Politics & Stuff

[Vesper 30,226]

UNITED AIRLINESPASSENGER DIES AFTER LYING ABOUT COVID SYMPTOMS... Photos Show Chaos

https://www.tmz.com/2020/12/19/man-dead-dies-united-flight-covid-coronavirus/

 

QAnon is still spreading on Facebook, despite a ban.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/technology/qanon-is-still-spreading-on-facebook-despite-a-ban.html

 

[manpe 10,861]

1 hour ago, Vesper said:

UNITED AIRLINESPASSENGER DIES AFTER LYING ABOUT COVID SYMPTOMS... Photos Show Chaos

https://www.tmz.com/2020/12/19/man-dead-dies-united-flight-covid-coronavirus/

Good that he died, good riddance that fucker. At least he can't put more people at risk anymore. If there is anything good about COVID, is that it kills thick cunts like him who don't care about themselves or others.

[Vesper 30,226]

34 minutes ago, manpe said:

Good that he died, good riddance that fucker. At least he can't put more people at risk anymore. If there is anything good about COVID, is that it kills thick cunts like him.

unfortunately the thick cunts take out a lot of innocents

well over 100 million people in the US are fucking deranged

social media has shredded the ties that bind

it is staggering how quickly it did it too

On September 26, 2006, Facebook opened to everyone at least 13 years old with a valid email address.

The full version of Twitter was introduced publicly on July 15, 2006.

Around ten years later Trump was elected on the back of mass psychosis, racism/white nationalism, and magical conspiracy thinking amplified with the nuclear furnace-level blowtorch that became social media.

Instagram is even newer, launched publicly on October 6, 2010, and Snapchat a year later, publicly launched July 8, 2011.

4chan is older than FB (even the beta launch in 2004) and Twitter, having launched October 1, 2003, but it is also far smaller and took longer to morph into a huge RW op in terms of political postings.

 YouTube's first video was put up April 23, 2005, and YT started to explode by 2006.

Finally, there is Reddit, about a year older than FB and Twitter's full public launches, it came out on June 23, 2005, although it also took years to grow into a true force.

The first US election that was influenced to any true degree by social media was Obama in 2008. The so-called left dominate it back then, and the RW took huge notice, and by 2010 were starting down the path to the steamroller it turned into by 2015/16 and the rise of Trump etc. 2006 had very little actual social media interaction, but did have (as did other elections before it going back to 1994 and 1996 and increasing exponentially every two years) some online parts.

It is extraordinarily powerful, scientifically-designed agitprop and brainwashing, and works hand in hand with the traditional RW media like Fox, et al. to dominate the RW narratives, memes and disinfo universe, and keeps them in a delusional lockstep.

[Vesper 30,226]

 

[manpe 10,861]

23 hours ago, Vesper said:

Snapchat a year later, publicly launched July 8, 2011.

I know this doesn't belong here, but fuck it, it's so good that it can be posted anywhere

 

[kellzfresh 7,229]

On 12/20/2020 at 0:02 PM, Vesper said:

unfortunately the thick cunts take out a lot of innocents

well over 100 million people in the US are fucking deranged

social media has shredded the ties that bind

it is staggering how quickly it did it too

On September 26, 2006, Facebook opened to everyone at least 13 years old with a valid email address.

The full version of Twitter was introduced publicly on July 15, 2006.

Around ten years later Trump was elected on the back of mass psychosis, racism/white nationalism, and magical conspiracy thinking amplified with the nuclear furnace-level blowtorch that became social media.

Instagram is even newer, launched publicly on October 6, 2010, and Snapchat a year later, publicly launched July 8, 2011.

4chan is older than FB (even the beta launch in 2004) and Twitter, having launched October 1, 2003, but it is also far smaller and took longer to morph into a huge RW op in terms of political postings.

 YouTube's first video was put up April 23, 2005, and YT started to explode by 2006.

Finally, there is Reddit, about a year older than FB and Twitter's full public launches, it came out on June 23, 2005, although it also took years to grow into a true force.

The first US election that was influenced to any true degree by social media was Obama in 2008. The so-called left dominate it back then, and the RW took huge notice, and by 2010 were starting down the path to the steamroller it turned into by 2015/16 and the rise of Trump etc. 2006 had very little actual social media interaction, but did have (as did other elections before it going back to 1994 and 1996 and increasing exponentially every two years) some online parts.

It is extraordinarily powerful, scientifically-designed agitprop and brainwashing, and works hand in hand with the traditional RW media like Fox, et al. to dominate the RW narratives, memes and disinfo universe, and keeps them in a delusional lockstep.

I agree with everything you say about the huge influence social media has on our world today, which is scary.

But I completely disagree that it favors the right..... Not a chance. The left is the highest beneficiary of the social media, so much that in fact, I think it will be so difficult for a republican to win presidency in America if they don't move a little more to the left.

[Vesper 30,226]

IDEAS

Trump Is Losing His Mind

The president is discussing martial law in the Oval Office, as his grip on reality falters.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/12/trump-losing-his-mind/617446/

Donald Trump’s descent into madness continues.

The latest manifestation of this is a report in The New York Times that the president is weighing appointing the conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell, who for a time worked on his legal team, to be special counsel to investigate imaginary claims of voter fraud.

As if that were not enough, we also learned that former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who was pardoned by the president after pleading guilty to lying to the FBI, attended the Friday meeting. Earlier in the week, Flynn, a retired lieutenant general, floated the idea (which he had promoted before) that the president impose martial law and deploy the military to “rerun” the election in several closely contested states that voted against Trump. It appears that Flynn wants to turn them into literal battleground states.

None of this should come as a surprise. Some of us said, even before he became president, that Donald Trump’s Rosetta Stone, the key to deciphering him, was his psychology—his disordered personality, his emotional and mental instability, and his sociopathic tendencies. It was the main reason, though hardly the only reason, I refused to vote for him in 2016 or in 2020, despite having worked in the three previous Republican administrations. Nothing that Trump has done over the past four years has caused me to rethink my assessment, and a great deal has happened to confirm it.

Given Trump’s psychological profile, it was inevitable that when he felt the walls of reality close in on him—in 2020, it was the pandemic, the cratering economy, and his election defeat—he would detach himself even further from reality. It was predictable that the president would assert even more bizarre conspiracy theories. That he would become more enraged and embittered, more desperate and despondent, more consumed by his grievances. That he would go against past supplicants, like Attorney General Bill Barr and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, and become more aggressive toward his perceived enemies. That his wits would begin to turn, in the words of King Lear. That he would begin to lose his mind.

So he has. And, as a result, President Trump has become even more destabilizing and dangerous.

“I’ve been covering Donald Trump for a while,” Jonathan Swan of Axios tweeted. “I can’t recall hearing more intense concern from senior officials who are actually Trump people. The Sidney Powell/Michael Flynn ideas are finding an enthusiastic audience at the top.”

Even amid the chaos, it’s worth taking a step back to think about where we are: An American president, unwilling to concede his defeat by 7 million popular votes and 74 Electoral College votes, is still trying to steal the election. It has become his obsession.

In the process, Trump has in too many cases turned his party into an instrument of illiberalism and nihilism. Here are just a couple of data points to underscore that claim: 18 attorneys general and more than half the Republicans in the House supported a seditious abuse of the judicial process.

And it’s not only, or even mainly, elected officials. The Republican Party’s base has often followed Trump into the twilight zone, with a sizable majority of them affirming that Joe Biden won the election based on fraud and many of them turning against medical science in the face of a surging pandemic.

COVID-19 is now killing Americans at the rate of about one per minute, but the president is “just done with COVID,” a source identified as one of Trump’s closest advisers told The Washington Post. “I think he put it on a timetable and he’s done with COVID ... It just exceeded the amount of time he gave it.”

This is where Trump’s crippling psychological condition—his complete inability to face unpleasant facts, his toxic narcissism, and his utter lack of empathy—became lethal. Trump’s negligence turned what would have been a difficult winter into a dark one. If any of his predecessors—Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan, to go back just 40 years—had been president during this pandemic, tens of thousands of American lives would almost surely have been saved.

“My concern was, in the worst part of the battle, the general was missing in action,” said Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, one of the very few Republicans to speak truth in the Trump era.

In 30 days, Donald Trump will leave the presidency, with his efforts to mount a coup having failed. The encouraging news is that it never really had a chance of succeeding. Our institutions, especially the courts, will have passed a stress test, not the most difficult ever but difficult enough, and unlike any in our history. Some local officials exhibited profiles in courage, doing the right thing in the face of threats and pressure from their party. And a preponderance of the American public, having lived through the past four years, deserves credit for canceling this presidential freak show rather than renewing it. The “exhausted majority” wasn’t too exhausted to get out and vote, even in a pandemic.

But the Trump presidency will leave gaping wounds nearly everywhere, and ruination in some places. Truth as a concept has been battered from the highest office in the land on an almost hourly basis. The Republican Party has been radicalized, with countless Republican lawmakers and other prominent figures within the party having revealed themselves to be moral cowards, even, and in some ways especially, after Trump was defeated. During the Trump presidency, they were so afraid of getting crosswise with him and his supporters that they failed the Solzhenitsyn test: “The simple act of an ordinary brave man is not to participate in lies, not to support false actions! His rule: Let that come into the world, let it even reign supreme—only not through me.”

During the past four years, the right-wing ecosystem became more and more rabid. Many prominent evangelical supporters of the president are either obsequious, like Franklin Graham, or delusional, like Eric Metaxas, and they now peddle their delusions as being written by God. QAnon and the Proud Boys, Newsmax and One America News, Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson—all have been emboldened.

These worrisome trends began before Trump ran for office, and they won’t disappear after he leaves the presidency. Those who hope for a quick snapback will be disappointed. Still, having Trump out of office has to help. He’s going to find out that there’s no comparable bully pulpit. And the media, if they are wise, will cut off his oxygen, which is attention. They had no choice but to cover Trump’s provocations when he was president; when he’s an ex-president, that will change.

For the foreseeable future, journalists will rightly focus on the pandemic. But once that is contained and defeated, it will be time to go back to focusing more attention on things like the Paris accord and the carbon tax; the earned-income tax credit and infrastructure; entitlement reform and monetary policy; charter schools and campus speech codes; legal immigration, asylum, assimilation, and social mobility. There is also an opportunity, with Trump a former president, for the Republican Party to once again become the home of sane conservatism. Whether that happens or not is an open question. But it’s something many of us are willing to work for, and that even progressives should hope for.

Beyond that, and more fundamental than that, we have to remind ourselves that we are not powerless to shape the future; that much of what has been broken can be repaired; that though we are many, we can be one; and that fatalism and cynicism are unwarranted and corrosive.

There’s a lovely line in William Wordsworth’s poem “The Prelude”: “What we have loved, Others will love, and we will teach them how.”

There are still things worthy of our love. Honor, decency, courage, beauty, and truth. Tenderness, human empathy, and a sense of duty. A good society. And a commitment to human dignity. We need to teach others—in our individual relationships, in our classrooms and communities, in our book clubs and Bible studies, and in innumerable other settings—why those things are worthy of their attention, their loyalty, their love. One person doing it won’t make much of a difference; a lot of people doing it will create a culture.

Maybe we understand better than we did five years ago why these things are essential to our lives, and why when we neglect them or elect leaders who ridicule and subvert them, life becomes nasty, brutish, and generally unpleasant.

Just after noon on January 20, a new and necessary chapter will begin in the American story. Joe Biden will certainly play a role in shaping how that story turns out—but so will you and I. Ours is a good and estimable republic, if we can keep it.

[Vesper 30,226]

IDEAS

Trump Failed to Protect America

The president’s decision not to push back aggressively against Putin’s meddling seems only to have encouraged it.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/12/trump-failed-protect-america/617429/

As he accepted the Republican nomination for president in summer 2016, Donald Trump promised, “We will make America safe again.”

“The most basic duty of government is to defend the lives of its citizens,” he said. “Any government that fails to do so is a government unworthy to lead.”

This promise is worth revisiting as the nation tries to understand a massive hack, blamed on Russia, that affected many departments of the federal government and thousands of businesses. Yesterday, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency labeled the incident a “grave threat.” Although the scale of the intrusion is still difficult to grasp, President Trump’s approach to Russia has clearly failed to keep America safe.

Much about the hack is unknown. First, officials seem not to fully understand what was breached and what hackers acquired. Second, they are not forthcoming about what they do know, offering bland statements that suggest serious concerns but don’t outline them. Third, members of Congress have offered doomsaying interpretations but can’t divulge classified information. They might be exaggerating for partisan effect, or it could be a reprise of the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, when members frantically tried to warn the public but the administration paid no mind.

Read: Donald Trump’s pattern of deference to the Kremlin is clear

Regardless of the details, it’s hard not to see this hack as a fruit of Trump’s refusal to push back on Russian cyberaggression. The best defense against hacks is deterrence, but rather than deter the Kremlin, the president has repeatedly refused to even acknowledge previous Russian actions—basically giving Vladimir Putin an invitation to continue and amplify attacks, secure in the knowledge that whatever sanctions lower-level officials impose, Trump is uninterested in retaliating. The president has remained publicly silent about the new hack even now.

The problem is not that Trump is an active Russian agent. (There is no evidence that he is, despite some hysterical claims.) Nor is it that members of his campaign colluded with Russia in 2016 (though they did). Instead, as I wrote in April 2019, Trump refuses to protect the country from Russian hacking, “because it’s politically inconvenient and personally irritating to him.” The president is so furious over the implication that Russian assistance helped him triumph in 2016 that he has been unable to bring himself to acknowledge not only what happened then but anything that has happened since with regards to Russia.

David A. Graham: Trump refuses to defend the United States

During the 2016 campaign, despite having been briefed on Russia’s role by United States intelligence officials, Trump continued to speculate that the person who hacked the Democratic National Committee “could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.” In July 2017, in Poland, he momentarily seemed to acknowledge Russia’s role—“I think it was Russia”—and then promptly muddied the waters: “and I think it could have been other people in other countries. It could have been a lot of people.” At his disastrous summit with Putin in July 2018, Trump announced that he trusted the Russian president’s denials more than he did his own government. “They said, ‘I think it is Russia,’” he said. “I have President Putin. He just said it is not Russia. I will say this: I do not see any reason why it would be.” Trump’s chief of staff reportedly warned against bringing up Russia around the president because it enraged him. Trump never condemned Russian interference in 2016, and his administration blocked some efforts at strengthening election-security defenses.

The irony is that, despite the protestations of some members of the Trump “resistance,” there’s little reason to believe Russia’s meddling was responsible for his victory. There were many factors in that win—Trump’s effective messaging, his willingness to froth up racism, the Hillary Clinton campaign’s strategic choices, FBI Director James Comey’s handling of an investigation into Clinton’s email—but the Russian actions appear to have been a small factor, if they were one at all.

David A. Graham: Collusion happened

The greater problem was the principle: Russia challenged American sovereignty and took from Trump’s reaction the clear message that they could get away with it. The Trump administration, over the past four years, has imposed a long list of sanctions on Russia for a wide variety of problematic actions—including its hacking attempts related to the 2016 and 2018 elections. But the impact of those actions was continually undercut by the president’s repeated public statements downplaying Russian culpability and signaling his conciliatory approach to Putin’s regime.

In 2020, rather than target election systems or social media—both of which had been hardened somewhat—Russia seems to have gone after other parts of the government, in what amounted to a clever bait and switch. In the first weeks after the election, the U.S. congratulated itself on keeping the election safe, only to learn that Russia had been wreaking havoc elsewhere.

Trump’s failure to protect America has not yet received the attention it deserves—perhaps because it is overshadowed by the coronavirus pandemic, another example of Trump failing to protect Americans. If experts are right about the gravity of this hack, however, the U.S. will be dealing with the consequences for years to come. Even if the damage proves moderate, the U.S. finds itself with badly deficient cyberdefenses that need to be repaired.

Either way, it’s clear that the federal government’s posture will soon change. Yesterday, President-elect Joe Biden promised to impose “substantial costs” on hackers. “Our adversaries should know that, as president, I will not stand idly by in the face of cyber assaults on our nation,” he said. That should be a dramatic test of a different approach to Russia.

[Vesper 30,226]

IDEAS

How Long Can This Continue?

Trump is turning the Republican Party against democracy.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/12/trumps-attempted-coup-dangerous/617447

On Friday, December 18, the secretary of the Army and the Army chief of staff formally disavowed any intention of participating in a military coup: “There is no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of an American election.”

That’s a fine statement, in line with the long-standing traditions of the U.S. military. It’s alarming, though, that anybody thought it necessary at all. The next day, multiple media sources reported that President Donald Trump has been scheming about a possible coup in the Oval Office with his innermost team of advisers: Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell, and Rudy Giuliani.

Trump also reportedly has been looking for some way to institutionalize Powell’s role by appointing her as a special counsel, empowering her to extend her delusive lawsuits past Inauguration Day.

There has already been one successful attempt to institutionalize Trump’s false accusations. On December 1, Attorney General Bill Barr appointed John Durham, the U.S. attorney for Connecticut, as a special counsel. Durham will now be able to continue his investigation of the Trump-Russia investigation, which Barr hopes will confirm Trump’s complaint that he was the victim of unfair persecution rather than a culprit who mostly got away with it.

None of this looks like a plausible path to preventing President-elect Joe Biden’s lawful inauguration on January 20, 2021. To put it mildly, a military coup against the United States Constitution would require considerable planning. Again, to put it mildly, planning has not been a strong suit of the Trump administration. As with his promise that the coronavirus would just miraculously go away on its own, Trump seems to be hoping that big talk can somehow substitute for hard work—criminal hard work in this case, but still work.

But if a coup—or an attempted coup—is not in the cards, here’s what is. We are getting an answer to the question posed to The Washington Post by an unnamed “senior Republican official”:

What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change … It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20.

We’re seeing the harm.

Though the Trump years, a certain variety of political observer has dismissed Trump’s attacks on the rule of law by pointing out that, by and large, Trump’s projects have failed.

And so on, down the list.

There have always been two answers to this dismissal. The first is that Trump got away with a lot that was previously regarded as wrong and forbidden. He did operate a business as president. He did collect a steady flow of payments from domestic and foreign favor-seekers. He did successfully defy congressional subpoenas and did successfully obstruct a special-counsel investigation; he did use his pardon power to reward associates who kept silent to protect him.

The second answer is that even when Trump has seemingly failed to get his way, he has still succeeded in doing enormous damage. He has moved a suite of terrible acts from the category of unthinkable to the category of possible. No, there won’t be a coup. But we have on record the first ever formal U.S. Army repudiation of a coup. That’s bad enough.

Trump’s co-partisans won’t join the coup. That’s good. They won’t disavow it either. A president who yearned to use the military to overthrow an election remains by far the most popular figure—and most potent fundraiser—in one of the country’s two great parties. That’s a fact with consequences that will not end on January 20.

Most elected Republicans surely disagree with Trump’s actions. They dare not say so. They will try to pretend it never happened—as Don Draper says to Peggy Olson in Mad Men, “It will shock you how much it never happened.” But to the extent that the pretense cannot be sustained, they will have to find ways to condone or excuse Trump’s actions. Along the way, they’ll push the Republican Party toward becoming a self-consciously post-democratic party, a party that accepts antidemocratic and anti-constitutional methods to advance its goals and protect its supporters’ interests.

We’ve seen such parties before in the United States, in the southern states after Reconstruction and before the civil-rights era. Then, those parties were regional. Now the politics of massive resistance has gone national—and in a vehicle that can win a respectable minority of the total vote in an ultra-high-turnout election.

The United States was once warned that it could not continue forever as half slave and half free. How long can it safely continue with only one of its two great parties wholly committed to democracy and legality?

[Vesper 30,226]

CORONAVIRUS

Hundreds of Maskless Trumpkins Pack Turning Point USA Party at Mar-a-Lago

 

FREEDOM TO SPREAD

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe, and Roger Stone were among those who attended the gala, where hundreds flouted Palm Beach COVID-19 measures.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/hundreds-of-maskless-trumpkins-pack-turning-point-usa-party-at-mar-a-lago

Hundreds of maskless revelers—including White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem—packed President Donald Trump’s Palm Beach club on Friday night for Turning Point USA’s annual winter gala, flouting local COVID-19 guidelines.

Photos of the event—hosted by the right-wing student group that made headlines last month after refusing to cancel its “Student Action Summit”—showed dozens of maskless guests eating together and cheerfully embracing at the Friday night gala in a Mar-a-Lago ballroom.

Attendees paid a minimum of $2,000—and upwards of $100,000—to hear speeches by several Republican A-listers, including Fox News host Laura Ingraham and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul. Other Trumpkins, like Corey Lewandowski and Roger Stone, were seen huddling up with guests and taking photos. Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe was also in attendance.

Anna Eskamani, a Democratic state legislator from Orlando, said the winter gala photos are not a surprise given that the Trump administration and Florida’s GOP leadership have no regard for COVID-19 mitigation measures.

“Time and time again, we see Republican leaders make up their own rules,” Eskamani told The Daily Beast. “We are in a crisis in Florida. Not only do these photos show how completely disconnected the Republican Party is from reality, but it hurts our ability to get out of this pandemic.”

Gabe Nies, a Nashville real-estate agent who attended the event, told The Daily Beast that he was invited to the gala by a close friend and flew down from Tennessee for the night.

“I was really grateful for the opportunity to be there and among friends and people that I am with, so to speak,” Nies said, insisting he did not feel unsafe.

Nies, who admitted he had COVID-19 about a month ago, said that everyone wore masks walking into the event—then ditched them as soon as they sat down.

“It wasn’t like we were avoiding each other but it wasn’t like we were not careful either,” Nies said. “Were we crazy and afraid and terrified? No. Our lives are not going to be shut down. We go on moving forward and supporting causes we believe in.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends all Americans use face coverings to curtail the spread of the coronavirus, especially in conjunction with social distancing and during indoor gatherings.

Photos posted online show at least a dozen packed tables at the Mar-a-Lago gala, making social distancing impossible. Other photos of the event show guests with their arms draped around each other as they pose for pictures in various areas of Trump’s club, including the swimming pool and near a white marble staircase.

“An amazing evening with an awesome patriot. Trump is still prez,” actress Sam Sorbo posted on Instagram, alongside a photo with McEnany.

The winter gala brazenly flouted Palm Beach County’s COVID-19 guidelines, which requires facial coverings “inside all businesses and establishments.” Photos of the gala only show waiters complying with the mask mandate. To date, 20,567 people have died and 17.9 million more have been infected with the virus in Florida.

Jill Roberts, an infectious disease professor at the University of South Florida, told The Daily Beast it is a “shame we continue to have these types of events” that can easily spread the coronavirus.

“Super-spreading as always can occur in events with a large number of people and put at risk not only the people attending but the essential workers who have no choice but to participate,” Roberts said, adding that the event was “high profile” and sent the “wrong message.”

“The event is social, and not essential. The risks that occurred here were entirely preventable, and do indeed pose risk to the surrounding communities, and moreover extended communities from which the essential workers are likely commuting. The event continues to deviate messaging between top government officials and public health, to the detriment of the most vulnerable,” the professor added.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CI_TOpGnqQt/?utm_source=ig_embed

The gala kicked off the four-day “Student Action Summit” for Turning Point USA, which Vice President Mike Pence is scheduled to speak at on Tuesday.

“This event represents freedom,” Charlie Kirk, the group’s 27-year-old founder, said during his 15-minute speech on Saturday, where he blasted COVID-19 restrictions, according to the Palm Beach Post. “That you’re not going to lock us down and shut us up any longer.”

In order to attend the summit, guests had to sign a waiver agreeing to “voluntarily assume all risks related to exposure to COVID-19,” according to Turning Point’s website. The group also controversially said last month they refused to implement a mask mandate at the gala or the four-day event.

“Each person has their own freedom and they need to exercise that responsibly...and that it is part of the spirit of this event,” TPUSA spokesman Andrew Kolvet previously told Business Insider.

At least a hundred young Republicans—chanting “let us in!”—were locked out of the Palm Beach County Convention Center on Saturday after Turning Point USA oversold tickets to the first day of its summit. Palm Beach County Administrator Verdenia Baker told the Palm Beach Post that the Republican student group “oversold their contract capacity by 500 to 600 people.”

The event, which reached its 2,000-person capacity, included keynote speeches from Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr.—who also spoke to the barred crowd with a megaphone. Carlson and Sebastian Gorka were also seen outside addressing the group.

“The Convention Center is adhering to the contractual agreement with Turning Point with a 2,000 person capacity; this leaves 500-600 people unable to enter the Convention Center,” Baker said. A Turning Point spokesperson, however, has denied that the group oversold the event or violated its contract with the city.

“We had a plan—once the number hit capacity—to escort kids into other spaces,” Kolvet told the outlet. “Once they locked the foyer doors, the students were unable to get in to get their badges.”

The Florida Department of Health and Palm Beach County Administrator Verdenia Baker did not respond to requests for comment from The Daily Beast. A Palm Beach Sheriff’s spokesperson also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

[Vesper 30,226]

Hell hath frozen over....

 

[manpe 10,861]

16 hours ago, Vesper said:

The United States was once warned that it could not continue forever as half slave and half free. How long can it safely continue with only one of its two great parties wholly committed to democracy and legality?

Lololol, that last sentence is dead giveaway that it's a democrat sponsored article.  They're both bad, it's just that the republicans are far FAR worse.

[Atomiswave 6,118]

16 hours ago, Vesper said:

Hell hath frozen over....

 

Pat Robertson is just another fake cunt of a so called priest. Him and the likes of him are deceivers and has become very rich by fooling others. His words are worth jack shit...a whole lot of crock shit.

[Vesper 30,226]

46 minutes ago, manpe said:

Lololol, that last sentence is dead giveaway that it's a democrat sponsored article.  They're both bad, it's just that the republicans are far FAR worse.

it is not 'sponsored' by a political party

[Vesper 30,226]

21 minutes ago, Atomiswave said:

Pat Robertson is just another fake cunt of a so called priest. Him and the likes of him are deceivers and has become very rich by fooling others. His words are worth jack shit...a whole lot of crock shit.

totally agree with this, lol

[Vesper 30,226]

Mike Pence is campaigning for the Democrats now, lolol Vice President Mike Pence: "[Democrats] want to make rich people poorer, and poor people more comfortable."

[Vesper 30,226]

A Threat to Democracy

https://www.democracydocket.com/2020/12/a-threat-to-democracy/

In 1814, John Adams wrote a letter to Virginia Delegate John Taylor reminding that “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a Democracy yet, that did not commit suicide.”

Texas was never going to win its recent lawsuit against Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, but if it had, it certainly would have fulfilled Adams’ dark prophesy. The lawsuit, filed by a Texas Attorney General under criminal investigation, read more like an effort to curry favor with the President than a serious legal document. On a personal level, his logic was sound: when pardons are being handed out to corrupt cronies, corrupt people figure out how to become a crony, fast.

Far more alarming was the decision of eighteen other Republican state attorneys general—most of whom presumably do not need a pardon from the outgoing president—to support Texas’ effort to disenfranchise millions of American voters and overthrow the results of a democratically held election.

They were joined by more than half of the Republican members of the House of Representatives—126 in all—all signing onto the proposition that four states’ elections should be entirely discarded. Strikingly, several of the signatures on that brief were from Members seeking to disenfranchise their own voters and cast their own elections into doubt.

The Supreme Court rejected Texas’ anti-democratic effort unanimously, with seven justices saying that Texas did not have a legal right to proceed and the other two saying that they wouldn’t block the election even if the case did proceed.

Our institutions held—this time.

But the broad support among Republicans for the previously unthinkable—a demand that the judiciary deliver Trump the presidency against the overwhelming will of the American people—signals a worrying and serious erosion of our democratic values within the Republican Party.

This time, there were several reasons that the attempted coup failed and John Adams’ prediction did not come to pass. There is no guarantee that we will be so lucky next time.

First and most obvious, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won a landslide election garnering more than 300 electoral votes and a lead of more than seven million votes nationwide. There was no single contested state whose results decided the outcome.

Second, the states attacked by Trump’s lawsuits included states with mixed partisan governments–Georgia has a Republican Governor and legislature, while Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin all have Democratic governors and Republican legislatures.

Third, Democrats control the U.S. House, and the Senate is narrowly divided. Thus, any ultimate decision to tamper with democracy would face a skeptical Congress.

Finally, the legal claims being advanced were outlandish, unsupported in law or fact, and poorly lawyered. By the time the U.S. Supreme Court received Texas’ case, similar claims had been rejected by courts around the country, and the lawyers advancing them had become the subject of national ridicule.

But what if it were closer, the legal claims and team more polished and the Congress unified in support of that candidate?

Donald Trump came to prominence in Republican politics by promoting birtherism—the racist lie that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Even as clear evidence proved that it was not true, Trump did not retreat. Instead, he expanded the lie to make it even more outrageous and conspiratorial.

Trumpism has morphed from a racist attack on the first Black president into an all-out assault on the very idea of democratic elections. In this sphere, Trumpism’s defining feature is a belief that every electoral outcome that does not favor Trump and his allies must be fraudulent. Its logic is tautological—if Trump did not win there must have been fraud. If there was fraud, Trump did not win. Nothing more is required.

One might think that the simple end of this problem is for Donald Trump to simply leave the White House on the morning of January 20th as a disgraced one-term president. The Republican Party’s reaction to the Texas case suggests this will not be the case.

John Taylor, to whom Adams was writing, was also skeptical of virtue as the foundation for democratic government. “The more a nation depends for its liberty on the qualities of individuals, the less likely it is to retain it. By expecting public good from private virtue, we expose ourselves to public evils from private vices.”

Trumpism has taught us that, for our democracy to survive, we cannot allow ourselves to be exposed to public evils from private vices. This means hardening our institutions of democracy and making them more explicit. This will need to take many forms, but we must start with those that force our nation’s leaders to do better.

First, every election-related lawsuit should have to explicitly state in the caption of the complaint whether the plaintiff is claiming fraud. Claims of fraud must be held to the highest pleading standard—providing the details of who, what, when and how much. If plaintiffs do not claim fraud, they need to say so. When a lawsuit claiming fraud is dismissed, judges should be required to make a specific finding that the claim of fraud was denied.

Second, state bar associations should promulgate specific rules of ethical conduct aimed at anti-democratic efforts.  Just as attorneys owe an obligation to the court, they should owe obligations to democracy and democratic institutions. Lawyers should not be allowed to recklessly shout fraud in the parking lot but quietly disclaim it in the courtroom.

Finally, the House and Senate must strengthen their internal rules to prevent Members from undermining democracy. Candidates who, through public statements or court filings, cast doubt on an election that they won should not be seated without formal inquiry into the validity of their election credentials. Members should also be cautioned from making statements, outside of official channels, casting doubt on the validity of an election other than one for a seat in their own chamber.

These suggestions are not the complete solution for what we have witnessed, but they are a start. We cannot ignore the challenges our democracy faces. We must not wait to act until it is too late.

[Vesper 30,226]

Profiles in Cowardice

https://www.democracydocket.com/2020/12/profiles-in-cowardice/

Shortly before John F. Kennedy’s book about courage in the United States Senate was released, he wrote an extraordinary essay in the New York Times Magazine that sought to explain the cross-pressures elected leaders feel as they formulate positions. If Profiles in Courage sought to demonstrate what political courage is, Kennedy’s essay offered insights into why some politicians display courage while others do not.

Kennedy rejected the romanticized notion that leaders demonstrate political courage solely because they “love the public better than themselves.” To the contrary, political courage often stems from politicians’ love of themselves, because they “need to maintain their own respect for themselves” and “because their desire to maintain a reputation for integrity is stronger than their desire to maintain his office.”

As for those without any political courage, Kennedy concluded: “It is when the politician loves neither the public good nor himself or when his love for himself is limited and is satisfied by the trappings of office, that the public interest is badly served.”

I was brought back to this delicate contradiction, of political courage relying on a commitment to democracy or a deep level of egotism mixed with self-preservation, while working through Texas’s failed bid to the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse the election results.

When Ken Paxton, the indicted Attorney General of Texas who is facing a new federal investigation, brought this frivolous lawsuit in the U.S. Supreme Court to invalidate the 2020 elections in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, people understood his likely motivation: to win a pardon by currying favor with Donald Trump.

In an odd way, I found solace in the fact that at least I could understand Paxton’s motivations: they were purely transactional.

But no similar bargain, however corrupt, could explain the behavior of the 17 other sycophantic state attorneys general who quickly followed Texas’s lead. It is as if they didn’t get the joke—Paxton wasn’t filing this lawsuit to win, he was filing it to get a pardon. While these other 17 attorneys general presumably didn’t need pardons, they blindly followed along, walking right past democratic norms, the expressed will of their voters and their own legacies and self-respect.

There is a Yiddish saying that a schlemiel is somebody who spills his soup and a schlimazel is the person it lands on. In this lawsuit, Paxton was the schlemiel. The other 17 AGs were definitely the schlimazel.

Even worse were the 126 Republican members of Congress who then added their names to this same effort. The 17 attorneys general could maybe claim that they were participating in this farce as their states’ chief lawyers. The 126 Republican members of Congress were, like court jesters, just there to bow and scrape in front of Dear Leader for his amusement.

If life were a movie, the Republicans’ humiliating display of self-loathing would end with a Republican politician boldly standing up to the president and showing political courage. But this is not a movie and Republican leaders failed us on the national stage.

However, we saw a few glimpses of the types of political courage Kennedy described from two other groups.

The first were judges. Most judges care enormously about their reputations for integrity. They are used to being called “Your Honor” and having people stand up when they enter and exit the room. Their desire to be perceived as independent guardians of the law was powerful motivation to stand up for democracy against the buffoonery that Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and others displayed in their courtrooms.

The second group were the local election workers and officials who took pride in the work that they did and the elections they ran. They were not willing to disparage their efforts and their communities simply to please a defeated candidate. They had too much pride for that. They are the real heroes of this election.

Some will suggest that there were some high-profile Republican leaders who showed courage. While a few members of Congress, for example, recognized that Joe Biden was the president-elect when he was in fact the president-elect, that is not courage—that is merely accepting reality. And while their colleagues were trying to disenfranchise millions, they largely stayed silent. Their inaction will forever be etched in the national memory.

It would be wrong to say that this perverse lack of political courage is solely a symptom of Trumpism and that the Republican Party will somehow revert back to the Party of Lincoln at noon on January 20th. It won’t, and we would be naive to think so. We will continue to see an anti-democratic agenda leveraged through regressive policies, tactics, and other craven acts.

Those of us who care about democracy can no longer afford to rely on the type of political courage Kennedy described in 1955. We must go further to display our own political courage by proposing and implementing new solutions to tackle these grave problems and not allow what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the appalling silence of the good people” to take hold without repercussions.

If, instead, we ignore the cowardice of these political leaders for another two or four years, we too will have failed to love both the public good and ourselves.

[DANILA 290]

Trump did great calling out all the nonsense in the "Covid" bill - needs to veto that shit immediately. The western world is in trouble with the crooked dems

[manpe 10,861]

15 hours ago, Vesper said:

Mike Pence is campaigning for the Democrats now, lolol Vice President Mike Pence: "[Democrats] want to make rich people poorer, and poor people more comfortable."

Lmao, as soon as he said that you can actually see him thinking "what the fuck did I just say"  Then tried to fix it by lying that they had fought to make every American richer.