Well we didn’t mean that…

Leaders from the Republican Attorneys General Association face mounting criticism after sending out a robocall that urged supporters of Donald Trump to join the 6 January march on the US Capitol that resulted in a deadly insurrection.

We thought it was going to be a protest! Not an insurrection! Please don’t impeach us.

“At [1pm”] we will march to the Capitol building and call on Congress to stop the steal,” a robocall from the Rule of Law Defense Fund (RLDF), a fundraising arm of the Republican Attorneys General Association, said.

Spot the irony? Good old rule of law, eh? Defend rule of law by forcing your way into the Capitol in hopes of killing … Read the rest

The arrests are up to 20.

Twenty federal criminal defendants related to last week’s deadly pro-Trump riot at the US Capitol have been rounded up across the country since the insurrection, with the allegations showing the danger of the mob.

Some of the defendants are accused of bringing weapons and bombs to Capitol Hill, indicative of the extremism of parts of the crowd. Others were photographed ransacking the building, smiling while posing with congressional items such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s lectern or at her staffer’s desk, or publicly bragged about the crowd’s violent and destructive joyride.

The most unsettling of the allegations so far appear to be those against Lonnie Coffman, an Alabama man charged after authorities found

… Read the rest

Trump is feeling defiant. It’s all good! Nobody can touch him! He’s going to go on a farewell tour to brag about his “accomplishments.”

Trump is confident Vice President Mike Pence and members of his cabinet won’t attempt to remove him under the 25th Amendment, the people said. Pence is dismissive of the idea of trying to use that authority to drive Trump from office, one person said.

The president and some allies also believe Democrats are overreaching by trying to once again impeach him over Wednesday’s mob at the Capitol, and think Senate conviction would be unlikely in any event.

Oh yes, overreaching, it’s shocking isn’t it, so unlike Trump’s sending his fans to make war on Congress.… Read the rest

A former governor of California, a Republican, says what he thinks of the attempted insurrection or coup the other day.

He grew up in Austria in the wake of WW2. He knows what Kristallnacht was.

It’s surprisingly powerful.

[Updating to add: I forgot to warn about the music. I did mean to. It’s very annoying.]

My message to my fellow Americans and friends around the world following this week's attack on the Capitol. pic.twitter.com/blOy35LWJ5

— Arnold (@Schwarzenegger) January 10, 2021

… Read the rest

https://twitter.com/i/status/1348343347522408449… Read the rest

Foreign Policy posted an interesting conversation during the insurrection, about what exactly the name for it should be.

Naunihal Singh: This is not a military coup because that would involve the president using the military or the Secret Service or some armed branch of the government to get his way. Nor would I argue that it is what some people have called a civilian coup or an executive coup. Even autogolpes involve the threat of military force.

In a sense he was using them if he had arranged for them to do nothing.

…

JT: Let’s talk about that for a second. What we did have is the president inciting protesters, who then went to the Capitol to interfere

… Read the rest

Jim Wright aka Stonekettle:

Now that Allied Forces have once again taken Washington, everyone is ashamed of being a Nazi.

I told you.

I did. I told you.

2021 gonna be the year of Republican redemption arcs. Why, I, um, I never liked that guy anyway! It’s true! No, really, I was, uh, RESISTING FROM INSIDE, yeah! That’s it, resisting from inside. Uh, uh, Defund the Police! Yeah! I’m one of you! <takes a knee

We’ll call it The General John F. Kelly Defense

Kelly was mouthing off on MSNBC the other night, as if he were some kind of resistance hero. It’s enough to make you puke.… Read the rest

At least Trump is miserable.

The president is “ballistic,” a senior administration official said after Twitter permanently took down his account, citing the possibility that it would be used in the final 12 days of Trump’s presidency to incite violence. The official said Trump was “scrambling to figure out what his options are.”

There aren’t any. I said this yesterday so sorry for the repetition, but there aren’t any. He can create his own platform blah blah but it won’t be Twitter, and neither will anything else. Parler isn’t Twitter, and if Trump started a new Twitter called Tritter or Ditter it still wouldn’t be Twitter.

In a statement issued by the White House, Trump said he’d been “negotiating

… Read the rest

Politico reports that the Pentagon says it did everything right so shut up.

One obvious complication here is that Trump stuffed a lot of his people into the Pentagon in preparation for the coup so it could be Trump’s people now saying don’t be silly of course we didn’t help the coup attempt.

But Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy and other top officials noted that in the days leading up to Wednesday, federal and D.C. law enforcement officials requested only 340 unarmed DoD personnel to do specific missions, primarily traffic and crowd control… At the time, officials had a wide range of estimates for the size of the crowds that would descend on Washington for Wednesday’s procedural vote to certify President-elect

… Read the rest

This is chilling.

https://twitter.com/themaxburns/status/1348035751825592325

It was the Trump people who refused to send in the National Guard. Somehow I didn’t realize that. You’d think the “National” part would be a clue, but I missed it.

https://twitter.com/themaxburns/status/1348037946981679109

Oy. I didn’t know that either.

God damn.… Read the rest

Military honor yadda yadda. Ronan Farrow reports:

As insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol this week, a few figures stood out. One man, clad in a combat helmet, body armor, and other tactical gear, was among the group that made it to the inner reaches of the building. Carrying zip-tie handcuffs, he was captured in photographs and videos on the Senate floor and with a group that descended on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office suite…

…A day after the riots, John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, at the University of Toronto’s Munk School, notified the F.B.I. that he suspected the man was retired Lieutenant Colonel Larry Rendall Brock, Jr., a Texas-based Air Force Academy graduate and combat veteran.

A … Read the rest

“Oh,” they cry, “hey gee guess what, it turns out he really is a fascist.”

Of course he really is a fascist. What do you think fascists are? Magic beings with golden horns, and plutonium hair, and the ability to walk on the ceiling? Fascists aren’t special, they’re just fascist. They’re just power-mad and violent and nationalistic and racist and brutal. A dribbling moron like Trump can be one, easily.

On Friday afternoon, 48 hours after the U.S. Capitol was stormed by violent insurrectionists encouraged by Donald Trump in an attempt to overthrow the government in protest of his election loss, a senior member of his administration spoke to me while he was driving to work.

“This is

… Read the rest

pic.twitter.com/2VOjppqkdi

— BlueChairss (@BChairss) January 9, 2021

H/t KBPlayer… Read the rest

More arrests.

On Friday, the Department of Justice (DoJ) announced charges against a man accused of bringing guns and molotov cocktails to Washington. Another was reported to have had an assault rifle and ammunition and told friends he planned to shoot Pelosi, the House speaker, or run her over.

In a Saturday lunchtime statement, the US attorney’s office for District of Columbia announced the arrest and charging of three suspects, among them Jacob Anthony Chansley of Arizona, who also goes by the name of Jake Angeli and who was photographed in horned headwear and dressed in fur pelts, in Vice-President Mike Pence’s seat in the Senate chamber.

The 33-year-old self-styled “QAnon shaman”, “entered the Capitol building dressed

… Read the rest

Oh good, they found this guy. I wanted to see his ass busted.

A man photographed lounging with his foot on the desk in House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office in Washington as part of a pro-Trump mob that breached security and rampaged through the US Capitol was arrested on Friday.

“Foot” is kind of euphemistic for it.

Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

That’s not just a foot, it’s a big heavy hard boot, it’s Orwell’s boot stamping on a human face forever. That’s a man brandishing his boot in the office of a powerful woman. That photo conveys so many messages it would take hours to list them all.

Richard Barnett, 60, of Gravette, Arkansas, was taken into custody in that

… Read the rest

More medium-size rodents fleeing the sinking gangster:

Donald Trump’s grip on the US presidency appeared increasingly tenuous on Saturday as Democrats advanced plans to impeach him for a second time, political allies continued to abandon him, and Twitter banned his account, removing his most powerful way to spread lies and incite violence.

Adding to the pressure in the aftermath of Wednesday’s deadly riot in the US Capitol building by Trump supporters, one Republican senator, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, openly called for the president’s removal.

“I want him to resign. I want him out. He has caused enough damage,” she said, punctuating the wave of disgust that followed Trump’s goading of a mob seeking to overturn his election defeat by

… Read the rest

Loser Don tried to get around his banishment from Twitter by using the official POTUS account, but he failed because oddly enough Twitter understands that Trump tweeting as POTUS is still Trump, and they zapped the tweets immediately.

This is built in. Loser D can of course use another outlet, or perhaps use another IP address to set up a new Twitter account, but he can’t do it as himself, because Twitter won’t let him, and doing it as someone else is no use to him. He already has plenty of slavish someone elses who will praise him from now until the earth falls into the sun, and what he wants is to speak in his own glorious albeit … Read the rest

They watched it.

Correction: this is the pre-speech warm up team.

https://twitter.com/edi_samira/status/1347176030495272960… Read the rest

Twitter finally did it.

Twitter permanently suspended President Donald Trump’s account on Friday, citing “the risk of further incitement of violence.”

Not to mention further lies and abuse and bullying.

The company banned the president’s account after years of public pressure and several attempts to limit the reach of his account in recent days. Hundreds of Twitter employees signed a letter urging Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to ban the president for using the platform to incite violence in the wake of the Capitol siege.

“In the context of horrific events this week, we made it clear on Wednesday that additional violations of the Twitter Rules would potentially result in this very course of action,” Twitter said in a

… Read the rest

They said no thanks.

According to the Associated Press, the Capitol Police knew about the potential threat of the riot days before it took place, but rejected offers of help from the National Guard and the FBI. Officials said that they wanted to avoid using federal force against Americans, as they had done this summer.

Uh………………………….

So when it’s Black Lives Matter, it’s deadly force time, but when it’s pasty-faced fascists, it’s hello nice to see you please don’t steal anything worth more than $5000.

The choice to turn down help amid warnings of an insurrection is as revealing as it is disturbing: Why did law enforcement assume that they’d encounter violence from protesters marching for Black lives in

… Read the rest