Queen Melania has issued a disgusting “statement” on official White House stationery.

With nearly every experience I have had, I found myself carrying many individual’s [sic] stories home with me in my heart.

Most recently, my heart goes out to: Air Force Veteran, Ashli Babbitt, Benjamin Philips, Kevin Greeson, Roseanne Boyland, and Capitol Police Officers, Brian Sicknick and Howard Liebengood. I pray for their families comfort and strength during this difficult time.

Her “heart goes out” to, first of all, the ex-military woman who tried to climb through the broken window of the door barring entry to the House floor. Legislators were crouched or prone on the floor of that chamber, hoping not to be slaughtered by people like Ashli Babbitt. Queen Melania puts her first and the two Capitol cops last. Last.

But never mind that, because it gets even worse. The very next paragraph reveals that actually it’s all about her.

I am disappointed and disheartened with what happened last week. I find it shameful that surrounding these tragic events there has been salacious gossip, unwarranted personal attacks, and false misleading accusations on me – from people who are looking to be relevant and have an agenda. This time is solely about healing our country and its citizens. It should not be used for personal gain.

She says, using it for personal whine.

Told you it was disgusting.

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 all the Democrats. Sic semper tyrannis amirite?

The voice then said: “We are hoping patriots like you will join us to continue the fight to protect the integrity of our election.”

Patriots=Republicans. Democrats are Unpatriots, so we have to execute them all.

Also, this collective of Republican Attorneys General was claiming the election was stolen, on the basis of zero evidence that it was and a lot of evidence that it wasn’t. Not something you want prosecutors doing, to put it mildly.

They’re now saying they knew nothing about it, they were busy tidying their desks, please go away.

The Democratic Attorneys General Associationhas rejected the Republican defense, releasing a statement highlighting Republican leaders who they say incited the violence by taking up the president’s long-debunked claims of election fraud.

…

The Democratic attorneys general also said that the Republican association’s “former chair spoke at the rally that incited the mob,”pinpointing Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, and that “former [Missouri attorney general] Josh Hawley led the effort in Congress to undermine the election”.

Rule of law, people, rule of law.

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 11 homemade bombs, an assault rifle and a handgun in his truck parked two blocks from the Capitol. The truck had sat there all morning during the pro-Trump rally, and Coffman was arrested as he tried to return to the vehicle after dusk.

Another guy allegedly sent text messages saying he wanted to shoot Pelosi, and brought hundreds of rounds of ammunition and three guns to DC from Colorado. That’s a hefty drive.

On Sunday night, authorities arrested two more men, Eric Munchel of Tennessee and Larry Rendell Brock of Texas. Both had drawn attention online because of photos showing them wearing body armor inside the Capitol building and carrying plastic ties that could restrain a person.

Brock is the ex-military one.

As new details emerge, it has become obvious that lawmakers faced more imminent danger than was understood as the attack unfolded on live television.

As in lots of the insurrectionists really did intend to murder those lawmakers and did have the means to do so.

The top federal prosecutor in Washington, DC, Michael Sherwin, said he expected hundreds of people could be charged in the aftermath of the attack, and investigations may take months to understand it fully.

“I would not be surprised if we find loose affiliations of groups that were organized and had plans in place,” Sherwin said Sunday. “We saw in some of these individuals we identified — they look paramilitary almost, right? You’ve got the uniform, you’ve got communication, you have all the paraphernalia. Those show indications of affiliation and a command-and-control. So I believe we are going to find those hallmarks.”

This wasn’t a protest that spiraled out of control. Many in that mob were not playing.

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.

Trump plans to run out the clock on his four years in office by highlighting what he believes are his biggest accomplishments, including the barrier his administration built on at least part of the U.S. border with Mexico. A trip to Alamo, Texas, near the border is expected on Tuesday, a White House spokesman said.

It will turn out to be an Alamo Rent a Car in Amarillo.

In sum, it’s a last-ditch attempt to rehabilitate Trump’s legacy after his supporters stormed the Capitol on Wednesday, resulting in five deaths including that of a Capitol Police officer.

Should be a doddle. Just flap the hands, point the finger, make the pinch gesture, stick the lips out, snap the head back and forth, and there’s the legacy, rehabilitated.

A small group of House Republicans wrote to Joe Biden on Saturday, pleading with him to persuade Speaker Nancy Pelosi to back off impeachment as an olive branch in the interest of national unity.

That takes some monumental gall. How about they offer the olive branch for a change? By, for instance, impeaching and removing Trump? Why is it up to the god damn victims of a god damn murderous attack to offer it?

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.]

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 with a constitutionally established process to democratically transfer power to his successor. What should we call that?

NS: I’m not a lawyer, but we have to look and see whether it satisfies the requirements of sedition—and if the shoe fits, we should call it that. This is a violation both of principles and of law, being incited deliberately.

I get why people call it a coup: It’s because they want to say it’s an illegitimate power grab. The problem is that then they end up looking at the military as the actors who are engaged in this power grab. Whereas, in fact, what you have is Trump and all the people who are enabling Trump.

Some of whom are in the military or in charge of the military. In this instance doing nothing was doing something. It’s not clear, at least to me, how systematic all this was, but if military brass did stand by because Trump told them to, I call that the military doing something.

I see they got there too.

JT: Does it change the equation or the terminology if, for example, the stories about the civilian leadership of the Defense Department initially refusing to help the D.C. police are confirmed?

NS: Maybe, yes. If, in fact, what we are seeing here is not just an unwillingness to adequately police but a tacit cooperation with the protesters, then yes.

Ok then.

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.

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 with various other sites” while “we also look at the possibilities of building out our own platform in the near future.” But aides did not reveal what plans were in the works. When Trump’s eldest son, Don Jr. offered up a URL to those hoping to keep tabs of his father’s whereabouts, it was a site that had been purchased in 2009 and, in recent years, a place where his books were sold. For those who did sign up, an email was sent, plugging his latest work: “Liberal Privilege”.

“As you know, the election is coming up,” it read, of the contest that took place two months ago.

What I’m saying. Of course they can do that, but they can’t duplicate Twitter. They especially can’t duplicate Twitter in the next ten days, and after that, however hard he works to generate new headlines, Trump is not going to have the platform he’s had for the past almost 4 years. It’s over, Don. You’ve got a one-way ticket to Palookaville.

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 Joe Biden’s win, from 2,000 to 80,000 people, McCarthy said. In an earlier press conference, he said the idea of rioters storming the Capitol wasn’t in his “wildest imagination.”

Well why not? I wasn’t expecting it either but it’s not my job to keep track of security threats, but it is his job. Word is the planning was visible all over social media, and surely it is someone’s job to pay attention to coup-planning and pass the information on to people responsible for security. They certainly seemed to expect, or to be eager to pretend to expect, massive violence and insurrection last summer when it was protests against racism and police violence, so why not now when it’s literal plans to overturn an election by force? WHY NOT NOW? Why wasn’t it in Ryan’s wildest imagination that people who were publicly planning to storm the Capitol would do just that?

Despite widespread social media activity that suggested the protests might be violent, federal and local officials believed they had sufficient personnel to handle the situation, said chief Pentagon spokesperson Jonathan Hoffman, noting that the Pentagon does not conduct domestic intelligence collection.

Ok but does the Pentagon listen to people who do conduct domestic intelligence collection? Pentagon people were there for Trump’s violent clearance of Lafayette Park and march to the church, so what was different about this recent march and insurrection?

The Justice Department and other law enforcement told the Pentagon repeatedly that they had no indications that there would be “significant violent protests,” said Ken Rapuano, the assistant secretary of defense for homeland security.

If that’s true then the people who told the Pentagon that were in on the plot. The “indications” were out there in public, including Trump’s tweets.

Once the protests turned violent and it became clear the Capitol Police would need backup, Miller moved to approve Bowser’s request for additional D.C. Guardsmen, and later authorized thousands more personnel from six states to help civil authorities maintain order in the city, the officials said.

Why later? Why not instantly?

Army officials initially expressed concern about the request, because part of the original agreement was to keep Guardsmen away from the Capitol on Wednesday, a defense official said. Officials have messaged for weeks that the military will have no role in determining the outcome of the election.

Yeaaaah I don’t think that’s supposed to mean “the military will stand by and watch placidly as armed fascists seize the Capitol and murder half the Congress.”

Top Pentagon leaders were criticized this summer when National Guardsmen helped clear Lafayette Square of peaceful protesters in order for Trump to stage a photo op in front of a church holding a Bible.

You couldn’t make it up. In the summer Trump staged a fascist military suppression of peaceful protest and the people cried foul, so in the winter Trump staged a violent coup to wipe out the Democratic half of Congress and hand the election to himself and the military watched it on tv.

This is chilling.

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.

Oy. I didn’t know that either.

God damn.

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 patriot, storming the US Congress. What would unpatriotic look like?

Two family members and a longtime friend said that Brock’s political views had grown increasingly radical in recent years. Bill Leake, who flew with Brock in the Air Force for a decade, said that he had distanced himself from Brock. “I don’t contact him anymore ’cause he’s gotten extreme,” Leake told me. In recent years, Brock had become an increasingly committed supporter of Donald Trump, frequently wearing a Make America Great Again hat. In the days leading up to the siege of the Capitol, Brock had posted to social media about his plans to travel to Washington, D.C., to participate in Trump’s “Save America” rally. Brock’s family members said that he called himself a patriot, and that his expressions of that identity had become increasingly strident. One recalled “weird rage talk, basically, saying he’s willing to get in trouble to defend what he thinks is right, which is Trump being the President, I guess.” Both family members said that Brock had made racist remarks in their presence and that they believed white-supremacist views may have contributed to his motivations.

Farrow talked to him, and he told a touching story about going there for patriotic reasons, and thinking he was welcome to go into the Capitol (which I think does apply to some public areas at some times, but probably not so much when there are barriers in place and there’s a riot happening and the cops are trying to push back, and which I’m quite sure doesn’t apply to the floor of the House or Senate or to legislators’ offices without an appointment or invitation).

Legal experts said that people who breached the Capitol could face a range of criminal charges, from disorderly conduct to seditious conspiracy. “Presumably this person broke into Congress in order to stop or intimidate or interfere with the counting of the Electoral College certification, a fundamental feature of the peaceful transition of power in the United States,” Alan Rozenshtein, a professor of law at the University of Minnesota, said.

Well, yes, that’s what he went there for, but aren’t we welcome to do that? Or no?

Brock’s family members and his friend said that his service in the Air Force was central to his identity. Several of Brock’s e-mail addresses and social-media accounts featured his call sign and military nickname, Torch. One family member said that Brock derived “this weird sense of power” from his time as a military pilot, along with a Manichean world view. “He used to tell me that I only saw the world in shades of gray, and that the world was black and white,” the other family member said. 

The military can instill some fine qualities in people, or…it can do the other thing.

“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 confirmation of so much that everyone has said for years now — things that a lot of us thought were hyperbolic. We’d say, ‘Trump’s not a fascist,’ or ‘He’s not a wannabe dictator.’ Now, it’s like, ‘Well, what do you even say in response to that now?’”

Yes but it’s not just now that it’s like that, it was like that all along. We’ve been saying it all along because it’s true.

All this time, Olivia Nuzzi writes, Trump’s people have been telling themselves it was all worth it to get the reactionary judges and the reduced taxes, but now at the last possible second they realize he actually is as bad as we always said he is.

Granted, his actions on Wednesday were a big step up the Staircase to Evil, but they’re still very recognizably trumpy. They didn’t come out of nowhere.

“I went through Access Hollywood, Charlottesville — all of these insane things. There’s some degree of growing accustomed to the craziness. It’s not like my heart is racing, like, Oh God, how am I supposed to react to this? It’s just more that I’m depressed. For people who devoted years of their lives to dealing with the insanity in an attempt to advance a policy agenda that you believe in, all of that has been wiped out. The legacy of the Trump administration is going to be that the president sparked an insurrection and people died because he tried his best to not abide by the Constitution and the tradition of a peaceful transition of power that’s been the norm since our founding. Nothing else is even going to be a side note.”

Since the “policy agenda” is about making the rich even richer, and the environment even more destroyed, and women even more prisoners of their biology, I have zero sympathy, along with the zero respect for not figuring that out until 12 days before the end. The previous 1413 days didn’t do it, huh?

Trump’s inner circle has contracted amid the self-created chaos and carnage. For this reason, resignations have not had much of an effect on him directly. “He may not even notice,” one adviser said. “People aren’t around to begin with. There aren’t policy meetings with the president and eight or ten people in there anymore.”

So it’s basically all watching tv and just the occasional attempt to overthrow the government?

I tell you what though, they’ve had it with that Mark Meadows guy. It turns out he’s not nice at all.

Advisers have expressed concern and anger over Mark Meadows, the chief of staff, whose actions have been perceived as an effort to secure employment with Trump in his post-presidency, perhaps at the Trump Organization. “Jared has been telling people, ‘Don’t even deal with him anymore,’” one adviser said. “Mark’s responsible for bringing kook after crazy after conniver after Rudy into the West Wing.” (“This is completely false,” Avi Berkowitz, Jared Kushner’s spokesman, said in a tweet responding to this article, “Jared has never said that.”)A former senior White House official said, “Morale plummeted under him, huge mistakes were made — and now he’s scrambling to stick around after. He’s a dishonest asshole who pretends to be this religious Southern gentleman. Fuck that.”

Honey that’s all of them. Look around you. These are not good people. You’re not good people.

“The smart lawyers have gotten to him. It’s all hit him since yesterday: You may have legal exposure from yesterday. You definitely have legal exposure from other things. You have less than two weeks to remain ensconced in here with executive privilege.” 

Duh. Maybe it wasn’t such a hot idea to commit all those crimes in plain sight just before you got yanked out of there.

This adviser, who spoke to Trump on Wednesday amid the siege, said Trump watched the events on television intently. CNN reported that he was so excited by the action, it “freaked out” some staffers around him. The adviser told me that Trump expressed disgust on aesthetic grounds over how “low class” his supporters looked. “He doesn’t like low-class things,” the adviser said, explaining that Trump had a similar reaction over the summer to a video of Brad Parscale, his former campaign manager, shirtless and drinking a beer in his driveway during a mental-health emergency in which police tackled him and seized his weapons. “He kept mentioning, ‘Oh, did you see him in his beer shirt?’ He was annoyed. To him, it’s just low class, in other words.”

Yes that’s the important thing. They weren’t carrying the elegant, expensive, Fifth Avenue guns and tasers and Confederate flags.

H/t KBPlayer

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 in horns, a bearskin headdress, red, white and blue face paint, shirtless, and tan pants”, the statement said.

“This individual carried a spear, approximately 6ft in length, with an American flag tied just below the blade,” the attorney’s office said, adding that he was taken into custody on Saturday and charged with “knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority, and with violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds”.

Aw, he was just there to have fun. Wasn’t he?

The man seen carrying the speaker’s lectern, Adam Christian Johnson, 36, was booked into Florida’s Pinellas county jail on Friday night on a federal warrant.

On Saturday he was charged with “entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority; one count of theft of government property; and one count of violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds”, prosecutors said. Johnson is expected to be extradited to the capital for a court appearance this week.

Johnson, the US attorney’s office said, “illegally entered the United States Capitol and removed the Speaker of the House’s lectern from where it had been stored on the House side of the Capitol building. A search of open sources led law enforcement to Johnson, who is allegedly seen in a widely circulated photo inside the Capitol carrying the lectern.”

The lectern is still missing.

On Friday the DoJ said one Capitol attacker, Lonnie Leroy Coffman, 70 and from Alabama, was alleged to have had in his vehicle “one black handgun, one M4 Carbine assault rifle along with rifle magazines loaded with ammunition, and components for the construction of 11 ‘Molotov cocktails’ in the form of mason jars filled with ignitable substances, rags, and lighters”.

A statement said: “Coffman was [also] found to have on his person a 9mm Smith & Wesson handgun [and] a 22-caliber derringer style handgun.

“… Coffman told officers that the mason jars contained melted Styrofoam and gasoline. [The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] advised that the combination of melted Styrofoam and gasoline is an explosive mixture that has the effect of napalm because, when detonated, the substance causes the flammable liquid to better stick to objects that it hits.”

Oh that’s nice. He was hoping to do that to people.

Citing court documents, CNN reported that another attacker, Cleveland Grover Meredith Jr, was alleged to have sent texts in which he said he had “a shit ton of … armour-piercing ammo” and wanted to “[put] a bullet in [Pelosi’s] noggin on Live TV”. He also reportedly said he had considered running Pelosi over.

FBI agents who searched Meredith’s truck and trailer reportedly found a Glock 19, a 9mm pistol and an assault rifle and “approximately hundreds of rounds of ammunition”.

How democracies die.

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.

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 state and, along with the West Virginia state representative Derrick Evans, who was also arrested, faces federal charges stemming from the siege of the Capitol on Wednesday, federal prosecutors said.

Barnett was arrested on federal charges of entering and remaining on restricted grounds, violent entry and theft of public property, according to a Department of Justice official, NBC reported.

…

The FBI has issued appeals for the public’s help in identifying those who took part in the riot, who face arrest and court.

“Just because you’ve left the DC region, you can still expect a knock on the door if we find out you were part of the criminal activity at the Capitol,” said Steven D’Antuono, the FBI Washington field office’s assistant director in charge, at a telephone news briefing on Friday.

That is, just because you’ve left that doesn’t mean you won’t hear from us, or even though you’ve left you’ll still hear from us.

Barnett shared his thoughts with the New York Times that day.

Barnett recounted stealing an envelope from the Democratic House speaker’s desk.

“I didn’t steal it,” Barnett told the reporter. “I put a quarter [25c] on her desk, even though she ain’t fucking worth it, and I left her a note on her desk that says, ‘Nancy, Bigo [his nickname] was here, you bitch.’”

And here he is saying it.

Barnett leads a pro-gun rights group in Arkansas and according to the Washington Post had identified as a white nationalist in a Facebook post days before the riot took place.

He also hates women.

Derrick Evans, a newly elected Republican member of the West Virginia house of delegates, part of the state legislature, was taken into federal custody, with a reporter for the local NBC affiliate WSAZ sharing a video of the event.

On Wednesday, Evans reportedly filmed himself storming the Capitol, shouting: “We’re in! Keep it moving, baby!”

“Reportedly” plus here’s the video.

Representing West Virginia.

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 Joe Biden.

And in this context “seeking to overturn his election defeat” means “seeking to overthrow the government.”

Five people died, including a police officer who confronted rioters and a rioter shot by law enforcement. Multiple arrests have been made, among them a Florida resident photographed walking off with the lectern of the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi.

The US attorney’s office said a 70-year-old Alabama man was charged with possession of molotov cocktails and assault weapons after his pickup truck was discovered packed with homemade bombs and guns.

This isn’t some after-school prank. This is enraged white supremacists trying to disable the legislature and install a dictator.

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 vocabulary-deprived voice. He can’t do that on Twitter any more, not nohow.

President Donald Trump continued tweeting Friday evening using the government-owned @POTUS account, despite having his @realDonaldTrump account permanently suspended by Twitter earlier in the day.

“As I have been saying for a long time, Twitter has gone further and further in banning free speech, and tonight, Twitter employees have coordinated with the Democrats and Radical Left in removing my account from their platform, to silence me,” Trump wrote in a series of tweets that are no longer visible on the social media service.

The tweets were removed from the service almost immediately. It’s unclear what steps Twitter took in the handling of the @POTUS account.

The last sad cry of a broken psychopath.

They watched it.

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

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 blog post. “Our public interest framework exists to enable the public to hear from elected officials and world leaders directly. It is built on a principle that the people have a right to hold power to account in the open.”

But when the power in question is a psychopath that doesn’t work.

In the post, the company cited Trump’s two most recent tweets as an explanation for the removal.

In one, Trump wrote: “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”

In the next, he tweeted, “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”

Taken together, the company determined, they were “likely to inspire others to replicate the violent acts that took place on January 6, 2021, and that there are multiple indicators that they are being received and understood as encouragement to do so.”

It seems like a no-brainer, but the evil people are doing what they do.

“Disgusting. Big Tech wants to cancel all 75M @realDonaldTrump supporters,” tweeted Jason Miller, a senior advisor to Trump’s 2020 campaign.

Nikki Haley, the former ambassador to the United Nations, tweeted: “Silencing people, not to mention the President of the US, is what happens in China not our country. #Unbelievable”

And armed insurrectionist attacking the heart of government is what happens in Belarus and our country.

Updating to add: