month between Trump, National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien, Vice President Mike Pence, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the president said he planned on running in 2024, if the 2020 election results were not nullified by Trump’s attorneys.
“If you do that—and I think I speak for everybody in the room—we’re with you 100 percent,” O’Brien told the president, according to the Bloomberg report.
So, it's just a coincidence, I'm sure, that Pompeo recently secretly met with Mohammed bin Salman and Benjamin Netanyahu, and few days later a major Iranian nuclear scientist was assassinated.Trump’s refusal to concede has been supplemented by an attempt to make it harder for Biden to reverse his policy achievements. Indeed, even before Election Day 2020, various Trump officials working in the administration were charting paths forward to make it harder for Biden to reenter the Iran nuclear agreement.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Knowledge and reality in the age of Trump
I'm not sure I have enough faith in the institutions. Trump's a buffoon, but he's laid the groundwork for a cleverer villain.Trump's most important contribution to the trolling of the American mind is not what he says, but that it is impossible to ignore what he says. In the past, the constitution of knowledge dealt with and contained alt-truth by ignoring and sidelining it. For generations, such marginalization allowed Christian Scientists and astrologists and conspiracy theorists and many other purveyors of alternative realities to believe what they believe without disrupting science and society. But there is just no way to marginalize an American president. He can set the agenda and dominate the news. He can turn the White House into a baloney factory. He can impanel a public commission to investigate a claim he completely made up. All of which, and more, he has done.
[...]
Weaponized trolling has enjoyed the advantage of surprise, but as that diminishes, the troll army will encounter a disadvantage. Trolls have swarms, but the constitution of knowledge has institutions.
[...]
How much damage the troll attack inflicts depends on a lot of things, but it depends most on how successfully the institutions rally to improve their performance and defend their values.
National Affairs
This is an excellent article. Longish, but worth the time to read. Check it out.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
h/t Stephen
Friday, November 27, 2020
Another frivolous lawsuit denied
The Supreme Court better not agree to hear this shit. I'm not feeling very confident about them after that ridiculous decision they reached on the Covid situation in New York, though.Donald Trump’s legal team suffered yet another defeat in [the 3rd US circuit court of appeals] Friday as a federal appeals court in Philadelphia roundly rejected the campaign’s latest effort to challenge the state’s election results.
Trump’s lawyers vowed to appeal to the supreme court despite the Philadelphia judges’ assessment that the “campaign’s claims have no merit”.
“Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here,” Judge Stephanos Bibas wrote for the three-judge panel.
[...]
The three judges on the panel were all appointed by Republican presidents. including Bibas, a former University of Pennsylvania law professor appointed by Trump. Trump’s sister, Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, sat on the court for 20 years, retiring in 2019.
“Voters, not lawyers, choose the president. Ballots, not briefs, decide elections,” Bibas said in the opinion, which also denied the campaign’s request to stop the state from certifying its results, a demand he called “breathtaking”.
[...]
Pennsylvania officials had certified their vote count Monday for President-elect Joe Biden, who defeated Trump by more than 80,000 votes in the state. Nationally, Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris, garnered nearly 80 million votes, a record in US presidential elections.
[...]
“The activist judicial machinery in Pennsylvania continues to cover up the allegations of massive fraud,” Trump’s lawyer Jenna Ellis tweeted after Friday’s ruling. “On to SCOTUS!”
Guardian
JFC. The GOP is anti-democratic. And despicable.A separate Republican challenge that reached the Pennsylvania supreme court this week seeks to stop the state from further certifying any races on the ballot. The Democratic governor Tom Wolf’s administration is fighting that effort, saying it would prevent the state’s legislature and congressional delegation from being seated in the coming weeks.
I hope to god they do.Republicans are concerned that the chaos caused by Trump’s stance and his false comments on the conduct of the election in the key swing state of Georgia, which Biden won for the Democrats, could hinder his party’s efforts to retain control of the Senate.
Guardian
Unfuckingbelievable. That SHOULD turn all of Georgia against him. Of course it won't. But maybe enough.Trump has attacked the election system in Georgia, even though it is headed by Republicans, after Biden flipped the southern state to the Democrats for the first time since 1992.
On Thanksgiving – a day usually reserved for presidential platitudes – Trump broke with tradition and repeated those attacks in a now rare face-off with journalists. “I’m very worried about that,” Trump said when asked about his previous baseless claims of fraud in Georgia. “You have a fraudulent system.” He then called Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who has defended the state’s election process, an “enemy of the people”.
It would serve them right.Such attacks have Republicans worried as they seek to motivate Georgia voters to come to the polls in January, volunteer for their Senate campaigns and – perhaps most importantly of all – dig deep into their pockets to pay for the unexpected runoff races.
In particular Trump’s comments have spurred conspiracy theories that the state’s electoral system is rigged and prompted some of his supporters to make calls for a boycott of the coming vote – something that local Georgia Republicans desperately do not want.
Maybe try to convince Dad to STFU.Donald Trump Jr, has jumped into the fray, tweeting: “I’m seeing a lot of talk from people that are supposed to be on our side telling GOP voters not to go out & vote.. That is NONSENSE. IGNORE those people.”
Is he going to call Raffensperger an enemy of the people while he's down there? Jesus what a shithead. I hope Raffensperger votes for the Democrats. He won't, but he should.The president has also pledged to visit Georgia to hold rallies in support of the two Republican candidates, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue.
UPDATE:
Great strategy for meritless lawsuits.
Is this now the new norm?
I don't expect a Biden administration to be solid enough to investigate and prosecute.
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