HOW CAN TRUMP JUST LEAVE THE WHITE HOUSE PEACEFULLY ON JANUARY 20?

You know the alarming news:

President Trump on Friday discussed naming Sidney Powell, who as a lawyer for his campaign team unleashed conspiracy theories about a Venezuelan plot to rig voting machines in the United States, to be a special counsel overseeing an investigation of voter fraud, according to two people briefed on the discussion.

It was unclear if Mr. Trump will move ahead with such a plan.

And the even more alarming news:

Ms. Powell’s client, retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser whom the president recently pardoned, was also there....

During an appearance on the conservative Newsmax channel this week, Mr. Flynn pushed for Mr. Trump to impose martial law and deploy the military to “rerun” the election. At one point in the meeting on Friday, Mr. Trump asked about that idea.

We're told there's nothing to worry about. The ideas were rejected by Trump's aides:

Ms. Powell’s ideas were shot down by every other Trump adviser present, all of whom repeatedly pointed out that she had yet to back up her claims with proof....

The White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, and the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, repeatedly and aggressively pushed back on the ideas being proposed, which went beyond the special counsel idea, those briefed on the meeting said.

So if "the ideas being proposed ... went beyond the special counsel idea," does that mean that "those briefed on the meeting" wouldn't confirm the martial-law part of the story, but would acknowledge that something off-the-wall was discussed beyond making Sidney Powell a special counsel? Or does that mean there were even crazier ideas floated that have yet to be revelead?

A Business Insider story assures us that Trump can't really declare martial law.

The president has broad powers to suspend normal legal constraints on his authority in response to a "national emergency," such as a natural disaster or terror attack, including deploying troops within the US to subdue unrest and assist law enforcement officers.

However, Joseph Nunn, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, in October, wrote that the legal precedents for a president imposing martial law are vague, with no clear Constitutional principles or Supreme Court rulings governing its use. He wrote that under current law, "the president lacks any authority to declare martial law."

Nunn notes that martial law can be appealed to the courts:

The Supreme Court, without actually endorsing the federal government’s power to declare martial law, has established that such declarations are subject to judicial review. At a minimum, in a state or territory that the federal government has placed under martial law, individuals who have been detained by the military may ask a federal court to order their release by petitioning for the writ of habeas corpus. A court that considers an individual’s petition can decide whether the declaration of martial law was constitutionally permissible. The reviewing court can also decide whether the military’s particular actions — such as the decision to arrest and detain the person petitioning for habeas corpus — have violated the Constitution or exceeded the powers granted by the statute (if any) that authorized martial law.

Even Jonathan Turley, usually a Trump sycophant, says that "a plan for martial law ... would quickly collapse in the courts." I'm not sure this would be the case if Trump had installed loyalists rather than Federalist Society clones on the bench, but the judges he's appointed, even though they're right-wing ideologues, seem to want to do their work within the system.

Also:

Despite Flynn’s claim that the U.S. military could be dispatched to take part in re-running the presidential election in certain states, senior military leaders say that’s not going to happen.

On Friday, Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy and Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville said in a joint statement that there “is no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of an American election.”

And now even Trump is claiming he never entertained the notion:

Martial law = Fake News. Just more knowingly bad reporting!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 20, 2020

But it's clear that he's desperate to do something. It's clear that he won't accept a congressional ratification of the Electoral College vote on January 6. And neither will a large segment of his base. (Polls suggest that the about a third of the electorate firmly believes he was cheated.)

You might think he's just grifting, or trying to stave off legal and financial entanglements. But even if this is a grift, how can he simply leave office voluntarily on January 20 and retain the support of folks like these?

These people will conclude that Trump is a cuck if he leaves peacefully -- but he'll also look weak if he's successfully dragged out kicking and screaming.

I don't know what the way out will be. Maybe Trump will save face by declaring that he doesn't want anything more to do with Washington because it's so sick and corrupt, in effect telling us that we can't fire him because he quit. Or maybe he'll insist (preposterously) that he can force the system to reinstate him as president and force Biden out. Failing that, I think he'll make a scene right up to noon on January 20 -- and beyond. There might be a standoff. I can't believe there'll be a peaceful transition.

OBAMA'S LIST OF 2020 FAVORITES IS CULTURALLY ELITIST, AND SO WHAT?

Sean Trende, a conservative-but-not-crazy elections analyst at Real Clear Politics, posted this on Twitter yesterday, in response to Barack Obama's release of his list of favorite 2020 movies and TV shows:

We talk a lot about how America has fractured culturally over the past 40 years, and this is such an interesting illustration. I'm not particularly red culturally, don't watch a lot of network television, etc., and I've *heard* of one of these movies and four of these shows. 1/ https://t.co/tFCAVGXNbo

— Sean T at RCP (@SeanTrende) December 18, 2020

This isn't 100% bad; from googling a lot of these shows relate stories that wouldn't have been told when you had three networks all fighting over the same basic demographic. 3/

— Sean T at RCP (@SeanTrende) December 18, 2020

which is probably where the median American would be. It's an interesting insight, too, into Obama's intense appeal among "Intellectuals", which in part stems from the fact that presidents with these sorts of tastes have historically fared poorly in American elections. 5/5

— Sean T at RCP (@SeanTrende) December 18, 2020

It might be hard to think of a president who's enjoyed critics' favorites the way Obama does, but Bill Clinton fared pretty well in American elections, and he let it be known in 1992 that he was a great admirer of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. (We were also told that he read murder mysteries and big biographies of statesmen; his favorite movie was High Noon.) After Clinton left the White House, in 2003, he released a list of his favorite books. Marcus Aurelius and Garcia Marquez were on the list, as well as T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, William Butler Yeats's Collected Poems, and works by Reinhold Niebuhr and Max Weber. Not exactly beach reading. And yet that guy did all right in electoral politics.

George W. Bush tried to go both high and low. In 2005, we learned about the songs on his iPod, which included a lot of uptempo hits:

... Mr. Bush's iPod is heavy on traditional country singers like George Jones, Alan Jackson and Kenny Chesney. He has selections by Van Morrison, whose "Brown Eyed Girl" is a Bush favorite, and by John Fogerty, most predictably "Centerfield," which was played at Texas Rangers games when Mr. Bush was an owner and is still played at ballparks all over America....

The president also has an eclectic mix of songs downloaded into his iPod from Mark McKinnon, a biking buddy and his chief media strategist during the 2004 campaign. Among them are "Circle Back" by John Hiatt, "(You're So Square) Baby, I Don't Care" by Joni Mitchell and "My Sharona," the 1979 song by the Knack....

Later, we were told that he was in a book-reading contest with adviser Karl Rove. Rove said Bush's reading in 2006 included these books:

Biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, Babe Ruth, King Leopold, William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, LBJ and Genghis Khan.
Andrew Roberts’s “A History of the English Speaking Peoples Since 1900,”
James L. Swanson’s “Manhunt,”
Nathaniel Philbrick’s “Mayflower,”
Eight Travis McGee novels by John D. MacDonald,
Michael Crichton’s “Next,”
Vince Flynn’s “Executive Power,”
Stephen Hunter’s “Point of Impact,” and
Albert Camus’s “The Stranger.”

None of this mattered. Obama's tastes don't matter. Americans appreciate these lists, criticize them, mock them, or ignore them, but they don't vote on them.

We also talk as if this is the first time in American history that we've had cultural divides. That's absurd. Let's go back seventy years. Here was one of the top hit songs of 1950:



But some people in 1950 much preferred this:



Or this:



Or this:



In 1950, these divisions didn't lead to civil war. People just liked different things. (Rock music was part of a civil war a couple of decades later, but that war was about much more than music.)

We don't have to let these matters divide us as a nation. We can agree to disagree on music, books, movies, and TV shows. If we're letting them matter, it's because conservatives know that if they redirect voters' class anger away from plutocrats and toward "cultural elitists," they'll keep winning elections and be free to continue lining the plutocrats' pockets. When we're encouraged to care, we should recognize that we're being played for chumps.

WILL TRUMP JUST CASH IN AND THEN PASS THE TORCH?

As Shane Goldmacher and Maggie Haberman reported today in The New York Times, losing the presidency has perhaps been Donald Trump's most successful business venture.

Deflated by a loss he has yet to acknowledge, Mr. Trump has cushioned the blow by coaxing huge sums of money from his loyal supporters — often under dubious pretenses — raising roughly $250 million since Election Day along with the national party.

More than $60 million of that sum has gone to a new political action committee, according to people familiar with the matter, which Mr. Trump will control after he leaves office. Those funds, which far exceed what previous outgoing presidents had at their disposal, provide him with tremendous flexibility for his post-presidential ambitions....

Some campaign finance experts have speculated that Mr. Trump might try to use the excess of cash in his new PAC, formally known as a leadership PAC, to pay for his own personal future legal quagmires, as he faces investigations once he leaves office....

“A leadership PAC is a slush fund,” said Meredith McGehee, executive director of Issue One, a group that supports increased political transparency. “There are very, very, very few limits on what he can’t spend money on.”

The story notes that Trump is collecting this money, ostensibly in order to fight to retain the presidency, or fund a campaign to retake it in 2024, even though he seems fed up with politics.

Those who have spoken with Mr. Trump say he appears shrunken, and over his job....

Mr. Trump has talked about running again in 2024 — but he also may not.... Talk of counterprogramming Mr. Biden’s inauguration with a splashy event or an announcement of his own is currently on hold.

Mr. Trump had been tentatively planning to go to Georgia on Saturday, according to a senior Republican official, to support the two Republicans in Senate runoff races there. But he is still angry at the state’s Republican governor and secretary of state for accepting the election result, and simply doesn’t want to make the trip. There is some discussion about him going after the Christmas holiday, but it’s not clear he will be in a more magnanimous mood by then.

But the grift can continue only as long as he insists that he can still be declared the winner, or can be returned to office four years from now. (Or sooner -- it won't surprise me if, after January 20, Trump insists that he can sue to regain the office and drive Biden out. His people will probably believe that, the same way they now believe he can overturn Biden's victory.)

Can Trump hope keep the cash flowing until the next election cycle? I bet he can. I know most of you think he'll spend much of the next several years in the dock, but I think he'll crowdfund his court battles, too. He'll be a hero and a martyr -- Deep State socialists are trying to destroy me!

I'm sticking with my theory that neither Trump nor any of his relatives will ever see the inside of a jail cell, because we don't convict rich people in America. But if you don't believe that, you can imagine that Trump believes it. And you can understand why: He's in his seventies and the law hasn't caught up with him yet.

Which brings us to 2024. If he's still a free man, will Trump really want to run again? It's quite possible that he won't. But to keep the grift going, he'll need to say that he's running right up until the last possible moment.

And at that point -- sometime in 2023 -- I think he might pass the torch. He should pass it to his angry wingnut son and namesake. But he'll pass it to his daughter, who may or may not have run for Marco Rubio's Senate seat by then. She might actually be a senator at that point.

I've long believed that Ivanka isn't sufficiently in touch with the beliefs of the crazy base to succeed as a Republican politician. But Trumpism has become such a personality cult that the Godfather might really be able to tell his adoring fans to direct their worship her way, and they'll do it.

And yes, I know that there's an aura of criminality around Ivanka and her husband, too. Business Insider reported on that today (paywalled story, but you can read it here):

President Donald Trump's most powerful advisor, Jared Kushner, approved the creation of a campaign shell company that secretly paid the president's family members and spent almost half of the campaign's $1.26 billion war chest, a person familiar with the operation told Insider....

The shell company — incorporated as American Made Media Consultants Corporation and American Made Media Consultants LLC — allowed Trump's campaign to skirt federally mandated disclosures. The tactic could attract scrutiny from federal election regulators.

But:

I’m not a lawyer. Does anyone know if this is even illegal? It SHOULD be. But a lot of white collar theft seems to be legal. 🤔 https://t.co/nHvdRnwDv9

— Betty Cracker 🐊 (@bettycrackerfl) December 18, 2020

I'm sure ther'll never be an accountability moment for this. The grift will just go on. And Ivanka might eventually be crowned. Or maybe Trump and his family will lose their hold on the base. But it'll take someone crazy and driven to knock the Trumps off their perch.

MAYBE THE WINGNUT ANTI-VAXXERS WON'T WIN

This is dangerous:

... after her [election] assertions were widely derided and failed to gain legal traction, [Sidney] Powell started talking about a new topic. On Dec. 4, she posted a link on Twitter with misinformation that said that the population would be split into the vaccinated and the unvaccinated and that “big government” could surveil those who were unvaccinated.

“NO WAY #America,” Ms. Powell wrote in the tweet, which collected 22,600 shares and 51,000 likes. “This is more authoritarian communist control imported straight from #China.”

... As Mr. Trump’s challenges to the election’s results have been knocked down and the Electoral College has affirmed President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s win, voter fraud misinformation has subsided. Instead, peddlers of online falsehoods are ramping up lies about the Covid-19 vaccines....

Apart from Ms. Powell, others who have spread political misinformation such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican of Georgia, as well as far-right websites like ZeroHedge, have begun pushing false vaccine narratives, researchers said.

On the other hand, there's this:

Vice President Mike Pence will receive the coronavirus vaccine Friday morning -- an on-camera event that the Trump administration says is part of federal efforts to build confidence among the public in the vaccine's safety and efficacy.

Along with the vice president, second lady Karen Pence and Surgeon General Jerome Adams will be administered the vaccine....

You don't have to like Pence to hope that his public embrace of the vaccine will diminish some right-wingers' skepticism about COVID vaccines.

Somewhere between Powell and Pence stands Tucker Carlson, a phony edgelord who wants to get credit from his crazy base for vaccine skepticism without actually being a true skeptic. A great deal of what Carlson said about the vaccine on his show last night is dangerous:

... the right-wing host ... derisively snarked about the amount of positive news coverage the authorization of COVID-19 vaccines has received.

“Suddenly the COVID vaccine is on the morning shows, touted on celebrity Twitter accounts, and the news about it is uniformly glowing,” he sarcastically declared. “This stuff is just great. A lot of famous people say so. Just the other day, the guy who played Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings series got the vaccine. As on any media tour, the paparazzi were there for the dramatic moment when they stuck the needle in his arm.”

Carlson quickly switched his attention to the recent news that an Alaskan health care worker suffered a serious allergic reaction to the Pfizer vaccine....

“‘It was all a fantastic experience,’ according to doctors who treated her,” Carlson said, quoting an article about the situation. “‘During the whole time, she was still enthusiastic she got the vaccine and the benefits it would give her in the future.’”

“What a cheerful patient, she must be,” he further sneered. “We’ve got to assume she is, in any case, because we can’t really know. The authorities did not release her name. All we know is she is a highly satisfied customer. Yet another. Have a vaccine and a smile. Just do it!”

But he's not telling his audience unambiguously that the vaccine is bad. He's telling them that Twitter and Facebook are bad. Last night, he said:

How are the rest of us supposed to respond to a marketing campaign like this? Well, nervously. Even if you're strongly supportive of vaccines -- and we are -- even if you recognize how many millions of lives have been saved over the past 50 years by vaccines -- and we do -- it all seems a bit much. It's too slick. Better to treat Americans like adults, explain the benefits, be honest about the risks, and let the rest of us decide....

Twitter has announced a new policy to censor any unauthorized inquiry about the vaccine or, as the company put it, "false or misleading narratives about COVID-19 vaccinations." Among other things, Twitter is censoring any claim that this vaccine might be used to "control populations."

So whatever you do, don't say this is social control. If you do, the richest, most powerful people in the world will act in perfect coordination to shut you down immediately. To repeat: There is no social control going on here, but if you suggest otherwise, Twitter will censor you.

In addition, Facebook has now decided it must "build demand for vaccination in communities worldwide" by sharing "reassuring information" about getting the vaccine. Mark Zuckerberg was a tech tycoon. Now he's a professional marketer who gets to control the conversation about the product he's selling. Facebook has announced it will squelch "any misinformation" it sees about this vaccine.

None of this inspires confidence. Censorship will not convince a single person to take the coronavirus vaccine. In fact, it will have the opposite effect. If you wanted to roll out a national vaccination campaign, the first thing you would need after the vaccine itself is social trust. People have to believe that the authorities know what they're doing, otherwise they won't participate. Censorship is the enemy of social trust.

Do his viewers walk away from this determined never to get vaccinated -- or just hating the tech giants more? I don't know. But as awful a human being as Carlson is, it's clear that he could be worse. He's claiming to be pro-vaccine. He's doing somewhat less damage than he could.

I'll conclude by noting that I read a Free Republic post last night from a Freeper who calls himself "gas_dr." The poster, who describes himself as " a critical care physician in a large city environment," says he just received his first vaccine shot. He was positive about the experience:

I arrived and underwent a very streamlined check in process, gave written informed consent that was not unusual in any way. Acknowledged that this was a vaccine being administered under EUA conditions. The media was out in force as this was the first private hospital as previously said that was inoculating its staff.

I was called third stepped up and underwent the most routine of injections. The vaccination was administered into my left deltoid, a quantity of approximately 0.3 cc on a 30 g needle. To say I felt nothing would be absolutely true. There was absolutely pain. [He later explained that he meant to write "absolutely no pain."] ...

I was scheduled for follow up booster in 19 - 21 days. When I left, I cannot quantify the wave of relief and genuine happiness that I had. I was reflecting that in 7 days, I would not longer have to personally worry about this disease causing a tragic outcome in me personally. I also was overjoyed that the means in 7 - 10 days I will no longer be a threat to my family, my elderly parents, and I won't have to get any further CoVID tests.

... As I have said before, this represents the Manhattan project of the 21st century. I am proud to be a recipient of this vaccine, and grateful for the President who made this happen in 10 months.

Perhaps because they know the poster, who's familiar to them and shares their political beliefs -- he goes on to describes himself as "somewhere to the right of Atilla the Hun" -- the other Freepers seem receptive to what he's saying. He shoots down a skeptic or two and explains why he trusts the science.

Or maybe there isn't as much vaccine skepticism on the right as I've feared. It helps that these folks want to give much of the credit for the vaccine to President Trump. I'm fine with that. Whatever gets people vaccinated. Whatever stops the spread.

Maybe this vaccination campaign will work. Maybe America won't still be having COVID outbreaks five years from now. Maybe, when Tucker Carlson gets vaccinated -- and he will -- he'll be willing to tell his audience that it wasn't so bad. Maybe this country isn't as crazy as I thought.

BRAD RAFFENSPERGER IS SO EVIL HE ... ONCE ASKED CHINESE-AMERICANS TO VOTE FOR HIM!

This is what the right now considers a scandal:

In several videos posted to YouTube, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger begged Chinese-Americans to vote for him by mail in his 2015 Georgia House of Representatives race. Raffensperger went on to win this race by 159 votes.

The videos, apparently recorded in Raffensperger’s home, seem to be tied to Atlanta 168, a Chinese-American community located in Georgia. Raffensperger is seen in one video begging for at least 100 votes from the Chinese community, specifically suggesting they use absentee voting.

“Some of you may be going out of town,” said Raffensperger. “We brought applications today that you can fill out, we’ll even give you envelopes with a stamp on it. You can fill it out, and the Board of Elections will send you your absentee ballot, and you can just fill it out and send it back.”

The story is from National File, a website edited by Tom Pappert, who used to write for a wingnut site called Big League Politics and has been known to appear on Alex Jones's InfoWars broadcast. National File made news during the 2020 when it accurately reported on explicit texts sent by North Carolina Senate candidate Cal Cunningham to a woman who was not his wife, and then falsely accused Mark Kelly, a Senate candidate from Arizona, of dressing as Hitler for a 1985 Halloween party. Cunningham lost his race; Kelly won his.

The scandal in Raffensperger's case, according to National File, is that Raffensperger attended to a gathering of Chinese-American citizens and urged them to vote for him. That's all he did. Watch the video. This was a perfectly innocuous candidate forum in someone's house, like the ones candidates conduct in every election. (Atlanta168.com is a web portal for Chinese-Americans in the Atlanta area.)



The right doesn't like Brad Raffensperger because he chose to follow the law rather than the demands of his own party when he ratified Joe Biden's victory in his state. National File is suggesting here that it's sinister for Raffensperger -- and, presumably, any other politician -- merely to associate with people of Chinese descent. I don't have to explain how dangerous this message is, do I?

YOU CAN HAVE MY NARRATIVE WHEN YOU PRY IT FROM MY COLD, DEAD HANDS

What we're being told by Tom Bossert, former homeland security adviser to President Trump and deputy homeland security adviser in the George W. Bush administration, is alarming:

This week, we learned that SolarWinds, a publicly traded company that provides software to tens of thousands of government and corporate customers, was ... hacked.

The attackers gained access to SolarWinds software before updates of that software were made available to its customers. Unsuspecting customers then downloaded a corrupted version of the software, which included a hidden back door that gave hackers access to the victim’s network.

... Evidence in the SolarWinds attack points to the Russian intelligence agency known as the S.V.R., whose tradecraft is among the most advanced in the world.

According to SolarWinds S.E.C. filings, the malware was on the software from March to June. The number of organizations that downloaded the corrupted update could be as many as 18,000, which includes most federal government unclassified networks and more than 425 Fortune 500 companies.

The magnitude of this ongoing attack is hard to overstate.

If you suspect that your right-wing relatives will have trouble redirecting their anger from China to Russia ... you're right. The FBI, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence have issued a press release on the attack. When Gateway Pundit posted the press release, here were some of the comments. The first one quotes a tweet from "stop the steal" lawyer Lin Wood, followed by a row of emojis.

Lin Wood
@LLinWood
· Dec 13
Did you know that Chinese Communist Party owns THE Panama Canal?

Did you know that CCP built its own Suez Canal next to one built by America?

Do you know how much land CCP has purchased in Africa, South America & United States?

Wake up America.

#FightBack

👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍

*****

The owners of SolarWinds, the company involved in one of the largest cyber-attacks in history, have links to Obama, the Clinton family, China, Hong Kong and the U.S. election process, according to investigators.

Per research by our friends at The Gateway Pundit, the owners of SolarWinds are connected to high profile U.S. politicians and companies that “verify” the outcome of elections in America.

*****

It is all the collateral the worthless pukes in DC have used to borrow money from China. China is the world's largest lender. The loans are worse than you would get from the Don

They are also the biggest payout to corrupt cowards in our midst. Something is brewing but it’s because evidence, which the MSM denies, is mounting. China grows nervous. We are under attack and I think it started 1 year ago when China unleashed a virus.

*****

I remember just reading the CCP owns 30 million acres of U.S. farmland....

*****

Bill Clinton gave them Panama Canal back in the 1990s. He also gave the Chi-Coms IBM supercomputers so they could predict weather to drop ballistic missles on us.

*****

Pretty sure that was Jimmy Carter.. Bill Clinton let the ChiComs have missile guidance technology from Loral so they could actually hit targets in the US.

*****

The three government investigative bodies are reportedly working together on the with SolarWinds to wipe clean any connection to Dominion and China.

There a little more truthful.

*****

Why do you suppose mitch wants plugs?

We now know why mitch wants plugs. mitch and his chinese wife have a shipping company they make a lot of money on from communist China. Hmmmm hmmmm

(Rush Limbaugh regularly calls Joe Biden "Plugs," a reference to hair transplants. Wait till someone tells him about Donald Trump....)

Meanwhile, here are the two lead stories at Breitbart:

And there's this:

check out the chinese flag next to "𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗛𝗨𝗡𝗧𝗘𝗥 𝗕𝗜𝗗𝗘𝗡 INVESTIGATION" pic.twitter.com/xdEcLSolqo

— Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) December 17, 2020

So no, you're right-wing relatives won't get angry at the Russians anytime soon. They have a narrative to preserve.

THEY TELL THEMSELVES THEY'RE GOOD PEOPLE

This is monstrous:

A top Trump appointee repeatedly urged top health officials to adopt a "herd immunity" approach to Covid-19 and allow millions of Americans to be infected by the virus, according to internal emails obtained by a House watchdog and shared with POLITICO.

“There is no other way, we need to establish herd, and it only comes about allowing the non-high risk groups expose themselves to the virus. PERIOD," then-science adviser Paul Alexander wrote on July 4 to his boss, Health and Human Services assistant secretary for public affairs Michael Caputo, and six other senior officials.

"Infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle aged with no conditions etc. have zero to little risk....so we use them to develop herd…we want them infected..." Alexander added.

"[I]t may be that it will be best if we open up and flood the zone and let the kids and young folk get infected" in order to get "natural immunity...natural exposure," Alexander wrote on July 24 to Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn, Caputo and eight other senior officials. Caputo subsequently asked Alexander to research the idea....

But I don't agree with Atrios:

It's never been polite to say so, but the "herd immunity" concept mostly wasn't being pushed due to a different reading of the "science" (however dumb), or even a different weighting of various economic costs and benefits (also however dumb), but because some people got very excited at the prospect of A Great Culling, quite convinced that a devasting pandemic was just the little kick in the pants our gene pool needed.

We know that early on there was right-wing indifference to the victims of the pandemic because they mostly seemed to be non-whites concentrated in Democratic parts of the country. (In the fall, Vanity Fair reported on a March meeting at FEMA after which, in the view of one attendee, "it seemed 'very clear' [Jared] Kushner was less interested in finding a solution because, at the time, the virus was primarily ravaging cities in blue states.") But the pandemic has recently been at its worst in the Dakotas and other blood-red areas of America, and they continue to be indifferent to the suffering.

I don't believe they're cheering on a culling of people they see as unfit. I think they've been telling themselves lies in order to justify doing what they want to do regarding the virus.

In March, the libertarian Hoover Institution scholar (and non-scientist) Richard Epstein proclaimed that the coronavirus would kill only 500 people in America; shortly after that, he told us he'd made a mistake -- the real number was 5,000. (We crossed the 300,000 mark this week.) Epstein's pronouncements justified a lot of right-wing inaction.

More recently, the Trump administration embraced the Great Barrington Declaration, an anti-lockdown manifesto whose signers included doctors who claim that coronavirus herd immunity can be achieved at an infection rate of 10% to 20%. Reputable scientists reject this notion, telling us that herd immunity in the absence of a vaccine can't be achieved without an infection rate of 60% to 70%, which would result in a death rate in the seven figures. But if you tell yourself that herd immunity is just around the corner, then you're not a bad person for pursuing it, right?

And Paul Alexander, in the messages quoted above, expresses an opinion that defies common sense: that young, healthy people can become infected to the virus harmlessly. This is premised on the notion that all young people are thin, fit, and healthy and socialize only with other young, fit, healthy young people, and that elderly people and people who have been in poor health can be sequestered completely away from the young and the fit. The absurdity of this can be seen by thinking about a college campus. Are there no older or less-than-perfectly-healthy professors? Or dining hall workers? Or security staff? Or workers and patrons in off-campus bars? Or people on the streets and in the stores near campus? And don't many people with preexisting conditions -- maybe even just asthma -- want to work and be able to walk the streets? Don't many more simply need to work? Has the Trump administration supported anything that would allow them to step away from their work indefinitely and be guaranteed it when the pandemic is under control?

But if you tell yourself these fairy tales, you can also tell yourself that you're not a sociopath for wanting to treat the pandemic as trivial. And maybe you aren't a sociopath. Maybe you're just engaging in magical thinking so you don't have to seriously consider the horrific consequences of what you've done.

THESE PEOPLE ARE HILARIOUS BUMPKINS, UNTIL THEY AREN'T

It's only a matter of time before Republican election truthers kill someone. It almost happened in October. The ABC affiliate in Houston reports:

Mark Anthony Aguirre, 63, was arrested by Houston police Tuesday and charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, a second-degree felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison....

According to Aguirre, he had been conducting surveillance for four days on a man who was allegedly the mastermind of a giant voter fraud scheme. Aguirre told authorities the man was hiding 750,000 fraudulent ballots in a truck he was driving....

Aguirre ran his SUV into the back of the truck to get the technician to stop and get out, according to court documents.

When the technician got out of the truck, Aguirre pointed a handgun at the technician, forced him to the ground and put his knee on the man's back until police came, the court document said.

Aguirre allegedly directed police to a parking lot nearby where another suspect, who has not been identified, took the truck.

According to court documents, there were no ballots in the truck. The truck was filled with air conditioning parts and tools.

This wasn't a ragtag operation. The group Aguirre was working for was run by a prominent Republican donor and right-wing activist.

Aguirre allegedly never told police that he had been paid a total of $266,400 by the Houston-based Liberty Center for God and Country, with $211,400 of that amount being deposited into his account the day after the incident.

The Texas Tribune has more:

Prosecutors say Aguirre ... was paid $266,400 by the group Liberty Center for God and Country, whose CEO is prominent Texas right-wing activist Steven Hotze.

Hotze was among a group of Republicans who unsuccessfully sued to have nearly 127,000 Harris County ballots tossed out this year. He was also among Republicans who tried — and failed — to stop Gov. Greg Abbott from extending early voting during the coronavirus pandemic, a suit for which Aguirre had provided an affidavit, stating that he was involved in an investigation into a “wide-ranging and fraudulent ballot harvesting scheme” in Harris County.

Jared Woodfill, a spokesperson and attorney for Hotze, confirmed that the Liberty Center hired a company led by Aguirre to investigate voter fraud ahead of the 2020 election. The company contracted approximately 20 private investigators to work on claims of fraudulent ballots in Harris County and other places in Texas.

Hotze is a doctor, author, public speaker, and "wellness expert." He's also a frequent donor to Republicans -- he's given multiple donations to Ted Cruz, John Cornyn, and past and present Republicans including Jesse Helms and Tom DeLay.

Hotze's main organization, Conservative Republicans of Texas, has been called a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The group has published European-supremacist propaganda.

A particular obsession of Hotze's is the LGBT community.

Hotze ... said [a proposed ordinance outlawing LGBT discrimination in Houston] was linked to a “Satanic movement” ...

At an anti-LGBT rally [in 2015], Hotze wielded a sword on stage, compared LGBT people to Nazis and pledged to drive “homofascists” from Houston to San Francisco. After the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of nationwide marriage equality, Hotze said justices in the majority “hate God” and “want to let sodomites queer our country,” and that the decision would lead to kindergarten teachers encouraging their students to try anal sex.

Hotze despises Obamacare, and once recorded a couple of bizarre Auto-Tuned anti-Obamacare songs in opposition, “God Fearing Texans Stop Obamacare” and “Texans Stand Against Obamacare”:

AustinChronicle · God Fearing Texans Stop Obamacare

AustinChronicle · Texans Stand Against Obamacare

More recently:

In 2020, Hotze filed lawsuits challenging governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. In April he sued Judge Lina Hidalgo of Harris County, Texas for mandating the wearing of face masks. In June, he filed suits against Texas Governor Greg Abbott, alleging that contact tracing violated the US Constitution's First Amendment, privacy, Due Process, and Equal Protection provisions, and that the governor's state-wide face mask requirement was unlawful.

After protests over the killing of George Floyd reached Texas in early June 2020, Hotze called Greg Abbott's office on June 6 and demanded Texas Army National Guard soldiers be sent to Houston with "the order to shoot to kill if any of these son-of-a-bitch people start rioting like they have in Dallas, start tearing down businesses — shoot to kill the son of a bitches. That’s the only way you restore order. Kill 'em. Thank you."

The website of the Liberty Center for God & Country -- the group that was paying Mark Anthony Aguirre when he allegedly terrorized an innocent air conditioner repairman -- is full of Hotze-written nonsense like this:

The Communist revolutionaries are like termites that have been undermining the American Constitutional Republic for decades. Their goal is to establish a totalitarian Communist regime in the United States.

The Communist revolutionaries have infiltrated the public school system, university faculties, the seminaries and clergy, the state and federal bureaucracies, corporations and both political parties. The Democrat Party has been completely taken over by Marxist Socialists and Communists. ANTIFA and BLM are the militant arm of the Democrats. It has been well documented that their funding has come from the Communist Chinese Party. The Chinese Communist party has bought off leaders in the Democrat party and in the mainstream media....

I have been warning about these revolutionary plans for decades, often falling on deaf ears. Finally, there is this incontrovertible evidence that a Communist revolution has been planned to begin tomorrow, November 4th, starting in Washington, D.C.

In every country that the Communists have conquered, they have targeted for assassination those leaders who oppose them.

I encourage you to prepare yourself to defend your family and friends.

But as an innocent air conditioner repairman learned when he came close to losing his life, the people you need to defend yourself against are Hotze and his allies.

DAMNED IF YOU DO, DAMNED IF YOU DON'T, MITCH

Mitch McConnell has now acknowledged that Joe Biden is the president-elect -- and it's being reported that he's worried about a possible congressional protest when the electoral votes are formally counted on January 6. According to Axios, McConnell is trying to persuade his caucus not to protest, based on the belief that if no senator raises an objection, somehow the crazy Republican base won't notice:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his leadership team urged fellow Republicans on a conference call today not to participate in any efforts to object to certifying Joe Biden's presidential election win in the Jan. 6 joint session, two sources on the call tell Axios.

... This is about politics as much as about doing the right thing. McConnell expressed concern about such a vote, because the GOP would have to vote it down — something that could damage incumbents up for re-election in 2022.

McConnell thinks not even bringing it up -- allowing the count to be ratified without any objections from a senator -- won't damage GOP incumbents up for reelection? Seriously?

Sorry, but Trump and his minions have the base convinced that a monstrous injustice has taken place. We know that Mo Brooks, a House Republican from Alabama, will lodge a protest. McConnell is saying that if no senator joins him, and therefore no vote on the protest takes place -- or I should say no votes, because Brooks will object to the electors of multiple states -- the base will shrug and accept the inevitable.

That won't happen. They're furious. They'll still be furious 22 days from now. (And two years from now.)

McConnell probably won't get his wish. Politico notes that Rand Paul -- McConnell's fellow Kentuckian and occasional nemesis -- still hasn't ruled out seconding the Brooks challenge. Also:

Conservatives ... have been eyeing Sen.-elect Tommy Tuberville — another Alabama Republican and Trump supporter — as someone who may get on board. And Senate Republicans are unsure where he stands....

Well, here was Tuberville a couple of days after the election:

I’d challenge that as a coach, and @realDonaldTrump is right to challenge that as a candidate.

The American people deserve transparency and to know the integrity of our votes are preserved. #Election2020

— Tommy Tuberville (@TTuberville) November 6, 2020

But even if McConnell keeps Paul and Tuberville (and Ron Johnson and others) from joining in the challenge, the base will despise GOP senators for not even trying to fight, even though the effort is doomed to fail. (It has to pass both houses, and won't pass in the Democratic House.)

One consequence of all this could be Ivanka Trump's election as a U.S. senator from Florida.

Marco Rubio is up for reelection in 2022. There are rumors that both Ivanka and Roger Stone might want to primary him. At Parler, Stone says he's not serious:

But I'm sure Ivanka is dead serious -- and while she might try to be less of an insane wingnut than her father on most issues, I guarantee she'll be an unswerving advocate of the theory that her daddy had his victory stolen from him. And if Rubio failed to "stop the steal," he'll have trouble against Ivanka in a primary.

Republicans might just have to hold that vote and kiss Trump's ass one last time, while allowing Mitt Romney, Pat Toomey, and a few other reality-based Republicans to defeat the protest in the Senate. I don't see any other way out for Mitch and his crew.

OVERTON WINDOW SUCCESSFULLY MOVED

The last state election certifications took place a week ago. The Electoral College votes happened yesterday. The Trump campaign continues to lose in court after court.

But it's now considered prgress for some in the GOP to acknowledge that Joe Biden won the presidential election.

Here's a Politico headline:

'Time for everybody to move on': Senate GOP accepts Biden's win

And here's the lede:

Senate Republicans are finally starting to recognize Joe Biden as the next president of the United States — even if they waited until the very last minute.

But as we learn from the story, only a fraction of the Senate GOP concedes that Biden will be president.

When asked on Monday afternoon whether Biden was the president-elect, some GOP senators paused and asked how far along the Electoral College count was taking place that day. Others declined to comment until results were officially certified and until Biden climbed past the necessary 270 votes.

But as the day went on and the Electoral College’s verdict was made clear, an increasing number of Republican senators — though certainly not all — began to say what the leader of their party won’t and what they declined to acknowledge for weeks: Biden will take office in January.

It's really big of these folks to admit the obvious:

“I understand there are people who feel strongly about the outcome of this election,” said Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.), the second-ranking Senate Republican. “But in the end at some point you have to face the music. And I think that once the Electoral College settles the issue today, it’s time for everybody to move on.”

“There’s clearly a constitutional president-elect,” added Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), the No. 4 GOP leader. Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) said “the Electoral College vote today makes clear that Joe Biden is now president-elect.” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) agreed that “it’s time to turn the page and begin a new administration.” And Sen Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) was unequivocal: “Vice President Biden is the president-elect based on the electoral count.”

But:

“Let’s see where the remaining legal challenges go. But it’s a very narrow path,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the chair of the Judiciary Committee....

Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), another member of GOP leadership, told reporters that asking about Biden’s status was a “gotcha question.” ...

Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) said Trump still has every right to “get to the bottom” of any purported election discrepancies and suggested it would be weeks still before he calls Biden the president-elect....

And Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), when asked if Biden is the president-elect, gave a terse “no.”

[Mitch] McConnell has also yet to issue a public statement on the Nov. 3 election results.

So maybe half the Senate GOP acknowledges reality. And Politico wants to give them a cookie.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post tells us that the election truthers at Newsmax and One America News have begun to "grapple uneasily" with objective reality.

For the past six weeks, two upstart cable news channels — Newsmax and One America News — have tried to outflank Fox News from the right by embracing President Trump’s strategy of election denialism.

But on Monday, as the electoral college sealed Democrat Joe Biden’s victory, their paths seemed to diverge slightly.

John Bachman, who anchors an afternoon show on Newsmax, the larger of the two channels, referred to Biden as the president-elect and noted that Trump’s legal challenges of the election results have failed at almost every step.

“What I’m trying to do is manage everyone’s expectations,” Bachman told viewers. “These judges don’t seem to be taking up these cases. This is the reality. This is the motion set in place.”

But no other example is given of a Newsmax host acknowledging the truth. Just the opposite, in fact:

... on Newsmax’s “American Agenda,” which followed Bachman’s show, host Bob Sellers seemed to treat Biden’s victory as an unsettled issue, saying that people are “waiting with bated breath” for the results of the process and asserting that “there are still some outstanding cases of irregularity.”

Around 5:30 p.m., ... a guest on Newsmax talked about alternative slates of electors meeting and said: “I think we’ve still got several weeks here for this thing to play out.”

During one segment, when Washington Times writer Tim Constantine criticized the president and his team for continuing to argue that the election is fraudulent without sufficient evidence in a bid to stay politically relevant, Sellers gently chastised him: “Tim, it’s kind of strange that you say that.”

And One America News, we're told,

virtually ignored the unfolding developments as electors cast their votes, instead devoting about four hours of daytime programming to a live feed of a hearing by the Arizona Senate to address voting procedures. Its 4 p.m. news roundup failed to mention the electoral college vote at all.

There's only one acceptable response to what's happened since November 3: Everyone needs to acknowledge that Joe Biden is the president-elect. Everyone. We're now giving credit to the Republican Party and Fox's crazier cousins because one non-prime-time Newsmax host and some Senate Republicans are saying what they all should have said a month ago, and saying it as if someone has put a gun to their heads and forced them to say it. Not good enough. They deserve no credit for this.

WILL THEY TRY TO PRE-STEAL THE NEXT ELECTION?

At Lawyers, Guns & Money, Paul Campos writes:

I fully expect the next few years will be a non-stop campaign on [Donald Trump's] part to win the White House back, by doing as much as possible to rig elections in Republican-controlled states, via legislation allowing the state legislature to appoint its own set of electors irrespective of election results etc.

I think Trump might gradually lose interest in a 2024 comeback (not because of legal problems -- he'll never go to prison -- but because he might get sick, or bored, or become distracted by something else). Laying groundwork in state legislatures years in advance of a run doesn't seem like his style.

But I think the idea of voter-proofing elections on the GOP's behalf will live on in state legislatures, independent of Trump.

Laws allowing legislatures to override the certified popular vote won't be described as efforts to circumvent democracy. They'll have anodyne names like "The Election Integrity Act of 2021" -- or, more brazenly, "The Defense of Democracy Act of 2021." They'll be portrayed as efforts not to throw out the popular vote in presidential elections, but to ratify the victory of the person who "really" got more votes -- invariably, the Republican candidate. (You know how those Democrats cheat.) And the bills might not apply only to presidential elections -- there are close races up and down the ballot, and Democrats sometimes win them. That can't be allowed to continue!

This year, the system held firm even in red states and states with Republican-controlled legislatures. But what will happen if Republicans try to make election theft legal before a theft attempt is undertaken? I think the line will hold -- but I'm not certain. The GOP electorate will insist on some response to the occupation of the Oval Office by a cheating usurper. So these bills will get a lot of votes. Their sponsors will become top-tier Republican candidates for higher office. Maybe none of the bills will pass, but the idea will be mainstreamed in the next couple of years.

EVERY REPUBLICAN IS A ROY COHN REPUBLICAN

There's a perception that Donald Trump brought something extra to the job of being a Republican politician because he'd been mentored by Roy Cohn, lawyer for the mob and Joe McCarthy. Cohn's advice to Trump was attack, counterattack, and never apologize.

Prior to Trump, Republican presidents have generally had underlings to do the attacking, counterattacking, and apology withholding -- but the GOP below the presidential level has been like this for decades. Here's Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal editorial page responding to criticism of a piece he ran:

The editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal accused strategists for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. of instigating a coordinated response to an op-ed article published Friday evening that called on Jill Biden, Mr. Biden’s wife, to refrain from referring to herself as “Dr. Biden” because she is not a medical doctor, but rather holds a doctorate in education....

In the response, published Sunday evening and for Monday’s newspaper, Paul A. Gigot, the top editor for The Journal’s opinion section for nearly two decades, pointed to negative notes about [the] article posted to Twitter by two Biden staff members as well as Douglas Emhoff, the husband of Senator Kamala Harris, the vice president-elect, as evidence of a campaign.

“Why go to such lengths to highlight a single op-ed on a relatively minor issue?” wrote Mr. Gigot, who elsewhere said the responses reflected “what was clearly a political strategy.”

Yes, it's simply unimaginable that top allies of the president-elect would all spontaneously react to a high-profile attack on his wife. Must be a sinister plot!

“My guess is that the Biden team concluded it was a chance to use the big gun of identity politics to send a message to critics as it prepares to take power. There’s nothing like playing the race or gender card to stifle criticism.”

"Identity politics"? Are people with non-medical doctorates now a protected class of citizens? Nobody told me! And I get all the emails from the Liberal Politburo! I'm personally going to give Mr. Soros a piece of my mind!

When Gigot says that negative responses to an op-ed are a way to "stifle criticism," he's articulating the Sarah Palin theory of the First Amendment, which says that criticism of conservative speech is censorship.

But this is why the GOP thrives: No criticism is every acknowledged as valid. The response to every critique is to double down and attack the critics.

Democrats don't do this, even though it always works for Republicans. And that's why the Republican Party and the conservative movement have dominated American politics for forty years.

REPUBLICANS, INCLUDING PENCE, WILL DAMAGE AMERICA AGAIN ON JANUARY 6

Tomorrow, Electoral College electors will meet in the fifty states and D.C. to cast their ballots; 306 are expected to vote for Joe Biden and 232 for Donald Trump. On January 6, the House and Senate will come together for a ceremony confirming the Electoral College vote. We know that one House member, Mo Brooks of Alabama, plans to challenge the results. By law, his challenge or challenges -- the challenges are state by state -- must be debated if a member of the Senate signs on.

Nicholas Fandos and Michael Schmidt of The New York Times believe -- preposterously -- that this session of Congress could determine how Republican voters think about the election in the future.

The fight promises to shape how Mr. Trump’s base views the election for years to come....

If even one Republican senator backed the [Brooks] effort, it could ensure that the partisan cloud hanging over the election would darken Mr. Biden’s presidency for years to come. If none did, it could send a definitive message to the country that despite Mr. Trump’s bluster, the party trusted the results of the electoral process and was finally ready to recognize Mr. Biden as the rightful winner.

Do Fandos and Schmidt seriously believe that GOP voters will just shrug and say "Well, I guess the election was fair after all" if no senator joins in this effort? That's absurd. These people are too far gone.

(How far gone? Politico reports that Republicans in downballot races all over America are insisting that they lost as a result of fraud, even when they lost in deeply Democratic states or districts, sometimes by 70 points or more. These losers are suing rather than conceding. The whole party is nuts.)

And do Fandos and Schmidt believe that the concurrence of a Republican senator actually makes this effort legitimate? That "a partisan cloud" will be "hanging" over Biden's presidency if a crazy Republican senator joins a crazy Republican House member?

Of course there will be a Senate challenger. There'll probably be more than one. Fandos and Schmidt tell us that there are two senators talking about it:

No Republican senator has yet stepped forward to say he or she will back such an effort, though a handful of reliable allies of Mr. Trump, including Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rand Paul of Kentucky, have signaled they would be open to doing so.

They'll do it -- and they won't be alone. Nor will Brooks. If 126 Republican members of the House signed on to a brief backing that Texas lawsuit, nearly as many are sure to sign on to this effort.

The effort will fail in the House, because it's Democratic, but the majority of Republicans will probably vote to reject the electors. It will fail in the Senate because Republicans Romney, Toomey, Murkowski, Collins, and Sasse will join with the Democrats to form a majority of the whole Senate -- but I assume the majority of Republicans will also reject the electors.

Fandos and Schmidt expect us to shed a tear for Mike Pence:

... the looming battle on Jan. 6 is likely to culminate in a messy and deeply divisive spectacle that could thrust Vice President Mike Pence into the excruciating position of having to declare once and for all that Mr. Trump has indeed lost the election....

The dilemma is particularly acute for Mr. Pence, who is eyeing his own presidential run in 2024. As president of the Senate, he has the constitutionally-designated task of opening and tallying envelopes sent from all 50 states and announcing their electoral results.

But given Mr. Trump’s penchant for testing every law and norm in Washington, he could insist that Mr. Pence refuse to play that role. And either way, it will call for a final performance of the delicate dance Mr. Pence has performed for past four years, trying to maintain Mr. Trump’s confidence while adhering to the law.

If you saw Fahrenheit 9/11, you'll recall the early scene, from January 2001, in which many House members of color expressed their support for challenging the Florida electors, while also expressing frustration that no senator would join them.



In the end, Vice President Gore announced his own defeat, in ceremonial language that's been used for more than a century.

The whole number of the electors appointed to vote for president of the United States is 538, of which a majority is 270. George W. Bush of the state of Texas has received for president of the United States 271 votes. Al Gore of the state of Tennessee has received 266 votes.

The state of the vote for vice president of the United States, as delivered to the president of the Senate, is as follows. The whole number of the electors appointed to vote for vice president of the United States is 538, of which a majority is 270. Dick Cheney of the state of Wyoming has received for vice president of the United States 271 votes. Joe Lieberman of the state of Connecticut has received 266 votes.

This announcement of the state of the vote by the president of the Senate shall be deemed a sufficient declaration of the persons elected president and vice president of the United States, each for the term beginning on the 20th day of January, 2001, and shall be entered, together with a list of the votes, on the journals of the Senate and the House of Representatives.

May God bless our new president and our new vice president, and may God bless the United States of America.

I think Pence will read the numbers, confirm that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have won the votes of 306 electors, but dispense with the traditional language and make a speech saying that this is not over. He'll thread the needle, saying Biden and Harris have won, pending further legal appeals.

He has to do that, otherwise his political career will end that day. He won't allow that to happen.

HE WANTED THEM TO DO HIM A FAVOR, THOUGH

He did. The surprise is genuine. Bribery's worked great for him all his life.

— Yas Just a Lightweight (@Yastreblyansky) December 12, 2020

Trump always talks about his judicial appointment record as if it's a tremendous accomplishment of his, something that wouldn't have happened under any other president. Here he is in a campaign speech in Pennsylvania on November 2:

[Audience member calls out "Amy Coney Barrett"] That's right, we put Amy on. You happy with Amy? Everyone loves Amy. Thank you. You know we do. They don't talk about that enough. They say it's the most important thing a president can do. So at the end of my first term, I will have approximately 300 federal judges, which is a big percentage of the judiciary. And three great Supreme Court Justices. That's a lot. Many presidents have gotten to choose none.

But that's not an accomplishment. That's luck, plus a great deal of manipulation, mostly on the part of others. Trump got to appoint these judges because Mitch McConnell held a Supreme Court seat for a Republican president, because Anthony Kennedy resigned (for whatever reason), and because Ruth Bader Ginsberg died. He appointed 300 lower-court judges because Republicans control the Senate and Mitch McConnell, the Federalist Society, and other right-wing activist groups have a judge-generating machine that runs like a Ferrari.

This is precisely what would have happened under any Republican president over the past four years. The appointee list would have been exactly the same, or nearly so. Trump didn't really participate in the selection process. He just took whoever was on offer.

And even if Hillary Clinton had become president and stayed on for eight years, and Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett had aged out of Supreme Court contention for the next Republican president (Republicans like to add justices to the court when they're young, so they'll be there for decades), the three would have had very nice lives as high-level federal judges with lifetime appointments. And they know that.

So they know that Trump didn't do them a tremendous favor. If they think anyone did them a big favor, it's Mitch McConnell or the FedSoc's Leonard Leo.

But Trump doesn't get that. He expected them to feel a debt.

We'd like to believe that they would have rejected the Texas case even if they'd personally regarded themselves as chosen by Donald Trump.

We'll never know for sure -- but it doesn't matter because they don't regard themselves that way. They were products of the right's judicial machine. So they don't feel they owe Trump anything. And he never understood that.

REPUBLICANS HAVE PROBABLY RUN OUT OF OPTIONS, BUT THEY'LL NEVER STOP WHINING

Bullet dodged:

The Supreme Court on Friday dismissed a long-shot bid by President Trump and the state of Texas to overturn the results in four states won by Democrat Joe Biden, blocking the president’s legal path to reverse his reelection loss.

The court’s unsigned order was short, and it denied Texas’s request to sue Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin over how they conducted their elections. Texas has not shown it has a legal interest “in the manner in which another state conducts its elections,” the order said. It dismissed all pending motions about the case.

So that's it. Isn't it?

Trump and much of the GOP will now just pivot to other tactics to overturn the election. There is literally never going to be a moment where he says "Ok, ya got me!"

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) December 11, 2020

And in fact:

Rudy Giuliani says President Donald Trump’s legal battle will go on despite the Supreme Court rejecting a bid Friday from Texas’ attorney general to block the ballots of millions of voters in battleground states that went in favor of Joe Biden.

“The case wasn’t rejected on the merits, the case was rejected on standing,” Giuliani said Friday during an appearance on Newsmax TV’s “Stinchfield.”

“The answer to that is to bring the case now in the district court by the president, by some of the electors, alleging the same facts where there would be standing and therefore get a hearing.”

I don't think that will work. But they won't stop trying. The energy may shift to individual right-wing intimidators. But Biden will be president.

THAT JOKE ISN'T FUNNY ANYMORE

The determination of very smart people to believe that Donald Trump is a joke and a spent force results in nothing-to-see-here reporting like this story, which appeared at the Daily Beast eight days ago:

Since Nov. 25, not a single fundraising email from the Trump campaign or its Republican National Committee fundraising account has featured [Vice President Mike] Pence’s name in the “from” field. And this week, that Republican National Committee joint fundraising committee, the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, made another subtle change: a handful of its emails swapped out the official Trump-Pence campaign logo for one featuring just the president’s name.

... According to four people with knowledge of the matter, [this reflects] an effort by the vice president and his team to distance Pence from some of the president’s more outlandish claims about a conspiracy to undermine the election and illegally deny him a second term in office.

“It is an open secret [in Trumpworld] that Vice President Pence absolutely does not feel the same way about the legal effort as President Trump does,” said a senior administration official. “The vice president doesn’t want to go down with this ship… and believes much of the legal work has been unhelpful.”

That was then. Eight days later, Pence is taking long drinks from the Kool-Aid:

Vice President Mike Pence was back in Georgia for the second time in less than a week to urge GOP supporters to vote in the January runoff elections for U.S. Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler.

But moments into his speech at the “Defend the Majority” rally, Pence also cheered on an attempt by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to overturn the November election results, including in Georgia, in favor of President Donald Trump.

“(Seventeen) states have joined the Lone Star State to defend the integrity of our elections to the highest state in the land,” Pence said. “President Donald Trump deserves his day in court — the Supreme Court. And all I can say is God bless Texas.”

The sedition is even more widespread:

Update about the 106 House Republicans who signed on to this embarrassing lawsuit to disenfranchise millions of legal American voters: that number is now 126. https://t.co/0xjSEjV7Cs

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) December 11, 2020

There is, at long last, pushback from Democrats. In the House:

Rep. Pascrell writes to Pelosi and Lofgren asking them to look into not seating the 126 amici in the new Congress, invoking Reconstruction era constitutional “safeguards to cleanse from our government ranks any traitors and others that would destroy the union.” pic.twitter.com/WR0lJEMepK

— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) December 11, 2020

And, as Greg Sargent reports, in the Senate:

[In] a speech that Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) gave on the Senate floor on Friday, ... he called out his Republican colleagues. Watch this full excerpt:

“Right now, the most serious attempt to overthrow our democracy in the history of our of country is underway.

Those who are pushing to make Donald Trump President, no matter the outcome of the election, are engaged in a treachery against their nation.” pic.twitter.com/FE7K91nlSD

— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) December 11, 2020

... you don’t often hear them saying what Murphy suggested here: that the Republican Party has morphed into a malignant and profoundly dangerous threat to the country and the long-term prospects for our democratic stability.

But is it too late?

I know we all are sure that the Supreme Court will not give these seditionist wingnuts what they want with this lawsuit.

But what happens if, for some reason, they do?

— digby (@digby56) December 11, 2020

I don't know the answer to this. A general strike? A civil war? Do we need to take up arms?

I laughed at the Texas suit. But the entire Republican Party seems to be treating it the way Trump treats every unpleasant reality he faces: He throws a tantrum, and the tantrum never ends, and he counts on the rest of the world to alter the reality he doesn't like, just to shut him up.

It sometimes works. I hope it doesn't work now. But there has to be a cost to the tantrum-throwers for doing this. But I don't know what it should be, or what's possible.

THE REPUBLICAN ASSAULT ON THE ELECTION ISN'T AN ACT -- IT'S A RIOT

Jamelle Bouie offers some conventional wisdom about the Texas suit to overturn the results of the presidential election:

This sloppy, harebrained lawsuit has no serious chance of success.... That this quest is quixotic is, in all likelihood, one reason it has so much support. It is only with the knowledge of certain defeat that Republican officeholders feel comfortable plowing forward with an effort that would tear the United States apart if it succeeded. They can play politics with constitutional government ... knowing that the Supreme Court isn’t going to risk it all for Donald Trump....

With no evidence that Republicans have really thought about the implications of a victory in the courts, I think we can say that these briefs and lawsuits are part of a performance, where the game is not to break kayfabe (the conceit, in professional wrestling, that what is fake is real).

Greg Sargent disagrees with Bouie, and with others who believe it's all an act, or merely an effort to mollify the president:

Republicans are not "humoring" Trump or suffering lack of "spine."

This implies Rs backing his effort have principles they *want* to adhere to but aren't, solely out of fear.

The worse reality: Rs genuinely support overturning the election and are participating in this effort. https://t.co/7KvacPaQrq

— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) December 11, 2020

As red states and Republicans in Congress sign on to this effort, I'm remembering a Malcolm Gladwell article about school shootings, in which the work of Mark Granovetter, a scholar of crowd theory, was cited. Granovetter wrote about how riots begin and are sustained:

In [Granovetter's] view, a riot was not a collection of individuals, each of whom arrived independently at the decision to break windows. A riot was a social process, in which people did things in reaction to and in combination with those around them. Social processes are driven by our thresholds—which he defined as the number of people who need to be doing some activity before we agree to join them. In the elegant theoretical model Granovetter proposed, riots were started by people with a threshold of zero—instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator’s accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him who were already doing that—and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if everyone around him was grabbing cameras from the electronics store.

Trump is, obviously, the individual with the threshold of zero -- he always has a threshold of zero when it comes to anti-social behaviors on his own behalf. But the Republican Party is full of people with thresholds of one (or zero) -- in this case, Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell, Lin Wood; media outlets such as Gateway Pundit, OANN, and Newsmax, plus Fox hosts such as Sean Hannity and Maria Bartiromo; and, of course, quite a few elected officials. Sufficiently low thresholds are necessary for all this to happen. Another observer paraphrases Granovetter:

In town A, ... a rowdy instigator with a threshold of 0 would start the riot. Then a neighbour with a threshold of 1 would decide to join in. This would prompt the next person who had a threshold of 2 to participate and so on, in a domino effect that would lead to widespread unrest.

Compare this to town B, where the thresholds of the population are the same, except that no one has a threshold of 1 — instead, 2 people have a threshold of 2. In this instance, the rowdy instigator would be a lone vandal because the domino effect would not be triggered, since no one had a threshold of 1 to follow the instigator’s lead and subsequently set off the cascade.

In a healthy country, no one of any prominence would have a threshold of one in response to Trump's threshold-zero assault on democracy. The Democratic Party is like town B -- it tends not to rally around bomb throwers like Alan Grayson. But the Republican Party is lousy with ones and zeros.

Why is that? Gladwell writes:

Granovetter was most taken by the situations in which people did things for social reasons that went against everything they believed as individuals. “Most did not think it ‘right’ to commit illegal acts or even particularly want to do so,” he wrote, about the findings of a study of delinquent boys. “But group interaction was such that none could admit this without loss of status; in our terms, their threshold for stealing cars is low because daring masculine acts bring status, and reluctance to join, once others have, carries the high cost of being labeled a sissy.”

That's the Republican Party. Contempt for the rule of law brings status; expressing a willingness to coexist with Democrats invites ostracism.

So this isn't an act. It isn't pro wrestling. It's a riot.