IECVCT January 6, 2021

[Edgy MD]

“Ivanka Trump did not take part in viewing or investigating the election results,” Trump said on his social media platform Truth Social on Friday morning. “He had long since checked out and I think he was just trying to respect the position of Bill Barri and his attorney general (he was weird!).” — Former President Trump responding to his daughter's testimony

Is he calling his daughter a dude?

[Ceetar]

I share your concerns, but what has been under-reported is that in a lot of places where people are running on "anti-CRT/anti-LGBTQ" campaigns for school board (even conservative New Hampshire) the voters are rejecting them for more inclusive candidates. So there is some hope.

citation needed on "a lot"

local politics is a clusterfuck, and I know my town isn't alone in having literally no one running against incumbents, who maybe aren't quite MAGA, but.. (my superintendent has not yet issued a statement that included the word 'vaccine')

It's hard to run. There's a lot of gatekeeping, and in some places you gotta register and run nearly a year in advance. My uncle is marginally involved with the CT democratic committee to the point that he was even going to run, was starting up the process of putting up a website and whoops! They had him in the wrong district. Better than my area, we've got almost no democratic committee in this county, so republicans run everything. our house rep is practically a republican, but is still running unopposed.

It's not even the dyed in wool grifters you have to worry about. Even fairly democratic people are caving to their demands just so they don't have to deal with criticism. Take the NJ revamped Health curriculum, that the fascist republicans are trying to say is teaching sex to third graders or whatever. It's not. But the principal of the 3rd-6th grade school was careful to say they're putting the "heavier" stuff of the 3-5 block of education on the 5th graders. And of course, parents free to opt out of _education_ if they want.

[Lefty Specialist]

We beat back an anti-gay, anti-CRT loon in our last school board election, but they're relentless and will be back.

[MFS62]

Jared WAS involved.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/p ... n-1365654/

Later

[Willets Point]

I feel like every big revelation that people are twittering about excitedly is something we knew 519 days ago. What other country in history has spent so long dragging their feet on prosecuting the organizers of an attempted coup? It boggles the mind.

[MFS62]

“Ivanka Trump did not take part in viewing or investigating the election results,” Trump said on his social media platform Truth Social on Friday morning. “He had long since checked out and I think he was just trying to respect the position of Bill Barri and his attorney general (he was weird!).” — Former President Trump responding to his daughter's testimony

Is he calling his daughter a dude?

Well, she probably has more balls than her husband (and a deeper voice).
So ... ?
LOL!
Later

[batmagadanleadoff]

In which thread do I stick this excerpt? So many choices. It could rightly go in the Politics thread. Or the Court thread. Or maybe a new thread for Wingnut Supreme Ginni Thomas. But it can go in here, just the same. It's a fuck you to Ginni Thomas, Clarence Thomas and John Roberts, the new (Gasp!) "center" of the Supreme Court.

Ginni Thomas Was Up to Her Pinwheeling Eyeballs in the Effort to Monkeywrench the Electoral College

It’s really time for Chief Justice John Roberts to act.

Excerpt:

The Washington Post breaks yet another story about Ginni Thomas, the wingnut spouse of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who was up to her pinwheeling eyeballs in the effort to monkeywrench the Electoral College.

Thomas sent the messages using FreeRoots, an online platform intended to make it easy to send pre-written emails to multiple elected officials. New documents show that Thomas indeed used the platform to reach many lawmakers simultaneously. On Nov. 9, she sent identical emails to 20 members of the Arizona House and seven Arizona state senators. That represents more than half of the Republican members of the state legislature at the time.

The message, just days after media organizations called the race for Biden in Arizona and nationwide, urged lawmakers to “stand strong in the face of political and media pressure” and claimed that the responsibility to choose electors was “yours and yours alone.” They had “power to fight back against fraud” and “ensure that a clean slate of Electors is chosen,” the email said.

It’s really time for Chief Justice John Roberts to take this matter in hand. A leaked draft memo is small beer ethically compared to an attempt by the spouse of a justice to ratfck a presidential election in such a way that it results in a lawsuit over which her hubby has to sit in judgment. I realize that depriving 50 percent of the population of its privacy rights and eviscerating what remains of our gun-control laws takes up a lot of a person’s time, but Roberts might find a moment or two to wonder if one of his colleagues is connected by marriage to a bunch of abject thieves.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/p ... l-college/

[Lefty Specialist]

If Steven Breyer's wife had been this active in party politics, what would Fox News have done? I wonder.....

[Edgy MD]

I'm not sure what's to be done from Chief Justice Roberts' persepctive. I'm not sure by what mechanism a chief justice can force an associate justice to recuse him- or herself.

I know the legislature can do something, and I know we can do something.

I am pessimistic about the impact of these hearings. I fear that it invites the whole country into being what we're best at, which is to be consumers, and the ones who are the actors will continue to be mostly the crazies and the inept.

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

Hopefully a message that it's not the committee pointing fingers at trump but trumps own people pointing fingers trump is the one that seeps in. Not overly optimistic either but I'm gonna watch and hope Garland also watches too.

[batmagadanleadoff]

I know I'm partisan here, but really, Clarence Thomas is a disgrace over this scandal and deserves to be impeached and removed from the bench. Which of course, will never happen, especially when the other party controls the White House and the Senate.

[Lefty Specialist]

So Bill Barr was and is an arrogant asshole. But the beauty of his testimony is that he was an arrogant asshole right to Trump's face, telling him any talk of fraud was 'bullshit'.

[batmagadanleadoff]

So Bill Barr was and is an arrogant asshole. But the beauty of his testimony is that he was an arrogant asshole right to Trump's face, telling him any talk of fraud was 'bullshit'.

This was such an unexpected stance for Barr to take, given his prior history with Trump. What are Barr's principles, and where are Barr's boundaries? And if this is all a principled stance and not just a caclulated move, does this all mean that Barr sincerely believed the truth of the Mueller Report whitewash he engineered a few years earlier in Trump's presidency?

[Lefty Specialist]

That testimony tells me that Bill Barr doesn't believe in anybody but Bill Barr. Lying about the Mueller Report was in his best interest, so he did it. But here obviously he felt the best thing to do was to throw Trump under the bus, then back over him a few times. Fun to watch.

[Edgy MD]

If only I could see that there was the metaphorical legal equivalent of a bus coming.

[MFS62]

If only I could see that there was the metaphorical legal equivalent of a bus coming.

Indictment and arraignment are more specific than metaphorical, but they would be nice.

Later

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

Stunning story in the WaPo examining this Jeffrey Clark angle. You should subscribe for a year just to read this

“That’s right,” Donoghue said he responded. “You’re an environmental lawyer. How about you go back to your office, and we’ll call you when there’s an oil spill.”

Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, told Trump that Clark’s proposed letter was “a murder-suicide pact,” according to Donoghue’s deposition. “It’s going to damage everyone who touches it. And we should have nothing to do with that letter. I don’t ever want to see that letter again.”

Inside the explosive Oval Office confrontation three days before Jan. 6

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... ore-jan-6/

[Centerfield]

Do you guys get the feeling this will make any difference? The MAGAts I know aren't watching and would rather jump off a bridge than admit they were conned.

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

Garland says he's watching... and threads like who and what motivated Clark beyond hubristic ambition that his colleagues say is not like him... might. I mean, this could be still more massive.

[Ceetar]

so what does it take, specifically? What's the process here, who brings charges and who convicts on them? Who do we need to click the button that says "ARREST THAT MAN!"?

[batmagadanleadoff]

so what does it take, specifically? What's the process here, who brings charges and who convicts on them? Who do we need to click the button that says "ARREST THAT MAN!"?

The DOJ brings the charges if they're Federal. A trial jury convicts.

Meanwhile, last night on MSNBC, Nicole Wallace wondered why the media is going gaga over Ivanka the count. She didnt flip on her father, said Nicole. She gave us nothing. The panel agreed and I was loving it. The count got her father's seal of approval to say what she said ahead if time, sez me. He has a soft spot for her and she probably did whatever manipulation it took to get him to agree to her testimony, whether it was pleading, crying or throwing tantrums. She wants to look good to her liberal NY friends. She's a liberal herself and she's probably calculating that there's no more future to her pretending she's a bible reading, abortion hating Republican.

[Ceetar]

They effectively ended abortion so they don't have to pretend to hate it anymore. They can simply say "the court says" and talk about the rule of law and all those lies. Seems like she's going the Liz Cheney route: be slightly less evil and position that as the 'middle'

[Willets Point]

Looking for the Democratic pundits to start supporting a Liz/Ivanka ticket. You know, for healing.

[Edgy MD]

What it takes is solid indictments of Trump's lieutenants — who then all give up the president.

What it also takes is will.

[TransMonk]

Do you guys get the feeling this will make any difference? The MAGAts I know aren't watching and would rather jump off a bridge than admit they were conned.

I don't hold any fantasies about that orange dude winding up behind bars. No one has voted in a national election since 1/6/21 happened. I'm guessing what the committee is hoping is that the sliver who may have supported Trump reluctantly in 2020 have a well-explained and widely-corroborated reason to NOT vote for him again.

It doesn't really solve the problem any more, though. Trumpism is bigger than Trump now. Six years without any accountability has given a lot of hubris to dangerous dingbats. Plus, the Dems are really horrible at 21st century politics.

We are in a perfect storm of stupidity and chaos. I didn't see much of it coming, but now that it's here, I'm not at all surprised. This is better than ANY wet dream that Putin has ever had.