Gladsome tidings!

Could it be…is it possible that QAnon is imploding? Q went silent after the election (and his predictions failed), one of the top administrators at 8kun resigned, and the mob of True Believers is dismayed.

Trump’s loss plunged many Q believers into a crisis of faith. “It’s hard to keep the faith when your wife and daughters have left you and we didn’t get the decisive MOAB [mother of all bombs] win we deserved on election night!!” one representative post on a Q forum read.

Some posts, potentially from trolls, in Q’s home subforum on 8kun this week insisted that the poster had died by suicide.

Other movements on the scene suggested at least one high-profile Q influencer was priming to pull the plug on QAnon—and blame 8kun in the process. NeonRevolt, a pro-Q blogger and author of a book on the topic, shared a “blind item” days after the election, alleging that Q’s 8kun account might have been compromised.

Well, yes, it is difficult to maintain your enthusiasm when you’ve ripped your family apart and discover that all the prophecies of your cult flopped. Unfortunately, that just leaves the QAnon cultists desperate for a rationalization to validate their awful decisions, so that kind of catastrophe never ends the belief, it just squeezes it out into another, equally disastrous body of life-ruining fantasies, as we’ve seen in every doomsday cult that’s ever existed.

Just wait for the emergence of “R” (oh, wait, that cult already exists — S, then). Also expect schisms. It’s going to be fun, but not for the faithful.

Tommy Tuberville needs some remedial civics lessons

Are you smarter than an Alabama football coach? Here’s one who just got elected to the senate. Let’s see if you can spot the errors here.

I wonder if my European readers will see what’s wrong with this story.

Then he accidentally erased the Supreme Court and the entire judiciary, which may not be such a bad thing.

Maybe we need some kind of qualifying exam before you can run for office.

Hope for the Democrats?

Our local blue dog Democrat, Collin Peterson, lost to yet another incompetent, unqualified Republican. It granted another seat to the Republican party in congress, which sounds like a bad thing…except that it should also help unify the Democrats, disposing of a discordant regressive voice from their ranks. Here’s an interesting analysis.

The Journal editors assert that these losses– including other reactionary Blue Dogs and New Dems from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party “will reduce Mrs. Pelosi’s legislative running room and perhaps test her party control. Her strategy of refusing to compromise on a Covid-19 relief bill may have cost seats, and now she’ll have a harder time getting a blue-state and union bailout through the Senate. If Mr. Biden wins, the GOP will be better poised to retake the House in 2022.” Or maybe the exact opposite. Losses of fake Democratic careerists like Brindisi, Kendra Horn (OK), Xochitl Torres Small (NM), Max Rose (NY), Joe Cunningham (SC), Abby Finkenauer (IA), Collin Peterson (MN)– as well as for virtually all the Blue Dog and New Dem candidates the DCCC and House Majority PAC wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on– will allow the Democrats to better define themselves, if they choose to, as a vehicle for the legitimate interests of working families, rather than as the other party of corporate whores.

The losses allow the Democrats to better define themselves, if the leadership chooses to. Somehow, I don’t see Pelosi/Schumer taking any steps in the right direction. They won’t see that conservative Democratic candidates are losers.

Another thing the more conservative leadership would like to do is pretend the Green New Deal and other progressive social policies were a recipe for disaster. They weren’t. They’re our path to victory.

The fight over the role of progressives in sinking (or not) Democrats’ chance at a robust unified government began late last week in a call leaked to Politico. On that call, Rep. Abigail Spanberger claimed she almost lost her race in Virginia because she was accused of wanting to defund the police (she does not). House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn reportedly said, “we are going to run on Medicare for All, defund the police, socialized medicine, we’re not going to win.” That’s led some progressives to push back; notably, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who pointed out every co-sponsor of Medicare for All won reelection and that Democrats are still running like its 2000 instead of 2020.

Earther looked at the Green New Deal, another bête noire of conservatives and Fox News, to see if it sank Democrats chances. The bill has 101 co-sponsors in the House and 14 co-sponsors in the Senate. Of the 93 House co-sponsors who ran for a seat in Congress’s lower chamber in 2020, only one lost reelection.

Using Cook Political Report’s Partisan Voting Index, Earther found four House co-sponsors who are in districts that range from very slightly Democratic to moderately Republican. Of those four, three decisively won their reelection bids, including Reps. Mike Levin, Jahana Hayes, and Peter DeFazio. The fourth, Rep. Tom Suozzi, is currently behind in his race in New York by about 4,000 votes, but is projected to “easily win” once all mail-in ballots are counted, according to Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman. [As of this date, that election has not been called, but he seems to be behind, so maybe not]

Outside of Suozzi, the only Green New Deal co-sponsor to lose is Florida Rep. Debbie Murcasell-Powell. She lost what was a moderately Democratic-leaning seat, though it was previously represented by Rep. Carlos Curbelo, arguably the most outspoken Republican on climate change prior to losing the seat in 2018 to Murcasell-Powell.

This is quick-and-dirty analysis aligns with other data showing that representatives who have sponsored and voted for progressive policies were not punished by voters. An analysis commissioned by the Sunrise Movement and Justice Democrats and shared with Intercept Washington, DC, bureau chief Ryan Grim shows that Democratic House candidates in more liberal swing districts won by greater margins than more conservative ones.

Basically, the people who actually back progressive policies came through the election largely unscathed and, in many cases, fared better than their more conservative Democratic counterparts in swing districts. And lest we forget, Kamala Harris, one of the Senate co-sponsors of the Green New Deal, is now vice president-elect. To be fair, there were also high-profile examples of progressive Democrats running on a Green New Deal failing to pry swing-ish districts out of Republican hands, notably the Texas race between organizer Mike Siegel and Rep. Mike McCaul, and a post-mortem on that race is certainly something to watch out for.

Here’s the deal: progressive Democratic policies are winners. Voters prefer them when they are not labeled as Democratic policies, because what the voters really dislike (reinforced by conservative media) is the Democratic Party. Maybe if the party actually embraced what they ought to be, a green/labor party, rather than working so hard at being a centrist/corporate party, they’d have more authenticity and earn more trust.

Hush now — coup in progress

Trump hasn’t conceded yet. That’s not supposed to happen. We should be getting worried, because it’s not just one delusional madman in power, we’ve also got the Senate Majority Leader saying there’s no reason for alarm over his intransigence, and when Moscow Mitch declares that there’s nothing to be worried about, it’s time to panic. We’ve got senators like Roy Blunt saying that Trump may not have been defeated at all. The Secretary of State has announced there will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.

Meanwhile, hordes of fanatics are building a defiant mob on social media. Trump is all about sucking up to his “fans”, so he’s going to continue to shy away from that graceful admission of defeat, if a narcissist like him were even capable of such a thing.

There’s also this:

It’s a purge to pave the way to seizing military control.

You’d think the election is now over, with some continuing ballot counting in a few states that won’t be enough to overturn anything. The Republicans do have a trick up their sleeve, though — abusing our archaic electoral college to override the popular vote. Apparently, there is a convenient loophole in which a state legislature could override the appointment of electors to stack the deck, and Pennsylvania, as one example, is a state where the Republicans control both houses.

At Trump’s urging, the state’s legislature — where Republicans have majorities in both houses — purports to exercise its authority under Article II of the Constitution to appoint the state’s presidential electors directly. Taking their cue from Trump, both legislative chambers claim that the certified popular vote cannot be trusted because of the blue shift that occurred in overtime. Therefore, the two chambers claim to have the constitutional right to supersede the popular vote and assert direct authority to appoint the state’s presidential electors, so that this appointment is in line with the popular vote tally as it existed on Election Night, which Trump continues to claim is the “true” outcome.

The state’s Democratic governor refuses to assent to this assertion of authority by the state’s legislature, but the legislature’s two chambers proclaim that the governor’s assent is unnecessary. They cite early historical practices in which state legislatures appointed presidential electors without any involvement of the state’s governor. They argue that like constitutional amendments, and unlike ordinary legislation, the appointment of presidential electors when undertaken directly by a state legislature is not subject to a gubernatorial veto.

They’ve also got the Supreme Court in their back pocket.

While we were dreading the possibility of an October surprise, and marveling that their efforts were so pathetic, maybe we should be more concerned about a January surprise. There is precedent.

Indeed, refusing to wage a much more organized, public campaign to challenge Trump’s coup attempt is exactly the kind of strategy Democrats went with 20 years ago in Florida during the Brooks Brothers riot — and look how that turned out. We got an illegitimate Bush presidency that gave us the Iraq War and a financial crisis that ended or ruined millions of lives.

This time around it could be even worse — the end of whatever’s still left of American democracy.

Remember that empty, exhausted, defeated feeling we had as the lawyers took over Florida and nitpicked their way to effectively shutting down ballot counting, and the Supreme Court declared Bush the president? And then most of us resigned ourselves to accept it, saying that Bush couldn’t be so bad that it warranted our side disrupting democratic institutions in the way the Republicans were doing? Are you ready to feel that way again?

You implement preventive measures before the problem worsens, Governor Walz

The numbers of the infected are surging in Minnesota, so now our governor says “Whoops!” and decides maybe we should refrain from wild partying.

Gov. Tim Walz strongly indicated during the Monday opening of a new saliva testing center in Minneapolis that he will soon announce restrictions on bars and restaurants as a way of stemming an explosion of COVID-19 infections in Minnesota.

Walz stood with Health Commissioner Jan Malcolm to announce another expansion in testing, this time at the Minneapolis Convention Center, but both officials further lamented an increase in both infection numbers and positivity rates. The state saw 10,000 new infections over the weekend and passed a 10 percent positivity rate.

Walz said health department information is seeing three infection sources: social events such as weddings and funerals, large family gatherings and bars and restaurants. The latter dovetails into another concern of health officials — the large number of 18-to-35 years olds who may be infected but asymptomatic. Those people can be efficient spreaders.

Barn doors, closed, after cow escapes, etc. OK. I think the citizenry have already learned to be slack about these things, unfortunately, and there is also going to be a subset of the population — you know the ones, the conspiracy theorists — who are going to see this as a validation of their belief that the Democrats want to steal muh freedoms.

In more positive news, I’ve been reading the news about the new potential vaccine. It’s an RNA-based vaccine? Cool. That’s an intriguing approach, except for the fact that RNA is remarkably fragile. My concerns were confirmed by this little bit of information:

Pfizer’s vaccine must be stored at ultra-low temperatures, which complicates the massive endeavor to distribute a vaccine throughout the population. Pfizer’s logistical plan includes using dry ice to transport frozen vials. Health facilities can keep the vaccine for up to six months at minus-70 degrees Celsius, or minus-94 degrees Fahrenheit. But many hospitals lack the special freezers that can get that cold.

So that’s like dry ice temperatures, but at least it’s not liquid N2 temperatures. I guess that’s doable, but it’s going to add to the expense and mostly force communities to upgrade their medical infrastructure a bit. Otherwise, though, the idea of using RNA to put the patient’s immune system to work making viral antigens is just kind of brilliant. I hope it’s working soon, and that maybe Governor Walz gets ahead of the game this time and starts making grants to regional medical institutions so they’re ready as soon as the vaccine is available.

Yeah, and closing the bars would have been a brilliant idea, too…last month.

Finally

Now we need to get to work and push that lackluster centrist dork leftward to get essential changes made. No complacency allowed!

I hear Trump left the White House this morning to go golfing. He should probably cut that short and start making plans to flee the country. He might be welcome in Russia, although I hear they don’t much care for failures. North Korea?

End it. End it now

Every morning now I get up and check the election returns, groan in disgust, and never look again until the next day. The first day or two, yes, it was ambiguous, the counts were incomplete, it was a close contest and it’s fair to avoid calling it for one or the other. That’s not the case anymore, though — the ineluctability of the math means it’s clear that Biden wins Pennsylvania, tacking 20 electoral college votes onto the 253 he already has, pushing him over the 270 vote threshold and making him the president-elect.

However, the television networks, which have somehow become the final arbiter of our electoral process, have been reluctant to declare an end to the four antic years of the reality TV presidency. Maybe they fear losing my once-a-day click on their news sites (because they will; I never want to hear from CNN or FoxNews ever again). Even the newspapers seem to regret that Trump’s chances are “fading”.

I know my country is afraid of math, but it’s kind of unavoidable when you’re tallying up the votes of a few hundred million people. Accept it. Only now are the news media, cowards that they are, beginning to question the wisdom of airing Trump’s lies. Hey, maybe post-election, Twitter will finally attain a spine sufficiently rigid to finally ban Trump’s racist ass, as they finally did Bannon.

Also, while I’m speaking of math and counting the hordes, I’m tired of the claim that Pennsylvania is going to win this for the Biden/Harris camp. It is only a quirk of the timing of the count and variations in election law that mean Pennsylvania might carry this one across the finish line — the whole country had to struggle and work together to barely eject the fascist/racist slug.

Another reason to end it now: the Republican cheaters are working hard to call any results into question. A couple of QAnon supporters were caught trying to smuggle a truckload of fake ballots into Philadelphia. You know they were going to try to blame the Democrats for ballot fraud, it’s just that they were caught doing it first.

Two armed Virginia men who were arrested Thursday outside the Philadelphia Convention Center were “coming to deliver a truck full of fake ballots” to the city, CNN affiliate KYW reported, citing prosecutors.

The center is one of the places where election workers have been counting votes from the 2020 general election, which includes the race for president.

Text messages reveal that the men were concerned about the tallying of votes at the convention center, prosecutors said, according to KYW.

Right. Because bringing fake ballots to the election center is exactly the thing to alleviate people’s concerns.

Both men were carrying loaded handguns, and police found an AR-type rifle in the Hummer, authorities said at a news conference Friday. About 160 rounds of ammunition were found in the weapons and the vehicle, authorities said.

We need to end this election farce because at some point we’re going to have to confront the seditious armed militias and conspiracy theorists who have rallied behind the worst president ever.

Almost tempted

I hear distant echoes of a possible Biden/Harris victory, but I refuse to believe it until the hammer drops and the evil orange turd is declared a loser, and fired. Until then, I’ll just read The Rude Pundit’s take.

I gotta tell you: I watched Trump’s appearance today in the White House press room with enough burning schadenfreude to power a small city. As much as I wanted to be appalled and saddened and enraged, mostly what I thought was “Suffer, motherfucker.” If Biden ends up winning, as almost everyone seems to believe he will, this excruciating ballot count will have been worth it because Donald Fucking Trump was dragged down into the shit he created, watching it all fall apart. Sure, a swift ending would have been preferable, but this is so obviously tearing his tiny brain and his titanic ego to shreds that I’ll take it.

I’m almost tempted to tune into the preznit’s Twitter feed or to watch one of his press appearances just to see the meltdown in progress, but I shall resist. Get him out first, then let’s sweep out the rest of the slime.

But I’m not celebrating yet. I’ve witnessed too many years of Republican ratfucking.