There are two threads in this Diary. One is corrupt, venal, lying Rs getting caught and put away as a regular and now accelerating occurrence. The other is Democrats getting stuff done in quantity last year, and looking like they can do it again this year, right through the November elections and beyond.
I am not simply an always-glass-half-full guy. My starting point, which I want you to remember at all times, is that it isn’t their glass, no matter how much they pretend that that is the essence of their privilege.
It started with R Reps. Duncan Hunter and Chris Collins, the first Rs to support candidate Trump. They were arrested, tried, re-elected, convicted, and sent to prison in 2018. TFG pardoned both of them in 2020.
Then it was Nebraska R Jeff Fortenberry running for re-election while under felony indictments that came down in October, 2021. He can’t look forward to a pardon, if convicted.
And it may be happening again. Marc Caputo reports from Florida:
NBC News, Orlando, Fla.--Rep. Matt Gaetz’s ex-girlfriend testifies to grand jury in sex-trafficking probe
A major development that suggests the DoJ mayi be moving closer to indicting him
But wait, there is so much more!
That’s before we get to the five GOP party organizations engaged in conspiracies to forge official documents for bogus Trump electors, and the various Federal officials and TFG campaign officials who may be implicated, such as Mark Meadows and Jeff Clarke. Reporters have fanned out to interview as many of those bogus electors as possible, and also those who refused to sign such forgeries.
It’s before the 1/6 select Committee wrote to Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy politely inviting him to come and testify before them, with the threat of a subpoena to follow if he doesn’t, and a possible indictment if he doesn’t comply with the subpoena. (Some other R Congresscritters have received the same offer and threat,with more to come.) We have one such indictment, for Steve Bannon, and more presumably coming from other criminal contempt cases referred to DoJ by Congress. Allowing for delays over the holidays, those cases should be ripening right about now.
McCarthy wrote back last night saying
Nuh-uh! No way, nohow, contrariwise!
and otherwise lying his head off.
It’s before we get to the conclusions of a raft of ripening state criminal and civil probes, Federal criminal probes, and private lawsuits, with discovery(!) by a multitude of injured parties, including police officers severely injured on 1/6, many victims of GQP-sponsored terrorism, and Dominion Voting Systems suing Fox for billions of dollars.
And there is far more where that came from.
Oh, yes. Besides that we are going to see the Full Court Press from Marc Elias and others: dozens of election lawsuits, in every state with a gerrymander, voter suppression laws, and laws allowing state officials to take ever local election boards, and substitute their preferred electors for those of whoever won on the day.
Right. That’s part one.
Several books will be written about all of this, and about particular parts of it, in varying levels of detail. Enjoy whichever of them appeal to you when the time comes.
As to part two, there is far too much even to list. Much of the content of GNRs for well over a year now has been what Biden et al. have promised to do, and have done, and are in the process of doing about, well, everything that TFG did wrong, and Republicans for more than fifty years before him, and Segregationist Southern Democrats before that, and so on in the deeds of actual and would-be tyrants back to before recorded history.
The Soto Zen Buddhist confession begins
All the evil committed by me is caused by greed, hatred, and delusion which have no beginning…
And now Biden, Harris, et al. have launched the 2022 election campaign with full-throated denunciations of R and TFG misdeeds, and full-throated calls for filibuster reform sufficient to pass the essential voting rights bills before the Senate, having passed the House.
I refer you then to our archive, including the Evening Shade Diaries as well, to C-SPAN, and to other well-known sources of the facts.
DeJoy should soon be gone, after the postal board gets its two new members confirmed in the Senate, and sits down to its next official meeting.
With voting rights largely secured (because the Rs will come up with new crimes against humanity until they shrink to irrelevance) we can start planning for everything else. BBB, even in its Manchinized, cut down form, will do the US and the world a world of good. And we can look forward to electing More and Better Democrats in November, and having a new Congress at the beginning of 2023 ready to take up everything that got cut this time. And then—one can dream, now—proper tax reform with full funding for IRS enforcement, and antitrust enforcement, and far more work on global warming and systemic racism and the rest. Maybe we can talk about, oh, I don’t know, effective enforcement of the Do Not Call list by the FTC, one of my pet peeves.
And SCOTUS reform. That depends, of course, on the pseudo-Originalist ideologues on the Court. If they massively overreach on abortion and vaccine mandates and some other stuff, we could see a groundswell of opinion that would force Biden and Congress to get serious. It has been noted that under the actual original Constitution, Barrett wouldn’t have had the vote, nor could she have been a judge at all, so what is her sorry bottom doing on the Court at all?
Regularly Scheduled News
Rs in Disarray
I heven’t even mentioned Giuliani’s legal troubles, have I? I’ll just observe that the fool is representing himself in court, and leave it at that. Well, the phrases dumber than a bag of hammers and not as sharp as a bowling ball have been bandied about, among many others.
Mitch McConnell is a loser.
The Loser-in-Chief
From your orange lips to the FSM’s noodly appendage.
But…
See also my post from yesterday, Truth Brigade: The Big 2020 Forgery, written before I knew that that video had become available.
Oh, and polling indicates that Rs are losing ground even with their base. The not-so-vicious ones continue to fall away, especially their children reaching voting age. The truly vicious ones are increasingly in despair, and increasingly suicidal.
Tyrants in Disarray
The US Treasury Department on Wednesday announced sanctions on eight North Korean and Russian individuals and entities for supporting North Korea’s ballistic missile programs. The Treasury said the sanctions followed six North Korean ballistic missile launches since September 2021, each of which violated United Nations Security Council resolutions. The US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield also said on Wednesday that the US is proposing additional UN sanctions over North Korea’s missile tests.
Hungary
Six parties of the left and the right are making common cause against Viktor Orbán. Polls indicate a close race.
Belarus
The pro-democracy protests against Alexander Lukashenko have been suppressed for the time being, but they will be back.
Russia
Putin, likewise.
China
Yes, them, too. They think that they have control of Hong Kong, Tibet, and Xinjiang, but their time will come. They are in a bind of their own making, introducing democratic reforms at the local and provincial level while suppressing all talk of democracy for the nation or autonomy for minorities.
Tyranny is the shortest-lived form of government.
Aristotle
Not short enough, but their time is coming.
Brazil
President Jair Bolsonaro has turned Brazil into a pariah state.
Polio and Guinea Worm
Still hanging on, but not for much longer unless the various civil wars get out of hand again.
Science! Animals! Weirdness!
More Disarray!
Scientists, healthcare workers, election workers, schoolteachers…
These moronic Rs say that like it’s a bad thing. Marshall demanded at length to know why Fauci’s public financial filings weren’t public. Really. On live TV.
Herstory Lesson
Only two things are infinite: the Universe and human stupidity. And I am not sure about the Universe.
Albert Einstein
Which brings us to:
Funny or Cry