Make America Normal Again

Today was a monumental day in American history. The nation finally shed the scourge and national nightmare that has been the Donald Trump administration, and moved toward normalcy.

Today, President Joe Biden gave his inaugural address and called for unity. He talked about American exceptionalism and how America can accomplish anything when we do it together. You can see Biden's entire speech below, but it was nice to see a President of the United States again who didn't berate people, insult his enemies and attack everyone that stood in his way. 

But as soul-soothing as Biden's inaugural was, it was only part of the return to normalcy that accompanied his first day in office. 

President Biden's Press Secretary Jen Psaki delivered a coherent and honest press briefing. One of the lines that stood during Psaki's remarks was that "there will be another one of these tomorrow." She said that in response to a question from the press that she did not have an immediate answer to. Instead of lying and spewing propaganda, she intimated that she will get back to that member of the press. Psaki further explained that the daily press briefings will again be, in fact, held daily (Monday-Friday).

In yet another departure from a the previous administration, Psaki explained that she had "a deep respect for the role of a free and independent press in our democracy." She went on to say that one of the key objectives of this press office would be to "bring transparency and truth back." The best way to combat misinformation, in her opinion, is to tell the truth even when it is hard to here. This has been a sentiment echoed by Biden himself. The new President has said time-and-time again that he will always be honest with the American people, especially as it pertains to the pandemic.  

The President, like he said he would do during the campaign, signed 15 executive orders on the very first day in office, which is many more than any of his predecessors. All of these executive orders were signed in order to bring America back as a worldwide leader. 

Some of the highlights of the executive orders include the following:

1. 100-day masking challenge, which includes a mask mandate in all federal buildings and land.

2. Reversed Trump's order to withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization.

3. Biden rejoined the Paris Climate Accords. 

4. Reversed Trump's Muslim travel ban, which was designed to discriminate against people based on their religion, which goes against everything this nation was founded on. 

5. Halted funding for the previous administrations border wall - a monumental waste of taxpayer dollars.

6. Reverse a permit for the Keystone XL oil pipeline. 

It is so good to see normalcy back and to see someone who actually cares about Americans back in the White House. You can tell he cares because he didn't spend the whole day on Twitter talk about the election, but instead got to work on matters that he talked about during the campaign. 

Give 'em hell Joe!

I can't so neither can you Boebert

Republican representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado has decided that the rules do not apply to her. This is typical for a member of the American Fascist Party, who flouts the rules of civil society at every turn.

Boebert, who has been on Capitol Hill literally one week, has decided that the rule against bringing a loaded weapon into the chamber of the House of Representatives shouldn't be followed in her case. Why does she need to carry a loaded weapon into the House chamber? Does this QAnon, conspiracy-theory believing nut plan to shoot her own colleagues some of who she believes are socialists and Satanists. 

You might claim, she would never do that, but she is a QAnon believer who thinks Democrats are Satanists who eat children in their free time. Boebert, who got elected on the strength of her support for the worst and most conspiratorial President ever, strikes me as someone who is quite likely to go off half cocked. 

For example: After the Capitol attack by a Fascist mob (Her constituents) on January 6, some Democrats have claimed that some of their Republican colleagues were giving tours of the Capitol to would-be rioters who showed up the next day. The Democrats called for investigations into these tours. The Capitol has been closed to tours to the public since March due to Covid. This freshman Congresswoman came out and said people should stop accusing her of giving tours and information to the rioters. Wait! What? No one did that. Guilty conscious much? Why was she so defensive tweeting at several Democrats when they never invoked her name?   

Denver Post op/ed on Boebert

Here is the thing the Boebert. If I can't walk in to my local courthouse brandishing a loaded gun, and without going through a metal detector, why should you? How dare you? You claim to be against the elite, whatever that means, but yet you have been on the job like four minutes and you want special exceptions made for you. Answer: DENIED!

This is the Trump problem all over again. Trump didn't wear a mask so his dumb supporters decided masks were a violation of their freedom. If this conspiracy nut Boebert is allowed to not go through metal detectors and can carry loaded weapons on to the floor of the House, then what is stopping the rest of the braindead Trump cult from refusing to check their weapons at airports, or refusing to go through metal detectors in normal government buildings in your small towns America?

If January 6 taught us anything it's that guns and Trump supporters don't mix. They beat police officers, who they claimed for years to have loved and supported, with flagpoles that garnished old glory herself. They stole a police officers' gun and shouted that they should kill him with his own weapon. A father of four little girls. These people are sick and should all be locked up for every minute that the law allows.

Boebert is just another side of the same Trump coin, and needs to be targeted for defeat in the next election. You might be in for a short stay on Capitol Hill Mrs. Boebert. Sane and civilized society can only hope.

Schwarzenegger's Kristallnacht speech

The above address, delivered by former Republican California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, says it all. The only thing I am going to add below is some context related to Kristallnacht - or the night of the broken glass in Nazi Germany in 1938.

Kristallnacht, conducted on the night of November 9-10, 1938, was when Nazi thugs roamed the country in a coordinated effort to destroy Jewish Synagogues, businesses and homes. The rioting began after a speech by Nazi Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels blamed all Jews for the assassination of a Nazi in France by one Jewish person. The night of terrorism was designed to scare Jews into emigrating from Germany - prior to the later development of the "Final Solution", or what we know as the Holocaust. A total of 91 Jews perished that night throughout Germany, Austria and part's of the Sudetenland - annexed portion of Czechoslovakia.

We too had deadly violence conducted this week after a failed leader and his Brownshirts in Congress promulgated the lie that Trump has been telling regarding a stolen election. Trump worked the crowd, some of whom were wearing shirts that said 6 million Jews were not enough, into a frenzy like Goebbels did in 1938, and then Trump set them lose on the Capitol. Five people died in the Capitol domestic terrorist attack, but the violence could have been more catastrophic. Thankfully it was not!

   

This group of deplorables are currently online planning their versions of the final solution so we as a country must be prepared to take these insurrectionist thugs seriously. They to, like governor Schwarzenegger said, have been brainwashed or led along like many of those in his father's time were. They didn't start out believing the President's grand conspiracy. They were brought to this place with one lie after another. Then the next lie built on that and then the next bigger lie built on the previous one, and so on: 

For example:

1. The press is the enemy of the people, so you can't trust the press. 

2. The press tries to warn the citizens of the President's lies, but distrust already exists

3. Democrats are evil socialists and radicals

4. Democrats are coming to destroy your neighborhoods and burn everything down, which is made easier to believe given that you have already been told they are socialists and evil.

5. Given the previous lies being spread for months about Democrats, like they hate our country. Isn't it much harder to believe the lie that they all conspired to rig an election against your sweet and innocent leader who is just trying to save the country - "I alone can fix it"

HERE IS THE GREATEST TRUTH EVER TOLD: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing." Edmund Burke.

Today's insurrectionists resemble those of 1865

"The objective of the conspiracy was for the Confederacy to accomplish what they failed to accomplish on the battlefield, which was to win the war." - James Solomon, Screenwriter of The Conspirator 

We all should know from our 8th grade history that John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln shortly after the end of the Civil War in 1865, but what some may not know is that Booth was part of a larger conspiracy by Confederate sympathizers to decapitate the head of the whole of Union government. 

This insurrection against the Union government in 1865 should sound familiar to us because we are living through a similar insurrection now. Donald Trump and his white supremacist sympathizers and GOP sycophants are trying to accomplish through violent insurrection and terrorism what they could not accomplish during the election, victory and preserving power and authority.

The plan in 1865 was for the conspirators to simultaneously assassinate Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant at Ford's Theatre, as well as Vice President Andrew Johnson, and Secretary of State William Seward on the night of April 14. 

Lincoln was shot and killed by Booth, but Grant avoided the same fate by turning down the Presidential invitation to join the Lincoln's at the theatre because Grant's wife and Mary Todd Lincoln did not get along. Lewis Powell managed to stab Secretary of State William Seward in his home five times in the neck and head, but Seward managed to recover from his wounds. George Atzerodt, who was assigned to assassinate Andrew Johnson, got drunk and then got cold feet. 

In the end, Booth was shot and killed in a barn during his capture, while Powell, Atzerodt, David Herold, who led Powell to Seward's home on that fateful night, among others like Dr. Samuel Mudd and Mary Surratt were put to death for their roles in the conspiracy. Not all the so-called conspirators deserved the same fate.

The members of Booth's conspiracy saw their beloved Confederacy dying, and in a desperate last attempt to salvage the lost cause, they attempted an insurrection to keep the Civil War going. 

By the same token, today's insurrectionists also see their lost cause fading. Their racist President (Trump), the antithesis of Lincoln, failed to win re-election in a landslide, and many in this modern-day Confederacy see this flawed human as their voice for bigotry, hatred and racism. Trump made it acceptable among a large swath of the public to voice their anti-other sentiment. That's why groups like the Proud Boys and other antigovernmental militias support him with such ferocity.   

It was not a mistake that many of the modern insurrectionists who attacked the U.S. Capitol building this week were carrying Confederate flags. They believe that others, however they define that, as the direct cause of their own personal failures. Much like their beloved leader Trump, they too can not admit that their failures may own. As they see this symbol of their desired America (Trump) being ousted from power by America's better angels, they to are acting out of desperation and are seeking one final way to overthrow a duly-elected government put in place by the majority of Americans. 

Remember this, Lincoln was not planning to abolish slavery in the states where it already existed when he was originally elected in 1860, but the South saw him as a massive threat and instead of dealing with him politically, they seceded from the Union and led an armed insurrection. They were traitors to their country because they feared the loss of the way of life as they knew it. Today's insurrectionists feel the same fear. That their country, which they feel should be dominated by white culture, is slipping away and they too will turn to armed treason in an effort to preserve this dastardly ideology.           

One can only hope that today's insurrection can be put to bed before 600,000 Americans kill each other in a second Civil War. If we all love our country, we will seek to work together to create a better and more prosperous Union that our founders envisioned. 

The Lincoln Project's next target

Remember this face and this particular image of this man raising his first in solidarity with the Trump supporters on the morning of January 6, 2021 at the U.S. Capital before those same supporters/rioters later stormed the building, leading to the deaths of five people. This man, Missouri's junior Senator Josh Hawley, was one of the senators who objected to Joe Biden's electoral college victory, suggesting to those same Trump supporters that the election was rigged.

Nothing could be further from the truth! The election was in no way rigged and Hawley, nor the President, have provided any evidence that it was, but that didn't stop Mr. Hawley and his cowardly co-conspirators, like senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), from lying about the so-called allegations of election fraud. 

Hawley, who is already planning to run for President in 2024 and to keep Trump's base, claims that this objection was all about election integrity, but in fact it was just a craven stunt to curry favor with Trump's crazed and armed base. Hawley and Cruz should resign the Senate positions for their roles in inciting a riot. Of course, they will not do that. They put their dirty, unwashed hands up everyday to see which way the wind is blowing and then develop their ideology from there. 

Remember that Donald Trump actually insulted, not only Cruz's wife, but suggested that his father was involved in the Kennedy assassination, but that has not stopped Cruz from licking Trump's toes and kowtowing to the Trump mob. Both of these men want to run for President in 2024. You must remember that they do not believe in the democracy that they want to desperately lead.

Even after the violence occurred at the Capitol on Wednesday Hawley and Cruz still objected to the electoral college results that gave Biden the victory. They were not alone, these other sycophants went along with the charade. Cindy Hyde-Smith (Mississippi), Cynthia Lummis (Wyoming), Roger Marshall (Kansas), Tommy Tuberville (Alabama) and Rick Scott (Florida). COWARDS!

Here are several videos of the mob that so-called journalists like Sean Hannity call the mob - the Trump mob.

Notice in the video below that this disgusting mob of scumbags came with bombs, incendiary devises, guns, zip ties, and at one point even chanted hang Mike Pence - who has been Trump's most loyal supporter. These people don't care about anything. These are the modern day Timothy McVeigh's who are looking for any excuse to go to war with the government. Trump is the mentally-ill vessel they have used to channel their neo-Nazi instincts.  

 

Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah) followed Mr. Hawley to the Senate floor, and while he didn't mention Hawley by name, his speech was a devastating rebuke for Hawley and Cruz, and for that matter, the President of the United States. He also suggested to every person who insists to promote these false election fraud allegations to tell the truth.

Washington D.C. is already being targeted again, so the police need to be ready to push back this neo-Nazi mob like it is a peaceful protest for racial justice, but for some reason they will not. I wonder why?

Who is this man?

Does anyone recognize the man in this hostage video? It looks like Donald Trump, but everything the person said in this concession speech contradicts everything Trump is and has been about.

First the man in this video condemns the violence that happened at the U.S. Capital on Wednesday, but Trump, along with his son Eric Trump and Rudy Giuliani, actually incited the violence on Wednesday by working rioters into a frenzy before telling them to march on down to the capital. The rioters followed the instructions immediately and stormed the capital, leaving several people dead, including at least one Capital Police officer who died of his injuries last night after he was struck in the head with a fire extinguisher by a member of the Trump mob. 

The schizophrenic person in this video, who clearly is grappling with multiple personalities, asks for calm after a difficult and hard-fought election. Really? It is Trump who has stoked the anger among his supporters having spent the last three months telling them the election was stolen from him, and by extension, them. He has fomented the lies that dead people all over the country have voted and imaginary fake ballots were being dumped in states across the nation and all the other conspiracy theories he has trafficked in regarding the election.

Also after getting these people all in a lather to go commit acts of violence, he is now turning on them in true Trump fashion. Make no mistake, these traitors and rioters who attacked the Capital deserve no quarter. They are criminals and in some cases murderers, but they committed these acts in Trump's name and at his direction, and now he says that what happened is unacceptable and they should be prosecuted. Yes Trump mob, Dumbo sold you out. I wish I could say I was shocked, but I am not. Ask Michael Cohen about how that feels. 

Finally, the same person who was giddy on Wednesday watching the violence he incited play out on television, did nothing to protect the vice president of the United States and the members of Congress - Republican and Democrat - who were in grave danger. Unlike, what he says in this video, he did not immediately deploy the National Guard. In fact, it took hours to get the guard authorization to move to protect the capital. See below.

This person, who claimed to be the "law and order President," has proven himself a fraud again. The violence he stoked led to the death of at least one officer. His supporters, who claimed to be for him because he supported law enforcement and the rule of law, are also frauds if they continue to support him after Wednesday's insurrection. Not to mention the criminals who committed these vile acts on Wednesday. Those people often cited the so-called violence committed by the "radical left" as a reason they worshipped this President, and then they went out and committed the most egregious of acts in the name of this same President. They bemoaned the destruction of property when the looters did it during the riots this past summer, and then they go and break windows in the Capital building and ransack the place. There were pipe bombs that had to be detonated by police. This is the epitome of hypocrisy.

These rioters were armed and could have killed members of Congress. Your three to four-minute video of a speech someone else wrote to try to absolve you of this Trump is not enough.      

What should be done about all this? Trump, if he was human, should immediately resign. But he will not because he is not. Vice President Mike Pence, a Trump sycophant, should vote along with the cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment of the Constitution to strip Trump of his powers until Joe Biden can assume office. But of course, Pence will not do that. Since neither of these will happen, the next step should be that Eric Trump and Giuliani should be arrested today and booked, and on January 21st former President Trump should be arrested as well and charged with inciting a riot - in addition to all the other crimes he's committed, including the crime of trying to engineer election fraud in the state of Georgia just one day before committing this criminal act in D.C. 

Georgia on my mind

It seems like a million years ago now, but just 48 hours ago the balance of power in America shifted. 

Late on Tuesday night Raphael Warnock moved ahead of Kelly Loeffler in the first of two Senate runoff races in Georgia, and then early Wednesday morning, Jon Ossoff overtook incumbent Republican senator David Perdue for good. The pair of improbable Democratic Party victories in this formerly, ruby-red state has flipped control of the United States Senate.

Although I believed Warnock and Ossoff had a good chance to win given that the Trump base was likely to stay home as long as there deity was not on the ballot, I never allowed myself to fully believe it until it actually happened. This result is going to allow Joe Biden to have a real chance at governing effectively and it might actually allow for the Republican Party to reclaim its position as a legitimate conservative party. That last part remains to be seen. 

Georgia's results give the Biden administration the opportunity to get his people confirmed to key positions in a timely manner, and his judges appointed as long as they are qualified. This result also prevents Moscow Mitch McConnell from hijacking the Biden agenda the way he did President Barack Obama's.

The Democratic House of Representatives in the last Congress passed over 150 pieces of legislation, but McConnell, the self-proclaimed grim reaper, refused to take up any of this legislation. He didn't even allow these bills to be debated on the senate floor. I am sure that some of these bills could have been passed in a bi-partisan basis, but they never had a chance as long as McConnell and Republicans were in control - much to the detriment of the United States citizenry.

Now that the Democrats are in control, the Senate can finally get back to being the world's most deliberative legislative body. The Democrats can not run amok because they still need to get Republican support for their agenda in order to meet the 60-vote, filibuster-proof threshold. This means that the two sides will have to compromise in order to get anything done.

My advise to the new Democratic majority is to forget the meaning of the word comprehensive. Politicians, especially Democratic ones, love to throw the word comprehensive before every type of legislative package. Democrats love to say things like comprehensive immigration reform, or comprehensive gun reform, or comprehensive tax reform. Instead, they should understand that incremental reform is still a positive thing, and could go a long way to help the American people. 

As an example, we might want comprehensive gun reform, but getting a stand-alone Federal background check law passed would go a long way to preventing the sale of guns to criminals. We might want comprehensive immigration reform, but getting DACA codified in law by itself would be a great accomplishment. 

Besides the legislative advantages to these victories, Georgia also rebuked Trumpism by handing defeats to two more Trump co-conspirators, Loeffler and Perdue. This tandem joins Martha McSally and Cory Gardner, who also lost their senate seats for blindly following Trump during his disastrous administration. The politicians who allowed Trump to trample the U.S. Constitution need to pay with their jobs, and this is another positive step in that direction. 

More of these sycophantic Republican politicians should have lost in the November, but they were carried across the finish line by the Trump base, who only seem to come out in support of Trump himself, and any Republican on the same ballot, but when he is not on the ballot, the Republicans have paid dearly - see 2018 midterm elections. It is important, as an educated electorate, that we not forget who these co-conspirators are and that we make them pay when their name again appears on the ballot in 2022. 

Again, from the bottom of my heart, thank you Georgia!

A Republican showing leadership? Are you sure?

Republican representative Adam Kinzinger (Illinois) has been one of the most visible members of the GOP fighting back against misinformation being spread by the insignificant lame-duck President Donald Trump and his collaborators in the GOP. Kinzinger is one of the few GOP Congressmen showing the courage that should be a given from a member of Congress. He has been front and center along with a few other Republicans calling the President and members of his own party out for trafficking in this misinformation about the November election and fraud despite knowing these claims are false. 

There is a group of cowardly GOP Senators who are planning to subvert democracy this Wednesday, January 6, 2021 when they object to the Electoral College results in a joint session of Congress. This group of impotent sycophants include, thus far: Ted Cruz (R-Texas), millionaire Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin), James Lankford (R-Oklahoma), Steve Daines (R-Montana), John Kennedy (no relation; R-Louisiana), Marsha, Marsha, Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee), Mike Braun (R-Indiana) and four cult members who were just elected to the U.S. Senate this year from Trumpian states, namely Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyoming), Roger Marshall (R-Kansas), Bill Hagerty (R-Tennessee) and Tommy, I'm no Nick Saban, Tuberville (R-Alabama). I list these anti-democracy fascists so you know who to vote out when their respective terms come up.

These Senators are not alone. By the latest count, nearly 140 of 200+ Republican House members plan to put their weakness on display on Wednesday. Its not going to be just the usual sycophants like Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Louis "Gomer Pyle" Gohmert (R-Texas) but a whole host of cowardly lions and lionesses who plan to further the President's lies before the American people.     

Kinzinger is not completely alone anymore in his objections to this anti-democratic movement in the Republican Party, which I have no choice but to call fascism. The Nazis used propaganda, misinformation and scapegoating to con the German populous into thinking that the Nazi way was God's way, and here we are 80 years later experiencing something eerily similar to what history described in Germany in the late 1930s and early 1940s. 

Joining Kinzinger in speaking out against the wild conspiracy theories in the Republican Party is Senator Ben Sasse (R-Nebraska), and Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and outgoing Congressman Denver Riggleman (Virginia). Riggleman spoke out not only about Trump, but also criticized his Republican colleagues for not speaking more forcefully especially as it pertains to made-up election fraud claims by Trump. You can read the full Newsweek article below. But I feel the need to highlight this quote by Riggleman. "He got so desperate to retain power that he forgot he was serving the people and not himself. He has never served anything but himself, when you talk about his businesses and what he's done."

Riggleman Newsweek article

I encourage you to watch all of Riggleman's farewell speech in the House (12 minutes), but starting in minute four he begins speaking out against misinformation and the damage it is doing to our democracy. Online misinformation is helping to make the public more ignorant than ever despite living through the information age. 

 

Romney has also been at the forefront of the criticism of Don the Con, and has been questioning his rhetoric from the beginning - as early as 2016. Romney realizes that his Trump's rhetoric could lead to violence if he instigates it. Romney said of Trump's election fraud rhetoric, "it's difficult to imagine a worse, more undemocratic action by a sitting President."  

Ben Sasse has recently been attacking Trump for his election fraud rhetoric, but it took a long time for Sasse to come out and speak out about Trump. Where was this Ben when dear leader was destroying America and ignoring a pandemic that has nearly killed 350,000 Americans thus far as of Jan. 2. I'm glad Sasse is speaking out but where was this earlier?

While the likes of Lindsay Graham and Moscow Mitch McConnell have not hopped on to the objection of Joe Biden's electoral college victory yet, but they haven't spoken out in force they would they should against a President who is trying to conduct a coup by overthrowing a lawful election by the American people. It is at this point that I have to remind people that Trump has NEVER won the popular vote. EVER!

New York Times by John Monsky

The Republican Party, according to Sasse, is running scared of Trump and Trump voters, but if history has taught us anything, it's that Trump voters don't vote for or against candidates unless Dumbo is on the ballot himself. Stop running like cowards from Trump's fat shadow and uphold American democracy with pride!