January 15: America First - Dictator Version - with Diamond and Silk

 

1/15/21: Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy, visits Trump in the Oval office, to urge his god-chosen leader to rise up.

 

Meeting of the buffoons.

 

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America First: Dictator Version!

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Jabin Botsford, a Washington Post cameraman with a telephoto lens, manages a snap of Lindell’s notes. 

We’ll let the Independent, a British newspaper, explain what the cameraman was able to pick up: 

One of Donald Trump’s fiercest supporters, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, went to a meeting at the White House with notes suggesting “martial law if necessary”.

The notes, captured by a photographer as Mr Lindell entered the Oval Office on Friday, come after Mr Lindell tweeted then deleted calls for the president to “impost martial law” in the seven battleground states that won the election for Joe Biden.

 

The page is curved and not fully visible, but the heading is titled “[illegible] taken immediately to save the [illegible] constitution”.

 

It references a “cyber” attorney and “Kraken” attorney Sidney Powell, while recommending “Kash Patel to acting CIA”.

 

“Insurrection Act now as a result of the assault on the… martial law if necessary upon the first hint of any…”, it read.

 

“… foreign interference in the election trigger [ineligible] powers. Make clear this is China/Iran.”

 

So, let’s be clear. If Lindell had his way, we’d all be in for a grand surprise in just five more days. 

Trump would give the order, and those 25,000 troops on guard in D.C., to guard against a repeat of what happened on January 6, would turn on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and Mike Pence and the rest. Martial Law. “America First: Dictator Version!”

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“The president’s right to loyalty.” 

FELLOW HEAD-UP-HIS-ASS Trump supporter Lou Dobbs, and (not for much longer) Fox Business News host, goes off on a rant about Republicans who he believes have stabbed Donald J. in the back. “These are people who don’t care about the party, the president. They don’t care about the Constitution themselves,” he tells a guest, former GOP Rep. Jason Chaffetz. “Because they’re acting in utter disregard for the president’s right to loyalty.” 

Obviously, Dobbs has never read Article I of the Constitution, or any of the other articles. Nowhere do the Founding Fathers express the belief that the head of the executive branch has a “right to loyalty” from members of the legislative branch. 

Or from you or me. 

(Like Lindell, Dobbs is channeling his inner fascist.)

 

Chaffetz, a former member of that branch doesn’t bother to correct the host, most likely because Chaffetz wants to keep getting paid to show up as a guest commentator on Fox News.

 

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EVEN WITH WASHINGTON D.C. under guard, and Lindell hinting that God really wants Trump to be like Xi Jinping, this next item may be the most important story of all in the grand scheme. 

According to scientists from thirteen institutions, the world’s oceans were hotter in 2020 than ever before. Hotter, even, than in 2019, when they were at that time hotter than ever before. 

Research published in Advances in Atmospheric Science, a publication you no doubt keep on your nightstand to read when you can’t sleep, indicates that 90% of the excess heat generated by human activity is absorbed by the waters of the world. As reporters explain, 

Researchers emphasized that warmer ocean waters intensify hurricanes and other storms that travel over the sea, and warmer water also expands to take up more room, causing sea level rise and coastal flooding. The disruption in rainfall patterns also leads to droughts and wildfires. 

 

U.S. government scientists at the NOAA also report that 2020 was, on land and sea and in the air, the second hottest year since records have been kept. The year 2016 maintains a slim lead, and 2020 knocks 2019 down to third. 

Even more telling, the year just ended was the hottest ever for the Northern Hemisphere, 2.3° F hotter than average. 

On a positive note, President-Elect Biden has announced his choices to head a White House Office of Domestic Climate Policy. Proof again, that not all politicians are alike. Under Trump, there was no such office and no such policy. With the Big Orange Buffoon in control, climate change was always seen as a “hoax.”

 

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“The President has perpetrated false rhetoric.” 

SINCE OUR TOPIC is idiocy, it might be time to nominate the new dumbest member of Congress, with several fresh candidates rushing to the fore. For this blogger, the current favorite is incoming Sen. Tommy Tuberville, famous mainly for being a college football coach. 

Apparently, Coach Senator never had time while charting X’s and 0’s to read the U.S. Constitution. He suggested this week that a great way to lower the temperature – not the global temperature, of course – but the political temperature in our country, would be to delay Mr. Biden’s inauguration until the COVID-19 crisis abates. 

(Yes! Brilliant idea! Since President Trump is doing such a fantastic job of focusing on that crisis right now!) 

“We probably could have had a swearing-in and inauguration later after we got this virus behind us a little bit,” Coach Senator told baffled reporters in Alabama. “Again, we’re talking about Washington, D.C.,” Tuberville added, in a snarky stab at the people who muck about in the “Swamp.” 

Alas, the fact that the 20^th Amendment sets January 20 as the day, and noon as the time for a new president to be sworn in, somehow escaped Coach Senator’s feeble intellectual grasp. 

One lawmaker who is definitely smarter than Coach Senator, is Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. The Republican senator said in a statement released this week that the decision to impeach President Trump was “appropriate.” She promised to listen to “both sides” when the Senate trial begins. As for Mr. Trump’s role in the tragedy that took place on January 6, she was clear: 

President Trump’s words incited violence, which led to the injury and deaths of Americans...the desecration of the Capitol, and briefly interfered with the government's ability to ensure a peaceful transfer of power.

 

For months, the President has perpetrated false rhetoric that the election was stolen and rigged, even after dozens of courts ruled against these claims. When he was not able to persuade the courts or elected officials, he launched a pressure campaign against his own Vice President, urging him to take actions that he had no authority to do.

 

Such unlawful actions cannot go without consequences and the House has responded swiftly, and I believe, appropriately, with impeachment.

 

Amen. 

And see below.

 

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PROVING that Republicans have their priorities straight, there is outrage from their side, after Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver, who happens to be a United Methodist minister, ends a prayer in Congress with the words, “Amen and a-woman.” Cleaver says he was simply acknowledging all the women now serving in the House and Senate, even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is kind of a wacko. 

It’s not exactly a major issue. You know: Compared to the fact that more than 4,000 Americans died from COVID-19 in a single day and some of these Republicans have been coddling Trump for four years. 

For instance, when he made stupid statements like: “Hey, drink disinfectant, and the virus will go away.” 

Or: “Don’t worry. This coronavirus will go away when it gets warm.”

 

Some Republican noted that “amen” is Latin for, “So be it.” Which this blogger definitely did not know. 

Anyway, GOP members were furious. Rep. Lauren Boebert was seen waving her pistol in the air, and fake shooting Cleaver for fun. 

Okay, that last part is a joke. 

Amen.

 

* 

“Every time… science clashed with…messaging, messaging won.” 

WITH THE CLOCK winding down on the Trump presidency, The New York Times publishes a damning story based on the experiences of two Trump appointees who went to work at the Centers for Disease Control in 2018. Kyle McGowan was chosen to serve as chief of staff at CDC and Amanda Campbell was installed as his deputy. Both were young, Georgians originally, and thrilled to return to home and take up what they imagined would be dream jobs. 

This past August, both resigned. Until now they had not said publicly why. Today, they let rip. “Everyone wants to describe the day that the light switch flipped and the C.D.C. was sidelined,” during the epidemic. “It didn’t happen that way,” Mr. McGowan said. “It was more of like a hand grasping something, and it slowly closes, closes, closes, closes until you realize that, middle of the summer, it has a complete grasp on everything at the C.D.C.”

 

Both McGowan and Campbell told the Times they tried to protect the scientists at C.D.C. from political meddling. It was a constant battle. 

Political appointees repeatedly asked the agency to change statements and alter advice about how to handle the crisis. This was especially true if such advice was seen, by implication, as criticism of President Trump. Kellyanne Conway would complain to C.D.C. and ask for restrictions on church choirs and limits on communion to be changed. Ivanka Trump would call with suggestions about how to open up schools. 

Debate and disagreement are to be expected. What McGowan is talking about is not that. “Every time that the science clashed with the messaging, messaging won,” he tells the Times. 

The Times explains: 

Ms. Campbell said that at the pandemic’s outset, she was confident the agency had the best scientists in the world at its disposal, “just like we had in the past.”

 

“What was so different, though, was the political involvement, not only from H.H.S. but then the White House, ultimately, that in so many ways hampered what our scientists were able to do,” she said.

 

Even when scientists were right, if their message clashed with the mixed-up message Trump was sending, the scientists paid a price.

 

Mr. McGowan said he was especially unnerved last winter when officials in Washington told the C.D.C. that regular telephone briefings with another senior scientist, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, were no longer needed because Mr. Trump had his own daily briefings. Dr. Messonnier angered the White House in late February when she issued a public warning that the virus was about to change Americans’ lives.

 

“There’s not a single thing that she said that didn’t come true,” Mr. McGowan said. “Is it more important to have her telling the world and the American public what to be prepared for, or is it just to say, ‘All is well?’”

 

“It’s demoralizing to spend your entire career preparing for this moment, preparing for a pandemic like this. And then not be able to fully do your job,” Mr. McGowan said. “They need to be allowed to lead.”

 

At one point, funding for C.D.C. was diverted for political purposes, with $300 million shifted from scientific work in order to fund a “vaccine public relations campaign.” That campaign was essentially designed to burnish the president’s battered image. The plan collapsed after the free press started nosing around. 

(Saving most of the $300 million.) 

McGowan had no illusions about the shit storm he had been through. “Damage has been done to the C.D.C. that will take years to undo,” he said. “And that’s terrible to hear, because it happened under my time there.” 

And with Donald J. Trump – sort of – at the helm. 

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE: We should note that conservative media personalities Diamond and Silk stand by Trump’s authoritarian side. As late as March 26, 2021, they appear on right-wing television where they insist that the U.S. military should remove Biden from office, partly because Biden had just tripped going up some stairs, and they suggest we “let the military take over from here.” David Brody, of Real America’s Voice News, asks, why should the military take over? “From a national security standpoint?” he wonders. Yes, the ladies agree – and we need to get to the bottom of what happened in the 2020 election. 

This blogger would suggest that if we let the military take charge, we won’t have to worry about elections ever again.