Thread: PRESIDENT TRUMP TROLLS HIS HATERS AS HE LINES UP THE COUP (DE GRACE)
As the disinfo & #Fakenews being thrown out by BOTH SIDES in this new type of INFORMATION WAR peaks, of course Trump himself would participate on Twitter where Friend & Foe alike can be DISTRACTED.

Narcissistic rage is one of the darkest and deadliest forces known to mankind. Before it erupts, it usually simmers and percolates for a long time, fueled by resentment, envy and entitlement, the latter always aggrieved as the narcissist's need for...

...adulation and glory is insatiable and he can see the world populated by the undeserving, inferior people who nevertheless dare to be happier and/or more successful than he is.

It thus creates enemies out of the innocent and often weak who become vessels for the narcissist’s hateful and envious projections.

These sustained projections form a basis of an attitude called the narcissism of minor differences, first described by Freud, where we exaggerate..

...small differences in people who are our neighbors (...) in order to feel superior to them and exclude them from our group. This attitude, like anything else based on fear and hatred, easily infects others, already narcissistically predisposed; and the sharing makes...

...the hateful projections grow and spread.

The co-existent phenomenon of collective narcissism, which intensifies the in-group ties (and which is unsurprisingly associated with authoritarianism) at the expense of excluding and demonizing those who do not belong to our group...

Okay something I’ve been thinking about this morning: WTF was the actual intention of the MAGAts who stormed the Capitol building?

There’s all these people on Reddit/here saying that this was an organized coup. And TBH I keep thinking that “organized” is a strong word. 90% of them had no aim other than showing up and shouting.

The other 10% are the ones that should worry everyone.

So Trump does his stupid rally, having fired up the MAGAts for actual months, then says they should march on the Capitol and of course they do, then sympathizers among the security forces let them through to the building itself.

SO many people are getting fired over that.

Anyway: so they’re inside and now what? Again, 90% of them have no clue, they just show up and shout and perhaps smash shit or steal, and generally be assholes.

The worrisome 10% had an aim in mind: kidnap/hurt/kill.

But here’s the thing: even that 10% didn’t have any fucking clue what to do. Look at the videos and photos, this was military cosplay. They made merchandise for gods sake. They loudly proclaimed their intentions to try starting a civil war.

There is a new "non-partisan" analysis of Michigan voting data conducted by multiple unpaid citizens and volunteer experts.

https://t.co/mkwUtPM7ms

First they looked at the shift in voting patterns that occurred between the 2016 and 2020 elections to identify suspicious counties. The two with the largest shifts were Oakland and Wayne.

After plotting each county they examined the correlations between Election Day votes and absentee votes. Trump's results correlate while Biden's votes skew overwhelmingly for absentee ballots. They call this a "serious statistical aberration."

Looking at Wayne county again they find that since the 2016 election the county has allegedly shifted 15 points in favor of the democrats.

They identified several townships in Wayne county that are anomalous. In one township, Biden gained "151% of the new registered voters and 97% of the new votes above 2016."

Thread: THE FAILURE CASCADE BEGINS.
Now that President Trump & America's Enemies have tied themselves to the TRAIN TRACK by ignoring or "debunking" all claims of Election Fraud the TRUMP TRAIN is going to run them over.
As they tell themselves "This ISN'T HAPPENING!"

Wish folks cared as much about countering the political culture of far right hyper-nationalistic populism that traffics in anti-Semitic tropes and naturalized conceptions of racial and gender hierarchies, as they care about dissing those who use the word “fascism” to describe it.

Ultimately, I think that’s what lay behind this terminological dispute. Is democracy more threatened by “center-left/center-right neoliberalism” or by the far right? People who resist the f-word say the former is the *real* threat. People who use the f-word focus on the latter.

My sense is that the people who use the "f-word" are not the neoliberal simpletons their critics tend to think they are. And likewise, the f-word refuseniks are no fans of the far right, they just don't see it as being as powerful and threatening as others do.

This might be overly reductive, but I think at least some of this has to do with where one lives. If one lives in a very blue part of the country, I can see how the threat of far right paramilitaries would seem hyperbolic and exaggerated.

I happen to live in a state capitol were heavily armed, far right paramilitaries have spent the past year assaulting people on a regular basis and working in cahoots with GOP legislators to invade and shut down the state legislature. Things feel quite edgy here.

The problem with #politics is that it exaggerates and makes (empty) slogans out of what we know. This applies to the #minimumwage too, where proponents of increasing it claim it will raise people's wages and opponents claim it will kill jobs. Neither is very accurate or finds

support in economic theory. Let's look at what a minimum wage law does, and then at what we can expect from it. Because the former is rarely admitted and the latter goes both ways. So, first, a minimum wage law is not an increase in anybody's wage, it is only a prohibition of

paying employees less than a stated amount. Raising the minimum wage law does not mean whoever is making less gets an automatic raise. What it does mean, especially after a transition period, is that there will be no jobs that create less value than is necessary for employers to

afford paying that minimum amount (plus taxes, benefits, overhead, etc.). No business can afford employing people for jobs creating less value for the business than they cost. So, no: increasing the minimum wage does not raise wages. It weeds out jobs (and workers!) that are less

productive than the decreed wage level requires for breaking even. It raises the average and median wages because low-wage jobs become unaffordable. Increasing businesses' salary costs will mean some lay people off, others refrain from hiring, and yet others reorganize to either

🚨BREAKING: Dominion Voting Systems forensic report:

"We conclude that the Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results."

@EpochTimes

SOURCE: https://t.co/84HlC1NGtR

"The allowable election error rate established by the Federal Election Commission guidelines is of 1 in 250,000 ballots (.0008%). We observed an error rate of
68.05%. This demonstrated a significant and fatal error in security and election integrity."

"A staggering number of votes required adjudication. This was a 2020 issue not seen in previous election cycles still stored on the server ... The intentional errors lead to bulk adjudication of ballots with no oversight, no transparency or audit trail. "

"Significantly, the computer system shows vote adjudication logs for prior years; but all adjudication log entries for the 2020 election cycle are missing. The adjudication process is the simplest way to manually manipulate votes."

WARNING, HEADS UP!!!!
Dear Patriots,
Some of you may recognize my name. I have daily briefing with POTUS and have posted here before a handful of times as a “helper”.
What I’m about to disclose is the most important post you’ll read before the inauguration.

Now, Assange -IMO- The Best For Last.

State Department released a ton of documents to WikiLeaks on 1/21/2018. Including John Podesta’s email re: “I’ll be meeting with Soros later this week for some “pre-programming” of machines.”

3 year delta on the approach has me excited 🤷🏼‍♀️👀

In the next @NewYorker, I look at a culture of retribution against whistleblowers under Trump—and a new complaint implicating CIA director Gina Haspel and Donald Trump’s nominee for the top legal job in the intelligence community in a retaliation campaign.

In the complaint, a DOJ lawyer claims the retaliation came after he uncovered a secret CIA surveillance program and a practice of lying to prosecutors to conceal its use in criminal cases. The scheme was corroborated in hundreds of pages of emails, transcripts & other documents.

Experts said the concealment may have broken laws and undermined convictions. The FBI told prosecutors that the CIA information, which resulted in numerous prosecutions, came from FBI investigations, named after the Pirates of the Caribbean films, into a fictional crime group.

As the DOJ lawyer, Mark McConnell, raised his concerns to superiors, he faced what six officials said was a retaliation campaign by CIA leadership. Intelligence officials were furious.

CIA officials repeatedly called for repercussions or consequences for McConnell—Haspel allegedly personally joined those calls, though the agency denies it. McConnell’s lawyer, who also represented the Ukraine whistleblower, called for an investigation into Haspel’s role.

1/21 Parliament votes on the new tiered restctions on Tuesday. A lot of comment in today’s papers on what’s happening in the hospital sector. Important questions on NHS capacity, demand, preparedness, Nightingales etc. Thread below sets out NHS hospital trust perspective.

2/21 Have deliberately concentrated in thread on hospitals as this is where current public debate ahead of Tuesday’s vote is. But many of same issues apply to community, mental health and ambulance trusts, all of whom are under the same current level of pressure as hospitals.

3/21 Running a hospital at the moment is much more complex & difficult than normal due to COVID-19. That often doesn’t show up in usual national data that some are currently quoting (e.g. NHS capacity levels below last year / not under real pressure so where's the problem?)

4/21 Remember pre-covid starting context. NHS already had large demand supply mismatch. Insufficient hospital beds. 100,000 staff vacancies. Despite frontline efforts, worst A&E/elective surgery performance in a decade. Huge overstretch in winter (late Dec-Feb) for last 5 yrs.

5/21 COVID-19 then made task massively more difficult in number of ways. Need to treat three sets of patients - COVID-19; planned care with urgent/important backlog cases from first phase of covid that simply can’t wait any longer; and usual emergency patients needing treatment.

A number of Trump appointees have tried to burrow into long-term public service jobs. Biden is firing them, which right wing commentators are trying paint as politicization. The reality is that this is correcting a Trump-era pattern of deprofessionalization. 1/

Lets step back to general principles here: political appointees selected on the basis of ideology are expected to resign when a new President comes into power. Career officials stay. For some positions its a little more complex but that is the basic governing logic. 2/

Trump blurred these basic differences between appointees and career staff. He ran out of time in his effort to turn potentially hundreds of thousands of career officials into appointees, and Biden reversed that policy. A good step to protect competence. 3/

Thats the big picture stuff, so lets focus on the specific case. The U.S. Agency for Global Media funds International broadcasters. The most famous is Radio Free Europe. Seven months ago a Trump appointee Michael Pack took over.

Pack engaged in extreme politicization of the agency. He hired people without relevant qualifications, stacked advisory boards with ideologues & conspiracy theorists, called reporters "deep state" & interfered in programming and political reporting to push a pro-Trump slant. 5/

#Gaslighting alert:

You may come across bot-amplified activists pitching the idea that #Republicans have been packing the Courts for years, and therefore, hypocritically object to Democratic Party machinations to inflict #courtpacking on America if Kamala Harris and her running mate are elected.

So, is it true, have "Republicans been packing" the Courts for decades?

Well, let's start by agreeing that this, or any, conversation is pointless unless we share a common language. If you think so, then ...

The term "court-packing" was devised to describe a proposal by President #FDR to add additional justices to the Supreme Court thereby increasing the number of justices. His plan wasn't so crass as simply to add justices.

Rather, under FDR's plan, the number of justices sitting on the Court would be increased by an additional justice for each sitting justice that reached the age of 70.

Get ready to shift how you think about congress. (quick thread bc Zeke’s asleep)...

For 10 years, it was a safe bet that congress would accomplish nothing. Congress was defined by dysfunction, gridlock, or outright white plutocracy under Trump.

But there’s a Dem trifecta for the first time in a decade now, so it's time to make new bets- and make them fast.

Usually congress moves slowly or not at all. Historically though, when a Dem trifecta comes, there is a brief window of opportunity - usually measured in months, not years - where legislative progress suddenly speeds up.

A quick trip through the last 100 years of this:

Wilson takes office with his Democratic trifecta in early 1913, and by the end of the year we get a progressive federal income tax and the creation of the Federal Reserve.

FDR takes office with his Democratic trifecta in early 1933, and that year we get the Public Works Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, banking reform, and massive economic recovery legislation.

1) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Starting an Impeachment Trial

2) It is unclear when and how the Senate may begin President Trump’s second impeachment trial. The problem with “starting” an impeachment trial is that once you start, under the Senate impeachment rules, it can potentially supersede all other Senate action.

3) That’s the case - UNLESS - the Senate works out some sort of an agreement on handling an impeachment trial. Otherwise, once you start an impeachment trial, without a side agreement, the Senate meets six days a week at 1 pm et, Sundays excluded, until the trial is finished.

4) The key is when the House sends over the article of impeachment. That triggers a lot of things.

First things first. The Senate must send a parliamentary message to the House that it’s ready to “receive” the article.

5) This is kind of like a football referee waving his hand at a kickoff returner stationed in the end zone to make sure he’s ready to proceed with the kickoff. Once the Senate does that, the House can send the articles.

But…