Barr Reads the Writing on the Wall, May Try to Flee the Scene Before It All Catches Up With Him

 

No, he didn't write in English

Dan K

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Sunday December 06, 2020 · 7:07 PM MST

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Attorney General William P. Barr is considering stepping down before President Trump’s term ends next month, according to three people familiar with this thinking. One said Mr. Barr could announce his departure before the end of the year.

It was not clear whether the attorney general’s deliberations were influenced by Mr. Trump’s refusal to concede his election loss or his fury over Mr. Barr’s acknowledgment last week that the Justice Department uncovered no widespread voting fraud. In the ensuing days, the president refused to say whether he still had confidence in his attorney general.

The “writing on the wall” is an idiom from the Biblical book of Daniel, where the Babylonian emperor sees a mystic hand write nonsense words on the wall of his dining room, and next day his empire falls to the Persians. (Daniel says it falls to the Medes, but he was wrong.) Trump is the emperor equivalent, of course, with Biden in the role of Cyrus (the Great), but Barr fit in nicely as one of the courtiers reacting in shock.

The writing on the wall in this case is Trump’s fury at Barr’s sudden (and really, out of character) refusal to keep supporting Trump’s reality disconnect. Barr long ago showed he has no scruples when it comes to bolstering the power of the president — Republican presidents, anyway. And he has arguably committed enough crimes that a functional Justice Dept. should easily find evidence to indict him. And no way is the Malignant Mangoface going to give him a pardon now.

Other Republicans, like Kemp and Raffesperger, can afford to have bouts of conscience and morality; Barr is more vulnerable. Yet he chose to shoot down Trump’s fiction that he won the election, and to do it at a damaging moment, when Trump needed something, anything, to keep his fiction going. Barr has seen up close and personal the way Trump operates and he knew this would make Trump just a wee bit displeased.

That may explain why Barr is now making noises that he won’t be around long enough for Trump to tweet-fire him. If that’s really his  thinking, he can’t count on it; he’s seen how Trump fired other people as soon as they hinted at resigning, so he could make them leave at his whim, not theirs.

What’s his game, then? I may have some more thoughts as I mull this over. In the meantime, this is submitted for your mull.

CNN has just posted the story, with a possible explanation:

Attorney General William Barr is considering leaving his post before January 20, the day President Donald Trump leaves office, a source with knowledge of the matter confirmed to CNN.

The source confirmed that Barr is not happy with Trump, writing that Barr "is not someone who takes bullying and turns the other cheek!"

"He has not made a final decision," the source said.

Barr has to have been blind not to see that bullying is what Trump does; it’s what he lives for, it’s all he knows how to do. And would have to have been naive not to think Trump wouldn't turn and bully him for not toadying along with the fraud fiction.

Now, being fired by Trump has become something of a necessity for administration officials looking to start repairing the reputations post-Trump. But Barr is also naive if he thinks he has any reputation left. That ship sailed the moment he put his hand down after taking the oath.

You can run, but you can't hide, Billy boy!  You did as much to empower the Donald as anybody.

Flynn tires of staging a coup through the courts or legislature, demands the kind with bullets

 

"Don't show me that Constitution.  Damn that Constitution."

Mark Sumner

Daily Kos Staff

Wednesday December 02, 2020 · 2:15 PM MST

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On Monday, Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Mike Kelly wrote his favorite Supreme Court justice in an effort to get the entire election in his home state thrown out. And every single day of the week Sidney Powell hasn’t let a line of continuous defeats stop her from making ever more ridiculous claims. 

But for some Donald Trump supporters, trying to find a court friendly enough to overrule millions of voters is just not coup-ing hard enough. Maybe it helps to have just been handed a pardon that absolves the bearer of all crimes past, present, and potentially future, because recently blessed, twice-confessed liar Michael Flynn is ready to throw out the voters, the legislatures, and the courts. Instead of the kind of political coup that Trump has been waging via Rudy Giuliani and his ever-changing legal team, Flynn is suggesting that other kind of coup. The one where the military takes over and installs their preferred leader.

Michael Flynn is drinking his authoritarian dictatorship straight, and absolutely testing whether or not his freshly minted pardon covers an act of outright sedition. And he made his demand not just on Twitter and other social media, but in a full page ad in The Washington Times.

There’s nothing vague about Flynn’s call for simply overthrowing the civilian government and replacing it with Generalissimo Trump. Flynn calls on Trump to declare a “limited form of martial law.” Though in what sense it would be limited is not clear, as Flynn then tells Trump he should “suspend the Constitution and civilian control of federal elections” while putting the military in charge of a do-over. 

Since Flynn is demanding an election process that the Constitution neither authorizes nor contemplates, it makes perfect sense that he then goes on to set the rules for who is allowed to “vote” in this military-approved coronation. This election can only be carried out under the watchful eye of people with guns, says Flynn, because all politicians and judges can’t be trusted. And people have to meet his requirement for who is a legitimate voter, produce the kind of ID that Flynn says they must have, and use the ballots he specifies—which presumably have just one line.

While he’s at it, Flynn also tells Trump to just go ahead and trash the First Amendment. Which seems almost unnecessary, seeing that he’s also indicated the entire Constitution is to be set alight. And then Flynn finishes up by threatening violence if Trump fails to come through with a military coup.

Having spent a lot of time throwing back shots with Vladimir Putin and plotting assassinations with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, it would be nice to think that Flynn has simply forgotten how things are done in the United States. Unfortunately, this is how things are now done in a country where Trump refuses to acknowledge the outcome of the vote or the verdict of the courts.

As with Trump and Powell, Flynn and his “We the People” organization offer no evidence of a fraudulent vote, much less millions. Unlike Powell, whose statements range from simply nonsensical to outright false, and whose punishment should start with disbarment, Flynn’s statements are … something else. Flynn isn’t court shopping for someone who will ignore his nonsense long enough to issue a stay or at least provide another platform for pounding the podium. Flynn is calling for Trump and the military to overthrow the legitimate civilian government of the United States.

The Constitution contains a narrow definition of treason, one that allows even the most outrageous encouragements to violence to skate clear of the term “traitor.” However, what Flynn is doing absolutely falls within the realm of sedition. In fact, it fits every definition of sedition.

• To conspire to overthrow or destroy by force the government of the United States or to level war against them;
• To oppose by force the authority of the United States government; to prevent, hinder, or delay by force the execution of any law of the United States; or
• To take, seize, or possess by force any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof.

And Trump will not always be there to pardon him.

If Michael Flynn has his way, Der Fuhrer Trump will wrap himself in the flag while holding the Bible upside down and declare himself our Glorious Leader.  If Flynn doesn't have his way, he'll wind up in jail after all.  It's called sedition, and Flynn meets every definition.

McConnell watches own constituents suffer and does nothing. We have to take his majority away

 

"You're not a gazillionaire?  Then BANG, your dead - just another poor COVID victim."

Joan McCarter

Daily Kos Staff

Friday December 04, 2020 · 2:30 PM MST

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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been holding COVID-19 relief hostage since for six months. His refusal to negotiate and his unreasonable demands have meant that struggling people had no choice but to try to return to their normal daily lives only to see the pandemic worsen. McConnell is just a responsible for tens of thousands of deaths as Donald Trump. His insistence on his "Free Pass to Tyson for Murdering Workers" liability shield will make him responsible for more deaths if he has his way.

Not even the abject suffering of the people of Kentucky will move him. “You hear the desperation in the phone calls: ‘I have to pay my rent today. I’ve done everything I can do. I’ve offered to rake leaves or mow grass or anything I can do.’ They’ve lost their job or the stimulus has run out,” Chris Bartley, associate pastor at a Methodist church in Pikeville, Kentucky, told AP. “I’m dealing with more mental health issues than I ever have in 20 years," he said. His church's food pantry saw some fall in demand after the CARES Act passed in March, but that's gone, and now "It's almost as much as we can do to keep up again," Bartley said.

We've got one last shot at taking McConnell's Senate Republican majority away in January. Please give $3 right now to send the GOP packing.

Ready to reach voters in Georgia, whether by phonebanking or textbanking, for the Jan. 5 runoff? Click to sign up for a training with Fair Fight—the voting rights group founded by Stacey Abrams—and they will set you up with what you need to start effectively reaching out to Georgia voters.

Gov. Andy Beshear adds: "We saw the first round of CARES Act funding really flow through our economy in a positive manner. … People needed the dollars. They spent the dollars. We saw businesses lifted up by those dollars. We were able to use funds to help people stay in their homes with an eviction-relief fund. Pay their utility bills so they didn't end up in debt." That's dried up because of McConnell. "We need people to not be Democrats or Republicans but to be human beings and do the right thing," Beshear said. "People out there are dying, People out there are hurting. This is the time to invest in our people and in their safety."

That's going to continue for at least several months more even with a vaccine about to be deployed, because it will take months to get it distributed to the whole population. Now that there is a vaccine, McConnell will have even more of an excuse for refusing to act. His real motivation will be sabotaging the new Democratic president because that's who he is, but he can point to the vaccine as the key to the nation rebounding and a lessened need for Congress to act.

That's why his majority has to end. He can't have the power over actual life and death anymore, because he'll always choose needless, preventable death just as long as it keeps his real constituency—the super rich—happy.

"If you're not a fat cat donor, just stand back!  Way back!  Keep going!  Back, back, back!"

 

Millions may resist even taking a COVID vaccine, thanks to conspiracist misinformation on Facebook

Thanks to the spread of conspiracy theories on social media, large numbers of people believing it is part of a mass "Deep State" plot are likely to resist receiving a COVID-19 vaccine.

David Neiwert

Daily Kos Staff

Wednesday December 02, 2020 · 2:27 PM MST

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If you celebrated the pending arrival of COVID-19 vaccines as a kind of light at the end of the pandemic tunnel, you had ample cause. Unfortunately, a rising tide of conspiracist resistance to any vaccine may well mean that the tunnel is going to last a lot longer than we hoped.

NBC News’ Brandy Zadrozny reports that researchers tracking public responses to the news of the vaccines have found that trust in the medications—as well as a willingness to be injected with it—has been dramatically eroded by anti-vaccination conspiracy theorists who believe a range of risibly false claims promoted in a misinformation campaign spreading on social media, particularly Facebook.

Neil Johnson, a George Washington University physicist who studies online extremism, told Zadrozny that his most recent work shows people organizing in spaces mostly unrelated to discussions of the pandemic—yoga fans, foodies, pet lovers, parent school groups—or considered “neutral” on the vaccine are increasingly being connected on social media to the conspiracy-theory-fueled vaccine “resistance” movement.

“It’s like a tumor growth,” Johnson said.

The conspiracy theories include such claims as the notion that 5G cell-phone towers are the real source of the disease; that Bill Gates leads a cabal of wealthy “globalists” who will inject vaccine recipients with a nefarious microchip simultaneously (a theory first spread by neo-Nazis); and that the vaccine is the spear point of a Satanic plot to control the world’s population. Unsurprisingly, there also appears to be a large overlap of anti-vaccine activists and QAnon conspiracy theorists.

As has been the case all along, Facebook appears to be the platform where the phenomenon most often occurs. Johnson says the anti-vaccination movement has reached more than 100 million susceptible Facebook users—and that, moreover, its methods are often more persuasive than scientifically informed observers might expect to find.

“It's like an insurgency,” Johnson said. “And the hard thing about battling an insurgency is we never quite knew where they were. There was almost like an invisible network behind them. Often, the groups that were most prominent, the ones coming to your attention because they were the biggest, didn't necessarily mean that they were the important ones in the network."

A previous study by Johnson and his research team, published in Nature last May, demonstrated that if members of the public were hesitant about taking the vaccines once they become available, it was primarily due to their exposure to the anti-vaccination theorists’ misinformation and completely fabricated claims. Worryingly, it also suggested that these views could come to be held by a majority of the public within a few years if permitted to spread uncontained.

The research showed that while pro-vaccination groups enjoyed larger membership, the online anti-vaccination groups outnumbered them and were often more effective: There was greater diversity in their messages, which also were emotive and persuasive. Moreover, the anti-vaccination groups were better at spreading those messages outside their groups.

In addition to the ordinary and mundane groups that have become hosts for anti-vaccine misinformation, some of the communities that seem to be uniting around opposition to a COVID-19 vaccine include libertarian, New Age, QAnon, and anti-government groups.

Facebook spokesperson Andrea Vallone responded to NBC News with an emailed statement that the company has worked to connect people with accurate information about vaccines and banned misleading ads.

"We also continue to remove misinformation about COVID-19 that could lead to imminent physical harm and direct people to our COVID information Center, which is available in 189 countries," she said.

Facebook since this summer has attempted various measures at limiting misinformation about the pandemic, including a more recent initiative aimed at falsehoods around the vaccinations generally that includes a prohibition on ads and the banning of anti-vaccination pages. However, it does nothing to prohibit the deliberate spread of false information about the vaccines.

The result, as Johnson observes, has produced a thriving anti-COVID-vaccine movement even as the pandemic reaches record numbers, primarily because Facebook has cracked down on misinformation about the disease itself, allowing anti-vaccination activists to circumvent Facebook and other platforms’ policy enforcement.

"If you take the vaccine, you'll just pop like a balloon."

My God, He's Completely Insane

President Trump. (photo: Justin Merriman/Getty)

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

03 December 20

readersupportednews.org

With "the most important speech he's ever made," the president announced he will bring the temple down on his own head.

od, he's completely bloody insane. He wants to bring it all down on his own head.

"The most important speech" he's ever made?

46 minutes?

Gawdamighty.

We were leading in all swing states far greater than they ever thought possible.

Tens of millions of ballots sent to unknown recipients.

It's a widely known fact that voting rolls are packed with people who are not lawfully eligible to vote....this is not disputed. It has never been disputed.

In Wisconsin...where we were way up on election night. [Holds up poster]...at 3:42 in the morning, there was this, a massive dump of votes, almost all Biden. I went from leading by a lot, to losing by a little.

If we are right about the fraud, Joe Biden can't be president.

They would fill out ballots not even knowing if these people were going to show up and when they did show up, they said, "Sorry. You've already voted."

It's name is Dominion. With a turn of a dial or the change of a chip, you can take a vote for Trump and change it to Biden.

It's already been out that 100s of thousands of absentee ballots have been requested. Who's getting those ballots?

It is statistically impossible that the person, me, who led the charge lost.

And, perhaps, the greatest Sir Story of them all.

The speaker of the house of a certain state said, "Sir, I expected to lose my seat. And instead, because of you, because of that incredible charge, and because of all those rallies, we had a tremendous victory. And everybody knows it. You were much more popular than me, sir, except I got many more votes than you did. And it's impossible for that to happen." There is something wrong. And I will tell you what's wrong...voter fraud.

Millions of votes were cast illegally in the swing states. If that's the case, then the results of the individual swing states must be overturned and overturned immediately. Some people say that's too far out. That's too harsh. Well, does that mean that we take a president, and we've just elected a president who was elected with votes that were fraudulent? No, it means you have to overturn the election.

You can watch the whole thing. He does everything except rub dirt in his hair. Me? I have a very brief tolerance for sedition in high places.

Beware Going 'Back to Normal' Thoughts - Remember, Normal Gave Us Donald Trump

 Normal gave us Trump.  We don't need no stinkin' normal.

Robert Reich. (photo: Getty Images)

By Robert Reich, Guardian UK

30 November 20

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Fatigued by the coronavirus and Trump, the idea of going back to normal is seductive – we must guard against it

ife is going to return to normal,” Joe Biden promised on Thursday in a Thanksgiving address to the nation. He was talking about life after Covid-19, but you could be forgiven if you thought he was also making a promise about life after Trump.

It is almost impossible to separate the two. To the extent voters gave Biden a mandate, it was to end both scourges and make America normal again.

Despite Covid’s grim resurgence, Dr Anthony Fauci – the public health official whom Trump ignored and then muzzled, with whom Biden’s staff is now conferring – sounded guardedly optimistic last week. Vaccines will allow “a gradual accrual of more normality as the weeks and the months go by as we get well into 2021”.

Normal. You could almost hear America’s giant sigh of relief, similar to that felt when Trump implicitly conceded the election by allowing the transition to begin.

It is comforting to think of both Covid and Trump as intrusions into normality, aberrations from routines that prevailed before.

When Biden entered the presidential race last year, he said history would look back on Trump as an “aberrant moment in time”.

The end of both aberrations conjures up a former America that, by contrast, might appear quiet and safe, even boring.

Trump called Biden “the most boring human being I’ve ever seen”, and Americans seem to be just fine with that.

Biden’s early choices for his cabinet and senior staff fit the same mold – “boring picks”, tweeted the Atlantic’s Graeme Wood (referring to Biden’s foreign policy team), “who, if you shook them awake and appointed them in the middle of the night at any time in the last decade, could have reported to their new jobs and started work competently by dawn”. Hallelujah.

All his designees, including Janet Yellen for Treasury and Anthony Blinken for secretary of state, are experienced and competent – refreshing, especially after Trump’s goon squads. And they’re acceptable both to mainstream Democrats and to progressives.

They also stand out for their abilities not to stand out. There is no firebrand among them, no Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders (at least not so far).

For the same reasons, they’re unlikely to stir strong opposition from Republicans, a necessity for Senate confirmation, particularly if Democrats fail to win the two Senate runoffs in Georgia on 5 January.

And they’re unlikely to demand much attention from an exhausted and divided public.

Boring, reassuring, normal – these are Biden’s great strengths. But he needs to be careful. They could also be his great weaknesses.

That’s because any return to “normal” would be disastrous for America.

Normal led to Trump. Normal led to the coronavirus.

Normal is four decades of stagnant wages and widening inequality when almost all economic gains went to the top. Normal is 40 years of shredded safety nets, and the most expensive but least adequate healthcare system in the modern world.

Normal is also growing corruption of politics by big money – an economic system rigged by and for the wealthy.

Normal is worsening police brutality.

Normal is climate change now verging on catastrophe.

Normal is a GOP that for years has been actively suppressing minority votes and embracing white supremacists. Normal is a Democratic party that for years has been abandoning the working class.

Given the road we were on, Trump and Covid were not aberrations. They were inevitabilities. The moment we are now in – with Trump virtually gone, Biden assembling his cabinet, and most of the nation starting to feel a bit of relief – is a temporary reprieve.

If the underlying trends don’t change, after Biden we could have Trumps as far as the eye can see. And health and environmental crises that make the coronavirus another step toward Armageddon.

Hence the paradox. America wants to return to a reassuring normal, but Biden can’t allow it. Complacency would be deadly. He has to both calm the waters and stir the pot.

It’s a mistake to see this challenge as placating the progressive wing of the Democratic party. It’s about dealing with problems that have worsened for decades and if left unattended much longer will be enormously destructive.

So the question is: in an exhausted and divided America that desperately wants a return to normal, where will Biden find the energy and political will for bold changes that are imperative?

 

Instead of working on COVID-19 pandemic, Trump's HHS is laying landmines for Biden

They're all monsters.

Joan McCarter for Daily Kos

Daily Kos Staff

Monday November 30, 2020 · 1:45 PM MST

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For a bunch of incompetents when it comes to actual governing, the Trump administration has been remarkably creative and effective when it comes to destruction. It's like they've trawled through every aspect of every department looking for fires to set, policies to dismantle—or enact—to cause the most damage possible. If anything, Trump's loss has made them even more determined to just blow it all to smithereens and to make things as difficult and screwed up for the incoming Biden administration as possible. If it can needlessly harm a maximum of people, it's even better.

Take, for example, a new proposed rule Health and Human Services (HHS) is rushing to finalize that would force HHS staff—under Biden—to assess almost every HHS regulation and determine whether it should be continued, amended, or rescinded. If the assessment doesn't happen, the regulations automatically expire. Which is why they call it “Securing Updated and Necessary Statutory Evaluations Timely” (SUNSET). What this would do in practical terms is pull legions of staff from running Medicare and Medicaid and Obamacare and all the other programs—in the middle of a pandemic when there are real emergencies.

It's probably no accident that they're trying to promulgate this rule exactly 10 years after the Affordable Care Act, with its raft of regulations, was enacted. Because the automatic expiration happens at 10 years unless the assessment is done. HHS estimates that in the first two years it would have to assess more than 2,400 rules at a cost of $26 million over 10 years. It would require 90 full-time staff to complete. And, as Jessica Schubel at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities argues, it would "distract the Biden Administration from critically important priorities that it must address, especially COVID-19. It would disrupt work on program operations and force the Administration to delay adopting its health care priorities because it needed to redirect staff to review existing regulations."

The work would have to be done because the regulations in question are governing how programs like Medicaid, for example, work and how states implement and run their programs. It’s an asinine rule meant to do nothing but sabotage the Biden administration. It's not even remotely necessary because the department already has review processes in place, processes that would be disrupted for regulations that need to be considered because staff would be pulled off doing unrelated and unnecessary reviews.

Just for example, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issues hundreds of regulations every year. Biopharma trade publication Biocentury spoke with a former senior FDA official who said that complying with the rule would "paralyze" the FDA. Coleen Klasmeier, formerly an attorney in the FDA's Office of the Chief Counsel, blasted the administration for making the announcement the very day after the election, with Trump refusing to concede. "First, it takes a particularly generous amount of tone deafness to do this today," she told Biocentury. "Second, it will paradoxically increase regulatory complexity and disrupt settled expectations with uncertain benefits for small entities. Third, it would harm the public health for regulations to automatically sunset, which seems likely given the burdens associated with performing the review."

HHS Chief of Staff Brian Harrison was clear about why they pushed this. "The reason we're doing this now is because we at the department are trying to go as fast as we can in hopes of finalizing the rule before the end of [Trump’s] first term." In terms of fucking absolutely everything up, it was a win-win for Team Trump. They could either upend basically the entire healthcare system (when the Supreme Court seems unlikely to choose to do so by tossing Obamacare) under Trump, or make one more mess for Biden to have to untangle in his first weeks in office.

Instead of actually working on the coronavirus pandemic, this is what Trump's HHS team is spending time and energy on: cooking up more bombs. Hopefully there are enough career officials in the government to slow walk this and prevent it from becoming final.

If a horse's ass is an insult, what's an elephant's ass?  A Republican who kisses Trump's ass.!