So far, President Donald Trump and his hardcore supporters have been unsuccessful in their attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, but they have a Plan B if President-elect Joe Biden is sworn into office on January 20, 2021: a Trump presidential campaign in 2024. If Trump's "four more years" don't start in 2021, some supporters believe, they can start in 2025. But journalist John F. Harris, founding editor of Politico, seriously doubts that Trump has a shot at recapturing the presidency four years from now.
In an article published by Politico on December 10, Harris acknowledges that although the 2020 election was a decisive victory for Biden, it wasn't the total repudiation of Trumpism that his critics were hoping for.
On Wednesday, the United States set a devastating new record in the coronavirus pandemic: 3,124 people dead in one day. This was the first time the daily number of deaths has exceeded 3,000, but it's the first time the daily number of deaths has exceeded a dark benchmark that so many people have invoked, over and over again, since the beginning of the pandemic: It's more people lost in one day to COVID-19 than were lost in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
There's been criticism from various corners of those who make this comparison, but it's understandable why it comes so readily to mind. The startling juxtaposition is meant to jar people out of the tendency to let all those COVID-19 deaths become a faceless statistic. The idea is to get people to take the virus seriously, since it's far more likely to kill you than a random attack by terrorists.
Proving that racism is the Republican Party's defining trait, the Georgia Republican Party has recruited more than 4,000 volunteers in what they told Fox News is the "largest and most aggressive" poll-watching operation in the state's history ahead of the Jan. 5 Senate runoffs. Of course Republican officials couched it in the usual "election security" language, with a strong current of intimidation running beneath the surface.
Georgia Republican Party Chairman David Shafer told Fox: "Georgia Republicans are building the largest and most aggressive ballot security operation in Georgia history. […] We have filed lawsuits to make sure that there are eyes on every part of the election process that is legally open to the public." He said that Republicans will "fight to count every lawful vote and reject every unlawful vote. […] It is imperative that every Georgian concerned about election integrity vote in the January 5 runoff election." That includes suing the state on the basis of the same bullshit conspiracy theories behind all Republican election suits that Republicans weren't given access in poll watching and vote tabulation processes.
Trump has initiated a nationwide temper tantrum for overgrown children throughout the land. He has worked the none-too-latent paranoia nerve that has been poked and prodded for decades now by a legion of fear mongers on TV and radio, scaring the kiddies about how their toys are going to be taken from them, and Christmas, too, all by "radical socialist Democrats" who want to destroy everything they love, and make them work while the darker peoples just loll around laughing at them all day, every day, insulting them in Spanish. They are holding their breath, but not until they turn blue; they're holding their breath until they are about to explode. And, speaking of explosions, they are, quite literally, playing with dynamite. Can we doubt that the bombs will begin going off, if not soon, then not too far into the coming new year.
If they were children, they'd be sent to their rooms without supper.
The U.S. Economy and Republicans’ Negligent Homicide
For the third time in the last month, unemployment claims soared last week — nearly one million — almost a quarter-million higher than the week before.
Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell remains content with his blinkered philosophy of indifference to societal pain, which he once clarified to Vice President Biden as the latter attempted to sway him on a Democratic bill: "You must be under the mistaken impression that I care."
In reality, he does care: He cares with extreme prejudice that, given emergency aid, President Biden would inherit a more stable economy than the one he and Trump intend to impose on the new Democratic administration. To be a keeper of one's brothers has rarely been, historically, a plank of Republican platforms; and whenever a Democrat is in the White House, it's unmitigated anathema.
Today’s big story remains the loss of our neighbors to Covid-19. Today, our official death count passed the number of those killed in the 9-11 attacks. On that horrific day in 2001, we lost 2977 people to four terrorist attacks. Today, official reports showed 3,140 deaths from Covid-19, the highest single-day toll so far. Hospitals are overwhelmed, our health care workers exhausted.
As the country suffers, Trump has launched a new approach in his attempt to steal the 2020 election. While he has previously insisted that he actually won, and that his “win” must be recognized, this morning he tweeted simply “OVERTURN.” Republican leaders have ducked the question of Trump’s refusal to acknowledge Joe Biden’s win in the election by saying that the president has a right to challenge an election through legal means. Few of them commented on this new attack on our democracy.
If this whole grinding post-election drama is all just an elaborate troll on Donald Trump’s part, a fundraiser aimed at fleecing his base even as he “owns the libs” by keeping everyone constantly on edge, it is already a bleak masterpiece. The judiciary to date has served as guard rails for his nonsense quest to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Now that the 6-3 conservative Supreme Court has been roped into the affair for the second time in a week, however, we are all of a sudden playing with live ammunition and it ain’t so silly no more.
At about the same time as that court was swatting Pennsylvania’s ludicrous election-flip argument out of the building, the attorney general of Texas was serving up a new legal complaint so freighted with inadequacies that it bends the very light. AG Ken Paxton — himself under indictment — has brought directly to the high court a suit against the election results in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Georgia, claiming that measures taken by these pivotal battleground states to allow voting during a pandemic invalidates the entire enterprise.
Given the twin pandemics, a surging number of cases and deaths from COVID-19, and the Trump Clown Car Posse's unremitting war on democracy, the question for inquiring minds is: Will there be time and space for Trump, his right-wing media allies, and the Christian Right's conservative core of evangelicals, to combat liberals’ "War on Christmas"?
A Short History of the 'War on Christmas'
— The Puritans ban celebrations of the holiday in the 17th century because it goes against their interpretation of the Bible.
— Henry Ford blames the Jews
— The John Birch Society blames the Communists
"Writers speak the unspeakable and the closer you get to it, the more real it is, which is part of making life possible for those who come after."
— Arthur Miller
Throughout his entire life, Noam Chomsky has used his knowledge, skills, and stature as a public intellectual to advocate for a radical change in societies that have failed to live to the promises and ideals of a radical democracy. Chomsky has made clear that intellectuals, artists, educators, and other cultural workers have a responsibility to use education to address grave social problems such as the threat of nuclear war, ecological devastation, and the sharp deterioration of democracy. And he has done it by communicating in multiple spheres to diverse audiences. His academic work and public interventions have become a model for enriching public life and addressing staggering forms of economic inequality, needless wars, and class and racial injustices. He has worked tirelessly to inspire individuals and social movements to unleash the energy, insights, and passion necessary to keep alive the spirit, promises, and ideals of a radical democracy. He models his own work on the responsibility of intellectuals by drawing from a wide variety of disciplinary fields and in doing so embraces a notion of education that turns intellectuals and cultural workers into border crossers and refiners of the moral imagination. This talk is dedicated to his courage and relentless spirit of resistance.
As the semester ends, I fear many of my students will fail my class. Most will pass, thanks to their hard work and a generous grade curve, but I’ve never had this many students failing or dropping the course before.
The Washington Post reports that an unprecedented number of students are failing classes, but asks whether standard A-F grading, as opposed to a simple Pass/Fail, is fair during a pandemic. I think the question is bigger than that.
My questions are: What should our role be as teachers? And what prepares students best for future success in life?
Since the 1970s, U.S. real wages have largely stagnated. After a century of real wages rising every decade, that stagnation changed the lives of the U.S. working class in traumatic ways. Likewise, since the 1970s, labor productivity grew steadily, aided sequentially by computers, robots, and artificial intelligence. The combination of stagnant real wages and rising productivity lowered labor’s share of national income in favor of capital’s. Profits consequently soared and took the stock markets with them. Income and wealth were redistributed sharply upward.
The post-1970 trauma of the working class was worsened, as traumas often are, by being minimally recognized and even less discussed in the media, among politicians, or in the academy. Workers thus encountered the end of the century of rising real wages individually as a mysterious evaporation of the American Dream or loss of an earlier American Greatness. They also reacted individually. More members of households (especially adult women) undertook more hours of paid labor outside the home to compensate for stagnant real hourly wages. Households also compensated by borrowing more heavily than any working class anywhere had ever done. Workers wanted so desperately to hold on to that American Dream.
Our post-election hope couldn’t be more fragile.
Does Joe Biden see his mission as merely reclaiming situation normal from Donald Trump? How aware is he of the big, beyond-our-lifetimes future and the crucial need to address climate change? Is he able to acknowledge that human “interests” go well beyond national borders? And if so, how much political traction would he have to have before he could begin turning vision into policy?
A recent bit of news: The House just voted overwhelmingly in favor of the 2021 Pentagon budget: $740.5 billion. The vote was 335-78. More Democrats than Republicans gave it their blessing — in utter defiance of any sane recognition of true security, national or otherwise. This is situation normal in action, requiring nothing from a politician except limited thinking.
[click image to enlarge]
In negotiations, Republicans hardly have to lift a finger because Democrats negotiate against themselves.
My, my, my, how "violent the radical left is!!!" HA! Former peaceful protests turned violent by infiltration? OK, let's be fair and credit where credit is due: Boogaloo, Prouds, militia-types and brat teen driven by their mother across the border with a high powered rifle. Certainly you remember the attempt to kidnap, murder Whitmer. Charlottesville; running over protesters and claiming they had a right to do that because "they got in my way."
You're talking about a movement where not an insignificant portion finds running over protesters 'funny.' I have argued with them before: they defend murder and attempted murder by motor vehicle because, "They were in the way." Should I have taken that as an excuse to run over the child who ran out in front of me a few months ago? His mother was too busy texting to pay attention. He was in my way. Never knew knew I had that "right!" Gee, golly, whiz: why would I slammed on my brakes? MAYBE because doing the right thing and civility are part of my emotional makeup AND...
Murder or attempted murder are STILL murder or attempted murder. No matter how smug the excuses.
If President Donald Trump were completely desperate for unnecessary but completely decisive humiliation before the United States Supreme Court, it's hard to imagine that he'd be acting any differently.
On Wednesday, he threw his weight behind a Texas lawsuit filed before the Supreme Court, asking to intervene in his capacity as a candidate. The Texas case, absurdly, seeks to overturn the results of the presidential election in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin, all of which voted for President-elect Biden, votes that have been officially certified. Essentially, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton argued that because he objects to some of the ways in which those states ran their elections, the certified results should be investigated and potentially thrown out, with the state legislatures left to pick appoint their own electors (presumably for Trump).
Seventeen American states, all run by Republicans, have decided to join Texas in its seditious and frivolous quest to have the U.S. Supreme Court throw out the votes of 81,282,896 citizens and declare Donald Trump the winner of the 2020 election. Those states: Missouri, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia.
All of these states gave their popular vote to Trump, though Joe Biden is receiving one electoral vote in Nebraska's split system. Each of these states is trying to get the justices to throw out all the votes in all of the states that Biden won, though the effort just names Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In reality, they would have the Supreme Court nullify the the entire election. And they argue in exceedingly bad faith in their amicus brief.
Do Republican voters really believe that Joe Biden stole the election from Donald Trump? Do they sincerely see Trump's efforts to overturn the election as the legitimate actions of a wronged man trying to defend democracy? When they declare "stop the steal," are they truly unaware that they are the ones trying to steal this election from the rightful winners?
Or are millions of Americans arguing in bad faith, merely claiming to believe Trump is the true winner? Is this all just a disingenuous song-and-dance, meant to put a morally justifiable gloss on what is actually widespread support among Trump voters for a coup? The answer to this question of "delusion or bad faith?" matters quite a bit, as Trump continues to prosecute his futile campaign to steal the 2020 election.
Yesterday's blog was devoted to resurrecting memories of some real right-wing bastards. Today's walk down memory lane is dedicated to the Republican pricks who have done so much to prevent progress along a whole range of critical issues from health care reform to gun control to the ever-growing inequities between rich and poor. There may be distinctions to be found between bastards and pricks, though they are mostly distinctions without much difference.
I want to start today's list with that prick, Senator Ron Johnson, from Wisconsin, the guy who chaired an alt-reality hearing this week to regale his colleagues with science from the mad house, with testimony on the COVID emergency that included whackadoodles still pushing Hydroxychloroquine and other affronts to sound medicine and good sense. This guy Johnson is either dumb as a doorknob or studiously indifferent to the health of the American people. Either way, he's a real prick, surely as much so as Governor Rick DeSantis in Florida or several others we might name to the GOP Prick Hall of Shame. Both of these pricks have done as much as they possibly could to deny the seriousness of the COVID pandemic. Both of them have been among the dimmer bulbs on the subject of manmade climate change, too. Johnson has been especially prickish in denying that looming threat to humankind while claiming that Democrats and assorted climate scientists have been influenced by Joseph Stalin and Hugo Chavez. Like Stalin and Chavez, "all they care about is control," according to Senator Johnson.
Today is the “safe harbor” date by which state presidential votes that have been certified will go forward to Congress, where they must be counted. While Wisconsin’s votes are delayed by a late challenge, Biden has enough votes to win the Electoral College handily even without those ten electoral votes (which he should still win).
And yet, the lawsuits continue. Today the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, announced he would be filing a lawsuit before the Supreme Court alleging that electors from Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin cannot cast votes because their states changed their voting systems to allow mail-in ballots. He alleges that these changes, made to permit voting during a pandemic, skewed the election results.
Smedley Butler won’t be around next year to save us.
The former Marine Corps general was offered a ton of money in 1933 to murder newly-elected president Franklin Roosevelt and stage a fascist coup.
Armed with the then-huge sum of $3 million, infamous billionaires funded a “Banker’s Plot” with 500,000 armed thugs set to erect a corporate dictatorship atop FDR’s grave.
Butler had led US troops throughout Latin America during the “Dollar Diplomacy” 1920s. He crushed grassroots uprisings and installed brutal dictators. America’s richest barons now wanted him to do the same thing here.
— from Foreign Policy In Focus
In Season One of the wildly popular TV series Szitsky Krik, viewers thrilled to see the delicious comeuppance of a former U.S. president and his once-glamorous wife Melania.
Having ruthlessly climbed over people to become the most powerful couple in the world, Donny and Melania are abruptly stripped of their political influence within months of a presidential election that failed to give Donny a second term. To add injury to insult, a series of lawsuits and a succession of debt collectors divest the unlucky pair of all their worldly possessions.
In a delightful TV turnaround, Donny and Melania immediately become refugees who, along with their three children, flee the country for asylum in Slovenia. There they are forced to seek safety in their one remaining asset. As a joke, Donny had once bought Melania’s ancestral hometown for $100. But it’s a joke no more! The town of Szitsky Krik, and the rundown hotel on its outskirts, is where the Trumps must now call home.
“Stand back and stand by.”
This was the infamous message Donald Trump delivered to the Proud Boys during that first calamitous debate with Joe Biden back in September. Moderator Chris Wallace had asked Trump to condemn “white supremacists and militia groups,” and Trump took the moment to give that one group — among the most violent, dangerous and heavily armed of the lot — the best day of its life.
“To say Proud Boys are energized by this is an understatement,” Megan Squire, a professor at Elon University who tracks online extremism, told NBC News after the debate. “They were pro-Trump before this shout-out, and they are absolutely over the moon now. Their fantasy is to fight antifa in his defense, and he apparently just asked them to do just that.”
Joe Biden is in the process of appointing several hundred people who are critical to what the administration gets done over the next four years. But not all these people will wield the same amount of power – as I discovered during my own time as a cabinet secretary. Here’s what you need to know about where the power really lies.
Appointments can generally be separated into three categories: cabinet members, presidential advisors, and heads of task forces.
1. CABINET APPOINTMENTS
Cabinet appointments usually get the most media attention, so we’ll start there. But just because you’re in the cabinet doesn’t mean you’re in the loop. In fact, as I discovered as Labor Secretary, it’s possible to be in the cabinet and not in the loop – and sometimes not even know the loop exists.
Election after election, voters are turning against mass incarceration and the war on drugs that sustains it.
In 2020, the people of Arizona, Montana, New Jersey, and South Dakota voted to legalize marijuana, joining 11 other states and the District of Columbia. In Oregon, voters opted to decriminalize possession of all drugs. And even during the deeply divisive Trump administration, bipartisan criminal justice reform managed to pass a Republican Senate and Democratic House to get signed into law.
Slowly but surely, the absurdly large incarcerated population in the U.S. is declining. One noteworthy exception, though, is women.
By Bill Berkowitz and Gale Bataille
The December 5th New York Times headlined an article titled “The Elderly vs. Essential Workers: Who Should Get the Coronavirus Vaccine First?” The sequence of access to the vaccine for people other than front-line health care workers and residents of nursing homes, raises tough ethical questions. Who is essential? How are the disproportionate impacts of class and race to be factored into access guidelines? Clearly, workers in industries such as agriculture and meatpacking -- the most dangerous of all occupations -- must be at the front of the line.
On November 23, the ACLU filed a federal lawsuit in the Lincoln, Nebraska, U.S. District Court, against Noah’s Ark Processors for the company’s refusal to protect essential meatpacking workers. According to the suit, treacherous conditions at the plant are putting essential meatpacking workers at grave risk of contracting COVID-19 and passing it on to their families and community members — as well as causing COVID-related death.
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