Incoming

Well, someone(s) is clearly rattled. Twitter has been full of some very shady characters in the last few days. One of them got a little unhinged in my timeline after the hearing last night and sent me a dozen disturbing tweets telling me that 1.) He is an “alpha male” and has sex accordingly 2.) He sees pedophiles in Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock and 3.) he doesn’t like the mask I wear in my Twitter image. Not quite as straightforward in his intentions but it feels a bit more menacing. Maybe the “alpha” 🙄 is from Georgia. The two senators from there should beef up security. I’m concerned.

I blocked a couple other brand new Twitter accounts from following me a couple of days ago. I don’t know these people and they were following no one I know. My tin foil antenna started twitching.

Anyway, I doubt they’re going to seek us out here but if they do, this post is especially important to women on social media who are going to be harassed:

1.) The internet is the great equalizer. You can take on any persona you want. Tap into your inner omega whatever that is.

2.) Women are conditioned to take things personally. Your online persona doesn’t have to. In all likelihood, they don’t know anything about you. They just want to throw stuff to see what sticks.

3.) Social media is asynchronous. If someone says something that disturbs you, take all the time you need to come back with a devastating reply. Could be funny. Think of banishing the boggart in a Harry Potter movie. Point your wand at the perpetrator, swish and flick and say, “Ridikolus!” They feed off disarming you. Making them sound stupid is sometimes very effective.

4.) You can always block them or walk away. You don’t have to reply. But if you do reply in some way, they won’t be expecting it. Just don’t defend yourself from their narrative. At the bottom of it all is their hatred of Democrats is stronger than any truth they are exposed to. They fear us. It’s completely irrational. But they’ve got this idea in their heads that being aggressive online will get you to shut up. Don’t let them shut you up. When they go to level 5, you need to go to level 5. When they go to 7, you need to go to 7. You get the point. Just don’t do anything that will get you thrown off Twitter but don’t just sit there and whine that they’re being mean to you.

5.) In the end, they’re just pixels on a screen. They cannot hurt you. Yes, they really are out there in the real world. Not gonna lie. Some people really are scary. And if you feel actually threatened in real life, call the police. But in the vast majority of cases, these people are furiously typing on their laptops in some podunk town in Georgia and not “alpha males”. Sex may be aspirational for them. Fox, Bannon and Q are just messing with their heads and they are overcompensating.

***************

Quick key takeaways from the heating tonight:

1.) The Proud Boys and Oath Keepers were the vanguard. They didn’t attend the rally at the ellipse because they were tasked with taking up positions at key areas around the Capitol. They were trained for combat and some had body armor. Their job was to break down the barriers so that rally goers behind them would be able to reach their targets more easily. This wasn’t a protest that got out of hand. It was intended to be aggressive and violent from the start. That takes planning.

2.) Donald Trump was not deluded about whether he lost the election. He was told over and over again that he lost. His own daughter accepted it. But Trump could not. See Mary Trump interviews before 1/6/21 for more insight into how Trump thinks.

3.) Pence was essentially the president for the last few weeks of Trump’s term. He’s the one who gave orders to Milley. It was likely Pence that took Pelosi’s insistence seriously that Trump be unable to launch nukes. He’s a complete douchebag otherwise but it may turn out that when the shit hit the fan, Pence found his inner strength to do the right thing. It disappeared after that so maybe it only made a one time appearance. Nevertheless, we owe him a lot.

I just wonder what he told the chiefs of staff to get them to obey him. It was probably the fact that the White House seemed to be in disarray and non-functional and there were no illusions as to Trump’s inability to act as president. In other words, it was an unofficial 25th amendment invocation and the right people were in the right positions to enact it and keep everyone in line until January 20. I can only imagine how that looked to our international allies. It must have seriously damaged our reputation.

4.) There are US Congressmen and probably senators, who asked for pardons for the acts they did for the planning of the coup. Scott Perry was named but there were others.

5.) This is a reminder that Liz Cheney is persona non grata within her party. She’s also no friend of ours. She’s extremely conservative. She just happens to think that she can push her policies through using the old fashioned methods of discourse, persuasion and voting.

But let’s give credit where it’s due. There’s chance that she will lose her primary and won’t be returning to Congress next year. This prospect didn’t stop her from accepting responsibility on the committee to expose the truth. She could have kept her mouth shut and sucked up to Trump like the rest of her party. That was in her self interest. Being on this committee may kill her political career and yet she’s on it. So, not all Republicans are without principle.

Still, if it turns out that the first female president is an ultra conservative, I won’t be surprised.

A Few Brief Thoughts on the First January 6 Committee Hearing

I thought that it was well put together, powerful, and moving. From what I have read so far, it impressed many other people as well, including some usually grudging media types.

I think that most of us already knew a good deal of this, but many people did not, and so it was so important to have it shown to a wide audience. Hopefully it will impel them to want to see the next hearings, so that the story can be filled in and rounded.

The most powerful moments were the culmination of the first half, moving from the statements of Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney, right into the wrenching footage of the attack on the Capitol; and then in the second half, the immensely moving testimony of Capitol police officer Caroline Edwards, so brave in so many respects, including speaking tonight.

Thompson was dignified and gracious. Liz Cheney was remarkable, and if she did all the questioning in every hearing, it would be fine with me. She was impeccably articulate, and went as far with the narrative as one could. It is so interesting that while I so disliked her father, one can see some of his qualities of unyielding determination and moving relentlessly to a desired goal, imbued in her. I thought that he was destroying the country, and yet she might be a major part in saving it, if anything can.

How this will play out in voting, is problematical. The media’s take will ultimately be, “This was strong evidence, but the voters will be more concerned about inflation, gas prices, etc.” Maybe they will be, but I cannot understand why the voters would think that Republicans would lower prices, or fix anything, outside of collaborating with tyrants, which would cost us our democracy. The difficulty always is in attempting to show voters what the Republican Party is all about as a whole, and why it is a terrible decision to vote for any of them.

These hearings, assuming they are mostly as powerful as this one, will render Trump very unlikely to be elected in 2024. Republicans like McConnell would love to metaphorically sever him, and then ride DeSantis, who gives them all they want, with less insanity. Note that I did not say, “without the insanity,,” as DeSantis’ pathology is of a different kind, still sociopathic, still fascistic, but not deranged.

These hearings of course are not about the Republican Party, they are about violent insurrectionists, and about Trump. But I hope that they will at least indirectly incriminate some of the members of the party, the ones who are still now defending Trump. And I hope there is continuing emphasis in the hearings on the Big Lie, which of course is even more dangerous than Trump, as it is used as the rationale for all the vote suppression, and efforts to take over the vote counting in every key state.

We should be very glad that there is this Committee, and that Nancy Pelosi would not allow Kevin McCarthy to put his two grandstanding insurrectionists on it. And the Committee has worked very hard to put this together.

Altogether, a very good Round 1, I think. And hopefully it is at least somewhat cathartic for the police officers, their families, and the members of Congress whose lives were at risk on January 6.

Prerequisite for tonight: On Tyranny- Be Wary of Paramilitaries

On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder is the Problems of Democracy book we should have read in high school. It’s never too late. The original came out in 2016 with 20 lessons on how to keep your head when everyone around you is going MAGA. It was recently updated with additional lessons on the history of Ukraine and the current war. Highly recommended.

But if reading is not your thing, you can get the original edition in graphic novel format. It still has text but the pictures are more relatable.

Anyway, Snyder has mini-lessons in video format. (It’s almost like he’s trying to tell us something…). And since tonight’s hearings are going to focus on the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, this lesson was particularly relevant. It’s not too long at 7:31 minutes.

I won’t say “enjoy!” But at least you’ll be ready to evaluate what they present tonight.

The real cancel culture

This picture was taken on October 10, 2020 when I dropped off my mail in ballot for the general election at North Park Ice Rink in Allegheny County. The Republican went with me. He drove me there. He saw me hand it over to the election official.

As you can see, families brought their children. Due to Covid, the venue was outside.

I wanted to drop my ballot off in person because Louis DeJoy was already creating havoc with the postal system and even though the majority Republican legislature approved mail in balloting in 2019, when it saw that Trump might actually lose PA in 2020, it started to put speed bumps in the way of actually using that option.

For example, drop boxes were restricted to a handful of locations in each county and only for a few weekends before the election. Mail in ballots couldn’t be counted before Election Day. A day or two to process the ballots that had arrived early would have alleviated the GOP concern that an early in person vote lead would be seemingly wiped out by the mail in ballots that were forced to be processed overnight, casting doubt on the final outcome. You’d think they’d want to get a jump on mail in ballots to get all votes counted by Election Day but it’s almost like they wanted some controversy around mail in ballot counting. So there was great resistance to counting the ballots prior to Election Day as some other states did. Also, the ballots had to be postmarked by Election Day but due to the recent glitches with the postal system, three days were allowed for postmarked ballots to be counted.

Well, the legislature didn’t like that last bit and took it to court. The compromise was that the mail in ballots that were postmarked by Election Day but didn’t arrive at the election offices until 72 hours later would be sequestered. The ballots that were actually counted were the ones that arrived in the elections offices by Election Day. The rest would be withheld from counting. I don’t know under what circumstances they would have been counted at the same time as the others but in the end, they weren’t needed for Biden to clinch the state. Yep, he won the state without the sequestered ballots. I’m assuming they were counted after the state called for Biden. Biden won PA by 80,000 votes.

So, you can see why I was concerned. There were some earlier shenanigans with a ballot printing vendor who sent mail in ballots to nearby townships in Allegheny county that had the wrong precinct information on them. All of those ballots had to be thrown out, reprinted correctly, and mailed back out. The vendor was reported at the time to have Republican connections. I have to follow up on this but I think the short summary is that the printer’s contract was immediately terminated.

I wanted to be absolutely sure that my ballot was in the hot little hands of the elections officials before Election Day. I didn’t trust that the mail in my heavily Democratic township wouldn’t be “unofficially” sequestered in a dark little corner of my local post office until it was too late to be counted.

These were the thoughts that were going through my mind as I took my ballot to North Park. After turning in my ballot, I checked my ballot status on the Allegheny county website several times a day to see that it had been received and then counted. I had to make absolutely sure it wasn’t tossed out because of something stupid I might have done, like not putting it in the envelope in the envelope or forgetting to sign it. Yes, it was ridiculous that voters like me had to jump through so many hoops in the middle of a pandemic before there was a vaccine in order to vote by mail and have my vote counted.

Such is the plight of a Democratic voter in a key battleground state.

But all this was irrelevant to the PA Republican legislature that was planning to disenfranchise any ballots it didn’t like and mail in ballots were on its radar. If they could just find a way to legally throw them out, that’s what they would do. Failing that, they were planning to submit a slate of electors not based on actual voting results but ones of their own choosing that would vote for TFG at the electoral college. Those electoral college ballots would be the ones counted on January 6, 2021.

No matter how you looked at it, they were going to elect Donald Trump to a second term regardless as to what the voters of Pennsylvania wanted.

Yes, they were going to let us vote and then the Republican legislature would make the choice for us.

Well, it didn’t quite work the way they planned. We had a very vigilant attorney general in Josh Shapiro who is now running for governor. He made sure that the votes were protected in court. The Republicans in the PA legislature weren’t able to carry out their plans before January 6, 2021. That’s why it was necessary for their conspirators in Congress to challenge the Pennsylvania results on the day that the electoral college ballots would be counted and certified.

That’s as much as I know about the PA part of this whole chaotic debacle that resulted in an attack on the Capitol. As a Pennsylvania voter before January 6, 2022, I was already horrified and furious that my own state legislature was trying to cancel me as a citizen of the United States. Fury doesn’t really describe it.

If the PA legislature had been successful, turning over my mail in ballot to my election official in person before the deadline would be a pointless exercise.

What do you call it when you can vote but your votes are canceled and some other body of people make the choice for you so that they can make all other decisions about your government without your input?

Russia. Hungary. Belarus. Any dictatorial regime anywhere at any time in history.

This evening, we’re going to find out about how the conspirators planned and carried out their attempted coup in January 6 and what they’re doing for the less flashy but just as destructive coup they are carrying out now.

It touched me personally and almost canceled me as a citizen and I am not going to ever let that go. I care and I want to get to the bottom of it so it never happens again.

One more time: If your news leaves you confused…

…or unable to tell fact from fiction

…or anxious and scared all the time

…or tells you you’re surrounded by enemies instead of allies…

It might be actively betraying you.

Change your news.

The January 6 Hearings on One Side, and Fox Network on the Other

As probably everybody here knows, Fox will not be covering any of the Congressional Committee hearings regarding the insurrection of January 6, 2021. The first of these public hearings will be shown on January 9, at 8pm Eastern Time, 5pm PT. All but one of the major networks: CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS, MSNBC, CNN, will be covering the Thursday hearings in prime time. Fox will not be.

Fox will be running its same shows. Fox has decided that it does not want its viewers to watch the hearings. Fox wants to pretend that the hearings are about nothing, just political theater. They continue to claim that the entire episode was just some tourists milling about the Capitol, and then some Antifa and BLM people running around. They say that whatever it was, everyone should just “get over it.”

I do not call them “Fox News,” not just because they are a propaganda network, but because they have successfully argued in court that they should be considered an entertainment network, not a news network. This was to avoid possible defamation liability, or other related lawsuits which might be filed against a news network for deliberately misstating facts. Fox executives said, “We’re an entertainment network!,” while they call themselves a news network, and constantly talk about “reporting.”

It is all a clever game for Fox, and they get away with it. So they decide that showing the hearings is not in their best interest; it might confuse their cult of brainwashed watchers, so they will either pretend it is not happening, or mock it.

This of course is a not very far away harbinger of the future, where Fox is State Television under a fascist Republican totalitarian state. We read about such a country in Orwell’s “1984,” telescreens mandatory in everyone’s home; where the state not only feeds continual propaganda to everyone, but can watch them to make sure that they are obediently viewing it, and not doing something subversive to the state, and its representation, “Big Brother.” This is indeed what is going to happen if these forces get their way; and every minute, they are trying to stitch more of this suffocating fabric.

So what do we do? We cannot force people to watch the hearings. We cannot ban Fox, though a worthwhile FCC would not allow them to call themselves a news network. There have been suggestions, as from Kurt Bardella, a former Republican strategist who appears to have legitimately switched sides, and now advises the current Administration, to ban Fox from all press briefings. That would actually make sense, if they are not a representative of the press, like TMZ is not.

These hearings are designed to serve many purposes. One of the most important of them is to inform the public as to just what was planned, and what occurred, in this terrifying assault on the Capitol and American democracy. If few people watch it, this would not be good for the democracy. We need them to watch it, somewhat like the nation tuned into the Watergate hearings every day. Fox, the mouthpiece and propaganda arm of the Republican Fascist Party, does not want people to watch it, so they will provide counterprogramming, in the form of their propaganda.

Any network which would even partially pretend to be a news network, would show these hearings, because they are significant news But Fox does not want to let the news through, it only shows what they want their audience to know or see. They’ve incited people to commit mass murder because of the “Replacement Theory” that they keep purveying. But that was just entertainment for them, I guess.

If they win this battle, they will control the entire feed of information to the public, as much as they do in Russia or North Korea, or the Cuba which the Floridian Latinx immigrants hate so much that they keep voting Republican, for DeSantis, Scott, and Rubio, because they are afraid of “Cuban Socialism,” not the actual fascism which is its totalitarian double, and actually exists in this country.

I hope that everybody tells everybody they know, about the hearings. People who only watch Fox, and there are reportedly millions of those people, will actually not know about the hearings, or perhaps see a brief, skewed, and false version of them.

It is essential that as many people as possible watch these hearings. They will be our best and probably last chance to get this story out, with various possible helpful effects in saving democracy, and rendering Trump unelectable, as well as possibly opening some people’s eyes to the Republicans’ efforts to create an authoritarian state, backed by a very well armed militia of fanatic and insane people with weapons of all sorts, and no regard at all for human rights, laws, and life.

I hope that as many people as possible watch it, talk about it, tell others at work about it, make it the water cooler topic of the month. Yes, there are more enjoyable things to talk about. But at least sometimes, the citizens of a democracy have a responsibility to be serious, to learn crucial facts, and to use that information to make important voting choices, and most imperatively, vote based on them. That is how democracies survive.

Fox Whatever It Is Called does not want our democracy to survive. They want a totalitarian state in which they are the propaganda arm of the authoritarians. If they want their brainwashed hordes to ignore or dispute actual reality, they will call for that. If they want them to riot and kill, they will call for that. That is what essentially happened on January 6, 2021, no matter how much effort they keep putting into hiding, denying, and lying about it

The most important thing in these hearings, in my view, is to show as many people as possible that this was in no way a one-time thing, even something bad that got out of hand. It is to tell the story that this was a plot concocted by Republicans at the highest level, intended to overturn the results of the election; to cause enough violence that either it would be impossible for the electoral results to be certified, or it would give Trump the opening to declare martial law, and thereby keep power indefinitely.

It is something ongoing, it is what the Republican Party is now. No matter how upset one might be about gas prices (and one might want to look to record oil company profits for the blame), the overriding issue is whether you want to have in power a party which does not believe in the democratic processes, or in laws, or in upholding valid elections, but which will do anything to take and keep power. In other words, they are a mortal threat to America. As the computer types like to say, it is now a feature, not a bug. This is the Republican Party in all its deceit and evil. Fox doesn’t want anyone to see that.

Question: Do school shooter drills save lives?

I ask because it seems to me like a lot of kids die anyway. Parkland was horrific. The shooter roamed the hallways. Uvalde and Sandy Hook took a high toll in a couple of classrooms.

Why do shooters concentrate most of their firepower in a classroom or two? What stops them from decimating multiple classrooms, especially when they’re carrying multiple guns and ammunition? What stops them from blowing through locked doors? For that matter, what stops them from shooting through windows?

19 children died in Uvalde. That’s a lot of children who were drilled on how to stay quiet and keep a low profile. I get it that you don’t want panicking children making a bad situation worse. But I question the efficacy of having children cowering in their classrooms like sitting ducks.

If these drills are going to work, they have to be more creative and better.

The Difference

Take a look at this new video from Russian Man on the Street interview channel 1420. The question is do you feel responsible for this, this meaning the war in Ukraine and the fallout:

It’s encouraging how many of them do feel responsible. Even the ones who say they don’t indicate that the choice to invade was made by others, people they didn’t vote for.

We have to consider the source here. These are younger people, they look like students, and they’re probably in a big cosmopolitan city like Saint Petersburg or Moscow. They probably have access to VPN, probably the free versions now since most of them can’t use the international banking system to pay for a subscription. So, the pool of respondents is limited to the people most likely to know what’s going on. The rest of Russia is in a black hole of sorts.

There has been a large swarm of Russian bots released on Twitter lately. I supposed some of them are real people. The thing is, I have no idea who they think they’re talking to. They show up in the feeds of the non-Russians who are most like the interviewees above: young, or educated, savvy purveyors of News who have probably actually read the books on the recommended list about the current conflict.

The basic message from the bots is that this is a proxy war or that the Russians are fighting the Americans. You’d get the idea that Ukraine isn’t involved at all. It’s just the place where the battles take place. One might come away with the feeling that Russia didn’t invade Ukraine either. They don’t like it when we push back and tell them we have no interest in attacking their country. We wouldn’t waste our army on a country like Russia that has a smaller GDP than Texas. We’ve just got the best arsenal in the world and we’re lending it to a friend. The idea that Russia is threatened by NATO is hilarious. That’s the excuse they give for their scorched earth invasion and bloody land grab. NATO. Except the reverse is true. If Ukraine had joined NATO, Russia wouldn’t have even dreamed of invading. The bots want Ukraine to sign in blood that they’ll never join NATO but after this war, they’d be crazy not to not apply with urgency once they push Russia out. NATO is a defensive alliance that serves as a deterrence. It’s not a threat to Russia unless Russia does something stupid.

Oh, but Zelenskyy is corrupt, they claim, as if Putin and his oligarchs haven’t stolen everything in Russia that isn’t nailed down. They think Biden is a joke and that Trump would have been a peacemaker. Now, THAT’s funny. I think Trump would have nuked Moscow at the first sign that his ratings dipped.

They very correctly point to our complacency back in 2014 when Obama didn’t protest too much the annexation of Crimea. Yeah, they said, you were perfectly fine with that. Except a lot of us weren’t perfectly fine with that. Or that we didn’t use our air power in Syria. Think of all the conflict prevented and lives saved if we had tipped the scales early in that debacle. But Obama was wed to his public persona as a pacifist and didn’t evolve in his position as commander in chief. Well, he let the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq drag on but he was skittish when taking on the Russians in Syria when ancient cities like Palmyra were bombed like crazy.

But here’s the difference between America and Russia. For the time being, we can change our leadership by voting the ones we don’t like out of office and by voting in new ones. Don’t like the dude in the Oval Office now? Wait four years and change the regime. The Russians can’t do that. Putin has made it impossible to displace him or the structure that is currently in place. The beauty of democracy is we get another chance to make things better. A do-Over. If Russians had that option, they never would have gone to war in Ukraine because Putin wouldn’t be in office.

Pointing this out usually evokes the snarky comeback from the bots that I’m not a part of the ruling class that actually has power. Oh, I have my eyes on those people and so did 81,000,000 other voters who truncated their power at least temporarily. But I am a member of the voting class and as long as we still can exercise that right and have every vote counted honestly, then I don’t have to live under the rule of an autocrat and feel responsible for something I can’t do anything about. I don’t have to put up with feeling helpless and ashamed of what my country is doing to innocent people. I can, and have, protested and petitioned my government for the redress of grievances. The bots don’t have a good answer to this.

The time may come soon when Putin will either no longer be able to function or he will die. When that happens, the people interviewed above may have a small window of opportunity to act and take back responsibility for that was done in their names. I hope they’re ready for it. The rumor is that they’ll have to contend with military leaders who will take over and they’ll be as harsh or harsher than Putin.

Maybe.

Or maybe they’ll be too busy in Ukraine defending themselves against the plucky Ukrainians who think of every shipment of arms we send them as new sports gear.

While the military is distracted and the internal suppression police don’t have anyone with authority telling them what to do, there may be a crack that can be widened to let the sunshine in.

Hope.

First Public Hearing for January 6 Committee is January 9, on Prime Time Television

“Overture, curtain, lights

This is it, the night of nights

No more rehearsing and nursing a part

We know every part by heart

Overture, curtain, lights

This is it, we’ll hit the heights

And oh, what heights we’ll hit

Let’s get on with the show, this is it”

Do you remember “The Bugs Bunny Show” on Saturday morning television? That was the catchy theme song, with Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck doing a vaudeville number to accompany it. My brother and I would watch it. I loved the cute concept of the cartoon characters getting ready to put on a show for the audience.

Here we are in 2022, and we’re ready for another show. It has been built up to for a year. The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol was formed in May, 2021. The Committee has decided to hold six public hearings in June, less than the eight originally expected. The first of these will be Thursday, June 9, at 8pm Eastern Standard Time. There will be five more, one in prime time on June 23, the other four apparently to be in the daytime hours, but not completely confirmed.

Denver Riggleman, former moderate Republican Congressman from Virginia, who has been advising the Committee, said today that the hearings will be exciting and concise; that “I think people are going to be absolutely surprised how much was known with multiple groups.”

The Committee has interviewed over 1,000 witnesses. There are some of the very best Congresspeople on the committee, as Kevin McCarthy was so upset that Speaker Pelosi would not approve the two insurrectionists that he wanted to put on it, that he simply refused to participate, allowing this to be a committee of serious people, without the usual Republican dismantlers of democratic processes.

A headline in USA Today says: “January 6 Committee’s long-awaited hearings promise revelations. Will a divided U.S. want to hear them?”

A classically typical media framing. The country is divided, so maybe that means that Americans don’t want to hear what was uncovered about the only attack on the Capitol which has ever been carried out from within? If the Trump forces don’t want to hear it, then that’s more important than the facts of the insurrection, which almost led to a takeover of the government? That’s not the way that the media used to cover things, but apparently it is now. If people were not interested in WWII, and preferred to listen to swing music, that would be the story with today’s media.

This effort to minimize everything; to mute or negate it due to the people holding their hands over their eyes and ears, is disgraceful. We hope that there are millions of people who want to watch this, and who are open to learning key facts. And we very much hope that what is learned will have a powerful effect on the public consciousness, that people will see how frightening this all was, and how terribly dangerous a place the country became, and still is, given the continuing plot to take it over by totalitarians.

We know that the Trump forces will do everything they can to divert, and distract, and lie about things, and talk about Hillary’s emails. The goal, as usual, is to throw up so much smoke and fog and yelling, that people will shrug and lose interest, and the media will care more about eyeballs than what is important. Let’s see if the people will surprise the media. If as children we could look forward to Saturday cartoons, as adults we can look forward to and carefully follow the battle for the survival of our American democracy. Curtain up!

My Indelible Memory of Peter Navarro

On, October 26, 2002, I was in my car, and I heard the dreadful news about the plane crash which killed liberal champion Senator Paul Wellstone, his wife, his daughter, three aides, and the two pilots. Wellstone was running for re-election to the Minnesota Senate against Norm Coleman.

People were reeling from the horror and human tragedy of this event, which has never been fully solved. I was listening to the radio on the news station KNX, and the hour-long stock report show came on, which I often listened to at 1 pm. And Peter Navarro was on. I had heard him before, he sounded like a typical right-wing Milton Friedman economics acolyte, I usually just ignored him.

On this day, Navarro chose to tell his audience that the stock market was going up. He said something like, “It may not seem the time to point this out, but see that the market is going up! That is obviously due to the fact that there is now a better chance that the Republicans will take over the Senate.”

I was beyond appalled. What a sickening thing to think and say. Well, it turned out that Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura appointed fellow Independent Dean Barkley to finish Wellstone’s term. The Democrats chose the retired Walter Mondale to fill Senator Wellstone’s position on the ballot, and he barely lost to Coleman, and the Republicans took over the Senate.

My memory of Peter Navarro has never faded from that day. I didn’t know where he went in his career, I don’t remember hearing him too much more on KNX, though he may have been on. Then he resurfaced years later as a major Trump supporter and advisor, opining on all sorts of things, many non-economic.

Then he ultimately became one of the major architects and supporters of what the Trump insiders liked to call “The Green Bay Sweep”; that term taken from a successful offensive running play that the Green Bay Packers ran under coach Vince Lombardi, a play that with superior personnel and execution, was almost impossible to stop.

For the Trump people, this was a plan to overturn the valid election of Joe Biden, by mounting challenges to the results in eight key states. The idea was to cause such tumult, that the election results could not be certified. What would happen after that was unclear, but the principal architects of the plan, according to Navarro, who was very proud of it, were Navarro and Steve Bannon.

The House Committee formed to investigate the insurrection of January 6, 2021, eventually subpoenaed Navarro. He refused to comply with the subpoena. He claimed Executive Privilege, somehow conferred by Trump. Today Navarro was indicted by a grand jury, and taken into custody on Contempt of Congress charges. There are two indictments; one for refusing to appear, and one for not producing requested documents.

Navarro was on MSNBC last night, speaking to Ari Melber. He had said on that show, or just before that, that he thought that an indictment for a charge with a one-year prison penalty, would potentially cost him one-fourth of his life span, based on expectancy charts, and would also cost him a good deal of money in fines. Life expectancy was obviously not a concern on the day he wanted to point out that Senator Wellstone’s death was being hailed by the people who run the stock market.

Who knows what will happen to this case? Trumpists have a way of slithering out of things, even those like Bannon, Manafort, and Dinesh D’Souza, who were convicted, and then pardoned by Trump, so that they could do more evil. It is at least something that the Department of Justice has taken action to enforce the Committee’s subpoena against Navarro.

Navarro is one of many Far Right people who want to wage war on Democrats and on America. Fanatics who want to “win” no matter who dies, or how the entire democracy is destroyed. No one should say that he didn’t warn them, on that show 20 years ago. All of them have given us plenty of warning. They don’t relent, or moderate, they get worse, and they believe in nothing but their own totalitarianism. I am very glad that at least Navarro got arrested today.