Portrait of the Cat Armellino With a Sonnet by Bertazzi , Giovanni Reder, 1750
Good Morning!!
As we get closer to Joe Biden’s inauguration, Trump is acting crazier than ever. I have to wonder if he can avoid a complete psychotic breakdown before he’s finally forced to leave the people’s house. With each passing day, he becomes more of an embarrassment to the country. Here’s the latest, along with some 18th Century cats in art:
Many of Donald Trump’s most dogmatic supporters see a mass protest in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6—just two weeks shy of Inauguration Day 2021—as their last chance to disrupt President-elect Joe Biden’s win. But for the president himself, it’s just another day to complain.
Two people familiar with the matter say that in recent days, Trump has told advisers and close associates that he wants to keep fighting in court past Jan. 6 if members of Congress, as expected, end up certifying the electoral college results.
“The way he sees it is: Why should I ever let this go?… How would that benefit me?” said one of the sources, who’s spoken to Trump at length about the post-election activities to nullify his Democratic opponent’s decisive victory.
A Girl Holding a Cat by Philippe Mercier, c.1750 (c) National Galleries of Scotland
The president’s exact plans for the Jan. 6 events remain unclear, and it has been common for him to lend his support to these rallies or protests via enthusiastic-sounding tweets, only to then stop short of doing much else. Since last week, Trump has asked certain aides and allies what they think would be good ideas for him to mark the occasion, such as a speech, a flyover, or a recorded video, the sources said….
On the day itself, protesters plan to meet in the northeast corner of the Capitol complex, where they’ll hear from a list of speakers that includes Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Trump adviser Roger Stone, and Rep-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who has supported the QAnon conspiracy theory. Trump has promoted the protest on Twitter, urging his supporters to attend.
“Be there, will be wild!” Trump tweeted on Dec. 19.
President Donald Trump is spending his final days in office attacking leadership within his own party, this time the second-highest ranking Republican in the Senate, offering a possible preview of his broader post-presidential strategy to use his influence in the 2022 midterm elections and beyond.
Trump, back at the White House after his Mar-a-Lago holiday with no public events on his schedule, attacked Sen. John Thune, a South Dakotan who is the No. 2 Senate Republican, in an afternoon tweet on New Year’s Day.
“I hope to see the great Governor of South Dakota @KristiNoem, run against RINO @SenJohnThune, in the upcoming 2022 Primary. She would do a fantastic job in the U.S. Senate, but if not Kristi, others are already lining up. South Dakota wants strong leadership, NOW!” he wrote in a tweet.
Trump has railed against Republican leadership broadly multiple times this week, but this time is naming names. Thune, the Senate majority whip, had been one of the top Republicans to speak in favor of accepting the Electoral College results and President-elect Joe Biden’s victory, drawing Trump’s ire.
“Once somebody gets 270, I understand they’re ruling right now, but I think that’s the process we have, yes. … In the end at some point you have to face the music. And I think once the Electoral College settles the issue today, it’s time for everybody to move on,” Thune said ahead of the formal electoral college voting process last month.
Trump’s tweet comes just 19 days before he leaves the White House and days before a joint session of Congress is set to formally certify the Electoral College results, with some Trump allies planning to join his baseless efforts to overturn the results of the election.
A Little Girl Nursing a Kitten by James Northcote, 1795 (c) Paintings Collection
Trump’s last-minute moves to close out his presidency — from his demand for increased stimulus payments to his unsubstantiated claims about the 2020 election — have put Republicans in a bind ahead of the state’s runoffs next week that will determine which party controls the Senate. And the president’s messaging is ironically aligned with that of Democrats, who see a renewed opening on their broader push for more coronavirus relief aid after President-elect Joe Biden takes office.
Though he is actively campaigning for the state’s two incumbent GOP senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, holding a Monday night rally to drive turnout to help save the Republican majority, Trump is continuing to run roughshod all over the party’s message for Tuesday’s must-win runoffs and, some Republicans worry, giving Democrats a perfect opening.
On Friday, Trump called the Republican-controlled Senate “pathetic” for failing to deliver on the $2,000 stimulus checks and other demands he wanted to pair with it after the Senate voted to override his veto of the $741 billion defense policy bill.
“Now they want to give people ravaged by the China Virus $600, rather than the $2000 which they so desperately need,” Trump tweeted, referring to Senate Republicans. ”Not fair, or smart!”
Indeed, Democratic challengers Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff have been jumping all over the president’s demand to boost the pandemic relief payments by $1,400. It’s a major closing argument for them — especially on the heels of Senate Republicans blocking a stand-alone bill to increase the value of the checks.
ATLANTA — President Trump took to Twitter Friday evening to make the unfounded assertion that Georgia’s two Senate races are “illegal and invalid,” an argument that could complicate his efforts to convince his supporters to turn out for Republican candidates in the two runoff races that will determine which party controls the Senate.
The president is set to hold a rally in Dalton, Ga., on Monday, the day before Election Day, and Georgia Republicans are hoping he will focus his comments on how crucial it is for Republicans to vote in large numbers for Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, the state’s two incumbent Republican senators.
Jean-Baptiste Perronneau, Portrait of Magdaleine Pinceloup de la Grange and kitty.
But Mr. Trump has continued to make the false claim that Georgia’s election system was rigged against him in the Nov. 3 general election. Some Republican leaders are afraid that his supporters will take the president’s argument seriously, and decide that voting in a “corrupt” system is not worth their time, a development that could hand the election to the Democrats.
Some strategists and political science experts in the state have said Mr. Trump’s assault on Georgia’s voting system may be at least partly responsible for the relatively light Republican turnout in the conservative strongholds of northwest Georgia, where Dalton is, in the early voting period that ended Thursday.
Mr. Trump made his assertion about the Senate races in a Twitter thread in which he also made the baseless claim that “massive corruption” took place in the general election, “which gives us far more votes than is necessary to win all of the Swing States.”
The president made a specific reference to a Georgia consent decree that he said was unconstitutional. The problems with this document, he argued further, render the two Senate races and the results of his own electoral loss invalid.
Mr. Trump was almost certainly referring to a March consent decree hammered out between the Democratic Party and Republican state officials that helped establish standards for judging the validity of signatures on absentee ballots in the state.
Meanwhile, Trump continues to ignore the racing coronavirus pandemic.
The US surpassed 20 million total recorded Covid-19 cases on Friday, hours after the country ushered in 2021 and left behind its deadliest month of the pandemic.
The nation also has set a Covid-19 hospitalization record for four straight days. The high counts are a grim reminder that even with 2020 behind us, the pandemic continues to ravage parts of the country. And some leaders warn the worst is still ahead.
“We are still going to have our toughest and darkest days,” Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti told CNN on Thursday.
It was a warm summer Wednesday, Election Day was looming and President Trump was even angrier than usual at the relentless focus on the coronavirus pandemic.
“You’re killing me! This whole thing is! We’ve got all the damn cases,” Mr. Trump yelled at Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser, during a gathering of top aides in the Oval Office on Aug. 19. “I want to do what Mexico does. They don’t give you a test till you get to the emergency room and you’re vomiting.”
Mexico’s record in fighting the virus was hardly one for the United States to emulate. But the president had long seen testing not as a vital way to track and contain the pandemic but as a mechanism for making him look bad by driving up the number of known cases.
And on that day he was especially furious after being informed by Dr. Francis S. Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, that it would be days before the government could give emergency approval to the use of convalescent plasma as a treatment, something Mr. Trump was eager to promote as a personal victory going into the Republican National Convention the following week.
“They’re Democrats! They’re against me!” he said, convinced that the government’s top doctors and scientists were conspiring to undermine him. “They want to wait!”
The result, according to interviews with more than two dozen current and former administration officials and others in contact with the White House, was a lose-lose situation. Mr. Trump not only ended up soundly defeated by Joseph R. Biden Jr., but missed his chance to show that he could rise to the moment in the final chapter of his presidency and meet the defining challenge of his tenure.
Now. we have a countdown of 18 days to go to get rid of the Russian Potted Plant in the White House He’s still kicking and tweeting whatever possible dignity he ever had right down that gold toilet! His Death Cult is up to no good too. But still, you can’t wake up to the first day of 2021 without being happy that a change is going to come for sure.
Can Biden fill the presidency? No, this isn’t about filling West Wing and Cabinet jobs. It’s about Biden filling his own job — projecting the aura of command that Americans associate with the presidency. At 78, he’ll be 78 days older on his first day than Ronald Reagan was on his last. On many days on the campaign trail, his frail bearing and meandering sentences made him seem every day of his age. Since the election, he’s typically been a crisper and more authoritative presence. Yet U.S. history has rarely presented a more vivid contrast between outsize challenges and a pedestrian leadership persona.
Can Trump still be Trump come Jan. 21? The president’s demagoguery with his baseless assertions of a stolen election, and his increasingly erratic behavior since the election, has put an old puzzle in a frightening new light: Does seemingly irrational behavior actually serve a rational purpose? I’m already on record with my hunch — not a prediction! — that Trump will fade faster than most people and probably even he assumes once he no longer occupies the White House. But this is the dominant question hovering over Republican politics. A subordinate question is whether his adult children have any real political sway of their own once dad is ex-president.
Which calls for one of my favorite Nina Simone Songs!!!
And then there’s this little–meager– thing coming into people’s checking accounts. The stimulus program is half what it was in March. There are some important differences too. This is from the IndyStar: “New COVID-19 stimulus bill is half of March’s. How else it differs.”.
With no changes, this round of stimulus will cost about $920 billion, according to Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. That’s much closer to the $1 trillion package Republicans floated this summer — and a third of the bill House Democrats passed for earlier this year.
Still, this package includes a mix of proposals from both parties:
A renewal of the Paycheck Protection Program for small business loan forgiveness
Funds for vaccine development and distribution
Funds for COVID testing
Funds to equip schools with protection equipment
Renewal of unemployment benefits
Direct stimulus payments
Check out the nifty graphic that outlines some of the major differences you may notice.
There will be some protests on next week when a one US Senator and a few Reps make total asses of themselves while simultaneously staging a coup. Here’s some headlines on the protests but the usual right wing nutters, the Gohmert thing, and the vote to put every one on the record to say Biden was legally elected in our democratic Republic.
Mike Allen / Axios: McConnell swats back at Trump amid Republican power struggle — It took four years and an election defeat. But someone with real power inside the Republican Party is standing up to — and swatting back — President Trump: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
The only thing that concerns me is the protests by the usual nutters who are getting angrier and more aggrieved and finding more ways to convince themselves that every conspiracy theory Trump sends them is reality.
A city accustomed to mass protests is gearing up for especially intense ones over what should be the most mundane of political events: the counting of Electoral College votes during a special joint session of Congress.
At the urging of President Donald Trump, however, die-hard supporters are planning to descend on the nation’s capital Jan. 6, to pressure Republican lawmakers into aligning themselves with the doomed effort to overturn Joe Biden’s electoral victory.
Knife fights, shouting matches, and verbal harassment of Trump opponents accompanied previous demonstrations following Biden’s election win in November. Now federal and local law enforcement are bracing for what may be the most intense Trump protest yet as Congress is poised to formally declare Biden president-elect.
Various Trump groups are promoting the demonstrations online. One called “#StopTheSteal” operates the website “WildProtest.com,” which proclaims that “PRESIDENT TRUMP WANTS YOU IN DC JANUARY 6.”
“Be there, will be wild,” says one flier.
The event has been co-signed by incoming members of Congress Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
And then, climate change the global problem we need to be on top of …
The DOE is poised to play an essential role as the Biden administration looks to leverage clean energy investments toward its twin goals of pulling the economy out of a deep slump and delivering on the president-elect’s ambitious climate pledges https://t.co/EZFpLfyHN9
To run his Energy Department, Biden has tapped former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, a staunch clean energy advocate who worked closely with the Obama administration to bail out her state’s auto industry during the Great Recession — a program that also directed stimulus funds to build the LG Chem facility there that produces batteries for the Chevy Volt.
“Granholm was really good on this stuff when she was governor. She’s been even more engaged on the climate fights since she left,” said John Podesta, the former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton who later led Obama administration climate efforts. “She still has very strong connections to unions, to the auto companies.”
Granholm is already leaning into her argument that a clean energy transition can help the U.S. economy — and blue collar workers — weather the economic turmoil from the pandemic.
“We’re going to be working at the Department of Energy with the … states and the cities, to help give them incentives, little carrots, little sticks,” Granholm told ABC’s “This Week,” on Dec. 20, adding that “combating climate change is such an economic opportunity for this country.”
Hang in there! Help is on the way! We’ll be here together to virtually hold hands and hug as we undo the terrible Trumpist Regime’s rule of terror and ineptitude.
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The only thing that concerns me is the protests by the usual nutters who are getting angrier and more aggrieved and finding more ways to convince themselves that every conspiracy theory Trump sends them is reality.
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