Opinion

The team of Arizona Republican state senators, legislative staff, and advisers finalizing the Cyber Ninjas' report on the 2020 presidential election in Maricopa County are preparing to say that Joe Biden legitimately won the election, according to the largest funder of the Senate's mostly privatized election review, former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne.

"The way some of these political RINOs [Republicans In Name Only] are doing this is they're trying to argue that the [election] report should only be allowed to go and address the original construct of the report, the original assignment of the audit, and leave out other things that have been found," Byrne told Creative Destruction Media's L. Todd Wood.

In anticipation of another gathering of Trump followers at the U.S. Capitol on Saturday, the various law enforcement agencies aren't taking any chances. The fences are back up and officials have called for back-up from local police; the National Guard has already gone out. The rallygoers are gathering to protest the prosecution and incarceration of the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6th. Organizers claim they are being held as political prisoners in cruel conditions, so one can understand why the authorities are concerned.

Most observers of extremist forums seem to think this so-called "Justice for J6" event isn't going to be very well-attended. Law enforcement reckons maybe 700 people will show up. This is not all that surprising since the organizer Matt Braynard, a former Trump campaign official, has told those who show that will not be allowed to wear their usual MAGA costumes or carry Trump regalia, which would have been like telling Deadheads they couldn't wear tie-dye or smoke pot at a Grateful Dead concert. He took the fun right out of it for the vast majority of Trumpers.

Is it life imitating art imitating life, or something even more complicated than that? At this point in America's state of malignant normality and unreality I am no longer sure. America in the Age of Trump lost the plot some time ago.

Consider this narrative: A crazed and out of control president, viewed by political rivals and military leaders as so unstable he might start a war — even a nuclear conflict — to gratify his ego and hold onto political power. He has launched a coup attempt, which remains unresolved. But a few brave and patriotic souls are willing to stop this president in order to save the country and the world from catastrophe and potential annihilation.

Last Wednesday, a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee was finally removed from Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the old Confederacy. The statue was erected in 1890, as Jim and Jane Crow tightened their hands, often literally, around the throat of Black America. The AP reported the big moment:

Hundreds of onlookers erupted in cheers and song as the 21-foot-tall bronze figure was lifted off a pedestal and lowered to the ground. The removal marked a major victory for civil rights activists, whose previous calls to dismantle the statues had been steadfastly rebuked by city and state officials alike.
"It's very difficult to imagine, certainly, even two years ago that the statues on Monument Avenue would actually be removed," said Ana Edwards, a community activist and founding member of the Virginia Defenders for Freedom Justice & Equality. "It's representative of the fact that we're sort of peeling back the layers of injustice that Black people and people of color have experienced when governed by white supremacist policies for so long."

Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, had ordered the statue's removal last summer amid the nationwide wave of protest that followed the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. But it took more than a year for lawsuits aimed at saving the statue to work their way through the courts. Northam called it "hopefully a new day, a new era in Virginia," adding: "Any remnant like this that glorifies the lost cause of the Civil War, it needs to come down."

On September 18, a group of MAGAheads plans to "rally" in Washington D.C. on behalf of the Capitol rioters who are facing charges for their crimes, deeming them "political prisoners." There is a dispute about how worried folks in D.C. should be about this event. Journalists who follow the insurrectionist movement closely don't think many people will show up. Law enforcement, however, is clearly worried, "taking no chances" and putting up fences around the Capitol and keeping the National Guard on standby.

Regardless of what happens, there is one clear moral to the story: President Joe Biden should have banned the unvaccinated from flying weeks ago.

Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley stepped outside the realm of his constitutional power to prevent Donald Trump from starting nuclear war with China or Iran. It was definitely unconstitutional and probably illegal. But he's not the true villain in this story; the true villain is almost never mentioned in the press.

This article was originally published at The Hartmann Report

For months, as Democratic voters in California seemed complacent in the face of the Republican effort to recall Governor Gavin Newsom, much of the national political and punditry class in the media claimed California would send dire warnings to the Democratic Party.

This article was originally published at The Signorile Report

Larry Elder was the leading GOP candidate in California's recall election Tuesday. The talk-show host lost by a mile. He conceded last night, but not before raising doubts about the election's legitimacy.

As the Editorial Board's Lindsay Beyerstein wrote:

A convergence of three unsettling headlines appeared for my morning reading the day before the nation observed the 20-year commemoration of the tragic deaths of almost 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11, 2001. The very day of the remembrance ceremonies, the 7-day average for loss of American lives to the ongoing COVID-19 catastrophe was 1,666, as we rapidly approached a death toll of 660,000 Americans.

This article was originally published at Idaho Capital Sun

So, again, with feeling: Anti-vaccine GOP leaders are lawless. Their followers are often criminal. (I mean this literally.) I'm going to keep repeating myself no matter how many times they claim to be "fighting for their freedom." I'm going to keep calling on the government to put an end to lawlessness no matter how much they hue and cry about "tyranny." Criminals are "free" to break the law, too. Then they are found and punished. The president was right to say the unvaccinated are the problem. His mandate forces tens of millions of them to get vaccinated. They are literally robbing the rest of us of our freedom.

This is important to point out, because the discourse so far keeps framing the question as one between freedom and government, as if government and freedom were opposites. Sure, they are opposites — if you are a conservative. That the discourse is framing them as antipodes is a consequence of the last half-century being dominated by the Republican Party's preferred ways of looking at the world. "Negative liberty," as Isaiah Berlin put it, is only one meaning of liberty, and it is, furthermore, often the narrowest, brittlest and dumbest.

On Monday, Republican recall hopeful Larry Elder refused to say whether he would accept defeat if he failed to unseat Democratic incumbent Gavin Newsom. The far-right radio host urged his supporters to go to the StopCAFraud website to report election voting "irregularities." The site, which was funded by Elder's campaign, claimed that "statistical irregularities" proved that the California governor had won the recall election by fraud. The catch was that the election wasn't until Tuesday and no votes had been counted.

In the post-Trump era, Republican losers follow a simple formula: Cry fraud, file frivolous lawsuits and fundraise off of them. You will lose in court, because there is no fraud, but it doesn't matter because every loss burnishes the GOP's "stabbed in the back" narrative.