And so it begins

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Long arm of the law

Good.  That shit needs to be seriously and severely curtailed.

Federal prosecutors have interviewed the secretaries of state for both Pennsylvania and New Mexico in recent months.

[...]

[Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al] Schmidt, a Republican, was asked about issues he encountered while serving as Philadelphia City Commissioner, including how misinformation about widespread voter fraud impacted him and other election officials at the time.

[...]

New Mexico’s top election official, Maggie Toulouse Oliver, also met with federal prosecutors in recent months “to discuss matters related to the 2020 election.”

[...]

Smith’s team has sent subpoenas to local and state officials in all seven of the key states – Georgia, New Mexico, Nevada, Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – that were targeted by Trump and his allies and where Trump’s campaign convened the false electors as part of the effort to subvert the Electoral College.

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger also spoke to federal prosecutors as part of the criminal probe.

Benson said in an interview on CNN that prosecutors were focused, in part, on the impact of misinformation on election workers and the “threats that emerged from that from various sources.”

Other officials from those states also have been interviewed by federal investigators as part of the special counsel probe, including Rusty Bowers, a former top GOP official in Arizona.

Smith’s sprawling investigations has focused on multiple alleged election-stealing efforts.

[...]

Smith and his team have zeroed in on a chaotic Oval Office meeting during the final days of Trump’s presidency, during which the former president considered some of the most desperate and far-fetched proposals to keep him in power over objections from his White House counsel.

  CNN

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Shameful

JFC

UPDATE:

Also at that meeting...

[Ryan Kelley, a Republican candidate for governor,] told the crowd in the video that "If you see something you don't like happening with the machines, if you see something going on, unplug it from the wall."

  Business Insider

WTF? Better call a lawyer immediately after, because you're going to need one.

What a day

Some highlights:

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Oh, yeah...

Trump troops heading to Philadelphia

Two men connected to a Hummer displaying stickers for the QAnon conspiracy movement are expected to face firearms charges for carrying guns without proper permits outside the Convention Center, where ballots were being counted for the presidential election, according to Philadelphia Police.

A law enforcement source said the investigation began Thursday night, when police received an alert to be on the lookout for a mother, son and another man from Virginia Beach traveling to the Philadelphia region to “straighten things out," as vote counting continued in Pennsylvania. The alert said that the people were believed to have an AR-15 rifle in the car, and that they were suspected of recently purchasing large amounts of ammo and AR-15 parts, according to the source, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the investigation.

  Philadelphia Inquirer

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Bannon banned

Twitter has banned the account of the former Donald Trump adviser and surrogate Steve Bannon[, saying it had suspended the podcast account for violating its policy on the glorification of violence.]

[...]

Speaking on his podcast, the War Room, which was distributed in video form on a number of social media outlets, the far-right provocateur appeared to endorse violence against Wray and the US’s most senior infectious diseases expert.

“Second term kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci … no I actually want to go a step farther but the president is a kind-hearted man and a good man,” Bannon said.

“I’d actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England. I’d put their heads on pikes, right, I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats, you either get with the programme or you’re gone.”

  Guardian

I saw that video. It was bad, but you could have passed it off as bluster until the end where someone off camera agreed, very seriously, and talked about hanging people for similar reasons, saying we used to do things right. Despicable people. Sadly, they have way too many followers.

The same video was on Facebook for about 10 hours before it was also removed.

[...]

The moves against Bannon came hours after Facebook banned “Stop the Steal”, a group involved in organising protests this weekend throughout the US against the presidential vote count.

One post, shared by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, declared: “Neither side is going to concede. Time to clean the guns, time to hit the streets.”

The increasingly heated language around the election has also included interventions from more mainstream figures, including the former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich, who appeared to call for election workers in Pennsylvania to be arrested.

[...]

“My hope is that President Trump will lead the millions of Americans who understand exactly what’s going on,” Gingrich said [on Sean Hannity's Fox show]. “The Philadelphia machine is corrupt. The Atlanta machine is corrupt. The machine in Detroit is corrupt. And they are trying to steal the presidency. And we should not allow them to do that.”

“First of all, under federal law, we should lock up the people who are breaking the law,” he continued. “You stop somebody from being an observer, you just broke federal law. Do you hide and put up papers so nobody can see what you’re doing? You just broke federal law. You bring in ballots that aren’t real? You just broke federal law.”

Fine talk from a man who was the first Congressman ever to be reprimanded by the House for ethics violations - 84 of them, to be exact,for which he was fined $300,000.

Also...

Philadelphia police arrested two men who were allegedly involved in a plot to attack the Pennsylvania Convention Center on Thursday night. Police were tipped off, possibly from a concerned family member of one of the men, who had driven 300 miles (480km) from Virginia.

UPDATE:

We're all expecting it

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.