semi-titled

Nolite te bastardes carborundorum

[pocochina]

Queens man indicted — Queens Daily Eagle

A Queens man was indicted Thursday for allegedly making hush money payments to a porn star shortly before he was elected president of the Un

i would like to extend my best wishes to all, even the haters and losers, on this very special day

[pocochina]

years of elena gilbert discourse have spectacularly overprepared me for alicent hightower discourse, ama

[pocochina]

honestly if any of you guys are in the UK, I hope you're enjoying every second of this shitshow, you have earned it

[anexplanationofunfortunateevents]

the darkest hour, one year later

The thing I have been thinking since January 6th, 2021 is that we have been on this path for almost exactly twenty years. Specifically, since December 12th, 2000.

Unlike 1/6, December 12th is not a date which has lived in infamy. (I had to look it up myself, I thought it might have been the 19th.) But it was the extremely consequential day when the United States Supreme Court handed down the lawless, intellectually dishonest, and unimaginably consequential decision in Bush v. Gore, which forced the state of Florida to stop its attempt to determine who had won the razor-close election for its presidential electors. This effectively handed the presidency to Bush, who received about 500,000 fewer votes than Vice President Gore – and who, a completed recount by press organizations showed a few months later, received fewer votes in the state of Florida.

Sure, it sounds bad if you describe it that way, and a lot of people said so at the time. But if you put it into the context of what led up to the decision, it actually looks a whole lot worse. It wasn’t the closeness of Florida’s election which dragged things out for over a month after the election. It was the Bush campaign doing everything it could to sabotage the recount, and the entire Republican establishment rallying behind him. “Everything” included something that’s been remembered as the “Brooks Brothers riot,” where a bunch of young Republican staffers charged into a Miami elections office and physically intimidated a bunch of local officials and volunteer poll workers into giving up on counting their constituents’ votes. And one reason Florida was even close enough to be swung by a 1/6-style mob attack was that the state’s Republican governor, who happened to be Bush’s little brother, had recently overseen a racist voter purge which secretly struck thousands of people (mostly Black Democrats) off the voter rolls.

So, to recap: Republicans tried to sabotage an election with shady bureaucratic antics in areas that most people assumed were apolitical. When that appeared not to have worked, they physically assaulted a government building where an important post-election procedure was being carried out. The violent attack bought enough time for a government institution with only tenuous democratic legitimacy to swoop in and decide “votes don’t count and we’re going to install the person who didn’t win over the public.” It does not strike me as farfetched that Trump and his henchmen thought that if they did steps one and two, then step three would work. Again.

Frustratingly, the small-d democratic failure of the 2000 election, if it’s remembered at all, tends to be decontextualized from what are broadly agreed to have been the policy failures of the Bush regime. But the clarity of 1/6 should make us reconsider. The Bush administration ignored expert warnings that the extremist Osama bin Laden and his terrorist organization al Qaeda were “determined to attack inside the United States,” and then once the warnings it had ignored proved prescient, it exploited the tragedy as an opportunity to seize a conventional strongman posture, conflating loyalty to the nation with political obsequiousness to the Dear Leader. Republican campaigns depicted opposition candidates as terrorists, simply because they were the political opposition.

The Bush regime used its control of the intelligence agencies to manipulate the press, the public, and elected officials into going along with a war of choice. It was a catastrophically bad choice on its own merits, and they went about it in a way that temporarily shielded them from constitutional checks on or democratic accountability for its bad choice. It locked people up in secret offshore prisons, publicly said it didn’t even have to show cause to arrest those people, and literally tortured them. That is a small-d democratic catastrophe.

The same Department of Justice that defended the government’s authority to kidnap and torture people also used its authority to harassand even imprisonpoliticians who it saw as potential opposition leaders. After the voters had the temerity to give Democrats a majority in the 2006 midterms, DOJ leadership demanded that US attorneys abuse their power to prosecute meritless cases of “voter fraud” and then purged the department of prosecutors who refused to frame innocent people for crimes in support of a political narrative aimed at delegitimizing the opposition’s victory.

Throughout it all, Fox News blasted a constant stream of Radio Rwanda-style propaganda demonizing the political opposition, and when that got boring, inciting violence against health care providers. This, too, was deliberately aimed at sabotaging democratic accountability – and it worked.

We have been on this path for a very long time.

So no. I am not surprised in the least that Republican officials and establishment right-wing media have found ways to rationalize defending Trump and propagating the Big Lie. I am a little surprised that many of them even hesitated and most of them even seem embarrassed about it. (Bush himself, to his credit, has denounced the 1/6 rioters in quite literally the strongest possible terms, calling them “children of the same foul spirit” as the hijackers who murdered thousands of people on 9/11. I am mildly curious what’s changed his mind.)

You might be thinking, “look, those weren’t exactly Rhodes scholars waving zipties and literally smearing poop all over the Capitol, I doubt they had much in-depth knowledge of recent American history.” But the 1/6 rioters weren’t the only insurrectionists. They had leaders like Trump’s campaign adviser and friend Roger Stone, who has taken credit for the Brooks Brothers riot, and Senator Ted Cruz, who worked on the Bush campaign’s legal team. These people knew exactly what they were doing, because they know exactly what they did before.

Moreover, even if you think political history begins with Trump, he and his supporters had every reason to believe that breaking the rules would be rewarded. Even if you accept that there is real democratic legitimacy – which isn’t the same thing as formal legality – to someone losing by millions of votes but still winning the election, elections have rules for a reason. Those rules include things like “a candidate can’t ask for or accept millions of dollars worth of opposition research and voter outreach from anyone, including foreign intelligence agencies” and “representatives of a campaign can’t pay hush money to the candidate’s ex without reporting it as a campaign expense” and “the FBI director can’t abuse his position to tell the public repeatedly about how bad and crime-y a candidate who didn’t commit any crimes seems to him.” All that stuff happened and everyone decided to let Donald Trump be the president anyway! The Trump mob wasn’t delusional to think rules are irrelevant to whether or not Trump got to be president. In this, if nothing else, they were completely correct.

There’s a lot of talk about how bad it is that some people don’t accept the president’s legitimacy, and it’s actually a reassuring development that normie centrist commentators generally acknowledge the link between the violent extremism of the 1/6 insurrection and the rhetoric of the conservative base’s favorite media outlets. But the core problem is not that people believe something radical in its implications, it is that they are justifying radical and violent action by claiming to believe something which is not true. If they were correct – even if Trump’s henchmen did not have to go to such tellingly extreme lengths to create a pretext for them to make such claims – that would be a different story. This development in Trumpist politics is not dramatics, or even hypocrisy. It is raw projection. Donald Trump sees no value in the perceived legitimacy of American elections because he never won legitimately. He knows it and his most fervent supporters know it and they are and have always been desperate to scare the rest of us away from acknowledging and grappling with it. Every “review” or “investigation” into some new theory about how zombie Hugo Chavez teamed up with the Chinese Communist Party to hire a bunch of hackers which would make random poll workers steal physical ballots should remind us of the possibility that if the Trump campaign and its Russian co-conspirators didn’t manage to sabotage the vote counting in 2016 it wasn’t for lack of trying.

January 6th was a dark day. It is almost unbearably dark to say that we are still living under its shadow; almost unfathomably dark to say that we lived under its shadow for decades until most of us saw it for what it was. All of that is true.

What is also true is that January 6th was the day the darkness gambled its most potent weapon and lost. The proto-fascist creep that started metastasizing at the turn of the millennium depended on a lot of normal people being able to rationalize denial. It never posted its selfies on Facebook, it never beat up a cop with a fire extinguisher, it never seared itself into the world’s memory with rockets’ red glare and bombs bursting in air. It could still make the people who were correctly alarmed wonder if they were just being alarmists – or worse, if they were the ones harming democratic stability by raising existential questions that weren’t warranted. All of that is gone. The constant, frantic lies from the terrorists’ sympathizers, as dispiriting as they are to hear, are a desperate and doomed attempt to regain something they know they have destroyed.

We did not choose to make January 6th a dark day. We can choose to make it the darkest hour before the dawn.

[pocochina]

maybe in the future we should observe 1/6 as a democratic festivus where we air out all the other times american conservatives went full fash

[pocochina]

putting some love and good vibes into the universe to everyone for whom this has been a hard and complicated day, except for exactly one specific hater and loser

[pocochina]

guess mitt romney took my advice

appreciate the congrats

[pocochina]

you’re welcome, everyone

[pocochina]

guys what should i tell lindsey graham to do

[pocochina]

[pocochina]

[pocochina]

do you ever think about how osama bin laden spent the last few years of his life hiding in a compound in fear of american intelligence agencies, obsessing over his press coverage, plotting his next conspiracy against the united states and modern liberal democracy in general, cursing barack obama, gorging himself on conspiracy theories, and seething about all the haters and losers who failed to appreciate his great victory?

me neither! no reason!

[pocochina]

do you ever think about how people only ran into the streets cheering for one night after bin laden got got, instead of for the better part of a week

[pocochina]

do you ever think about how bin laden used to have his goons sneak off to an internet cafe to publicize his carefully edited incitements to terrorism in the futile hopes that it would stop the united states of america from hunting him down like the rabid animal he was?

[pocochina]

dick cheney coming out against the fascist coup is some real lambs-lying-down-with-lions shit

[anexplanationofunfortunateevents]

democracy was on the ballot and it won

I am a slow-boring-of-hard-boards realist about politics. I am delightedly surprised when I get what I want AT ALL. Months and months ago, I said that my number one issue in this election was the desperate need to put the brakes on democratic backsliding in the United States. I’m not sure how to process the fact that I’ve started to get what I wanted even before the transition.

There is a real path forward for democracy reform in this country. EVEN WITH an aspiring autocrat doing everything he could to rig this election, EVEN WITH a pandemic raging, EVEN WITH malicious foreign actors still trying cause problems, EVEN THOUGH we still have not restored the Voting Rights Act, EVEN WITH all the structural imbalances built into our creaky eighteenth-century constitutional system:

Voter participation went way up! People voted over the course of several weeks from the comfort of their own homes, or on weekends, or on Election Day. And because people took responsibility and spread out their votes like that, it was safer to go to polling places. That was a huge collective choice to prevent a lot of suffering and even some deaths.

A big part of why they could do that is the enormous number of citizens who rallied to work at the polls so that the retirees who usually do the job could sit this year out.

Cities and states around the country took the time they need to count carefully.

Media gatekeepers, for the most part, had the discipline and the patience to be helpful to users about what we knew and what we didn’t. If anything, they’re erring on the side of being too cautious. This is after weeks of most media gatekeepers having the discipline to debunk a disinformation campaign by Trump’s allies and Russian backers, instead of aggressively participating in it.

Social media companies took the most aggressive countermeasures yet against election misinformation.

The person who got the most votes is also the person who won the election, which is pretty cool!

That is a huge improvement from EVERY PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. Just in terms of how well the election itself was administered, my only major criticism is that we still did not do something called risk-limiting audits. In the case of an election, audits are basically a carefully calibrated statistical smell test. They’re not a recount. They are a reliable and cost-effective way of figuring out if a recount or some other type of scrutiny should be done for the sake of public confidence in the results – and that makes them a cost-effective deterrence against any bad actors who are considering sabotage. Audits are important whether an election goes your way or not, just like smoke detectors are important whether your building catches fire or not.

But that absolutely should not take away from the fact that we overcame all the new problems that were introduced this year and took some big steps toward solving a lot of old ones – despite the best efforts of Trump and all his enablers. Imagine what we could do under an administration that is helping democracy revitalization instead of aggressively hindering it.

The easiest way for us to make the most comprehensive change would be to win the Senate, which would allow a Biden administration to pass a revitalized Voting Rights Act and restore legitimacy to the federal courts. If you have any time or money to spare in the next few weeks, consider sharing it with the two excellent Democratic candidates in the Georgia Senate runoffs.

We should be realistic about the situation: we’re probably not going to get to do it the easy way, at least, not until after the midterms. But we’re not going to be doing it the hard way any more. The hard way is what we’re doing now. We’re about to get a Department of Justice that opposes civil rights violations and enforces what’s left of the current Voting Rights Act. The intelligence and military cybersecurity units are going to be able to work with the administration instead of around it. And we aren’t going to have to deal with a 24/7 fusillade of lies and voter intimidation coming from the Oval Office. To spin out the “it’s a marathon, not a sprint” metaphor: we’ve been running a marathon uphill carrying forty-pound backpacks. We’ve reached the top where the path levels out, and someone just took our bags and gave us protein bars.

And while we have our protein bars, let’s look around, because the view is as clear and as beautiful as it’s going to get. Donald Trump had every intention of wrecking American democracy, and the entire Republican party had every intention of supporting his aspiring dictatorship. And, while Trump himself is and always has been a clown, the person occupying the Oval Office is the most powerful person on the planet. Actually, that’s an understatement. Since Truman gave the order to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, our technology has grown stronger and our government has concentrated more and more power in the executive branch, which means that every holder of that office has arguably been the most powerful person in the history of the world. Every other holder of that office has at least wanted to think of himself as using that power for the advancement of democracy and humanity. Donald Trump affirmatively tried to use all that power to entrench himself there permanently.

We stopped him. We stopped him peacefully. We stopped him without further harming the many vulnerable people he holds hostage in a hundred different ways. We stopped him not by elevating an equal-but-opposite charismatic demagogue for a two-men-enter-one-man-leaves smackdown, but by building a vibrant, heterogenous coalition and finding competent, experienced, principled leaders who respect that coalition in all its raucous power. We stopped him, in short, by choosing to do democracy.

That feels good today and it’s enormously consequential. It is also proof of concept. It is something that can happen, because it has happened.

Something that political scientists and democracy advocates have been saying for the past few years is that Trump has been a propaganda gold mine for dictators. They use him as a cautionary tale against liberal democracy or even against hoping that things can ever get better: see, even the Americans are no better than we are! Dictators can artificially insulate themselves from accountability in the short term, which makes them ill-equipped to think about backfire. Train your people’s eyes on the aspiring American autocrat, and they can all see his humiliating fall.

To our sisters and brothers around the world, from Idlib to Hong Kong, from São Paolo to Moscow, and along every wide country road in between: this is the only true thing your oppressors have ever told you. We are no better than you are. We are no more suited for or entitled to liberation. Look what we have done. Imagine what you can do.

There’s kind of a false dichotomy going on where people swung from “Trump is going to successfully rig the election for himself” pessimism to “oh, Biden only ousted an incumbent by a freakishly large margin, it wasn’t an immediate electoral college landslide, why did Trump get so close.” This take has set in before deep blue California and New York have come close to completing their mail-in ballot counts, which tells you that it isn’t serious, but it’s also beside the point. Trump succeeded in making the election unfair. If he hadn’t illegitimately put a whole lot of thumbs on the scale in his favor, if we’d actually had the free and fair election we deserved, I think he probably would have lost in a landslide. We did the work and showed up in numbers that were ultimately too big to rig. That led to victory, although not a victory you can quantifiably measure against the dozen or so American elections that were more or less free and fair. That doesn’t mean the rigging didn’t happen or have any impact. It means we beat the spread. As the world’s most prominent train enthusiast once said, that is a big fucking deal.

A government of the people, by the people, and for the people has not perished from the earth. One day soon, it may even exist. That is our charge. That is our choice.

So take a moment to recharge. Enjoy the view. Breathe. We got work to do.

[pocochina]

do you ever think about how osama bin laden spent the last few years of his life hiding in a compound in fear of american intelligence agencies, obsessing over his press coverage, plotting his next conspiracy against the united states and modern liberal democracy in general, cursing barack obama, gorging himself on conspiracy theories, and seething about all the haters and losers who failed to appreciate his great victory?

me neither! no reason!

[pocochina]

do you ever think about how people only ran into the streets cheering for one night after bin laden got got, instead of for the better part of a week

[anexplanationofunfortunateevents]

We’re not going to know tonight. This isn’t unexpected. It’s actually a result of two good things: 

Turnout was just bonkers. SO MANY PEOPLE voted.

A lot more people voted absentee than usual, because that was a smart and responsible choice to make during a pandemic.

If you think you can fall asleep right now, go to bed. Actually, no, turn off your various devices so you’re not tempted to check notifications if you wake up at 3:30AM, then go to bed. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

[pocochina]

after four and a half years of coincidence theorists pretending trump asking russia for more emails right before more emails appeared was just the world’s least funny person trying out a stand-up bit i genuinely don’t know what to get worked up about but like

seems totally normal and cool that miami-dade county spent last week like “hahaha whoops the post office’s dog ate a few piles of mail-in ballots” and now msnbc is like “trump pulling into the lead in florida after some bizarre and inexplicable thing happened to make the bottom fall out under biden in miami-dade”

[anexplanationofunfortunateevents]

the voting ends today but the fight almost certainly does not

Republicans are filing increasingly desperate and ridiculous lawsuits trying – emphasis on TRYING – to have votes thrown out because they’re big old losers who know they can’t win legitimately.

If you’re the kind of person who can get into the weeds of federal court filings on elections, you probably already have your hair on fire. If you’re not, I don’t recommend picking up the habit right now. It’s just going to make your head swim. These are so incoherent and meritless that even our corrupt federal judiciary and plenty of conservative state judges have frequently brushed them off. I get the sense that Trump’s lawyers are more hoping to win those cases than trying to win them. What they seem to be trying to do with these lawsuits is some mix of the following dishonest things:

depress turnout by making people feel like he can just have their votes thrown out so why bother;

set something, anything, up on track for the Supreme Court, which Trumpworld is (not unreasonably) confident they have sufficiently corrupted;

create a general sense that there’s some authority other than the voters who get to decide this election.

That is what makes me think Trump’s plan to barricade himself in the White House and tweet out a declaration of victory the first moment Fox News reports a good exit poll for him is only mostly about his pathetic need to self-soothe with an autocratic display. He’s also making one last go-for-broke play for the public narrative. He thinks – again, not unreasonably – that if he says he won, then he’ll get a bunch of “Trump Declares Victory” headlines and chyrons, which puts a thumb on the scale in terms of how people frame any resulting developments in their own minds. It’s not a good strategy, it’s more of a hail Mary, but it’s the only potentially helpful option he’s left for himself.

All of this has, once again, summoned the specter of the 2000 election.

We can’t look one day into the future. But we might be able to prepare ourselves for it if we look about twenty years into the past.

Keep reading

[pocochina]

It is COMPLETELY NOT WRONG to worry about the cheating, because it’s impossible to predict or prepare for, as long as you remind yourself that THEY CHEAT BECAUSE THEY KNOW THEY CAN’T WIN FOR REAL.

[pocochina]

Obviously I’m doomscrolling too but it’s worth remembering that OVER A HUNDRED MILLION VOTES were in the bank when polls opened this morning, and every minute that ticks by without a cyber attack bringing down the power grid in Phoenix or Detroit is better than some scenarios which have been entirely plausible for the past four years.

[anexplanationofunfortunateevents]

A Tale of Red States and Blue States

Once upon a time, there was a state.

It was a large state, with vast stretches of country between its world-class cities. It had communities rich in diversity and activism and ideas – and it had a lot of resentful white people who were just plain old rich.

The richest and most resentful white people created a terrible blight they called “modern conservatism.” They set their wicked curse on the state, and then unleashed it on the nation with two Republican presidents – one lamentable, the next even worse.

There were many along the way who sounded the alarm, but there were more who ignored the danger far too long. The spell had summoned a beast. The beast was hideous and stupid. It was no good at anything except being a hateful beast. But the dark spell had done so much damage that being a hateful beast was enough for the beast to win, at least for a time.

In one version of the story, the state is called “California.”

In another, it is called “Texas.”

Keep reading

[pocochina]

live shot of doug jones reelect hq: