It took 159 years for Confederate flag waving insurrectionists to take over the US Capitol, but Donald Trump pulled it off.
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16 comments:
[clutches pearls]
Beautiful! The people are taking back power!
No, they are not, Taking back power is done through elections. This is the behavior of a delusional and violent cult in support of its dear leader who is trying to stage a coup d'état.
Sorry, but I am not allowing fringe/alternative reality commentary. If you want to post that kind of stuff start your own blog. See also my guidelines for commenting which are linked in the sidebar. Comments that do not keep at least one foot firmly planted in the real world will be deleted.
Here's the question I'm grappling with tonight: Why has it been all right -- and even encouraged by those sworn to uphold the laws of our country -- for angry mobs to pillage, plunder, destroy, burn, and decimate cities for months, inciting and resorting to violence, pulling down statues erected by the people of those cities, with impunity -- law enforcement having been told to stand down -- but today a woman was shot and killed by law enforcement because she participated in a similar protest for the other side? Apparently guns are good again, as long as you hate Donald Trump.
And why are all those who were active at the capitol today instantly identified as "Trump supporters"? Indeed I'm sure many of them were, but it will be impossible to know for sure, until the offenders are interviewed. Some, I am positive, were posing as such, just to stir up trouble. It happens all the time but is never reported by the liberal media.
The American people were defrauded in this election and it appears that numbers of them are ready to fight for what is right. Dark days are coming for this country, and those who voted for it will be among those standing aghast at things that will be perpetrated by the government on law-abiding citizens. I wonder if your average middle-class leftist is ready.
Let's talk about the real world: censorship of the scandal involving Biden's son, support for all depredation done by the BLM, funding from Soros to many of the entities that supported the strictest quarantines, etc. Obviously, you do not have the emotional conditions to deal with the collapse of the world in which you grew up.
@ Jenny the Pirate
Those are perfectly fair questions. But they do not rise to the level of attempting to overthrow a lawful election. And yes, those were Trump supporters. Seriously. An ocean of people wearing MAGA hats waving Trump flags (and Confederate) showing up at a rally Trump called for and that he addressed and urged them to march on the capitol? Come on.
@ Thiago Santos de Moraes
As noted above, some of those are fair questions. But ordinary political issues and controversies are not grounds for trying to overthrow the government. As for Soros, he is the great bugaboo of people on the right. I'm guessing you don't spend a lot of time worrying about the decades long influence of the Koch brothers. As for your closing commentary, tread carefully. I have already deleted one comment. If I have to go down that road again you will be asked to take your commentary elsewhere. I am tolerant of respectful and fact based discussion. But the bottom line is that I am the proprietor of this particular corner of the internet and here I decide what is, and is not, kosher. Again, my house rules are linked in the sidebar.
Finally, the seeds sown in Nixon's southern strategy have come to fruit with the Party of Lincoln succumbing to mindless, faux states' rights Confederacy. Say what you will about old time Southern Democrats and Dixiecrats, and you are saying it about today's Republican Party. The Party of Hoover and McCarthy took advantage of Southerners' outrage over civil rights and was then overtaken and metastasized into a party of white, (fundamentalist) Christian, rural, old economy, gun-nut identity and nostalgia while supporting the economic and social policies accelerating the root causes of their grievance and scapegoating those whose policies actually made American great but are supported by people who don't match the gauzy TV images of 'real Americans' they see in their heads (a definition of an American that is uncoincidentally limited to themselves and people they like. and who like the same stuff they do as a politicized sort of lifestyle fetishization.)
The quickest and most likely route to Trump's removal from office took place in the early morning of January 7, confirming the historic numbers of votes for Biden Harris last November. However, I agree Pence and the cabinet should remove him, the House should impeach him, the Senate should remove him from office, and every single trespasser in the United States Capital building should be arrested and charged.
If any conservative Orthodox Christians are confused over whether to be concerned about the election results in Pennsylvania, read the unanimous ruling of the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals written by Judge Stephanos Bibas. Judge Bibas was appointed by Trump and is a pious, 'traditionalist' Orthodox Christian with deep personal ties to various 'traditionalist' monasteries; he even founded an Orthodox parish while teaching law in the Midwest. He is not whatever your image of a milquetoast, ethnic, Greek Orthodox, Christian might be. He, on behalf of himself and two judges appointed by George W. Bush, lambasted the allegations of the Trump campaign's flailing attempts at overturning election results in Pennsylvania (as almost every other legal Hail Mary by the Trump campaign).
https://www2.ca3.uscourts.gov/opinarch/203371np.pdf
There was no fraud. It was really close, in some places (e.g., AZ, GA, PA, WI). But, it wasn't close, nationally. What one's social circle believes and the size of a candidate's rallies doesn't matter. The fact one doesn't like some construction of "them" and their lifestyle choices doesn't matter. And conspiracy theories are just a fancy name for gossip, which is a sin. Trump lost. This is part of living in a representative democracy in a federalist system. This is what living in a republic can look like. In fact, it's the structure of our federalist republic that makes this election even close: Republicans have won the White House with a majority of the popular vote only once in the last three decades! Trump snuck out a win in 2016 while most Americans voted for someone else. Republicans and rural Americans have been hitting far above their weight class in federal elections for decades (thanks still to 19th-century Republican 'gerrymandering' of the Senate following the Civil War; the filibuster; and the inability/unwillingness of high population states to split, e.g., CA, TX, NY, IL, FL, PA, to more accurately represent the distribution of the U.S. population in our upper chamber.) But, sometimes you lose. And Trump lost. We expect better of children playing Little League and high school football player than we are seeing from Trump, his mob, and most Republicans.
"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."
"The Campaign never alleges that any ballot was fraudulent or cast by an illegal voter. It never alleges that any defendant treated the Trump campaign or its votes worse than it treated the Biden campaign or its votes. Calling something discrimination does not make it so."
"Voters, not lawyers, choose the President. Ballots, not briefs, decide elections. The ballots here are governed by Pennsylvania election law. No federal law requires poll watchers or specifies where they must live or how close they may stand when votes are counted. Nor does federal law govern whether to count ballots with minor state-law defects or let voters cure those defects."
"In our federalist system, we must respect Pennsylvania’s approach to running elections. We will not make more of ballot technicalities than Pennsylvania itself does."
"...as lawyer Rudolph Giuliani stressed, the Campaign “doesn’t plead fraud... [T]his is
not a fraud case... [The Campaign] objects that Pennsylvania’s Secretary of State and some counties restricted poll watchers and let voters fix technical defects in their mail-in ballots. It offers nothing more... But Pennsylvania law is willing to overlook many technical defects. It favors counting votes as long as there is no fraud. Indeed, the Campaign has already litigated and lost many of these issues in state courts."
"The Campaign’s claims have no merit. The number of ballots it specifically challenges is far smaller than the roughly 81,000-vote margin of victory. And it never claims
fraud or that any votes were cast by illegal voters. Plus, tossing out millions of mail-in
ballots would be drastic and unprecedented, disenfranchising a huge swath of the electorate
and upsetting all down-ballot races too. That remedy would be grossly disproportionate to
the procedural challenges raised. So we deny the motion for an injunction pending appeal."
- From https://www2.ca3.uscourts.gov/opinarch/203371np.pdf
Regarding comparisons of the BLM protests over the Summer and yesterday's MAGA insurrection:
The BLM "protests peaked on June 6, when half a million people turned out in nearly 550 places across the United States. That was a single day in more than a month of protests... [four] polls — including one released this week by Civis Analytics, a data science firm that works with businesses and Democratic campaigns — suggest that about 15 million to 26 million people in the United States participated in demonstrations over the death of George Floyd and others... Across the United States, there [were] more than 4,700 demonstrations, or an average of 140 per day, since the first protests began in Minneapolis on May 26... [Turnout] ranged from dozens to tens of thousands in about 2,500 small towns and large cities."
Based on "data from May to June, having already documented 7,305 events in thousands of towns and cities in all 50 states and D.C., involving millions of attendees... The overall levels of violence and property destruction were low, and most of the violence that did take place was, in fact, directed against the BLM protesters... Only 3.7 percent of the protests involved property damage or vandalism. Some portion of these involved neither police nor protesters, but people engaging in vandalism or looting alongside the protests.
In short, our data suggest that 96.3 percent of events involved no property damage or police injuries, and in 97.7 percent of events, no injuries were reported among participants, bystanders or police... These figures should correct the narrative that the protests were overtaken by rioting and vandalism or violence. Such claims are false. Incidents in which there was protester violence or property destruction should be regarded as exceptional — and not representative of the uprising as a whole. In many instances, police reportedly began or escalated the violence, but some observers nevertheless blame the protesters. The claim that the protests are violent — even when the police started the violence — can help local, state and federal forces justify intentionally beating, gassing or kettling the people marching... Given that protesters were objecting to extrajudicial police killings of Black citizens, protesters displayed an extraordinary level of nonviolent discipline, particularly for a campaign involving hundreds of documented incidents of apparent police brutality. The protests were extraordinarily nonviolent, and extraordinarily nondestructive, given the unprecedented size of the movement’s participation and geographic scope."
Not that facts from reputable, credentialed sources matter to those in a cult of personality when a post on AmericanPatriotQ.com and the MAGA_NoSnowflakes! subreddit "owned the libs" with an "in-depth analysis" of media reports on election results and Constitutional law.
@123, How many people we killed as a direct result of these overwhelmingly peaceful and uneventful protests? What what the cumulative monetary damage from said peaceful protests? How many citizens lost their jobs and/or businesses from said peaceful protests?
Amerian Orthodox are squarely on the side of the secular democrats. Like the Catholics, they think it's the new imperium and they will follow it slavishly.
According to “ a database created by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project (ACLED), a non-profit, working in collaboration with a group of researchers at Princeton” found “at least 11 Americans have been killed while participating in political demonstrations this year and another 14 have died in other incidents linked to political unrest, according to new data from a non-profit monitoring political unrest in the United States.
Nine of the people killed during protests were demonstrators taking part in Black Lives Matter protests. Two were conservatives killed after pro-Trump ‘patriot rallies’. All but one were killed by fellow citizens.” I provided the denominator above.
While “The protests that took place in 140 U.S. cities this spring were mostly peaceful... the arson, vandalism and looting that did occur will result in at least $1 billion to $2 billion of paid insurance claims”.
No one is arguing the violence is justified. It is understandable, however, given the question you didn’t bother to ask: how many unarmed people have died at the hands of police and how much are they worth? how has the systemic civil rights abuses by police cost? “False arrests, civil rights violations and excessive force are just some of the claims made by civilians, costing [U.S.] taxpayers over $300 million in fiscal year 2019” alone. One example, one year: “During fiscal year 2019, New York City paid out $175.9 million in civil judgments and claims for police-related lawsuits -- not including settlements made with the city's comptroller's office, said Nick Paolucci, a spokesman with the city's Law Department.” and while the protests began with police violence, it quickly became about societal racism, and the cost of that you didn’t inquire about.
Far more Americans lost their jobs because of the Republican policies that led to W’s Great Recession and Trump’s Covid recession than the small percentage of the historically large BLM protests that included violence caused by the protestors rather than law enforcement and accelerationists.
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