2020 USA presidential election

We spend $750 billion annually on "defense" and the center of American government fell in two hours to the duck dynasty and the guy in the chewbacca bikini.

https://twitter.com/YousefMunayyer/status/1347026407294201863?s=20

As I watched this unfold I was thinking much the same thing.

Although I have to say, what has shaken the U.S. population so badly, this assault on the Capitol yesterday, is really nothing by comparison to what U.S. operations have done in Latin America, in Asia, in Africa, in the Middle East, to other democratic movements and elected governments over the years. You know, just days before this, remember, the U.S. Congress, by an overwhelming margin, passed the defense authorization bill to pump more money toward the Pentagon and overseas special operations, and, through other measures, is backing those operations of the CIA, basically dedicated to, whenever the order comes down, being ready to go in and overthrow democracy. So, Americans are now getting a mild taste of their own medicine, in a sense.

https://www.democracynow.org/2021/1/7/us_foreign_election_interference_a...

NDPP wrote:

Facial Recognition Firm Claims Antifa Infiltrated Trump Protesters who Stormed Capitol

NDPP, why are you spreading fascist Trump's b.s.?

Re #1656. WATCH...

"If rioters storm buildings in unfriendly countries western media glorifies them, yet condemns the riot in DC. If a woman was shot/killed in any unfriendly country it would have been on TV endlessly. FB/Twitter ban or block Trump/allies but not liars about elections in Bolivia."

https://twitter.com/s_m_marandi/status/1347441913427763205

This is Jenny Cudd from Midland, Texas. She recently ran for mayor.

Meet Jenny Cudd from Midland Texas "WE did break down @SpeakerPelosi's office door and somebody stole her gavel and I took a picture sitting in the chair flipping off the camera and that was on Fox News"

https://twitter.com/RexChapman/status/1347384440343953411?s=20

Fake news. No dead cop.

There were infamous white nationalists and noted conspiracy theorists who have spread dark visions of pedophile Satanists running the country. Others were more anonymous, people who had journeyed from Indiana and South Carolina to heed President Trump’s call to show their support. One person, a West Virginia lawmaker, had only been elected to office in November.

. . . .

what comes into focus in the storming of the Capitol is a jumbled constellation of hard-core Trump supporters: a largely white crowd, many of them armed with bats, shields and chemical spray; some carried Confederate flags and wore costumes of fur and horns inspired by QAnon; they were mostly men but there were women, too.

https://twitter.com/bluestein/status/1347513742171451393?s=20

Dominion Voting Systems filed a defamation lawsuit against lawyer Sidney Powell, demanding more than $1.3 billion in damages for havoc it says Powell has caused by spreading “wild” and “demonstrably false” allegations, including that Dominion played a central role in a fantastical scheme to steal the 2020 election from President Trump, the Washington Post reports.

After a mob of Trump supporters were done storming the Capitol at the President’s urging, there was a bone-chilling message left behind that was scrawled on a door: “Murder the Media.”

. . . .

Schaff reported that “two or three men in black” surrounded her, then “became really angry” and violent when they saw her New York Times press pass.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/threats-cable-nooses-trump-supporters-terrorized-media-during-insurrection

Makes sense.  After all, they're the "enemy of the people."

NDPP wrote:

Fake news. No dead cop.

JKR wrote:

I think the Trump mob's attack of the Capitol will make it more likely that right wing led mob attacks will now be more common place worldwide. This has emboldened the right worldwide.

Probably, but it is destroying the Republicans in the US and to a lessor extent the Conservatives here.

Neither party can afford to lose even 2% of their support (federally). The only way they have been able to win has been gerrymandering and voter suppression in the US. That hasn't been so successful in Canada. 

The Trumpers will either run the Republican party or leave it. I think leave it because Republican leadership realizes it has gone way too far.  They won't all leave but they don't all have to leave (not vote) to doom the party. There is a contingent that believes the party betrayed Trump.  Another contingent thinks Trump betrayed them when he condemned the rioters. They were convinced they were doing his bidding. 

Kunstler: Fog and Noise

https://kunstler.com/cluster-fuck-nation/fog-and-noise/

"Is there a game on? Consider: What you're seeing may not be what you think you're seeing. If an 'ordinary transition to the next administration' meant what you think it means, Nancy Pelosi would not be shrieking for an insta-super-quickie impeachment. Something's up and it's making them even more hysterical than usual.

The game is a deadly one because there is so much at stake: careers, reputations, fortunes, lives, the climax of four years of sedition Gotcha. The 'Resistance' threw everything it could at the Golden Golem of Greatness. It discommoded him in his duties, and wasted the nation's precious time in a gathering crisis of civilization, but nothing stuck to him: RussiaGate, impeachment, not even covid-19. The November election was the final play. Ever find, in a game of chess, that you've blundered unwittingly into a checkmate...?"

NLR: Riot on the Hill

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/riot-on-the-hill

'Yesterday's sacrileges in our temple of democracy - oh, poor defiled city on the hill, etc.'

"...Let me be clear, the Republican Party has just undergone an irreparable split. Institutionally, Senate Republicans, with a strong roster of young talents, will the rule the post-Trump camp and, via vicious darwinian competition - above all, the battle to replace McConnell - bring about a generational succession, probably before the Democrats' octogenarian oligarchy has left the scene. The major internal battle on the post-Trump side in the next few years will probably center on foreign policy and the new cold war with China.

That's one side of the split. The other is more dramatic: the True Trumpists have become a de facto third party, bunkered down heavily in the House of Representatives. As Trump embalms himself in bitter revenge fantasies, reconciliation between the two camps will probably become impossible, although individual defections may occur. Mar-a-Lago will become base camp for the Trump death cult which will continue to mobilize his hardcore followers to terrorize Republican primaries and ensure the preservation of a large die-hard contingent in the House  as well as the red-state legislatures. (Republicans in the senate, accessing huge corporate donations, are far less vulnerable to such challenges).

Tomorrow, liberal pundits may reassure us that the Republicans have committed suicide, that the age of Trump is over, and the Democrats are on the verge of reclaiming hegemony. Similar declarations were made during vicious Republican primaries in 2015. They seemed very convincing at the time. But an open civil war amongst Republicans may only provide short-term advantages to Democrats, whose own divisions have been rubbed raw by Biden's refusal to share power with progressives. Freed from Trump's electronic fatwas, moreover, some of the younger Republican senators may prove to be much more formidable competitors for the white college-educated suburban vote than centrist Democrats realize.

In any event, the only future that we can reliably foresee - a continuation of extreme socio-economic turbulence - renders political crystal balls useless."

Greenwald: Violence in the Capitol: Dangers in the Aftermath

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/violence-in-the-capitol-dangers-in-67f

"...It is stunning to watch now as every War on Terror rhetorical tactic to justify civil liberties erosions is now being invoked in the name of combatting Trumpism, including the aggressive exploitation of the emotions triggered by yesterday's events at the Capitol to accelerate their implementation and demonize dissent over the quickly formed consensus.

The same framework used to assault civil liberties in the name of foreign terror is now being seamlessly applied - often by those who spent the last two decades objecting to it - to the threat posed by 'domestic white-supremacist terrorists,' the term preferred by liberal elites, especially after yesterday, for Trump supporters generally. In so many ways, yesterday was the liberals' 9/11, as even the most sensible commentators among them are resorting to the most unhinged rhetoric available.

Calls proliferated for the banning of the social media accounts of instigators and protest participants. Journalists and politicians cheered the decision by Facebook and Twitter to temporarily bar the President from using their service, and then cheered again when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday, that the ban on Trump extended through Biden's investigation. Some journalists, such as CNN's Oliver Darcy, complained that Facebook had not gone far enough, that more censorship was needed of right-wing voices. The once-radical 2006 Gingrich argument - that some opinions are too dangerous to be expressed became close to a consensus.

Those who argued in the summer that property damage is meaningless or even noble are treating smashed windows and looted podiums at the Capitol as treason, as a coup. One need not dismiss the lamentable actions of yesterday to simultaneously, reject efforts to apply terms that are plainly inapplicable: attempted coup, Insurrection, sedition. There was zero chance that the few hundred people who breached the Capitol could overthrow the US Government - the most powerfully armed and militarized entity in the world - nor did they try.

It has long been clear that, in the post-Trump era, media outlets looking to keep viewers hooked, and government officials looking to increase their power, will do anything possible to center and inflate the threat posed by right-wing factions. I've said this more than I can count over the last year at least. Like all inflated threats, this one has a kernel of truth. As is true of every faction, there are right-wing activists filled with rage and who are willing to do violence. Some of them are dangerous (just as some Muslims in the post-9/11 era, and some Antifa nihilists were and are genuinely violent and dangerous).

But as was true of the Cold War and the War on Terror and so many other crisis-spurred reactions, the other side of the ledger - the draconian state powers clearly being planned and urged and prepared in the name of stopping them - carries its own extremely formidable dangers..."

One need not dismiss the lamentable actions of yesterday to simultaneously, reject efforts to apply terms that are plainly inapplicable: attempted coup, Insurrection, sedition. There was zero chance that the few hundred people who breached the Capitol could overthrow the US Government - the most powerfully armed and militarized entity in the world - nor did they try.

As Greenwald should well know, there were more than a few hundred people.  Some were carrying rope and handcuffs.  Who knows what they would have done had they gotten a hold of people they were searching the Capitol for, such as Pelosi.

As far as an attempted coup, that is not entirely clear, as the post above discusses.

And as far as threats to civil liberties, I am not aware of any legislation discussed to restrict them as after 9/11.  Twitter is a private entity.  No one has a right to post there.  If you want to make them public utilities, that's another discussion.

Police have arrested Florida man Adam Christian Johnson, who was pictured carrying Nancy Pelosi’s lectern on Wednesday He is being held on a federal warrant.

https://twitter.com/Phil_Lewis_/status/1347901957466415111?s=20

Clyburn told the network that he had heard from others in Congress that their staff  reported seeing members of the violent mob being let into the building “through side doors.”

“Somebody on the inside of those buildings were complicit in this,” the South Carolina lawmaker asserted.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/clyburn-suggests-someone-within-us-capitol-was-complicit-in-letting-mob-inside

By wrongly calling the Capitol rabble 'terrorists' Joe Biden will likely create some

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/01/by-calling-trump-supporter-terrori...

"The hyperventilating over Wednesday's MAGA cosplay in the Capitol Building, continues. The real danger to the people does not come from those 'deplorables' who walked into the Capitol but from the 'elite' who will use the incident for their own purposes..."

WATCH: Capitol Police Open Doors for the Protestors...

https://twitter.com/christina_bobb/status/1347596278583197698

"They stand aside and invite them inside..."

WATCH: The Police opened the fucking gates...

https://twitter.com/cevansavenger/status/1346920924310867968

They blame Trump for the violence, believing she got caught up in the president’s lies about the election.

“It cost her her life,” Lonna Cave said.

https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-joe-biden-donald-trump-police-elections-7051411972c58cfbbf079876ce527ab4
 

NDPP, supporting lies and bogus conspiracy theories has consequences.

NR, that's true. The gullibility of Americans shows how the U.S. education system has been a huge failure. Hopefully we're doing a much better here in Canada.