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Sunday, January 10, 2021

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 

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Friday, January 8, 2021

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 ☺):

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.

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Thursday, January 7, 2021

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.

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

 

  

 

  

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Monday, January 4, 2021

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
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Friday, January 1, 2021

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. 
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

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