Baked Alaska arrested by FBI for role in Capitol riot

Long-time readers of Linux Beach may remember Tim Gionet, who goes by the on-line handle of Baked Alaska, as one of the chief instigators of a white supremacist attack on the Santa Monica Committee for Racial Justice in July and August of 2017. This was before he spoke at the infamous “United the Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA on 12  August 2017. He was one of the “very fine people” the now twice impeached Trump heralded.  He was a feature player in the struggle I documented in Six days before Charlottesville, the same racists came to Santa Monica.  He can be seen in both these pictures from Santa Monica and Charlottesville—bearded, black baseball cap with white lettering. 

Latter, I told you that it had been reported that his injured bodyguard was visited in the hospital by a representative of Donald Trump. 

In 2018, he surfaced again as a supporter of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, at a pro-Assad rally organized by the “anti-imperialist” ANSWER Coalition. a real example of white Left-Right convergence at its finest. When he was profiled by Al Jazeera, Assad's infamous propagandist, Partisangirl came to his defense. 

Also in 2018, I exposed the relationship between the Republican candidate running against Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Omar Navarro, and Baked Alaska.

Well, Baked Alaska is back in the news again. Yahoo News reported this afternoon:

FBI arrest social media personality known as Baked Alaska for his alleged involvement in the Capitol riots

Tim Gionet, a streamer who has gained popularity on social media under the name Baked Alaska, was arrested in Houston on Saturday, and is being charged with federal crimes for allegedly taking part in the insurrection at the US Capitol. Gionet allegedly live-streamed himself and others while inside the Capitol on January 6. He also had a warrant out for his arrest for violating release conditions from a separate incident in Scottsdale, Arizona.

This is a rather unsurprising development given his history, but I thought you might want to know given the part coverage of him in this blog. All this scrud needs to do hard time.

More, later...

Clay Claiborne

 

About the looting and the Black Lives Matter protests - a picture book essay

Since the Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd last summer, it has become a staple of the Trumpists, Republicans, and white supremacists in general, that these protests were responsible for the looting that devastated some business districts. There definitely was a relationship between these two phenomenal, but it's not the one we have been led to believe. Let me the speak from my own experience on this.

The Looters

On the afternoon of 31 May 2020, there was an outbreak of looting in nearby Santa Monica, CA. It took place in the ritzy shopping area around 4th & Santa Monica Blvd., and since it was, well, Santa Monica, it got nationwide coverage. Here is an ABC7 report on it, complete with a bird's eye view of the looting, shot from a helicopter.

You'll notice that they accurately labeled their report Looting in Santa Monica blocks away from Black Lives Matter protest. The reporter accurately describes the looters of being opportunistic, and you'll notice there are only a handful of Santa Monica Police around, and they are completely overwhelmed. If you know that Santa Monica has a pretty substantial police department, you may be inclined to ask: Well, where are they? More on that later.

The Protesters

There was a rather large and robust march through Santa Monica, and neighboring Venice, to protest the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others, that took place around the same time. 

I participated in that march.

I picked it up as the march came by my place in Venice. It was heading south on Pacific Ave. from Santa Monica, when I shot this picture from my balcony. Then I promptly joined the march. I live about a block south of Santa Monica.

We continued south on Pacific for about a mile into Venice. While we were still marching south into Venice, the word came down the line that the police, both LAPD & SMPD, had moved the curfew up to 4:00PM. It had been 6:00PM. It was then around 3:30PM, hardly enough time for the marchers to get back to their starting point in Santa Monica, let alone transit home.

Then we went one block west to Ocean Front Walk, and headed north back towards Santa Monica.

                                   

As you can see, it was a very peaceful march, if somewhat loud.

It involved local area residents of all ages and many ethnicities.

As we crossed Rose Ave. again, I punked out, for a variety of reasons, including covid, curfew, and just plain being tired of walking, and headed on home.

But I caught what happened next on TV.

As the matchers got into Santa Monica, they were blocked by what looked to be the entire Santa Monica Police Department. As you can see by the time, they were intent on enforcing that 4:00PM curfew they had declared while the march was still in progress. There had been no violence from the marchers to that point, and no looting from the BLM protesters at any time.

This was happening about the same time of the looting was breaking out on Santa Monica & 4th, about a half-mile away.

Apparently, SMPD didn't have enough forces to both kettle and harass the social justice protesters, and deal with the looters at the same time. So, they chose to mess with the peaceful protesters while they let the looters run wild.

From their POV, it was all good, because they could use the looting they failed to stop to tarnish the Black Lives Matter protesters that were demanding an end to police violence and harassment. Two for one.

The looters were opportunists. They were criminals who knew that the police preoccupation with peaceful protesters would give them the opportunity to loot in areas that normally would be heavily policed.

So, you see, rather than the protesters being looters, or even aligned with the looters, it was actually the looters and the police that were making common cause.

More, later

Clay Claiborne

Will Trump's 50-year-old obsession with nuclear weapons end with a grand finale?

If I seem overly concerned with the danger of an unhinged president still in charge of the nation's nuclear arsenal in the final weeks of his administration, it's not just because he is desperate to retain that power. 

It's not just because he has shown that he is willing to try to do so by any means, even those that are illegal, and may well result in mass casualty events. 

It's not just because he clearly enjoys chaos and mass destruction. It's not just because he seems willing to burn the country if he isn't allowed to continue ruling it. 

It's not just because he has shown little regard for human life. 

It's not just because he's so fond of those areas where he can exercise the unilateral power of the presidency, like issuing pardons or launching nuclear weapons. 

It's also because he has been obsessed with the “power and importance” of nuclear weapons for more than 50 years.

While I wrote blog posts and made videos warning about this danger while he was running for office, I haven't focused on it since because that Rubicon had been crossed, and I always saw this nuclear danger as an end game scenario, a kind of parting “shot” from a finally defeated Trump.

We are there now.

Many years ago, Trump used his now-suspended Twitter account to warn us that this was a situation we had best avoid, as in this 2013 tweet:

Be prepared, there is a small chance that our horrendous leadership could unknowingly lead us into World War III.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 31, 2013

And this one a year later:

The global warming we should be worried about is the global warming caused by NUCLEAR WEAPONS in the hands of crazy or incompetent leaders!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 8, 2014

But we find signs of this obsession 30 years before that tweet.

On 8 April 1984, New York Times magazine ran a piece by William E. Geist about Donald Trump's expanding real estate empire titled "THE EXPANDING EMPIRE OF DONALD TRUMP." It was supposed to be a puff piece promoting the young real estate developer's latest project, Trump Castle:

Donald J. Trump is the man of the hour. Turn on the television or open a newspaper almost any day of the week and there he is, snatching some star from the National Football League, announcing some preposterously lavish project he wants to build. Public-relations firms call him, offering to handle his account for nothing, so that they might take credit for the torrential hoopla.

...
With castles on the drawing boards, the first tenants are moving into Mr. Trump's $125 million Trump Plaza luxury cooperative apartment building at Third Avenue and 61st. Street. His Generals are off to a winning start in their first season under his ownership. He is hovering attentively over his newly opened Xanadu of conspicuous consumption, the $200 million Trump Tower condominium-office-retail complex on Fifth Avenue, also supervising the final touches on Harrah's at Trump Plaza, a mammoth $220 million casino-hotel in Atlantic City set to open next month.

This puffery drones on like that for more that 6,600 words before Trump takes it in a most unexpected direction:

The football thing is cute, Trump Tower and the piano and all of that, it's all cute, but what does it mean? he says, sounding what borders on a note of uncharacteristic despair.

Asked to explain, he adds: What does it all mean when some wacko over in Syria can end the world with nuclear weapons?

Since the object of this piece was clearly designed to promote Trump as New York's dynamic new developer, it's odd that he would even bring up the question of nuclear holocaust, let alone keep returning to it 

Trump tells Geist that his obsession with nuclear holocaust goes all the way back to 1969:

He says that his concern for nuclear holocaust is not one that popped into his mind during any recent made-of-television movie. He says that it has been troubling him since his uncle, a nuclear physicist, began talking to him about it 15 years ago.

And he tells Geist his greatest dream:

His greatest dream is to personally do something about the problem and, characteristically, Donald Trump thinks he has an answer to nuclear armament: Let him negotiate arms agreements - he who can talk people into selling $100 million properties to him for $13 million. Negotiations is an art, he says and I have a gift for it.

In a Washington Post interview that same year, 1984, Trump again returned to the question of nuclear war:

This morning, Trump has a new idea. He wants to talk about the threat of nuclear war. He wants to talk about how the United States should negotiate with the Soviets.

He wants to be the negotiator.

He says he has never acted on his nuclear concern. But he says that his good friend Roy Cohn, the flamboyant Republican lawyer, has told him this interview is a perfect time to start.

It could have been a real boon to humanity had Trump's nuclear obsession really been about nuclear disarmament, but as we have often seen with Trump, he is shrewd enough to portray this obsession in a positive light. Thirty-two years later, after he had won the US presidency, and was actually in a position to move towards nuclear disarmament, what he did was quite the opposite. The LA Times reported, 23 December 2020:

While the country has been preoccupied with the COVID-19 pandemic, economic decline and the election, President Trump’s administration quietly and steadily steered America’s nuclear weapons industry to its largest expansion since the end of the Cold War, increasing spending on such arms by billions of dollars with bipartisan congressional support.

Overall, the budget for making and maintaining nuclear warheads has risen more than 50% since Trump was elected in 2016, substantially outpacing the rates of increase for the defense budget and overall federal spending during his presidency before the pandemic. On Monday, Congress approved Trump’s proposal to increase spending next year for the production of such weaponry by nearly $3 billion.

Three years after the Geist piece, in 1987, Ron Rosenbaum did an extensive interview with Trump in the 21 Club for the now defunct Manhattan, inc. In 2016, he reprinted it in Stale.  It was to be another puff piece about the high-profile real estate developer. Rosenbaum recounted:

My gig was to take the loudest, glitziest luminaries of the loudest, glitziest era of Manhattan, the power brokers and power lunchers, out to lunch and turn on a tape recorder, and then to profile their self-importance.

The interview was suppose to be promoting Trump's latest project, the Trump Tower Atrium, but mostly what Trump wanted to talk about was The Subject.  Rosenbaum said “his PR adviser told him he shouldn’t talk about The Subject at all, he should only be plugging the success of the Trump Tower Atrium,” but when Rosenbaum “heard of Trump’s initial enthusiasm for talking about The Subject,” he was happy to make that the focus:

“I’m dealing at a very high level on this,” [Trump] said. With people in Washington. In the White House. There was too much at stake for him to risk the wrong kind of exposure on The Subject.

The Subject has itself been the subject of considerable delicate pre-lunch negotiations between Trump and the magazine. Trump was enthusiastic when he first heard I wanted to focus on The Subject.

That’s great, he said: The Subject is far more important than any development deal he’s ever done, than any deal of that sort he’ll ever do. The life-or-death nature of The Subject transcends mere real estate. He’s pursuing it as if it were the biggest deal of his life. The Ultimate Deal.

Rosenbaum tells us “The Subject is nuclear weapons proliferation and Trump’s crusade to find a way to halt it before a wild-card nuke deals death to millions.”  Trump told him “It’s one of the great problems of the world. Not one of them. It is the.”  Here again Trump credits his uncle for starting his obsession:

“My uncle who just passed away was a great scientist. He was a professor at MIT. Dr. John Trump. In fact, together with Dr. Van de Graaff they did the Van de Graaff generator. He was the earliest pioneer in radiation therapy for cancer. He spent his whole life fighting cancer and he ended up dying of it.”

It was his uncle, Trump tells me, who got him started thinking about The Subject.

Probably remembering his PR advisor's advice, he complained “What I would have liked was a story on how well the Atrium at Trump Tower is doing.” 

“Well,” I said to Trump, “we can get into that. Would you like to start out by telling me how well the Atrium’s doing?”

What followed was the single most surprising moment of our conversation. The one that convinced me that Trump’s interest in the nuke-spread issue was genuine.

He brushed aside my offer to listen to the Atrium success story. And never once returned to it. The master salesman passed up a chance to make a pitch. Instead he returned to The Subject.

Later, when he again realized his obsession with nuclear weapons was getting in the way of business, he said:

“You know, a while ago you asked me to talk about the success of Trump Tower Atrium—it really does pale. It’s hard to get off this subject.”

In the rare moments when he did return to business, it showed how little Trump has changed in the 33 years since that interview. When asked what he would have done if he had won a bid he wanted to loss, Trump said, “I’d ask for a recount, because the price I bid was ridiculous.”

Although Trump's reputation was suppose to be that of a great deal maker, Rosenbaum wrote:

But the thrills and perils of deal making no longer have the same excitement for Trump these days. Not compared with The Subject.

“Nothing matters as much to me now,” Trump says.

He’s been “spending so much time on this other thing,” he says, meaning The Subject, that he’s hardly had time to think of conventional deals.

Trump was already concerned about our current situation, nukes in the hands of a madman:

“Those people think that because we have it and the Russians have it, nobody will ever use it because they’re assuming everybody’s not necessarily mad.”

And even then, he envisioned a world dominated jointly by the US and Russia: 

“Most of those [pre-nuclear] countries are in one form or another dominated by the U.S. and the Soviet Union,” Trump says. “Between those two nations you have the power to dominate any of those countries." 

Probably Marco Rubio was familiar with candidate Trump's obsession in February 2016, when he called him “a lunatic trying to get ahold of nuclear weapons.” 

In a 1990 Playboy interview, Trump again returned to his obsession:

I’ve always thought about the issue of nuclear war; it’s a very important element in my thought process. 

In 1995, when asked on MSNBC where he saw himself in five years, this was his response: 

“In five years from now, who knows? Maybe the bombs drop from heaven, who knows? This is a sick world, we’re dealing here with lots of sickos. And you have the nuclear and you have the this and you have the that.”

Margaret Hartmann, writing in the Intelligencer, 20 August 2017:

Hearing the U.S. president promise last week to respond to any North Korean threats with “fire and fury like the world has never seen” was astounding — though perhaps it shouldn't have been. Trump has been publicly discussing his vivid fears about nuclear weapons for decades, predating any serious talk of him running for president. These comments suggest that Trump thinks about nuclear annihilation far more than the average American.

Chris Wallace of Fox News had some great advice on Trump: “Watch what he does, not what he says.”  We must now apply that test to Trump's claim that his  long-standing “concerns” about nuclear holocaust came from a desire for nuclear disarmament, and not for nuclear destruction.

Like many of you, I have long been a strong supporter of nuclear disarmament, but all we could do was protest. Once he became president, Trump was in a position to do much more. Forty-eight years after his uncle sparked his obsession, he was finally in a position to do something about “his greatest dream [is] to personally do something about the problem.” So, what did he do?

He made it much worst. The title of David Axe's Christmas Eve article in Forbes gives us a quick summary, "Donald Trump Is A Nuclear President—His Legacy Is More Nukes, Fewer Controls." He writes, 24/12/2020:

In his single term in the White House, Donald Trump expanded America’s nuclear arsenal and undermined decades of arms-control efforts. 

...

1. Trump nudged the Pentagon to double the number of low-yield nuclear weapons, which according to experts raise the risk of nuclear war by making nukes seemingly more “useable” in an armed clash between major powers.

At the same time, Trump’s nuclear doctrine expanded the list of external threats that officially justify nuclear retaliation. Perhaps most notably, the list of threats now includes a major hacking event. The U.S. Navy subsequently deployed the low-yield W76-2 variant of its Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missile.

2. At the opposite end of the yield spectrum, the billionaire president accelerated development of high-yield SLBMs and canceled a Pentagon plan to decommission the megaton-class B83-1 gravity bomb.

That means that if Trump was to decide to nuke someone because of “a major hacking event,” which we just had, by the way, it would be a completely legal order, and while most cybersecurity experts blame Russia for the hack, Trump blames China, and his decision on who to nuke is final.

What he has done as president shows that this 50-year-old obsession has not been for nuclear disarmament, as he would have you believe, it has been a fetish for nuclear weapons, and the nuclear holocaust they can create.

The next eight days are extremely dangerous ones for the whole world not just because Trump is an “unhinged” president, to use Pelosi's artful term, with the ability to launch nuclear weapons. The danger is greatly amplified because this unhinged president has had a 50-year-old obsession with nuclear weapons, and his ability to use them is about to expire.  

With that troubling thought expressed, let me return to Geist's article for a lighter note. In 1984, Geist makes a statement that deserves its own place in the “Famous Last Words” Hall of Fame:

The idea that he would ever be allowed to get into a room alone and negotiate for the United States, let alone be successful in disarming the world, seems the naive musing of an optimistic, deluded young man who has never lost at anything he has tried.

Let us all hope for the best, and do everything we can to remove Trump from office as soon as possible.

Clay Claiborne

See also:

This may be ABC This Week's most dangerous lie yet

Even just impeaching Trump will lower the nuclear threat

This may be Fox News' most dangerous lie yet

with apologies to Willie Nelson:

It was the time of the preacher

In the year of '21

Now the lesson is over

And the killing's begun

It was the time of the preacher

In the year of '21

When you think it's all over

It's only begun

This may be ABC This Week's most dangerous lie yet

Today, Martha Raddatz on ABC This Week, tried to assure us that US President Donald Trump can not unilaterally order a nuclear strike:

 

George Stephanopoulos: Martha, on Friday we saw that extraordinary call from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, wanting to know what kind of safeguards were in place to prevent any kind of improper nuclear strike by the president. I think there was surprise that that was made public.

Martha Raddatz: Again adversaries are looking at us every minute, and China and Russia certainly were surprised that that was made public, but Nancy Pelosi was assured that there are procedures in place guaranteeing that there will not be any sort of accidental launch of a nuclear weapon or any sort of illegal launch of a nuclear weapon. There does not seem to be a lot of concern about that just because of those procedures. Many people think there are not enough procedures, and I'll bet you that's something they'll look at in the new administration, but for now they are not concerned about it.

The hole in her claim of protections against “accidental or illegal” launch, is that any order to launch nukes by POTUS is considered legal. All the safety mechanisms in place are designed to protect against an illegal launch by rogue elements in the military. They are all designed to assure that the order actually did come from the president. After that, it's all good. 

In spite of the importance for all US citizens to understand the circumstances and authorities that might lead the United States to launch nuclear weapons, information on procedures for launching nukes is a state secret. This is the most authoritative report I have found, it is titled Defense Primer: Command and Control of Nuclear Forces from the bi-partisan Congressional Research Service, and since it was updated on 3 December 2020, we can be sure it is current, even after Donald Trump clearly lost the election. Here are a few selections from that paper (emphasis added):

The U.S. President has sole authority to authorize the use of U.S. nuclear weapons. This authority is inherent in his constitutional role as Commander in Chief. The President can seek counsel from his military advisors; those advisors are then required to transmit and implement the orders authorizing nuclear use. But, as General John Hyten, then the Commander of U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), noted during his September 2016 confirmation hearing, his job is to give advice, while the authority to order a launch lies with the president. The President does not need the concurrence of either his military advisors or the U.S. Congress to order the launch of nuclear weapons. In addition, neither the military nor Congress can overrule these orders. As former STRATCOM Commander General Robert Kehler has noted, members of the military are bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice “to follow orders provided they are legal and have come from competent authority.” But questions about the legality of the order—whether it is consistent with the requirements, under the laws of armed conflict (LOAC), for necessity, proportionality, and distinction—are more likely to lead to consultations and changes in the President’s order than to a refusal by the military to execute the order. In this sense, addressing legal questions about an order to use nuclear weapons would seem similar to the process used for evaluating any employment order from the President. The President could delegate the authority to authorize the use of nuclear weapons to others in the chain-of-command(an option considered necessary during the Cold War), but they also could not overrule the President.

In other words, any evaluation of the legality of a presidential nuclear strike order would come after the strike, and not in the five or six minute window that may be available if an adversary was to launch an attack from a boomer close to US shores.

On the The Nuclear Command and Control System(NCCS), the paper says this:

Specifically, the NCCS provides the President “with the means to authorize the use of nuclear weapons in a crisis and to prevent unauthorized or accidental use.”

So, Raddatz is 100% right about protections against an accidental launch, but that's not our current concern, is it? The danger of an accidental or unauthorized launch of nuclear weapons has long been a concern, and deep protections against that have long been in place. What this system never considered, in putting so much power in than hands of one man (a woman has yet to hold such power*) was the possibility that the United States would elect a rogue president like Donald Trump. 

Some may think the president wouldn't be allowed (by who?) to launch a nuclear strike unless missiles were already heading to us first. This Congressional report is also clear on that point:

The United States has never declared a “no first use” policy, and the President could order the first use of nuclear weapons. As noted above, his military advisors may seek to adjust his orders to meet the laws of armed conflict, but there is, otherwise, no legal barrier to first use.

The irony of the current situation is that we are depending on rogue elements in the military to protect us from a “legal" launch order from an unhinged president. But as this report from Bloomberg makes clear, mutiny is unlikely:

It takes just two “votes” to launch the missiles. So even if three two-officer ICBM crews refuse to carry out the order, it won’t stop the launch.

 Also for those who actually believe in Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), it should be a serious security concern that we are announcing that the US can't launch nukes within minutes while Trump is POTUS.

Like Fox News, ABC doesn't want to see Donald Trump impeached for a second time, so they are telling a big lie about the most exigent need to remove Trump immediately. This should surprise no one. As I documented in Bourgeois media resorting to sleight-of-hand to put Trump in the White House, 21 December 2015, ABC News has long been willing to lie to protect Trump.

Beyond this problem of Trump's finger still on the nuclear trigger, there are other important reasons why Trump must be removed from office ASAP. His coup attempt didn't begin or end on 6 January, 2021, it is on-going. He is already apologising to his supporters for appearing to call out their attack on the most democratic branch of government. The right-wing The Western Journal, is reporting today, Breaking: Trump Regrets 'Peaceful Transfer of Power' Video, Vows Not to Resign:

In its reporting of what was taking shape behind the scenes, The New York Times said that in conversations with aides, “Mr. Trump struck a defiant tone, insisting that he would remain a potent force in American politics as aides and allies abandoned him and his post-presidential prospects turned increasingly bleak.”

“Behind closed doors, he made clear that he would not resign and expressed regret about releasing a video on Thursday committing to a peaceful transition of power and condemning the violence at the Capitol that he had egged on a day before,” the Times wrote.

A report in The Daily Beast said Trump loudly proclaimed his intention to remain in office on Friday. 

At the same time, he has refused to disavow a call by his most extreme supporters for an armed march on the US Capitol, and state capitols on 17 November 2021. Twitter said it closed @realDonaldTrump, in part because they fear it would be used to promote additional seditious activity, and that his final tweet, announcing that he wouldn't be at Biden's Inauguration, 20 January 2021, could signal to his most extreme supporters that their hero would not be in harm's way should they plan a mass casualty event at the Inauguration. 

More, later

Clay Claiborne

See also: This may be Fox News' most dangerous lie yet

*This situation where one person can nuke the world must be changed, and no doubt will be changed before a woman becomes commander in chief, just as South Africa was forced to give up its nukes when it stopped being ruled exclusively by whites. This is all for the good, still there is a rotten smell about it. 

Even just impeaching Trump will lower the nuclear threat

Now, a number of lawmakers, most notably the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, are openly worrying about a problem I have been warning about even before Trump was elected, the grave danger of nuclear weapons under the control of an unhinged president. In my last post, This may be Fox News' most dangerous lie yet, I showed that Trump still retains the ability to unleash nuclear weapons by unilateral orders, in spite of vague assurances from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. Milley tried to assure us that military officers further down the chain of command would refuse any such order.

Since then, the military brass, in response to reports of the Pelosi-Milley conversation, have re-affirmed that Trump is still commander in chief, retains full authority to launch a nuclear first strike anywhere, and at anytime. The only legal ways to take this power away from him are impeachment or removal via the 25th Amendment, and any refusal of a nuclear launch order from the president would amount to a munity or military coup.

It's clear that Veep Mike Pence will never countance a 25th Amendment removal, and Senate Majority leader Mitch Mcconnell will not allow a Senate trial, even if the House impeaches him. So many say, what's the point in moving forward with an impeachment on Monday.

So, it now seems that for the next 10 days, the only thing that may stand between an unhinged Trump ordering a nuclear strike, and its execution, is a military officer becoming the sort of hero that Denzel Washington played in Crimson Tide. This is a very thin thread upon which to hang the future of humanity.

Be that as it may, Pelosi is right to say the House must do its job, even if the Senate won't. But there may be an even stronger reason: If it should come down to some in the military deciding whether on not to refuse an order from the commander in chief, wouldn't it be far more likely that they would mutiny, and refuse such an order, if they know Donald Trump is awaiting trial because he has just been impeached for a second time?

More, later

Clay Claiborne 

UPDATED: This may be Fox News' most dangerous lie yet

On the Fox News Special Report today, host Bret Baier made the following statement:

Pelosi raising the alarm with Joint Chief-of-Staff Chairman Mark Milley about quote "preventing an unhinged President from using the nuclear codes," saying the situation could not be more dangerous. That's despite the fact that a sitting president does not have the sole authority to launch nuclear weapons.

They told their viewers that Nancy Pelosi's concerns were misplace, and we have nothing worry about, in spite of a mountain of evident to the contrary. 

From the Washington Post today:

There is no legal way to stop Trump from ordering a nuclear strike if he wants to, expert says
By Elizabeth N. Saunders
8 January 2021
...
I asked Vipin Narang, an associate professor of political science at MIT and a nuclear proliferation and strategy scholar, what this does — and doesn’t — mean. (The content has been lightly edited.)

1. Is there anything Milley can do to prevent the president from “accessing the launch codes and ordering a nuclear strike”?

The answer is emphatically no. The president, and the president alone, possesses the sole authority to order a nuclear launch, and no one can legally stop him or her. Despite reports that Pelosi received assurances that there are safeguards in place in the event the president of the United States (POTUS) wants to launch a nuclear weapon, any such meaningful or effective safeguards would be illegal. More...

From Foreign Policy today:

What Could Stop an ‘Unhinged’ U.S. President From Ordering a Nuclear Strike?
Not a lot, it turns out.

By Jack Detsch
8 January 2021
What can the military and Congress do to stop the president from ordering a strike?

Legally speaking, not much, if anything. Neither Pelosi nor Milley is in the chain of command to make the decision over whether to employ nuclear weapons; that authority rests with Trump and the U.S. defense secretary, who would act together in making such a move. While officials such as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the commander of U.S. Strategic Command, which oversees the American nuclear triad, are charged with transmitting orders for the use of those weapons and advise the president on a launch, Trump would not need the agreement of the military or Congress to strike. Asked on Monday by reporters whether he would follow an order from Trump to launch a nuclear weapon against Iran, Stratcom chief Adm. Charles Richard said he would “follow any legal order I am given” and added that the system of nuclear command and control has “served us well for 70 years.”

While experts agree that there’s no way to challenge the president’s authority to order a strike, not everyone is as sure as Richard that it’s a good idea. “The president has sole, unfettered authority to order the use of nuclear weapons with no ‘second vote’ required,” tweeted Jeffrey Lewis, a nonproliferation expert at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. “If you think that’s crazy, I agree with you. But many people being appointed by Biden to national security jobs disagree with us.” More...

From Time today:

Pelosi Wants to Keep Nukes Out of Donald Trump's Hands. There's Nothing She Can Do
By W. J. Hennigan
8 January 2021
... The phone call, which was confirmed by Milley’s office, comes as Pelosi moves to impeach Trump for a second time. “The situation of this unhinged President could not be more dangerous, and we must do everything that we can to protect the American people from his unbalanced assault on our country and our democracy,” she wrote.

The truth is, however, there is nothing to be done: the U.S. President has sole launch authority over the country’s nuclear arsenal. The power has remained with the White House since President Harry Truman ordered dropping atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. More...

And from Vox today:

Trump has the authority to launch nuclear weapons — whether Pelosi likes it or not
By Jennifer Williams and Alex Ward
8 January 2021 
In a letter to House Democrats Friday, Pelosi told her colleagues that she’d just spoken to the Pentagon about ways to prevent an “unstable” President Donald Trump from launching a nuclear weapon in his remaining days in office.

“This morning, I spoke to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley to discuss available precautions for preventing an unstable president from initiating military hostilities or accessing the launch codes and ordering a nuclear strike,” Pelosi wrote.

She later told House Democrats on a call that Milley assured her there are safeguards in place to prevent the president from ordering an illegal nuclear strike, USA Today reported. (A Joint Chiefs spokesperson later confirmed that Milley had spoken with Pelosi: “Speaker Pelosi initiated a call with the Chairman. He answered her questions regarding the process of nuclear command authority.”)

It’s understandable that his critics on the Hill — who were hunkered down in the belly of the Capitol while Trump’s supporters raided their offices Wednesday — would be tempted to snatch the president’s keys to the “red button.”
But the House speaker does not have the authority to try to keep the nuclear codes from Trump. Like it or not, the president of the United States has sole authority to launch a nuclear weapon. More...

I purposely cited these four credible reports from today to show that nothing has been changed for Trump. This has been the truth about what is called the National Command Authority since at least the Cuba Missile Crisis in 1962:

Only the president can direct the use of nuclear weapons by U.S. armed forces, through plans like OPLAN 8010-12. The president has unilateral authority as commander-in-chief to order that nuclear weapons be used for any reason at any time.

Unfortunately for us, Donald Trump is no JFK.

Fox News is trying desperately to ward off any attempt to get Trump out of office. They have been a big part of the effort to keep him on even after he was voted out. They know that effort has probably failed, and now they are fighting to avoid impeachment or a 25th Amendment removal. They know Trump's ability to unilaterally launch a nuclear strike in the next 12 days is the single biggest motivator of immediate removal.

So, they lied and said "a sitting president does not have the sole authority to launch nuclear weapons." General Milley may be the highest ranking officer in the US military, but he has no role in the military chain of command. Any assurances he might give by saying Trump's order would never be carried out, would depend on military officers disobeying a command from the commander-in-chief, or determining, on their own authority, that the order was illegal, and mutiny. But the National Command Authority is organized, and its officers trained, to carry out a nuclear strike order immediately, and without question.

Fox News doesn't even address what appears to be the general understanding of the question. They never say what could stop him, or who would have to co-sign, they just assert, without proof, that Nancy Pelosi is being ridiculous, and state as fact "that a sitting president does not have the sole authority to launch nuclear weapons."

I wish that was true, but it's a big lie.

Remember the struggle between a boomer captain, played by Gene Hackman,  and his XO, play by Denzel Washington, over obeying a launch order in Crimson Tide. In the movie, the sub had received a launch order, but then lost communication. The XO wanted to confirm the order, the captain wanted to proceed with no further confirmation. It took a mutiny, and a gunfight on the sub to stop the captain from launching the nukes, and fortunately, when communications were reestablished, they found that the order had been rescinded, and we had a happy ending.

But if the order hadn't been rescinded, they would have launched the nukes, even the XO agreed.

When you look at the real world situation, the officers on a boomer may be completely unaware of what happened at the Capitol this week. They may not even know what target they are being ordered to nuke. They will only know that the codes matched. That means its a legal order from the President of the United States, and theirs is not to reason why. They will do the one thing they have been trained to do and launch the nukes.

As I said, I cited the four articles above because they reflect the current situation, but this has long been a settled question, documented in a series of tweets I sent out this morning (something I can still do, but Trump can't ☺):

The President of the United States, Donald Trump, can launch a nuclear weapon whenever he wants. There exists no check on this authority. #DeNukeTrumpNow #ImpeachTrumpNow https://t.co/hmhMxfx8sq

— 12 days to go! (@clayclai) January 8, 2021

JAMES CLAPPER: In a fit of pique, he decides to do something about Kim Jong-un, there's actually very little to stop him.#DeNukeTrumpNow #ImpeachTrumpNow https://t.co/dsNref1Owe

— 12 days to go! (@clayclai) January 8, 2021

"The US president has sole authority to authorise the use of US nuclear weapons."#DeNukeTrumpNow #ImpeachTrumpNowhttps://t.co/MIDQsreC6K

— 12 days to go! (@clayclai) January 8, 2021

Trump ... with all the authorities ...and nothing left to lose. Among the authorities he’ll retain until his final minutes in office? The awesome and awful power to launch the United States’ nuclear arsenal on command.#DeNukeTrumpNow #ImpeachTrumpNow https://t.co/lufYe3au0P

— 12 days to go! (@clayclai) January 8, 2021

"The president still has the sole authority to launch a nuclear attack,"#DeNukeTrumpNow #ImpeachTrumpNow https://t.co/lEdnotDJvI

— 12 days to go! (@clayclai) January 8, 2021 

We need Trump gone ASAP. 

Clay Claiborne

UPDATE 9 January 2021: Top Pentagon Officials confirm that Trump is still commander in chief, and can launch nukes, David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt reported in the New York Times yesterday:

[S]hort of the cabinet invoking the 25th Amendment or impeaching and convicting the president, it would be unconstitutional to defy legal orders from the commander in chief, experts note.

...

Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California on Friday took the unprecedented step of asking the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff about “available precautions” to prevent President Trump from initiating military action abroad or using his sole authority to launch nuclear weapons in the last days of his term.

...

But some Defense Department officials clearly resented being asked to act outside of the legal authority of the 25th Amendment and saw it as more evidence of a broken political system. They said that some political leaders were trying to get the Pentagon to do the work of Congress and cabinet secretaries, who have legal options to remove a president.

Mr. Trump, they noted, is still the commander in chief; unless he is removed, the military is bound to follow his lawful orders. While military officials can refuse to carry out orders they view as illegal — or slow the process by sending those orders for careful legal review — they cannot remove the president from the chain of command. That would amount to a military coup, the officials said.

So while it would be very comforting to believe that someone would stop our unhinged president from nuking the world, nobody in the military command will do that. There are only two legal ways to take the nuclear trigger away from Trump before 20 January 2021, impeachment, or removal via the 25th Ammendment.

Use Trump's anti-BLM Executive Order to arrest him, given those who invaded the Capitol 10 yrs. & defund the Capitol cops

I'll make this blog post simple and short, so I'll get straight to the point.

You may remember that back in June, while the Black Lives Matter protests were raging in the wake of the death of George Floyd, that US President Donald Trump issued an executive order that threatened up to ten years in federal prison for destruction of federal property.

.....This action is taken effective immediately, but may also be used retroactively for destruction or vandalism already caused. There will be no exceptions!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 23, 2020

Later, on 26 June 2020, he actually did issue "Executive Order on Protecting American Monuments, Memorials, and Statues and Combating Recent Criminal Violence"

Which clearly states:

Sec. 2.  Policy.  (a)  It is the policy of the United States to prosecute to the fullest extent permitted under Federal law, and as appropriate, any person or any entity that destroys, damages, vandalizes, or desecrates a monument, memorial, or statue within the United States or otherwise vandalizes government property. 

This would certainly include those who trespassed in, and vandalized, the Capitol building. It continues:

The desire of the Congress to protect Federal property is clearly reflected in section 1361 of title 18, United States Code, which authorizes a penalty of up to 10 years’ imprisonment for the willful injury of Federal property. 

It would also seem that these Trump terrorists should be eligible for that maximum. Trump's Executive Order also applies to those who merely incite the violence and destruction:

(b)  It is the policy of the United States to prosecute to the fullest extent permitted under Federal law, and as appropriate, any person or any entity that participates in efforts to incite violence or other illegal activity in connection with the riots and acts of vandalism described in section 1 of this order.

So it seems to me that Trump should be charged under the terms of his own Executive Order, along with Rudy and Don Jr. And finally:

(e) It is the policy of the United States, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, to withhold Federal support from State and local law enforcement agencies that have failed to protect public monuments, memorials, and statues from destruction or vandalism.

So, it seems to me that Trump's Executive Order also give good grounds for defunding the Capitol Police. 

More, later...

Clay Claiborne

 

  

 

  

Why is Trump looking to the Electoral Commission of 1877 for salvation?

It will surprise no student of history that the white supremacists fighting to illegally extend the presidency of Donald Trump with a stunt in Congress on Wednesday, that seeks to overturn the popular and electoral vote in favor of a congressional coup, should turn to the Electoral Commission of 1877 for precedence. That commission, set up by Congress to resolve the disputed presidential election of 1876, led to the Compromise of 1877 that result in the end of the post-Civil War black reconstruction, and the rise of white terrorism and Jim Crow in the South.

Eleven Republican senators in open rebellion against the Constitution cited the example of the 1877 Electoral Commission in their Joint Statement from Senators Cruz, Johnson, Lankford, Daines, Kennedy, Blackburn, Braun, Senators-Elect Lummis, Marshall, Hagerty, Tuberville on Saturday:

“The most direct precedent on this question arose in 1877, following serious allegations of fraud and illegal conduct in the Hayes-Tilden presidential race. Specifically, the elections in three states-Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina-were alleged to have been conducted illegally.

“In 1877, Congress did not ignore those allegations, nor did the media simply dismiss those raising them as radicals trying to undermine democracy. Instead, Congress appointed an Electoral Commission-consisting of five Senators, five House Members, and five Supreme Court Justices-to consider and resolve the disputed returns.

“We should follow that precedent.”

Occurring as it did, less than a dozen years after the Civil War, the presidential election of 1876 was still preoccupied with the unfinished business of that great conflict. Democrat Samuel J. Tilden and Republican Rutherford B. Hayes were the main contenders. That year 185 electoral votes were required to win. When they all were counted Tilden had 184 and Hayes had 165 with 20 electoral votes from four states unresolved.

At the time, the roles of the two major parties was in many ways the reverse of what it is today. Then, the Democrats were the party of white supremacy, while the Republican party was still the party of Lincoln. After the Civil War, radical Republicans, together with ex-slaves and some poor whites, advanced a second American revolution in the South that came to be known as black reconstruction. This was largely possible because federal troops stationed in the South after the Civil War suppressed those opposed to the freemen.

Those hoping to overthrow black reconstruction, and return the old capitalist planter class to power in the South coalesced around the Democratic Party. In 1876, Tilden carried most of the South. Sanctions over the use of terrorism to suppress the black vote resulted in two slates of electors being presented to Congress from three southern states—Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina. In Oregon, there was an issue involving a single elector, but the selection of the president was to be decided in the South.

It was because they were presented with these competing slates of electors that congress passed the Electoral Commission Act which was signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant on January 29, 1877. As stipulated in the act, a 15-member Electoral Commission was then formed to decide which electors to count.

Congressman James Monroe reported, “It was from the beginning a Democratic rather than a Republican measure." In the October 1893 edition of The Atlantic, Monroe wrote about why he and many other Republican representatives refused to support the bill:

They contended that it was a compromise of principle like that of 1820, which condemned half the country to slavery; like that of 1850, which gave us the Fugitive Slave Law. It belonged to a class of weak concessions which had always injured the country and ruined every party that had touched them. 

In short, it was another in a long series of compromises with white supremacy.

As many other critics of this goofy demand for an Electoral Commission in 2021 have pointed out, the precedent of 1877 simply doesn't apply because, in this case, nobody is presenting competing slates of electors to Congress. Duh! All electors have already been certified and accepted as of 14 December. There's nothing for an Electoral Commission to decide. Of course it doesn't apply, but I'm more interested in why they find it such an attractive precedent in spite of its in-applicability. 

I think they liked the results of the Electoral Commission of 1877. Although it did end up naming Hayes as president, the Democratic friends of white supremacy were able to wring some important concessions from the Republicans, not the least of which was that Hayes would remove federal troops from the South. W. E. B. Du Bois called it “the bargain between Big Business and the South (p. 691)” in his "Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880." He describes the commissions work:

“Negotiations were entered into and conferences held. On the 26th of February, 1876, there were three conferences. The outcome was an agreement. The Republicans guaranteed that Mr. Hayes, when he became President, would by non-interference and the withdrawal of troops allow the planter-capitalists, under the name Democrats to control South Carolina and Louisiana…This meant that Southern landholders and capitalists would be put in complete control of disfranchised black labor (p. 692).”

86 years after DuBois, long time GOP operative Karl Rove acknowledged the racist aspects of that commission's work on Fox News Outnumbered today:

“Back when we had the commission in 1876/1877 in the election involving Rutherford B. Hayes,  the president was sworn-in in March, and the electoral commission of that era was already underway investigating the efforts in the South to wipe out the black Republican votes in states like Florida, and thereby toss those states into the Democratic column.”

The white supremacists planters and capitalists of the Antebellum South had been out of power less than a dozen years before the Compromise of 1876 put an end to one of the great experiments in revolutionary democracy in the United States by bringing them back. As the federal troops receded, the Ku Klux Klan emerged and the terror campaigns against African-Americans multiplied. Measures were taken to effectively disenfranchise the former slaves, and starting in 1876, what became known as the Jim Crow segregationist laws started being passed. Many would stay on the books till 1965.  

In a backlash against the rising diversity of American life, we have seen a resurgence of misogyny and white supremacy coalesce around the presidency of Donald Trump. In this last-ditch effort to extend his presidency, they have turned to the example of the Electoral Commission of 1877, not because it is a good fit for the facts of their case, but because they seek a similar outcome, a resurgence of reaction. 

While it's not surprising that those seeking a resurgence of white supremacy today should look to the model and law created by those seeking to do the same after the Civil War, they would do well to listen to Du Bois:

“The revolution of 1876 was, in fine, a victory for which the South has every right to hang its head. After enslaving the Negro for two and one-half centuries, it turned on his emancipation to beat a beaten man, to trade in slaves, and to kill the defenseless; to break the spirit of the black man and humiliate him into hopelessness; to establish a new dictatorship of property in the South through the color line. It was a triumph of men who in their effort to replace equality with caste and to build inordinate wealth on a foundation of abject poverty have succeeded in killing democracy, art and religion (p. 707).”

The dozen or so GOP senators and a hundred-plus Trump fans in the House certainly have every right to hang their heads.  Like those that proposed that first Electoral Commission, they are still trying “to replace equality with caste and to build inordinate wealth on a foundation of abject poverty,” but this time they shall not succeed “in killing democracy, art and religion.”

Clay Claiborne

Let's make Trump the anti-authoritarian vaccine

Happy New Year. 2021 doesn't have a hard act to follow.

The world, especially this country, has been put through the {wringer,ringer} in the last four years of Donald Trump "presidency," and 2020 proved to be a real zinger. A year ago, we didn't know what a novel coronavirus was, let alone what it could do. Since then it has killed 1.8 million people worldwide, 350 thousand of them in the United States, and we now face not only a novel coronavirus, but multant novel coronaviruses as well! 

Trump's mismanagement and utter disregard for human life is the biggest reason why 4.25% of the world's population has suffered 18.89% of the COVID19 deaths in spite of being a wealthy country with advanced medical technology, and extensive industrial infrastructure. 

So, this might be a good time to put Trump's much hyped "Operation Warp Speed" into context by remembering that both the Russians, and Chinese had vaccines earlier, and the first US vaccine was developed by Pfizer outside of the Trump program. Now that they've started actually vaccinating people, even though they are starting with the low-hanging fruit of health care workers, and people in group homes, they are doing so at a rate that will take about ten years before they get to everyone in the US. (These projections may be exaggerated, because they probably don't take into account all the people who won't need vaccinations because they will be dead before it gets to them.) Warp speed indeed! 

Of course, our response to the pandemic isn't the only thing Trump has degraded.

Many other countries have already brought this pandemic under control ahead of a vaccine by practising the disciplines of mask wearing, contact tracing, and quarantine as necessary. Vietnam, for example, a country with 28% the population of the US, has lost only 35 people. We, on the other hand, have been put in the position of having to wait for Big Pharma to come to the rescue.

Fortunately, it looks like they have, or at least their scientists, and other workers have, and we now have  a number of vaccines that can put down this pandemic—provided they can now manage to get it into enough people's arms.

Can there be "vaccines" against "diseases" of the body politic?

With all the attention to the pandemic and vaccines, we've gotten an education on how vaccines work. We have learned how they imitate the pathogen, or some of its aspects, so that the body's immune system can learn to recognize the elements of the disease, and produce antibodies to fight it. Early vaccines even used a weaken form of the virus or bacteria to create the vaccine, although this could be very dangerous. Some used a related animal disease, like cowpox to make humans immune to smallpox. All worked in basically the same way: After the body wages a small bout with the weaken "disease," which may be no more than a sore arm for a day, the body has learned to recognize the disease, and mount a winning defense against it should the body encounter it in its most virulent form.

It is my most fervent wish for 2021 that the Trump presidency will have a similar lasting effect on the body politic of the United States: That this Trump experience will be like an anti-authoritarian and anti-racist vaccine for the United States.

After all we've seen over the past four years, there is no doubt that he would be a fascist dictator if he could. Fortunately for us, this wannabee Hitler is a buffoon. We have been suffering from a weak version of an authoritarian attempt to overthrow our democracy, such as it is.  

Finally, land is in sight. Its beginning to look like we weathered this storm. Nobody expects what is euphemistically referred to as "Trump's base" to go away in 2021, but Trump out of power will be a good start. It will be an even better start if we learn to recognize the signs of developing dictatorship, and patch our systems to better defend against fascism. Still, it ain't over till..does a fat lady sing at the inauguration? Anyway, it ain't over till then. Until January 20th, the circus is still in town, and Trump will still be trying to execute his ham-handed coup d'état.

So, we must remain vigilant, and not take anything for granted. Here are some important dates to watch:

3 January 2021: The new congress is sworn in. 

It is also the 1st anniversary of Trump's assassination of Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani. If there is an Iranian revenge attack, it may be a false-flag attack, like the Gulf of Tonkin attack US President Lyndon B. Johnson, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara hatched up in 1964 to get the US fully involved in the war in Vietnam.

As documented in Vietnam: American Holocaust, we found this interesting phone call between McNamara and LBJ that took place before the fateful second attack:

MCNAMARA: Now this is an action that we might well wish to consider after the second attack. But I think it would be inappropriate, and General Wheeler agrees, and Dean Rusk agrees, inappropriate to provide the task force commander that authority. There will be ample time for us, after a second attack, to bring this problem to your attention, and you can then decide how far you wish to pursue the attacker into his base area....

LBJ: But I wish we could have something that we already picked out, and uh

MCNAMARA: We'll see

LBJ: and just hit about three of them damned quick. Right after

MCNAMARA: We will have that, and, and I, I've talked to Mac Bundy [national security adviser] a moment ago and told him that I thought that was the most important subject we should consider today, and, and be prepared to recommend to you a response, a retaliation move against North Vietnam in the event this attack takes place within the next six to nine hours. And we

LBJ: All right. Now we better do that at lunch. There's some things I don't want to go in with these other, I want to keep this as close as I can. So let's just try to keep it to the two.

MCNAMARA: I will be prepared to do so at lunch.

The NVA never made a second attack, but this didn't stop LBJ from claiming it, and using it to get congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which is the closest the US got to a Declaration of War in Vietnam.

If the Trump does try to trump-up an excuse for war, it won't even add to his list of firsts for a US president. So if a fracas develops between the US and Iran in coming weeks, ask who benefits? Cui Bono? Would Iran really risk war only days ahead of the change to an administration that promises to move back to jaw-jaw, and rejoin the Iranian nuclear deal?

On Wednesday, two nuclear capable US Air Force B-52s flew a "show of force" mission over the Persian Gulf near Iran. The US has a history of staging false-flags in Gulfs. Watch for it. In November, Trump was talked out of making a pre-emptive strike on Iran. Then. Now he is much more desperate.

Last month Trump removed much of the top civilian leaders of the military and replaced them with people loyal to him. Whatever his people at the Pentagon are doing, they are playing it close to the vest, and refusing to share with the Biden transition team.

Now we are being prepped for such an attack. Today's CBS Evening News is reporting:

Tonight US military officials tell CBS News that Iran, and its militias, may be planning to attack—act against a US embassy or military base in the region. This as a top Iranian commander is vowing revenge for the US air strike that killed General Qasem Soleimani one year ago.

This is the new civilian Pentagon leadership Trump just put in charge for final weeks that is spinning these tales to the media, the same officials who are still refusing cooperation with Biden's transition team.

Trump may try to start a war with Iran ahead of the transition as a pretext for keeping power. Given his long-time obsession with nuclear weapons, I wouldn't rule out his using one of the "little" nukes he had developed (so they could be more usable☺). In February, Trump had some of these so-called low-yield missiles deploy to boomers. Why would he have done that if he didn't contemplate using them?

Erik Prince is famous for creating the private mercenary army Blackwater. He's still tops in that field; he has already done a number of jobs for Trump, and his sister, Betsy DeVos, is Trump's Secretary of Education. Prince and his ilk are just the sort that Trump would call on for black-ops with Iran, or a little off-the-books intrigue in the US, and Trump just pardoned four Blackwater killers.

4 January: Trump campaigns in Dalton, Georgia for the state’s two Republican senators, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue. Perdue is currently in quarantine "out of an abundant of caution." I knew he would say that.

5 January: Georgia Senate run-off election. We all know why this is important. Moscow Mitch has got to go!

6 January: Congress meets in joint session to confirm the electoral college vote. This is D-Day.

This is the crucial day. Several GOP congressmen and at least one senator have said they are going to challenge the vote. Like all of Trump's "legal" attempts to overturn the election, this too will fail. 

Trump has called for his supporters to come to Washington, DC for "Wild Protests," as congress votes. The Washington Post is reporting:

Threats of violence, ploys to smuggle guns into the District and calls to set up an “armed encampment” on the Mall have proliferated in online chats about the Jan. 6 day of protest. The Proud Boys, members of armed right-wing groups, conspiracy theorists and white supremacists have pledged to attend.

In this scenario, Trump is counting on his Iran war to galvanize his supporters, sow chaos, and drive anti-war protesters onto the streets. This threat to stay in office even after the election has been certified will also bring the people to the streets. While he has his supporters, including the Proud Boy types, gathered in Washington. 

JANUARY SIXTH, SEE YOU IN DC!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 30, 2020

Using this chaos as an excuse, he will attempt to invoke the Insurrection Act in a last desperate attempt to stay in power illegally. If the does that, it will be our biggest challenge yet, and it is one we must meet and beat back before we can declare Trump the vaccine and not the lingering disease.

Clay Claiborne