According to QAnon supporters, most of whom live in the U.S., the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshipping, cannibalistic pedophiles. Among the nefarious practices of this ruling elite is the harvesting of children’s blood to extract a psychoactive compound known as adrenochrome.
A number of prominent Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, together with liberal Hollywood celebrities, business leaders, and global financiers are believed to run this “deep state.” QAnon adherents claim that former president Donald Trump spent his four years in office secretly investigating them in the hope of arresting their top leadership in a reckoning known as “the Storm.”
QAnon supporter Jessica Prim was arrested last April in New York for posting online messages threatening the life of then-candidate Joe Biden. While being taken into custody by police, she tearfully implored, “Do you know about the children?” Mental illness appeared to account for Prim’s state of mind at the time. Nonetheless, it was QAnon beliefs, spread through social media networks, that motivated her actions.
Former President Donald Trump has long dreamed of having his name attached to one of the United States' most prominent international airports. His suggestion: Trump International.
However, Palm Beach County has confirmed that the former president's dream will not be coming to fruition at its airport.
According to the Sun-Sentinel, the idea of renaming the airport in honor of Trump was recently touted by Christian Ziegler, who serves as a Sarasota County commissioner and the vice-chairman of the Florida Republican Party. However, County Commissioner Melissa McKinlay has made it clear that she does not support the idea.
Shortly after President Joe Biden's inauguration on Wednesday, a friend told me he was worried. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., was smiling way too much during the ceremony, he said, and it made him nervous. The sight of a smiling McConnell, after all, is like seeing a smiling Ted Bundy: It should immediately make you wonder where the bodies are buried.
Sure enough, McConnell wasted no time launching his evil scheme to maintain control of the Senate after losing his Republican majority.
On Thursday, McConnell kicked off the newly Democratically-controlled Senate's first filibuster, not of legislation nor appointments, but of even starting the business of the Senate by assigning committee spots. He demanded that Democrats take the elimination of the filibuster off the table completely before commencing with the basic business of the upper chamber. He justified the move by pompously declaring, "Minority rights on legislation are key to the Senate" and disingenuously appealing to tradition.
With every day that passes in which Minority Leader Mitch McConnell filibusters the organizing resolution for the Senate to pass unless Democrats promise him he can filibuster President Biden's agenda in the coming years, he further cements his legacy. Not as a Senate mastermind, but as a white supremacist extortionist. Mind you, he's been that for most of his career, but didn't really come into full realization of it until the nation elected a Black man, President Barack Obama. He did it in large part by using the filibuster, a "Jim Crow relic" in Obama's own words.
Obama called for eliminating the filibuster in his eulogy for Rep. John Lewis to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, "making sure every American is automatically registered to vote, […] adding polling places, and expanding early voting, and making Election Day a national holiday, […] guaranteeing that every American citizen has equal representation in our government, including the American citizens who live in Washington, D.C. and in Puerto Rico, […] ending some of the partisan gerrymandering—so that all voters have the power to choose their politicians, not the other way around." Not to put too fine a point on it, the filibuster is far from being an institution created by the Framers of the Constitution to preserve the rights of the minority.
For all that the news has gotten much calmer and more straightforward since Wednesday, we did indeed get an old-fashioned (or at least a past-administration typical) news dump tonight.
It turns out that, in the last, desperate days of his attempt to keep his grip on the presidency, Trump plotted with a lawyer in the Department of Justice, Jeffrey Clark, to oust the acting attorney general. The plan was to replace Jeffrey A. Rosen, who replaced Attorney General William Barr when he left on December 23, with Clark himself. Clark would then press Trump’s attacks on the election results.
by Jaime O'Neill, but Mostly From Dan Embree Who Has Appeared on this Blog Before
"— If you can't tell whether it's verse or prose, it's prose. If you can't recall a single line, it's bad prose."
— Dan Embree
In an email, my old friend Dan Embree weighed in on the Amanda Gorman poem delivered at the inauguration event on Wednesday. He was more bald-faced in his criticism of it than I was in my rather mealy-mouthed essay of yesterday on the same subject. In real life, Dan presents a sterner presence than I do. He's a hair or two taller, and he still maintains the military bearing he took on when he was a cadet at West Point. He served in Viet Nam under harrowing circumstances before returning home to organize a group called Concerned Academy Graduates Against the War. He later would testify against his old commander, General William Westmoreland in the case "WasteMoreLand" had brought against CBS News, a civil suit about the general's habit of prevaricating to the press. Dan told the truth; Westmoreland didn't. CBS won.
For weeks I wondered why Trump was so uniquely obsessed, or so it seemed, with Georgia and its 16 Electoral College votes, since beating that state alone into criminal submission by rescinding Biden's lawful votes would not have affected Biden's victory. I've been slow on the uptake. But, in my defense, only a diseased presidential brain such as Trump's could have wrapped itself around the unfolding lunacy of the Justice Department's Jeffrey Clark's.
Based on Katie Benner's reporting, it now seems that Trump saw Georgia as a sort of political petri dish, in which the state's externally introduced corruption would contaminate the legislatures of other "disputed" states, which in turn would swing the EV count and re-enthrone the Toddler King.
Four hundred lights stretch along the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall. Each represents one thousand people in America who have died of COVID-19. It is only in their absence that we have space to acknowledge the dead--there is not enough space beside the pool for that many people to stand. It is only by symbols that we can understand the enormity of what we’ve lost.
If the living marched on DC in equal numbers, the sea of people would be as large as the DC Women’s March in 2017or twice the size of the crowd in the iconic photos of Dr. King’s “I Have A Dream” speech during the March On Washington in 1963.
It is difficult to comprehend the silence around these 400,000 deaths. When 2,977 people died in the 9/11 attacks, the nation mourned and grieved, took off their shoes at airports, invaded two countries, formed new departments of security and surveillance, tossed out half our civil liberties, and posted flags commemorating the lives lost on 9/11 in airports around the nation.
Often I hear the media or my friends refer to “when things go back to normal.”
Having Joe Biden inaugurated as President of the United States on Jan. 20th makes it seem more possible—a return to “normalcy.” Every day the deaths from the pandemic continue to tick upwards on the news — as the numbers inch inexorably beyond 400,000 in the US, I suspect I am not the only one numbed and depressed - unable to take in the enormity of the numbers flashing on the screen - number dead, number sickened, number hospitalized…and behind every number, a human being, a worker, teacher or artist, someone who died alone because their families and friends could not sit by their bedside in that loneliest of vigils.
You can’t poke into any issue in Congress without stumbling over sacks full of corporate campaign donations. The recent eruption of pro-Trump mob violence inside the U.S. Capitol exposed boodles of that special interest cash to public view.
Much to the embarrassment of major Wall Street banks, Silicon Valley tech giants, and CEOs of brand-name corporations, hundreds of thousands of their political dollars were traced to the mayhem in our Capitol.
Specifically, their money was going into the coffers of 147 Republican lawmakers who backed the fraudulent Trumpster attempt to overthrow last fall’s presidential election.
It seems like only yesterday that we were all making jokes about 2020 being the worst and reassuring ourselves that 2021 was bound to be better. Looking forward to the departure of the most divisive president in U.S. history we slid into the new year relieved and a little bit complacent, secure in the knowledge that the country was soon to be rid of him. Instead, this has been the most tumultuous January in modern memory.
Each week of the new year has been momentous. Specifically, every Wednesday of the new year has been historic.
Although Donald Trump's presidency ended on Wednesday when President Joe Biden was sworn into office, it remains to be seen what role the former president will play in the Republican Party in the months ahead. Reporters Michael Warren and Jamie Gangel, in a CNN article published on Biden's second full day as president, take a look at some Republicans who are discreetly lobbying for Trump's repudiation.
Having been impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives for incitement to insurrection following the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol Building, Trump awaits an impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate. Mitch McConnell, now Senate minority leader rather than majority leader, has indicated that he is open to possibly voting "guilty" — and according to Warren and Gangel, "dozens of influential Republicans around Washington" have been "quietly lobbying GOP members of Congress to impeach and convict Donald Trump."
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced Friday morning that the impeachment of Donald Trump in the Senate is imminent. "I have spoken to Speaker Pelosi who informed me that the articles will be delivered to the Senate on Monday," and promised "It will be a full trial, it will be a fair trial." That's a rebuff to Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who attempted to dictate the schedule to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Schumer in a proposal released late Thursday. McConnell argued that Trump needed time to plan a defense and that "At this time of strong political passions, Senate Republicans believe it is absolutely imperative that we do not allow a half-baked process to short-circuit the due process that former President Trump deserves or damage the Senate or the presidency."
Impeachment-voting Liz Cheney, reports Politico, is expected to be primaried by a retired Air Force officer as well as a former Wyoming state senator — both of them being boneheaded participants in Trump's sadistic orgy of revenge.
Freshman representative Peter Meijer of Michigan, "another impeachment backer," will be opposed by yet another military veteran, the growing aggregation of whose kind will soon become, it seems, the most populous and least representative voices in The People's House. This particular yahoo is a four-times-failed political candidate, but his splendiferous calling card next time will be that he has appeared on Steve Bannon’s insurrectionist podcast. Good boy.
Today’s big news was not entirely unexpected: There was never any plan for a federal response to the coronavirus pandemic. “What we’re inheriting is so much worse than we could have imagined,” said President Biden’s coronavirus response coordinator Jeff Zients in a call with reporters. Another official said: “There is nothing for us to rework. We are going to have to build everything from scratch.”
Biden says he is approaching the coronavirus with a “wartime” strategy, moving the power of the federal government behind the effort to get everyone vaccinated. He warned today that the death toll, which is at 407,000 Americans today, will likely rise to 500,000 by the end of February. Today, he invoked the Defense Production Act, which enables the government to direct private companies to produce goods for national needs at the same time that it provides a market for the goods the companies produce. He wants more testing, faster vaccinations, and more funding for state and local governments to enable them to provide more vaccination sites. He has announced he hopes to vaccinate 100 million Americans by April 20.
There's no way I'm going to emerge unscathed from what I'm going to say here, and while I don't want to be a killjoy, I can't restrain the urge to say that the "poem" written and delivered by Amanda Gorman at Biden's inaugural really wasn't very good. Sure, we can all cheer the sentiments expressed in it, but the "poem" was more prose than poetry. The young poet was surely winning, charming, and attractive, but her poem was amateurish and rather sodden with predictable metaphors (some of them mixed, tired, or ill-conceived). There were occasional forced rhymes, and an overly-anxious desire to please her audience by echoing what they already thought. It was catechistic, filled with the kind of Oprah-ized and Maya-ized sentimentality so often dished up by Broadway shows. It is the touchy-feely side of liberalism that so readily allows the right wingers to see people on the left as weak sisters and brothers, too, always with the uplift that can so often sound and feel ersatz. However it may be packaged, it always comes out sounding like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. The narrative, in brief, enshrines the story of meeting every obstacle, climbing every mountain, overcoming everything thrown in one's path. But when such self-consciously "inspiring" words are delivered by Oprah, or when similar stuff was delivered by Maya Angelou at Clinton's inaugural, it lacked the feel of the streets, or even the avenues. When the coat you're wearing to read stirring words about the long and weary struggle costs more than a working stiff is likely to make in a month, the content, the form, and the style tend to feel a bit at odds, somewhat too comfortable for the people in the cheap seats.
Donald Trump is the only American president to be impeached twice. This time, he stands accused in a single article of impeachment of "incitement of insurrection" for delivering an incendiary speech on January 6 to an angry mob of supporters, sparking them to storm the U.S. Capitol building to prevent the certification of Joe Biden's Electoral College victory.
Trump will now be tried in the Senate. There, he will be given the opportunity to defend his shameless rhetoric and behavior. Among other claims, he will likely mount a defense under the First Amendment and argue that his speech was constitutionally protected by the Supreme Court's landmark 1969 decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio.
The Senate can be expected to consider Trump's position carefully and fully. But at the end of the proceeding, no matter who leads his legal team, any impeachment defense based on Brandenburg and the First Amendment will be—to put it in the vernacular—complete and utter garbage.
In the seventies, I was working in Silicon Valley when email became ubiquitous on business’ campuses. Although email simplified office communication, I noticed two negative aspects: email discouraged face-to-face interaction and it facilitated uncivility. On January 8th, Twitter — email’s progeny – suspended Donald Trump’s account. This was a welcome, although belated, defense of civility.
As a computer technologist — since the sixties — I’ve become used to the dual-edge of technological progress: each new advance, in some regard, makes our life easier; on the other hand, each advance has unsavory side effects. The first computers simplified the keeping of financial records but also eliminated the jobs of many bookkeepers. In business, the invention of email made day-to-day communication easier, but email made these conversations less personal and, in some cases, more abrasive. (It wasn’t long after I started using email that I first became aware of the email “flamer;” an angry, accusatory, or disparaging email — someone saying something digitally that they would never say in person.)
In the interest of stemming the QAnon conspiracy theories about Satanist pedophile rings in Hollywood, I’d like to share my experience with actual Satanists in Hollywood. The truth is so much more boring than the (completely false) conspiracy theories.
It’s worth starting with the original Satanic panic of the 1980s. I recommend the account relayed in the podcast “You’re Wrong About.”
The co-host Sarah Marshall is writing a book on the Satanic panic and she really knows the topic inside and out. It’s not too different from today: adults became hysterical over alleged sexual abuse of children by a Satanic cult that didn’t exist. It never existed.
One day before the Inauguration, the Trump Administration added Yemen’s Houthi movement to a list of foreign terrorist organizations. It was just the latest, desperate attempt to hamstring President Joe Biden’s promise to end the war in Yemen.
While Trump proudly proclaims that he started no new wars, he also failed to end any of the existing ones while escalating others. The US sold $34 billion in weaponry and spare parts to Saudi Arabia from 2003-2019, and Trump also rushed through $290 million in bomb sales in December last year, despite documented Saudi use of US armaments to attack Yemeni civilians.
The unilateral Trump Administration decree also punishes three Houthi leaders by freezing their US bank accounts and preventing their ability to travel to the US. It appears unlikely, however, that any Houthi leaders have JP Morgan bank accounts or scheduled vacations in Hawaii.
Today is the day the United Nation’s Treaty on Nuclear Weapons goes into effect. It’s the long planned but seemingly impossible day millions — if not billions — of people have waited for since Hiroshima Day, August 6, 1945.
Today, the U.N. treaty declares that the manufacture, possession, use or threat to use nuclear weapons is illegal under international law, 75 years after their development and first use. Actions, events, vigils and celebrations will be held around the nation and the globe to mark this historic moment.
Even though I’ve spent most of my life working for the abolition of nuclear weapons, I never thought I’d live to see this day. The most striking test of faith came in none other than Oslo, Norway, where my friend, actor Martin Sheen, and I were invited to be the keynote speakers at the launch of something called “The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons,” or ICAN, which went on to the win the Nobel Peace Prize.
Today, January 22, 2021, the world celebrates the establishment of a new international norm when the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) enters into force. For 75 years the world has lived with the existential threat of nuclear war. For 50 years the United States, along with the other eight nuclear nations, have been obligated by the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty to work in good faith to abolish their nuclear arsenals. Yet the nuclear nations have neglected this obligation, following the lead of the U.S. by rebuilding their nuclear arsenals and accelerating a new arms race.
Tired of being bullied and realizing that the effects of nuclear weapons know no boundaries, non-nuclear nations have had enough. A majority of the worlds’ nations endorsed the TPNW with 122 supporting the treaty when introduced at the U.N. in July 2017. Currently there are 86 signatory nations and 52 have ratified it. The treaty prohibits nations from developing, testing, producing, manufacturing, transferring, possessing, stockpiling, using or threatening to use nuclear weapons, or allowing nuclear weapons to be stationed on their territory. It also prohibits them from assisting, encouraging or inducing anyone to engage in any of these activities. At long last, nuclear weapons join all other weapons of mass destruction in being declared illegal by the states who are signatory to this treaty.
We’ve just come through an especially contentious election in an increasingly polarized country. Yet there’s an issue that offers hope to bring people together, and on which legislators from both sides of the aisle could find common ground: concern for animals.
Caring about animals has been a core characteristic of who we are as Americans. So many historic figures over the last several hundred years have demonstrated that heart for our fellow creatures. There are accounts of Abraham Lincoln placing baby birds back into their nests and scolding his peers for mistreating turtles. Ulysses S. Grant was sensitive to the mistreatment of horses used for supplying the Army.
As a child of the 1980s, I have such nostalgia watching videos of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush playing with their dogs on the White House lawn. I think back to President Bush’s dog, Millie, who had her own bestselling book. A few years later we all got to know Socks, a stray tuxedo cat President Bill Clinton adopted.
Seven Senate Democrats are demanding that the Senate Committee on Ethics open an investigation in the actions of Republican Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz for their actions related to the Jan. 6 violent insurrection against Congress.
The two "amplified claims of election fraud that had resulted in threats of violence against state and local officials around the country," the Democrats write. The group—Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Ron Wyden (D-OR), Tina Smith (D-MN), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Tim Kaine (D-VA), and Sherrod Brown (D-OH)—notes that the Senate has the exclusive power to determine whether the members' actions violated Senate ethics rules. They are asking the Ethics Committee to carry out a "thorough and fair investigation and consider any appropriate consequences based on the Committee's findings."
Critics of former President Donald Trump have often used the word "cult" to describe his army of unquestioning devotees, many of whom continue to believe the debunked conspiracy theory that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris didn't legitimately win the 2020 election and that the election was stolen from Trump through widespread voter fraud. One Trump critic who considers Trump devotees a "cult" is Steven Hassan, author of the book "The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control." And he addressed the need to "deprogram" members of the Trump cult during an interview with Vanity Fair's Joe Hagan that was published on Biden's first full day as president.
Hassan has first-hand experiences with cults. During the 1970s, he was a follower of cult leader and Unification Church founder Sun Myung Moon (who died in 2012)
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