The Washington Post has a zillion-word feature today about how the insurrection of January 6 played out:
Live television news coverage showed the horror accelerating minute by minute after 1:10 p.m., when Trump had called on his followers to march on the U.S. Capitol....The Capitol was under siege — and the president, glued to the television, did nothing. For 187 minutes, Trump resisted entreaties to intervene from advisers, allies and his elder daughter, as well as lawmakers under attack.
....During the 187 minutes that Trump stood by, harrowing scenes of violence played out in and around the Capitol. Twenty-five minutes into Trump’s silence, a news photographer was dragged down a flight of stairs and thrown over a wall. Fifty-two minutes in, a police officer was kicked in the chest and surrounded by a mob. [Etc.]
....Trump watched the attack play out on television and resisted acting, neither to coordinate a federal response nor to instruct his supporters to disperse. He all but abdicated his responsibilities as commander in chief — a president reduced to mere bystander. The tweets Trump sent during the first two hours of rioting were muddled at best. He disavowed violence but encouraged his supporters to press on with their fight at the Capitol. And throughout, he repeated the lie that the election was stolen.
As for Tucker Carlson's absurd claim that the whole thing was a false flag operation, even Trump flunky Kevin McCarthy knew better:
Trump falsely claimed to McCarthy that the rioters were members of antifa, but McCarthy corrected him and said they were in fact Trump supporters....“You’ve got to hold them,” McCarthy said. “You need to get on TV right now, you need to get on Twitter, you need to call these people off.”
Trump responded, “Kevin, they’re not my people.”
McCarthy told the president, “Yes they are, they just came through my windows and my staff is running for cover. Yeah, they’re your people. Call them off.”
If your stomach can handle it, read the whole thing.
Irrelevant. You need to get into the foreign backed operation that was supposed to take place outside the capital, which was called off. This was why Pence got cold feat. He knew what his master's wanted. The "rioters" got mad, which is why they tried to grab him.
Everything here is side talk.
I am really surprised that Kevin didn’t focus on the fact the WaPo report makes it crystal clear that the FBI ignored warning after warning that 1/6 would be violent. They even ignored a tip in December that people were plotting ways to smuggle weapons into DC.
Shortly after the 6th Propublica interviewed Capitol police who were there that day. They said that they had always had extensive preparations before any demonstration. They had spent hours on that before the protest of George Floyd’s death even though the intelligence had indicated it was not likely to be violent. However there was no such preparation before the 6th.
To me the FBI refusing to heed warnings that far right activists were likely to stage a violent protest in our Capitol should be the headline. Journalists need to do a deep investigation of what is going on at the FBI. Instead they have ignored the fact — a fact reported in the IG report about the FBI’s handling of HIllary’s emails — that right wing agents in the NY office had leaked damaging information about Hillary to help get Trump elected and had successfully pressured Comey and McCabe to also do so. (To be fair Comey didn’t “leak” he just publicly revealed things about his investigations of the emails against FBI/DOJ policy as well as his superiors.) Instead the media have chosen to protect the FBI, likely because those agents were good sources. If they NY office was staffed by right wingers, I would bet the rest of the FBI is too. If fact I have read that that is the case at least with the criminal division. The FBI has never even had a Democrat as Director.
Just found the link to the article describing the FBI’s failure to heed the warnings and the Capitol Police not getting the preparation they normally get before demonstrations.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a38125381/january-6-report-washington-post-trump-law-enforcement/
How many conservatives does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
None, they're screwed already so they just sit in the dark.
To be fair, a panicked McCarthy would phone the president about every tour group that showed up at the Capitol. Dozens of times a week. Drove the WH staff nuts.
Why didn't the last Yung Gun of 2011 go out in a blaze of glory?
and that's why they couldn't vote to impeach him....
Brian Stelter had an excellent and dark segment yesterday on imagining what could happen in 2022 to 2024.
https://twitter.com/brianstelter/status/1454839184863150086
He covers a lot of ground in 10 minutes, and all the more depressing since so much has already happened in one form or another. He makes a point about Trump launching his own social media saying 'they're not as big as Fox but the set the agenda'. That's the issue I have with Facebook and the rest of the Right's media silo, they might not have the direct impact Fox has but the percolate and condense the crazy for Fox to scoop up anything useful that sounds just plausible enough because of their fear of losing viewers to frothier places.
Almost that time of year again,
here's the shirt wingnuts mail back and forth at Christmas,
https://i.redd.it/prpm8mvnhiw71.jpg
It's like you can feel the normalcy.
Trigger warning. Insert projectile vomit gif here.
El Jefecito & Swanson are the kind of men Haw-Haw Hawley is actually talking about (but wouldn't know that) when he says emasculated individuals have turned to pornography & video games as a consequence of repeated "cancellation".
Honestly, I half-expect Orange County Rockefeller Republican Kevin Drum unironically agrees with anti-canceller Hawley.
Odd. On the one hand Trump tells McCarthy they aren’t his people and on the other hand he tells him “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”
Carlson, of course, is a fill blown Nazi who believes himself to be a member of the master race.
Given the reputation of the Dirtbagger Left & their appetite for a strongman mirror the MAGA Right, it could be argued that an unbiased observer* would offer that the QANON Shaman & His Band of Birthers were a case of Schrodinger's Populist Revolution.
*El Jefe, of course, was not an unbiased obsever & knew just as well who the January 6, 2021, March on Washington were.
Well non-strongman dems have utterly failed to stem the tide of fascism since January.
I just watched Simon Whistler's Biographics video about Trujillo, & I tittered every time he referred to the Jefe. The wearing of lifts & a girdle, & the appetite for teen girls, were just... chef's kiss.
Maybe we shouldn't want strongmen, regardless their alleged ideology. (The Dominican's was very fluid.)
The McCarthy stuff is a good reminder that as horrible as it was, it really could have been a lot worse with a few more minutes of delay in evacuation.
Those people weren’t just gunning for Democrats as Mike Pence well knows. I doubt that most of them knew who was and wasn’t a Republican, except for the most prominent figures. Clearly Republican leaders thought they were in grave danger — the Post’s report describes Lindsay as basically pooping his pants in terror.
I suspect that had these traitors actually attacked some Republicans or had gotten their hands on Pence a lot of MAGA people around the country would have finally realized what they were supporting. Most of the Trump lovers that I know well (even a few family members) would have freaked out. I do know a couple previously normal, sane people who probably would have found a way to justify it.
As much as I don’t want to see violence against anyone I think we might actually have been better off is some Republicans were victims of these violent fascists.
It's the nature of populist revolt.
Bannon called his America First movement, though ideologically & politically conservative, Bolshevik for a reason.
To regurgitate what so many folks have said, why is t-Rump not locked up????
Really, why isn't this LOSER in jail by now? The only thing I can think of is that Republican's are so seriously mentally ill that they simply can't recognize crazy when they see it.
Two impeachment acquittals say you're right.
Merrick Garland and a lot of people in the Justice Department obviously think they have to go soft on these jerks to avoid further inflaming them.
This is stupid. Going soft on them will only both further encourage them and will nonetheless inflame them in any event.
It's often pointed out that if this had been a mob of Black Lives Matter protestors every one of them would be facing terrorism chargers and life in Gitmo right now, and that is exactly what should happen.
Whether the mental filth population is further inflamed or not isn't relevant at this point, because they will be further inflamed whatever happens, what is relevant is establishing boundaries and precedents.
Democracy is a conversation, you cannot have a conservation with people who are against it. Exclusion is how society deals with criminals.
Every one of these idiots needs to be charged with everything they can be charged with, from month old parking tickets to treason.
People like Jacob Angeli & Ashli Babbitt tell me we may need to return to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest solutions to the polemic of our mentally deranged population.
Don’t kid yourself. BLM would’ve been shot and killed on the Capitol lawn. There’s zero chance a brown mob is ever going to be allowed to storm the Capitol.
"if this had been a mob of Black Lives Matter protestors every one of them would be facing terrorism charges"
Only the ones left alive.
I'm pretty sure the FBI would go after the families of the dead.
I'm unsure of the hesitance of the DOJ...
Are they waiting for the Washington Post to take these people to court themselves? Is there really so little there that it is useless? Have they consumed too much ketamine to care anymore?
DC has been wired for wingnuts for generations, whether wingnuts believe it or not, so right now the entire bureaucracy is in a state of institutional paralysis.
Do you believe it's a fundamental loss of mettle or a cynical solving of an equation to maintain the status quo? Neither? Both? Something else?
I'm really at a lose here. Misdemeanor property destruction, short sentences, probation, fines. Will there really be need to build a bonfire of innocents on the Mall for there to be action?
Most of them are there because they would think Louis Rukeyser exhibited sound moral judgment.
It's foundational incapacity and decades of increasing accommodation of wingnuttism because they assumed Republicans represented the American heartland and none of them ever spoke to anyone who didn't also work in DC, and they wouldn't trust their own opinion if they did because that's not their job. It's corporate management conservatism at it's most feeble and removed, and those who want to do something are shocked to realize they're surrounded by a huge number of people who were at least tacit supporters of the attack on the capitol.
If you start seriously charging the attackers, you end up following their connections to every conservative in America, and that's what they don't want to do, though that is actually exactly what they should do. The criminality and traitorousness needs to be addressed for what it is.
I like your style. Et je suis d'accord. The "rot" is deep. As you said, it's even taught in schools and whole swaths of bureaucrats are trained in it. It's not a conspiracy if they all think alike, eh?
Wow. Just wow. But you know something? You're right.
It isn't "hesitancy" . It's how DOJ works. They even warned last spring it wouldn't be until early 2022 until charges were filed.
Justice delayed...
3.5 years to get to the point where that Florida school shooter plead guilty.
Nearly 1% of the US adult population in prison.
The US justice system seems to be in about as good of shape as the US Senate.
The US justice system seems to be in about as good of shape as the US Senate.
Or in about as good shape as the United States itself.
What is it they used to call the Ottoman Empire? The sick man on Europe. The USA is the sick man of the developed world.
Surprised they called anything Turkish European. Especially a century ago.
I have no expertise or personal opinion on what the DoJ should be doing, but if you're interested in an informed opinion that it's better not to rush into indicting the president, I would suggest checking out what Teri Kanefield has to say. She's an attorney and writer in Northern California who was primarily on Twitter previously but seems to have switched to Youtube because she has more space there. Super low tech but she makes a real argument. Just a few days ago she specifically addressed the issue of whether DoJ is "letting them get away with it".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHlNkUO55oc
There's hundreds of others they can indict.
I'll listen...
I've listened. Her argument is persuasive to me. Given that there are so many who believe and support Trump's lies, any evidence must be as airtight as possible, and even then, any criminal charge will not change that many minds, while further inflaming passions.
Make the case as airtight as possible and put it before the electorate. Patience IS needed. If that's not enough to do the job. then we lose. It is not guaranteed that we get to keep even the imperfect democracy that we have.
Not prosecuting for fear of ‘inflaming passions’ is the same perversion of justice as the lynch mob, only in reverse.
Thank you for equating me to the member of a lynch mob. What do you do for an encore?
Why does Lady Justice wear a blindfold?
You certainly do know how to make friends, don't you?
Her argument is persuasive to me. Given that there are so many who believe and support Trump's lies, any evidence must be as airtight as possible, and even then, any criminal charge will not change that many minds, while further inflaming passions. Make the case as airtight as possible and put it before the electorate.
I understand the need for DOJ to take the time needed to make the evidence as airtight as possible. But is she saying that Trump himself (or other top officials) shouldn't be charged with criminal acts (and that we should therefore rely solely on the electorate) even if airtight evidence can be compiled? Voters play an important role, but they're not prosecutors, and no one should be above the law.
Also, although it's undoubtedly true many minds can't be changed, it seems likely even Donald Trump would have difficulty mounting a successful run for the White House from prison.
(I'm open to the argument that Trump shouldn't be charged by the federal government, mind you, if it's abundantly clear there is absolutely zero probability of conviction; and there is in any event the possibility he could be charged by New York State).
What you want is a case so tight that even someone like Eastman or Guiliani will tell Trump, etc., to take a plea.
Nothing else will convince the faithful. As for the nuts, someone like Hawley will swoop them up.
Trump is more likely to follow Sidney Powell's way & say he's out of money to mount a legal defense.
#7thBankruptcy
I began to listen to her and already what I meant in my comment had diverged from I believe you think I mean. Ms. Kanefield is of course giving the correct analysis of working from within the system. The system that puts innocent persons to death. The system that prosecuted a war on the very hearsay she derides. The system that favors the wealthy and those of property over the powerless. The system that is defined from the inside instead of from the population it pretends to defend. The system that took its own citizens and placed them in internment camps because the color of their skin and epicanthic folds. The system that placed displaced indigenous peoples into free range concentration camps. The very system that instead of listening to itself and its very deeply held and cherished beliefs of human Liberty and dignity decided to allow a civil war because apparently not all men were created equal and we should allow the States find their own accord through bloodshedr. I believe that's what she on about. I believe we may be headed in those directions today. I believe we haven't learned squat from those past failures of the system. (Of course that same system gave us Roe which may as well be moot today in some states, and abolishment of slavery only to be replaced with defense of Capital against Labor)
I believe she is describing a suicide pact. A waxing and waning that nothing could be done about (she may be right there though). A status quo that must be upheld because of our addiction to it, even as it destroys our nervous system and restrains our actions.
I'm talking about remaking that system or at least improving it. Its age is showing. We should not live in the clothes of dead men of two centuries ago.
No, I don't intend to live in the "shoes of dead men" I do plan on living, though, and enjoying life as much as possible in a world I didn't create. I don't intend to hasten the day when my dead body inhabits my own shoes.
If that makes me insufficiently sensitive to the real pain that exists in this world, then so be it.
I hope we can all "walk" that way someday. And I'm not singling any one person out. But there are folks suffering now, not necessarily due to their actions alone, nor others' actions, but by the system itself. Specifically, some pregnant persons in Texas. Today. They are suffering because of the system. I'm like Ms Kanefield in understanding that no system can wipe out all suffering as it can't prosecute all crimes, but surely we can prevent it from producing suffering a week after those chuckleheads passed their abortion of a law (intended metaphor). Yes? Apparently not. We must have patience. We must let the system grind on.
Please excuse me; peut-être I'm succumbing to this prickling fear lately myself.
No, please excuse me. Have you read any history? It's all a story of pain, suffering and injustice. I can understand you wanting to change all that. But we have but one life to life, and should not waste it tilting at windmills which will last longer than the human race will. I freely admit my relative good luck. I will do what little I can do, short of beating myself up over things I can't change. And you can't change.
Oooof, a truth hurts sometimes. I guess I'll just revel in my good luck as well.
Great comment.
Merci.
Justice delayed...
Unfortunately, we already knew he did nothing, didn't we? I mean, we watched it not happen.
Trump is an ignoramus, but he knows well what gets you put in jail and assets seized. He was very careful to not do the stuff that really gets you in trouble with the law for insurrection.
It's the IRS that could really hurt him in my opinion. Notice that he's careful not to attack the IRS or agitate about tax rates and tax shelters etc. Here's hoping the IRS zaps him for $500 million.
Seizing assets would be the only thing that could get Ivanka & El Jefecito to flip. Threaten their inheritance, & they will sing like canaries to preserve a percentage of their wealth rather than lose it all.
Even Eric isn't dumb enough to think dad will live forever.
I tend to agree that what the Trumps really care about is money. They seem to know instinctively that what makes them popular is not anything they say or do but just the fact they are rich and nasty. If they're poor and nasty well... so are millions of anonymous Americans.
Thus the IRS is their real enemy.
I think they'll sing like canaries if they themselves are looking at prison. I doubt the prospect of losing Papa Don's fortune is a major inducement, though, because Javanka are already fabulously wealthy.
Jared has siblings his parents might love more, though.
We definitely know his radio is capricious enough to play favorites among family.
Even if they don't get the bulk of the Kushner fortune I think they'd be fine. They were racking up high eight figure incomes all throughout their White House years. And in any event, the couple's combined net worth is supposedly in the $800 million range.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/rich-ivanka-trump-132501573.html#:~:text=Widely%20known%20as%20the%20second,estimated%20to%20be%20%24300%20million.
*dad, not radio
Knock, knock.
Who's there?
Conservative.
Conservative who?
Fuck you.
[And the tag at the beginning and the end misses the middle]
Should have ended with "let's go Brandon".
But then no one would understand it because they're too clever for us.
You give Newt Gingrich a Ph.D. & he thinks he's Aristotle.
You give Newt Gingrich a PhD and every dingbat in America thinks he's Aristotle.
With the exception of a few items, like Mark Meadows draft tweets, all of this information was available in July.
I created a spreadsheet of the timeline (limited to the assault, the WaPo has additional pre-riot data).
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vT7kjMWqRitCLjw71x0eiOxbJ62pcVgXhvywGD4aMp6Zb48-VZa-xG-m1qEcN5KdUOYZe1k6fLEHZw3/pubhtml
If I could create it from information available at cnn.com, billmoyers.com, justsecurity.org, et al, then why are we all agog over the Washington Post story?
I'm glad they did it and that everyone is paying attention, but isn't is surprising that so few press outlets thought to put together a detailed timeline? (BTW, mine has additional entries, like foreign leaders tweeting their dismay, National Guard communications, DoD communications).
I'll end this by saying that, for me, the impeachment of Trump missed the sweet target by a mile when the managers took the (contestable) path that Trump *incited* the riot. The much firmer case was Trump's Dereliction of Duty while the Capitol was under assault.
I think the reason the impeachment managers focused on inciting the insurrection was because for that all or nearly all the evidence was publicly available. Had they focused instead on dereliction of duty, requiring official testimony from multiple government agencies, and private documents and communications between government officials, Trump would have easily strangled any sort of investigation until Biden took office, at which time impeachment would be moot.
The reason we have now been given access to several of these details is precisely because despite some delays and attempts at witholding information from Trump and his lackeys, they haven't been able to block all of it from becoming public because Trump is no longer President.
Good point. I think Dereliction of Duty should have at least been included somewhere - one never knows what might convince reluctant Republicans (if there were any).
My problem with the incitement charge was that Trump never gave explicit instructions to break in and do worse. That's the trouble with shady language: (from Jan 6 rally)
"people are not going to take it any longer",
"We will not take it anymore",
"We're not going to let it happen",
"you'll never take back our country with weakness",
various instances of "fighting" (e.g. the press),
"we can't let [president Biden] happen",
"This is a criminal enterprise",
"When you catch somebody in a fraud, you're allowed to go by very different rules",
"We must stop the steal",
"And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore"
Which was sandwiched in between a very long laundry list of unverified, and almost certainly false, claims of fraud.
I think Trump incited the crowd, but my thinking so is not sufficient proof for a skeptic - and rightly so. "Fight" and "not going to let it happen" is language that's found all over the place, like when a sports team announces it's moving out of a city. One has to get very contextual - a difficult task - to say that such words are a command for violence.
Although I understand your point and to an extent agree with it had he been on a criminal court, I think things were handled as best as they could given the circumstances and the venue (a political trial, not a criminal one).
I agree that individually none of his words were damning enough, especially if you only look at what happened on Jan 6 itself, but I do think the entire context of everything, from how things were built up little by little since election day, and particularly the fact the event was originally planned for a different date and then was moved to Jan 6 at the request of Trump's people to me was enough to convince any skeptic, however, here lies the main issue.
I don't think there were many skeptics in the true sense of the word (as in people willing to change their mind if shown enough proof). Even among the GOP the vast majority knew he incited the insurrection and several even openly stated so on the day of the attack while they thought their lives might be at risk or immediately after, but once things got under control and business as usual resumed, they immediately went back to trying to coddle Trump. Audio, video, or some other evidence where Trump directly says "Bring me the head of Pence" or any other similarly clear words of incitement towards anyone not loyal to him wouldn't be enough to sway the bulk of those who keep insisting that Trump didn't incite an insurrection because for them it isn't about the evidence, it is a matter of fealty to Trump.
Thank you for expanding on this issue.
That link above was from July (vers 21)
Here is one that incorporates information from the Washington Post report (vers 25)
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTBD_T85A0BNs2LlBmZDokR9ae8YOMgDA5_9FI9oMUBU3lUgMWZDwMnzea5A6qUO1bLyF6PDgr0Gdvu/pubhtml
Josh Marshall, over at Talking Points, has looked over a report from the Washington Post analyzing a cache of emails and other exchanges between the (unprincipled) principals in the White House. The insurrection riot was to force VP Pence to go along with the plan, which attorney John Eastman had laid out in step-by-step detail, of how the coup was to go down.
Amazingly, Pence did the right thing. But our democracy is still hanging by a thread, because a more competent adminstration could have used The Plan to retain power ... indefinitely. This needs to be fixed, ASAP. But it won't happen as long as the Coup Party retains effective control over the Congress.
I think Pence knew he was being thrown overboard if the coup had succeeded. Not sure if Ivanka or Crenshaw or Cotton would have gotten the Naval Observatory, but do know Pence would have had a tragic accident from a fourth floor window (had a stroke while passing the window, fell into it, broke the glass, dropped to his death).
Terrible. I guess when trump steals the presidency back in 2024, good democrats will just grin and bear it. It’s all over but the shouting.
Well, as we saw at the 2001 and 2017 inaugurations, hundreds of thousands of folks could "march in protest", to no avail. Not even much news coverage.
And the lesson from the 1/6 attack is that they gave up too soon. Chickened out.
Bad intent is all conservatives have, how should we regard that?
What value does anything they propose have for society? It never has any, yet they have been consistent in this for millennia.
The one thing they can do is fight with their neighbors, but that, in the modern world, is no longer of even trivial value. It's what no one can afford to accommodate or indulge, there is no space or time left to escape it.
Eyeing little girls with bad intent ...
Content ranges from ‘disturbing’ to ‘hair-raising’. This:
“White House staffers received calls from dozens of lawmakers desperate for Trump to make the crowd leave. Many tried to remind Trump aides that they still supported the president, and some even promised not to certify the election
”
We need the names of these chickenshits.
Pob Rortman. Grindsay Laham. Scick Rott. Rarco Mubio.
Arrell Dissa. Urgess Bowens. Peg Grence.
OT: So, you still think the deal for BBB is going to happen any day, now?
🤣
Done deal. No Leave, bit more price control on pd. Your not getting it.
CNN's Manu Raju a few hours ago:
Manchin's stringing along Ds. Simply, he doesn't want this new social spending paradigm. He is not a moderate Democrat; he's a conservative Democrat.
Uh, he's not a Democrat.
Representatives of America's native population of secret geniuses gathering today in Texas where JFK, jr is expected to announce that his father will soon hand over executive authority to
Pope InnocentTrump,https://www.rawstory.com/qanon-jfk-jr/
I am not a lawyer, so I know that discovery might be worse than the current situation, but couldn't Caroline Kennedy sue the Filipine exile who started the Qonspiracy for mental distress, as well as the torchbearers of the movement (in the year since the drops stopped)?
Seems, given the success of Sandy Hook parents versus Alex Jones, that it's not out of the question.
The fact that Trump is a piece of shit was readily apparent before November 2016. If that wasn't obvious to someone before then, pointing at January 6th isn't going to make it any more obvious.