DC Unrest Megathread

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Neo-Nazi militias inside the Senate chamber. My lifelong conservative Republican grandfather is rolling in his grave.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Also like. This is, in fact, legally, treason.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Catharsis.  Not just for those protesting/rioting today, but for all of us.  It takes events like this for our national purpose to be allowed to change and update.  Whatever may come of this, we should relish this opportunity to break the "end of history" ethos that has strangled our spirit for the past 30 years.

If we had a more transformative Democrat as president-elect (i.e., not Biden), he would go on national television tonight to announce the immediate establishment of a provisional government, reconstitute the House and Senate (w/ Ossoff and Perdue being seated immediately) and implement martial law.

Use this opportunity to flip the table and unleash all the pent-up social/political change we've needed since WWII.   

Go to hell, fascist.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

https://twitter.com/Mike_Pence

Look at what Mike Pence changed his cover photo to.... lmao.

Himself and his wife?

What was it before?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

i am so pissed off. absolutely vomitrocious. “Make America Great Again” really does = “Make China and Russia great again by making America look like a third world banana republic”

those people who did this today are insane and evil.

RED AVATAR GOOSE!!!!!

Welcome to the team, bruh.

thx man you know i just hate how a lot of the way ppl been acting lately and so been kinda goin left just bcuz a lot of the right has really really lost it. today was a whole new level

Welcome aboard, comrade!

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Any sense of when they'll resume counting?

Imminently.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

How the hell has it not been two hours yet?!

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

How the hell has it not been two hours yet?!

Seriously, can someone explain how they count time for these purposes?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Who was the one absent? Harris?

Perdue's seat is vacant.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

https://twitter.com/mepfuller/status/1347072023005163522?s=21

lmao, I’m not a small fry, I’m like 5’10 and 180 lbs of stockiness, and you can see Allred dwarfs me, Allred deffo would have won

[img width=465

Well Harris, you smarmy piece of s***, you and your ilk are Liars.

I would have paid big money to see former NFL player Allred smash Harris's face open like a rotten grapefruit with one punch on the house floor.

Encouraging violence is not the answer. You're better than this, Badger.

Is he? Badger's grown on me in recent months, but he's always been a bit of an internet tough guy.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I just heard Tim Ryan being interviewed on our local NPR station. He is of course the chair of the committee that oversees the Capitol Police Department. He had words of praise for the Department saying they were simply outmanned, but castigated the fact that the Capitol Police were over also unprepared and understaffed given all the advance warning of incitement that Donald Trump has committed over the last several months.

What shocked me was news I had not yet her. Reportedly there are 40 to 50 officers injured out of this, 15 of whom were hospitalized, one of whom is in critical condition after being beaten with pipes!

I heard Jim McGovern on my morning show a few hours ago. He was apparently presiding when the House had to flee, Pelosi having been ushered out a few minutes before. He seems to be all in on Omar's impeachment and/or 25th push.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

New Jersey and Delaware are sending parts of their National Guards to D.C.

Is this by their own initiative? because that would be beyond the jurisdiction of the state militia. Is it by the request of the DoD? if so who issued it? Trump or Pence?

Murphy said it's at the request of the United States National Guard Bureau, in other words, uniformed Army and Air Force leadership.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Capitol police has charged the following 14 people in relation with yesterday's events:


Unlawful Entry:
Leonard Guthrie, Cape May, N.J.
John Anderson, St. Augustine, Fla.
Matthew Council, Riverview, Fla.
Bradley Ruskelas, Inverness, Ill.
Michael Curzio, Summerfield, Fla
Cindy Fitchett, Cobbs Creek, Va.
Terry Brown, Myerstown, Pa.
Douglas Sweet, Hudgins, Va.
Thomas Gallagher, Bridgewater, N.H.
Zandra Sixkiller-Cramer, Glenwood, Md.

Assaulting a Police Officer, Unlawful Entry, Resisting Arrest:
Mark Leffingerwell, No fixed address

CPWL & Unregistered ammunition:
Grant Moore, Buford, Ga.

CPWL, Unregistered Firearm, Unregistered Ammunition:
Lonnie Zoffman, Falkville, Al.

Assaulting a Police Officer:
David Blair, Clarksburg, Md.

Lots of Florida Men in this list.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I had this question a couple weeks ago and I don't think I got an answer--can anyone be preemptively pardoned? I mean, someone must be convicted of a specific crime before being given the get-out-of-jail-free card, right?

No, they don't have to be convicted; see Ford's pardon of Nixon.

Carter also blanket-pardoned a bunch of draft dodgers, which is one thing people are worried Trump might do with the Capitol terrorists.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

And there it is folks, BUT BLM/ANTIFA!

Yeah, you deleted all the posts yesterday about it.  One doesn't forgive the other, but the 100 days of the Siege of Portland, the CHAZ, etc were all more violent than this event.  It just hit "closer to home" for some.  I moved here from the Twin Cities due to people burning down many city blocks of businesses and homes.

Absurd. The attempted violent overturning of a presidential election, stoked by the president himself, is many orders of magnitude worse than the terrible violence that came as an unfortunate side effect over the summer.

Not to sound too idpol-oriented, but if you're in an advanced stage of right-wing authoritarian brain rot then maybe it does stand to reason that violently overturning a presidential election and thinking that maybe cops should be a little less happy to gun down black people for looking at them funny are equally egregious violations of state legitimacy.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I think we might need to consider the idea that a newbie R-Vatican avatar with the username "The Reckoning" might have a somewhat more positive outlook on what happened yesterday than he is letting on.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I’m not saying they aren’t responsible for the violence, I’m saying that they didn’t actually intend for it to happen.

That they continued the lying which triggered the violence after the violence happened proves their personal power is more important to them than preventing the violence. Hawley made his objection intending for more violence because violence was now provably the outcome of such lies. He decided he'd rather have Trump supporters back him in 2024 or 2028, even if more Americans died.

Their hasn’t been additional violence after the session resumed, including after further objections were raised, so it shows violence wasn’t gaurunteed.

Are you mentally incompetent? I mean I saw the blue avatar.

Nobody is suggesting that lying is an arcane ritual which immediately summons redneck shock troops to smear feces on the walls. I'm saying it's radicalizing people and is leading the country in a direction toward further violence.

No s@%t it’s radicalizing people, but that doesn’t mean they actually condone the violence.

We can argue that their isn’t a real difference in effect, but I do believe there is a difference in the character of people.

There is a difference in the character of people, yes. Knowing that your self-serving lies are provoking violence, not supporting that violence, but continuing to tell them anyway, shows even worse character.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I’m not saying they aren’t responsible for the violence, I’m saying that they didn’t actually intend for it to happen.

That they continued the lying which triggered the violence after the violence happened proves their personal power is more important to them than preventing the violence. Hawley made his objection intending for more violence because violence was now provably the outcome of such lies. He decided he'd rather have Trump supporters back him in 2024 or 2028, even if more Americans died.

Their hasn’t been additional violence after the session resumed, including after further objections were raised, so it shows violence wasn’t gaurunteed.

Are you mentally incompetent? I mean I saw the blue avatar.

Nobody is suggesting that lying is an arcane ritual which immediately summons redneck shock troops to smear feces on the walls. I'm saying it's radicalizing people and is leading the country in a direction toward further violence.

No s@%t it’s radicalizing people, but that doesn’t mean they actually condone the violence.

We can argue that their isn’t a real difference in effect, but I do believe there is a difference in the character of people.

That's like saying when some Saudi sheik who funded a radical Salafi madrassa that educated a bunch of people who went on to join al-Qaeda and commit terror acts, the Saudi sheik "doesn't actually condone the violence."

No. It doesn't work that way.

It literally does. If the person doesn’t condone the violence, they don’t condone the violence. Period.

"I don't condone the violence" is not a series of hocus pocus magic words you can say to wash away all sin. You're (I assume) a (self-proclaimed) Catholic, you should know that confession doesn't work without a firm intent to change one's ways.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1347555316863553542

HE DOESNT LEARN

He doesn't, but notably, this still reads like the words of someone who now admits he lost.

If we're lucky, the next twelve days will show us a "Trump synthesis" of sorts where he's still the same old narcissistic SOB but is no longer speaking, or tweeting, in ways that actively obstruct the transition or his successor.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Oh yeah I didn't say this on here when his video was released last night--but I am convinced that video was either a deepfake or deceptively edited. I am unconvinced it was really him.

I'm convinced it's him, but I'm absolutely certain he was coerced into it, and hopefully he will continue to be coerced into holding the position he articulated in it.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Oh yeah I didn't say this on here when his video was released last night--but I am convinced that video was either a deepfake or deceptively edited. I am unconvinced it was really him.

I'm convinced it's him, but I'm absolutely certain he was coerced into it, and hopefully he will continue to be coerced into holding the position he articulated in it.

The speech pattern seems off and a lot more...fast?...than he usually speaks. I think maybe he went off on a ton of tangents and bitched and complained so maybe they edited it to seem like an "adult" statement.

That would make sense. His body language was also even stranger than usual--lots of weird head tilts and shifts in his center of gravity. I'm convinced that he did actually say the words we saw him say, though.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1347569870578266115

Good. Traitors aren't welcome anyway.

Pence being there and Trump not is my preferred outcome at this point, yeah. Better yet if Pence is there as the outgoing President.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Do you suppose that's because he will be cheerleading from the sidelines when the QAnon fraction of the US armed services will try to stop the inauguration themselves?

That, I think, would be reading too much into it, especially since disrupting the inauguration ceremonies short of actually killing Biden would have no legal effect.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/1347614091498557440

Hot take. In the last day or two of his presidency, Trump will pardon a number of these defendants.

I'm sure he has the pardons sitting on his desk already in case he's removed on January 14 or so and has to sign them in the last few minutes before the US Marshals escort him out.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Many, many Trump supporters are utterly embarassed at what has happened, IRL and on forum.

Sure, but the question therefore is; are they still Trump supporters?  The answer to that will tell us all we need to know.

No, even that doesn't go far enough. It's easy for these profile in Courage last-minute converts to democracy to reject Trump in the last week and a half of his presidency when he is irrelevant towards conservatives maintaining political power and advancing their agenda. If they don't oppose Trump ISM, which encompasses all those jackass congressmen, Senators, Governors, and hundreds of assorted Republican officials who full bore stood by and parotid Trump's Fantastical claims of election fraud and incitements for Direct action.

If they can't bring themselves to throw out those individuals for at bare minimum a sane Republican like Nancy Mays, Mitt Romney, John Kasich, Etc, or if not then bite the bullet and vote Democrat or third-party, then they've demonstrated they really don't give a crap. Between conservatism and democracy, they will choose the former every time.

Except for the fact that you could count on one hand the number of elected Republican politicians who are truly Trumpists.  Frankly, that list might begin and end with Josh Hawley.  And, even he is probably more pandering than anything.

Tuberville?  Gosar?  Mo Brooks?  Boebert?  Greene?  Gaetz?  We're already over one hand and those are just the first ones that jumped to mind.

Jim Jordan is another one that I can think of. As I was remarking elsewhere, the number of extremist ideologues in the Republican caucus is alarming to me.

How can we forget Big Louie Gohmert

Don't leave out rising stars Bob Good and Mary Miller!