My conclusion is that they were either told not to fire on the rioters or they didn’t have the ammunition to do so, but who would do that?
The only people who would have had the authority to issue those instructions would be the Sergeant at Arms of the Senate, the Sergeant at Arms of the House, and the Chief of the Capitol Police Department.
The Sergeant at Arms of the Senate is elected to his position by the Senate and reports to the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, currently Mitch McConnell. The Sergeant at Arms of the House of Representatives is elected by the House members and reports to the Speaker of the House, currently Nancy Pelosi.
This operating structure makes it impossible for either the House or the Senate to issue unilateral instructions through the Chief to the uniformed force. Therefore, they must have agreed to issue joint commands, if any commands were issued.
The Capitol police force officers were at risk of losing their lives. One did. Under those circumstances, there would have been spontaneous acts of self-defense by the uniformed officers, unless they were forbidden to use deadly force. I cannot believe that only one officer discharged a weapon during the entire incident unless they were ordered not to fire and, even then, I fail to understand why the officers being attacked did not use deadly force to protect themselves.
The chief of the Capitol police departments and both Sergeants at Arms have resigned
Perimeter Penetration Operations
So far, there have been two reports of armed individuals with bogus credentials attempting to penetrate the security perimeter.
This is called “testing the perimeter.” This is a technique used by would-be assassins during the planning of assassinations to test the “hardness” of the perimeter around the target and determine what it would take to reach the target.
The SAME technique is also used those charged with protecting “high-value” targets, using an unknown person with instructions to attempt to penetrate the perimeter established around high-value targets.
One of the people who were caught tryi9ng to penetrate the perimeter was driving around with an unregistered handgun, five hundred rounds of ammunition for that specific handgun, and 21 shotgun rounds.
No one travels around with 500 rounds of ammunition for a nefarious purpose because those bullets are almost useless unless they are housed in magazines designed for that particular firearm. No mention was made about the presence of multiple magazines. The fact that the subject of this investigation does not appear to have had multiple magazines argues against his being a serious assassin.
The 21 rounds of shotgun ammunition are another matter. Shotgun rounds can be used to create a diversion by putting the rounds into several paper bags, one inside the other. Lighting the outer bag causes the inner bags to catch fire, eventually cooking off the shotgun rounds. This creates a diversionary effect that can draw sentries away from their posts. The planting of two live pipe bombs, one outside the Republican National Headquarters and one outside the Democratic Party’s National headquarters was evidently another attempt to create a distraction
It worked. Capitol Police and Metropolitan Police Force members were drawn away from their primary assignments to investigate the pipe bombs.
Obviously, I have no way of telling from this distance whether the subject of this investigation is a probe for an assassination team, or a test of the security measures, or simply a stupid idiot in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Now, we are being told that the FBI is vetting all 25,000 National Guard Troops who have been brought to Washington DC from all over the United States. It is being reported that there are Guardsmen from all 50 states involved in the security operation around the Capitol, which means that there are 25,000 National Guardsmen who are not at their usual duty stations or in readiness for active duty in their home states
Assassinations are frequently carried out by the very people who are assigned to protect the person they assassinate.
Who watches the watchers?
In this case, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been tasked with watching the watchers…and the Secret Service has been tasked with watching the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
There have been reports that FBI has been penetrated by radical right-wing activists. We know that the Secret Service agents assigned to President-Elect Biden have been reassigned because they were known to have close ties to the Trump Organization.
The truth is that we really don’t know who to trust. We don’t know who is watching the people who are watching the watchers, nor do we know who is watching them.
If this sounds like “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” you are beginning to get the picture.
Jonna Connelly
01/18/2021 @ 3:21 pm
I want to write this in 190 point font all caps preceded and followed by a string of expletives: what is the appeal of that cheap crook, anyway? How does he inspire such extreme action and dedication?
I don’t expect an answer.
koshersalaami
01/18/2021 @ 6:19 pm
Jonna,
You may not expect an answer but I think I can give you one. The mindset of his followers from before they followed him is that lots of people were taking advantage of them. Immigrants were coming across the Mexican border, violating our laws and taking jobs. (In construction, that’s true.) Not only that, they’re turning America’s language into Spanish. (Every immigrant group looks like that. Wait two generations and most immigrants’ descendants can’t speak their grandparents’ language. The children of immigrants are fluent in both.) People who aren’t working, particularly minority people, are living on their tax dollars and would rather do that than work. (Uh, no, they’d rather work and be prosperous like everyone else and they’d rather not be stuck earning livings illegally because that’s the living that’s available. And this view ignores the Working Poor, which mainly comes from WalMart replacing full time jobs with part time jobs without benefits.) China is taking advantage of us. (Also true, but Trump blew the response, to the disgust of Wall Street.) Muslims are taking advantage of us by coming over here, practicing Sharia (not in the civil sphere) and attempting to get the entire country under Sharia law. Muslims who come here from overseas are terrorists. (Actually, much more terrorism comes from the resentful population of Americans.) They resent minorities and leftists giving our police, who risk their lives every day for us, a hard time. They resent leftists for wanting to take away their guns – the way the country’s going, we’re going to need them, and we have a Constitutional Right to them. Feminists, gays, and trans people are trying to change our morals and our language. Our country is going to Hell in a hand basket.
Along comes Trump, and Trump’s message is dead consistent: Your resentments are all justified and I will, as President, take them all seriously.
I don’t know if he ever made this promise explicitly, but this is a promise he kept, unfailingly. This is his message: You Are Right To Resent. They’d never had a major politician validate them like that before. He became President and kept validating them, while any other President would have been forced to moderate by the Office. This is why Trump never dropped the Wall. This is where Good People On Both Sides came from. He knew what his audience loved and he gave it to them, and they loved him for it. Finally, a politician who sees things as they really are and will say so. About Fucking Time.
Then he built myths and his followers believed them because he made so much more sense to them than everyone mainstream in politics and media. And the mainstream media allowed it, cracking down on him way too late. They gave him over a billion dollars in free coverage in the 2016 election. The mainstream media had made their fatal mistake years before when they treated Fox like a fellow news organization rather than like the sales organization it’s always been. Fox should have been turned into pariahs immediately. When Rupert Murdoch gave the Republican Party a million dollars during an election, that was like a referee making a tackle for one team. But the media by and large kept their mouths shut and in doing so created the monster that validated Trump.
Now because he’s the only guy they trust they believe his myths. The Election Was Stolen! Now, it’s obvious to anyone who follows anything that there was a reason Trump’s requests/demands to state election officials, particularly in Georgia, and Giuliani’s continuous failures in front of one Republican-appointed judge after another that the election was not stolen. But by that time they didn’t trust anyone else. They still don’t.
Now, all you see is that more and more people who aren’t Us are taking advantage of us, they’re constantly attacking the only guy in Washington who gets things right, and now they’re stealing the election and trampling even more on our rights! What do we do about it?
Jan. 6
Jonna Connelly
01/18/2021 @ 7:16 pm
So, k, what you’re saying is a big share of the American white middle class (and some others) is spoiled, entitled, mean, ignorant and stupid.
koshersalaami
01/18/2021 @ 7:43 pm
Well, yes
I think that’s what I just described
Some of them might be quite nice in apolitical circumstances, possibly kind, possibly thoughtful. But when it comes to politics, I’m afraid that’s exactly what I think. I can’t draw other conclusions. Stupidity isn’t the fault of the stupid, but the rest of those characteristics are more voluntary. Being spoiled may not be voluntary. Acting spoiled is. In most cases I think these people should certainly know better.
Jonna Connelly
01/18/2021 @ 8:25 pm
You say it better than I do!
My trmpian brother is one of the best people you’d ever meet. I mean he has done some very big time very good things. We can’t talk politics without a fight and I won’t any more because I can’t without insulting him. He isn’t good at explaining his reasoning, or at reasoning, I suspect. There’s some alienation from government generally, though.
One of the basic differences between us and, I believe between conservatives and liberals generally, he sees government as external and acting on the people while I see it as the people ourselves organizing for the general welfare and hiring people to do the work for us.
I’m reading the John Dean book on authoritarianism; if I ever finish it I might know more about that phenomenon. I suspect my brother is fundamentally more authoritarian than I am.
https://tinyurl.com/y3x3ux5r
koshersalaami
01/18/2021 @ 9:18 pm
You’re right, they do see government as external and we don’t. That’s in part because government often protects rights. Conservatives think the government takes away rights, but that’s because they define rights differently. Not necessarily intellectual conservatives. William F Buckley, for example, thought that marijuana should be legalized because making it illegal was inconsistent with conservative principles. But he was smart enough to worry about consistency.
You’re right about his view of authoritarianism even though authoritarianism is a government function. He is unlikely to want to question. I can’t keep myself from questioning; I doubt you could either.
I don’t know your brother’s opinion about race, though if he’s a Trumpist I have a guess, but I very much doubt he’d support Jim Crow. I’m not sure that kind people can. They might have been able to when they grew up with it as the norm, but not now.
Bitey
01/18/2021 @ 11:08 pm
Kosher, remember Jane Elliott with the ‘blue eyes/brown eyes experiment’? I think we discussed it previously. I remember first seeing her demonstration on Phil Donahue in the 70s. (It may have been the 80s.)
She described racism as “an emotional commitment to ignorance.” She also said that in her experiment, she watched children become vicious and domineering in the space of 15 minutes. I raise this because I think absolutely could support Jim Crow today. 15 minutes would just about do it.
koshersalaami
01/18/2021 @ 11:59 pm
Bitey, maybe you’re right, but I’m not sure anyone could control the environment for that many people, particularly without anyone blowing a whistle. It didn’t take Hitler fifteen minutes and he had a more homogenous, more obedient population to work with.
Bitey
01/19/2021 @ 8:41 am
Kosher, I don’t think it takes homogeneity to sow a crop of racism. You can take a group that is not in a favored category and offer them some advantage over a less favored group for their support. Then turn on them and do it again, distilling it down to a racist core. I think that is the way it happens currently in America. Take Latinos in South Florida and scream “socialism”, and then take their support, and parlay that into legislation against some other group. Take Christians and parlay their bigotry against LGBTQ. Take a pandemic and parlay that into legislation against public schools with “learning pods”, which is essentially discriminatory. All of these things are done currently. All you need to to is find out what some group wants, and then tell them that all they need to do is walk over ‘those people.’ Sadly, they will find their own justifications to do it. Trump has a plutocratic policy agenda, and he gets lots of non-plutocrats to fight and even die for it. These non-plutocrats would never receive one of his tax cuts, or be able to pay to belong to one of his clubs, but they feel included. He gets people to believe they are in by using a bait and switch with their hatred of choice.
koshersalaami
01/19/2021 @ 9:56 am
Depends in part how targeted you want the racism. Also, the Trump administration was successful at increasing hate crimes but not at mobilizing whole communities. They could mobilize organizations – mainly loose ones – but those entailed a lot of travel, like what happened in Milwaukee and at the Capitol and in Charlottesville.
Ron Powell
01/18/2021 @ 10:57 pm
Casting white folks as victims of anything in this country without a whisper or hint of the racism to which they desperately cling gives me slight cause to pause and wonder about how you can respond to Jonna’s question without putting race and racism at the top of your list…
Alan Milner
01/18/2021 @ 11:19 pm
My answer to Jonna’s question isn’t here. It’s on Facebook, but I didn’t focus on race and racism either, nor did I focus on anti-Semitism or any of the other obsessions that drive the evil among us because I was focused on what is it about Trump that causes people to fall under his sway. Kosh gave a very comprehensive answer, much better than mine…but there is always going to be this nagging feeling that there was something about Trump that we just didn’t get because we weren’t equipped to see it. I think Kosh comes close to nailing it and it isn’t really about his racism. Some of his followers follow him because he endorses their racism, but then how do you explain black and brown Trumpers?
Ron Powell
01/19/2021 @ 4:54 am
Alan, as I said in a reply to you in a different thread, there are black and brown ‘Trumpers ‘ because, simply speaking, they’re stuck on stupid.
koshersalaami
01/18/2021 @ 11:25 pm
Ron, I’m not casting them as victims. When Jonna above says “so what you’re saying….” and I reply “well, yes” should indicate that I’m not. Jonna asked me a question and I”m giving her the most descriptive answer I can. I start by talking about what they believe and I think it’s irresponsible of them to get to the point of believing any of it. I think we should be responsible for what we need to question. If someone says to me: “They all just want to live off our money and take welfare, they don’t want to work” and I think that I wouldn’t be like that so I don’t trust the answer and I go do some research and find out. And, as I keep saying, if you want to know, ask people who would actually know rather than people who have an axe to grind that colors their answer, particularly when they themselves are unlikely to have decent sources. The best witnesses are actual witnesses. If you want to understand your world, you need due diligence. Stereotypes don’t cut it. Ask yourself if something looks funny; if it does, ask how; then check it out.
Now, I am casting them as thinking they’re victims, because I believe they do. As I make quite clear, I don’t think they’re justified in thinking this, but I think it’s what they think.
Racism is a piece of it but racism is not the whole thing. Ask yourself a question: You posted that reporter’s video. All these guys doing things for the camera that they should have been hiding. Praying about opposing communists, globalists, whomever. Rifling desks. Searching for the Vide President to lynch him, and your video showed the damned gallows outside. How many references to race did you hear? You think these guys self-censor? They get on the internet and brag about their participation. How many of them put it in racial terms? And if they didn’t, why didn’t they?
I’m not stupid enough to say that racism isn’t heavily involved. If nothing else, their reaction to Barack Obama has proved that point since 2009. But why didn’t they put race front and center? What stopped them?
Ron Powell
01/19/2021 @ 5:03 am
Racists don’t put their racism in outright racist terms…
A significant number of slave owners didn’t put slavery in racist terms. Many thought they were doing slaves a service by keeping them in bondage…
Keeping blacks in a perpetual condition of involuntary servitude wasn’t racism it was Christianity.
koshersalaami
01/19/2021 @ 9:36 am
“Racists don’t put their racism in outright racist terms”? So what, the N word doesn’t exist?
The issue isn’t whether there were some polite slaveowners 160 years ago. There was nothing polite about the Klan. Why are these people not putting their racism in outright racist terms?
koshersalaami
01/19/2021 @ 3:53 pm
I know racism is baked into the DNA of this country. That’s not the question. The question is whether a majority of White people in America would support a return to Jim Crow.
This may sound strange, but racism doesn’t necessarily add up to that. Jim Crow was way beyond anything we have now. You think that if it were put to a vote in majority White areas that legislation would pass that encompassed separate hotels, separate water fountains, no racial intermarriage, restaurants where Black people weren’t allowed to be served, literally back of the bus, entertainment venues Black people wouldn’t be allowed to enter or, if they could, only through another entrance, and it’s your assessment that most White people in America would vote for this?
You’re avoiding my question. When I asked why the racism we both know is there was coded rather than blatant, that’s a legitimate question. It indicates something. What are they afraid of? And Why are they afraid of it?
Then there’s the question of why I ask. There are two reasons. One is that I like my accusations verifiable no matter what direction they go in and whom they target. The other is that I like to know what obstacles I’m facing and what obstacles I’m not. To look for the solution to a problem it helps to really understand the problem. If I”m going to combat racism it helps if I understand it. If someone doesn’t want to be called a racist or be thought of as racist, why not? Why don’t they want to own it? You may think that’s a trivial question but it’s anything but.
koshersalaami
01/18/2021 @ 11:46 pm
In fact, they were way more circumspect about racism than they were about antisemitism. How many guys you figure told that guy in the Camp Auschwitz sweat shirt to take the fucking thing off? You heard the prayer about Globalists. Who do you think he meant? Earlier in the week there was a guy with a shirt that said 6MWE. That stands for Six Million Wasn’t Enough. Neither shirt was exactly subtle; both blatantly supported the mass murder of Jews. Why was racism coded instead of blatant? I mean it was there; that’s what all that “support the police” was about. But why did it stay coded?
Bitey
01/18/2021 @ 11:58 pm
This is a fascinating question. I have wondered about this for a long time.
Ron Powell
01/19/2021 @ 5:08 am
“But why did it stay coded?”
Why did the KKK stop wearing hooded sheets and start wearing three piece suits?
koshersalaami
01/19/2021 @ 9:31 am
Yes, Ron, why?
We’re talking about whether average White Republicans would favor a return to Jim Crow, so this question is relevant. Why is it coded? The Camp Auschwitz shirt was not coded at all. Where was the non-coded racism in the Capitol invasion and why was it missing?
Ron Powell
01/19/2021 @ 1:36 pm
Racism is baked into the DNA of this country…
The Declaration of Independence refers to slaves as being influenced by George III to rebel against slave owners.
The 2nd Amendment was crafted specifically and almost exclusively to provide white citizens a right to arm themselves against slave rebellions and insurrection mounted by slaves seeking freedom…
The Constitution prohibited counting even free black as citizens…
The National sentiment was that ‘no black man had rights that the white man was bound to respect’…
There is no need to articulate that which is a given. This is especially so when it is no longer politically correct to do so…
Use of the ‘N’ word may Have receded from every day parlance and lexicon, but the concomitant attitudes and behaviors persist…
Alan Milner
01/19/2021 @ 1:57 pm
“Keeping blacks in a perpetual condition of involuntary servitude wasn’t racism it was Christianity.”
Absolutely, which is why it always confuses me when Black people adhere to what is, in reality, a minor Jewish herecy that got way out of control.
I can much more easily understand why Black people adhere to Islam, which is a color-blind religion (which accepted the premise of slavery but not race-based slavery.)
It made perfect sense to me when Cassius Clay became Mohammad Ali to the point where I have to struggle to remember what he called his slave name.
Bitey
01/20/2021 @ 4:34 pm
I have been pondering this during this conversation. Both sides of it would probably agree that you’re talking past one another. I am not faulting either side. It is a ponderable question. Why is the racism coded to the degree that it is, and the antisemitism more over.
How about this.
Racism, as we understand it in this context, from the perspective of those espousing racism, is a group of the powerful against a group without it. The racist is using a different part of their body to hold down their target. The racist is using their foot or their knee on the neck of Black people, or Latinos, and others if necessary. It is a certain type of attitude from the attacker. Given that, the urgency of the assault is not as severe. The racist assumes a certain buy-in from the rest of society. The system is already constructed broadly to accommodate the racist.
Conversely, regarding anti-semitism, whether legitimately assessed or not, the target of anti-semitism by the anti-Semite is more of a power against power conflict. The things said about Jews as enemies involve their capabilities, like wealth, or intellect, etc. The organized efforts against by governments have been on a warlike scale, pogroms, etc. They have shorter, hotter flare-ups with great intensity. The racism against groups perceived to be less powerful are on a longer, gentler slope. Anti-Semitic Christians worship a Jewish person and a perverted Jewish faith, while racist Christians reject non-whites as being less than human and lacking a soul.
I think there are aspects of crossover with both behaviors. Jews have been detected as less than/other than human. And, non-whites have been burned out of cities and towns and villages. But, when I think of the vile message on that insurrectionist’s sweatshirt, which I wont quote, I think of the wearer referring to things like international banking, and media, etc. I don’t imagine him, or others like him, picturing non-whites as presenting that type of threat to his perceived superiority.
That’s my best guess.
Bitey
01/20/2021 @ 4:37 pm
That should say depicted, not detected.
koshersalaami
01/20/2021 @ 10:54 pm
Bitey,
I agree with you about the differences in bigotry. I have for years.
In this case I brought up the antisemitism to show that this crowd wasn’t necessarily averse about expressing bigotry directly.
I have a different answer as to why I think it isn’t being expressed. It’s because there is too great a taboo about expressing it. Typically if I talk to conservatives they will deny they’re racists. It bothers them to be thought of that way, either because they don’t think of themselves that way or I suppose because they know it’s disadvantageous for others to think of them that way. In other words, they’re either existing within a norm that says racism is inherently bad or they are accepting that as the norm even if they are outliers who don’t fit the norm personally. What’s the language of “reverse discrimination?” Not that “it’s bad for White people” even though that’s really what they mean, though they are unlikely to acknowledge that even to themselves, but that it’s racist. Not “you’re hypocritical because reverse discrimination counters Your priority on racism” but simply “it’s racist, it’s discriminatory” with the accepted norm that that’s inherently a bad thing.
For most of them, not the Steve Bannons of the world, I think their racism has a base line, and my educated guess as to where it is is at deniability. What happened in the George Floyd case was that deniability became impossible and suddenly, for the first time, a majority of Republicans said that the police really are worse to Black suspects. The Trayvon Martin explosion was mostly Left. The George Floyd explosion was centrist.
Here I’m going to say something I don’t know about. I haven’t heard explosions about what Biden’s been saying about race from the Right. That doesn’t mean they’re not there but I haven’t heard about them. Biden talks about correcting racial injustice in damned near every speech he makes, and it might actually be in every speech he makes. This included his acceptance speech when the election was called for him and his inauguration speech. Nobody in his position has ever done anything like that. Obama didn’t, in part because his election was a statement, but the fact is even he didn’t do it. I suspect Hubert Humphrey would have had he been elected and so would Robert Kennedy, but we never found out. I haven’t seen it turn into an issue. But I could be missing it.
In any case, I think Jim Crow is below the baseline. The methods used to disenfranchise voters has always contained a kernel of deniability even though I think that deniability is bullshit. While I think they are more willing to practice disenfranchisement because Black people tend to vote Democratic than because they’re Black per se, the fact is they don’t care enough about the fact that they are targeting Black people to cease and desist, and that’s certainly racist, like the fact that Trump was so awful to Black people wasn’t enough to make Trump voters desert him.
But those guys are surprised by the racism accusation. The neighbor of yours who voted for Trump didn’t do it because he was intentionally striking a blow against you; the problem was that he didn’t care enough about you for that to affect his vote. It’s like adultery: The problem isn’t that “She means nothing to me” (using a male adulterer as the example here), the problem is that his wife’s pain didn’t mean enough to him for him to restrain himself.
But Jim Crow takes all that away. Jim Crow makes deniability, even to oneself, particularly to oneself, impossible. At that point you have to look in the mirror and see a racist. No choice. No ambiguity. And I don’t think most Republicans are willing to do that. And that’s why I think their racism isn’t overt.
Bitey
01/21/2021 @ 6:54 am
“But Jim Crow takes all that away. Jim Crow makes deniability, even to oneself, particularly to oneself, impossible. At that point you have to look in the mirror and see a racist.“
I think the exact opposite about this. “Jim Crow” makes it possible to not see a racist. “Jim Crow” lends the imprimatur of government to separation. Separation leads to inequalities, and the concepts cycle in support of one another. People quickly lose understanding of cause and effect. People start to believe that people desire their separation and disparate treatments.
I recall a conversation I had with a woman who had an aunt who collected antebellum chachkies. One of the things she showed me was a collection of post cards which depicted happy enslaved people on a plantation scene. I pointed out how this depiction was not accurate and would be considered offensive to some…not wanting to embarrass her. What happened was she was offended by my mention of it. Rather than see the racism in plantation slavery, she saw the romance of antebellum plantations. Give someone a prism and they will pick the color that they like best in the refracted light. Remember, “Gone with the Wind” won best picture, and that is a deeply racist film. They did not show racism as an ugly system. Rather, they showed it in support of the romance of white superiority. Hattie McDaniel was awarded with an Academy Award being depicted in a way that no one would choose to be depicted. Like the youth poet laureate said at the inauguration, “…in the norms of what just is, isn’t always justice…”. Jim Crow allows people to soak their souls in the “just is”, and they forget all about justice.
koshersalaami
01/21/2021 @ 11:06 am
I think you’re right once Jim Crow is in place and considered normal. The problem in terms of current racists is getting there. Keep in mind that their shtick is to be race-blind in legislation and policy. Their method is what Anatole France, about the only guy I quote because he said something first that uses logic I find valuable, was talking about when he said that the poor and the rich are equally prohibited from sleeping under bridges. They’d need to go to an equivalent to the grandfather rule. They won’t touch it directly, and the fact that they think they can’t or, alternatively, the fact that they don’t want to admit to themselves that they’re racist enough to do that is what keeps us out of reverting to Jim Crow.
I get the idea that if it’s in place it’s normal. If it’s in place it enables them to attribute what they’re seeing to race rather than circumstances.
The one place where I think my case doesn’t hold up is in school integration because parents don’t worry about whether whatever they see in the population of students about to enter their schools is attributable to race or circumstances; whatever its cause they don’t want it affecting their kids. I can’t tell you if that’s race per se or other-side-of-the-tracks-ism, but I’m not sure that distinction matters much other than in theory.
Bitey
01/21/2021 @ 12:02 pm
I see what you mean about the change from this to that being the difference. You could be right about that. I would certainly hope that is the case. My fear is that people would be all to willing to accept a change with a minor shrug. I have no reason to believe that they would accept it beyond just a fear.
koshersalaami
01/21/2021 @ 6:42 pm
Have you gotten emails from OZY? They started showing up and I eventually started looking at them.Some of them are not bad. Today in one of their emails I read this:
reaching those 74 million
Can Biden actually win over those who voted for Trump?
1. What That Number Is Not
Some want to define all 74 million Trump voters as MAGA-touting, QAnon-believing insurrectionists willing to storm the Capitol. But reality is more complicated. Many voted as much against Biden as for Trump, and perhaps half of Republicans believe the rigged election nonsense. When people paint all 74 million with the same brush, they play right into extremists’ talking points — making their influence, and existence, seem much bigger than it actually is. But if Biden were to target them, nothing draws converts to a radical cause more than martyrdom. As journalist Megyn Kelly put it on Wednesday’s special live episode of The Carlos Watson Show, calls from the left to strip degrees or disbar figures like Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley is “the crazy type of lunacy we should be avoiding.”
Bitey
01/18/2021 @ 5:08 pm
Alan, come on man. Can you name for me anything other thing that is “standard operating procedure”? I don’t want to pick nits here, but a standard procedure to fire upon someone…or a crowd? I can think of one circumstance where firing upon someone is S.O.P. That would be a firing squad. I assure you that there is no standard situation in this country where deadly force is required. There are cases where it is allowed, but it is never required.
Taken further, I can think of nearly infinite reasons why a government would not want to have guards fired weapons on crowds surrounding a building like the Capitol. To put it mildly, it is a bad look. It is a really bad look. The American president wears a business suit, not a uniform. We are not at war with the populace. An armed fortress, with warlords inside is antithetical to what the US is. Even the personal bodyguards of the President wear business suits. They don’t wear them for the tactical benefits. They wear them so as not to look military or threatening.
If you want a barrier where people only cross on pain of death, you need something more like the barrier between East and West Berlin, back when the country was divided. You’d need guard towers giving guards clear line of sight over a segment of the barrier, and full automatic machine guns from that sort of position. Personnel with handguns on the same level with those seeking to breach is not any way to control a mob. An officer with a handgun can contain individuals not working as part of a mob, and not wanting to be arrested. One officer against a thousand or more acting as a mob could not be contained by any such “procedure.”
That mob was estimated to be about 30,000 people. The force at the Capitol was probably several hundred. An officer shooting his 17 rounds from his government issue 9mm would would or kill a few people, then the mob would press forward and dismember him/her with their bare hands. They’d stomp his skull until his eyes leaked out. They’d pull his arms from their sockets. They reach into his guts, pull them out like vermicelli noodles, and crack his ribs backwards until he looked like a giant orchid. I’m guessing the officers on an undermanned perimeter did not fire because they did not want to expose the contents of their intestines to 30,000 strangers. As for the officer inside who fired his handgun into Ashli Babbit, he did so from cover and concealment. The window was big enough for one person at a time. He demonstrated that one person coming through would get shot. He also had an avenue of escape from that position. Tactically, that is not remotely similar to a overrun perimeter.
The perimeter was lost before the crowd arrived. Planning was its fatal flaw. Baking cakes has standard procedures. Guarding, protecting the peace, and hand to hand combat at close quarters do not have standard procedures…once the tactical situation has become life or death. This is one of the main ways that the profession of arms is misunderstood and underestimated. These things take training, discipline, and judgement. No cookbook, nor S.O.P. Manual can guide you through once the fur flies. Sorry to sound preachy, but imagine that this job is much tougher than you think.
Alan Milner
01/18/2021 @ 11:00 pm
Don’t look now, but that is exactly where we are at right now, aren’t we? In order to hold the inauguration outside, where it absolutely does not need to be, we have had to bring in 25,000 soldiers, erected barricades around the capitol and the White House, and then vetted all 25,000 troopers because we don’t know that we can trust them.
This ceased to be a police action when the rioters ripped their way into the Capitol building. In war, that’s exactly what you do, establish a perimeter, and kill anything that crosses the line. Gengis Khan was doing that 800 years ago, and it has never gone out of style.
And they don’t carry one magazine each. You know better than that. I carry two spare mags. and I’m a civilian. (but my carry piece only eats six round mags.)
The people who trained me (not in this country, by the way) would absolutely agree with you, but they are standing guard right now on a perimeter wall of their own because in their country, there are no non-combatants anymore.
The situation was poorly anticipated, but I think that was actually the result of inside help. In an attempt not to give the media some really bad images of armed and armored police officers protecting the Capitol, they gave images of a mob tearing the seat of government apart.
One of the things i noticed was that there were no emergency provisions for protecting the capitol building, no roll-down metal gates to cover doors and windows, internal doors and windows that were clearly not hardened for defensive purposes. Hell, I’ve got an armored door on my house (okay, the patio was simply glassed in until I enclosed it in ballistic plastic but that was for hurricane protection. I’m not sure that Lexan of the thickness I’ve used will stop a bullet and don’t want to find out either.
It is not clear that Trump had any say about what the Sergeants at Arms and the Capitol police chief did, but it does appear that Trump appointees slowed down the National Guard response.
I respect your service and your background, but I can’t forget the guy wearing the sweatshirt that said Six Million Was Not Enough. Sorry, that’s where my good-natured tolerance ends.
Ron Powell
01/19/2021 @ 5:22 am
Alan, I really wish you would stop calling them rioters and refer to them a bit more accurately. They are seditionists who are engaged in insurrection or they are simply insurrectionists…
The correct criminal charges will be a. fundamental element of the accountability…
Trump didn’t incite a riot. The article of Impeachment charges him with incitement of insurrection…
Words matter….
Alan Milner
01/19/2021 @ 11:31 am
Standard operating procedures are otherwise known as the plan and as we all know, no plan survives the first contact with the enemy. However, there are protocols for everything from cooking breakfast to revolutions. You have to start from an SOP because if you don’t start from an SOP you have no organizational structure and chaos immediately ensues. Of course, SOPs also cause situational blindness. The most classic example of that phenomenon that I can think of was Hitler’s insistence that Allies were going to land at Calais and his refusal to re-allocate resources to Normandy even after it was clear that the Allies had already landed there. And how was that achieved? By creating a fiction Nine Army and putting Patton in charge of it. That comparison might seem a little obtuse, but it was pretty clear that the people in charge were operating under a protocol that forbid them from making proper preparations because of the optics.
Bitey
01/19/2021 @ 12:21 pm
Alan, I was holding up a small stop sign regarding the use of some of those terms because I think it causes misunderstanding. Consider this a bigger STOP sign.
You’re using “standard operating procedure” as a cliche in the context of using lethal force. No, it does not mean, a plan. That’s why I asked you what your understanding of the term was. “S.O.P.” (for short) exists where there is not a plan. Standard procedure exists where plans are unnecessary. Everything about a military type of life is categorized and disciplined. SOP refers to how things are done in the standard manner. When going from the living room to the kitchen, the standard operating procedure is to walk through the dining room…etc. This may seem like a silly example to you, and no, this particular one does not exist, but it is the type of thing that is entered into a manual to describe the military way which is trained and expected. They involve the ordinary, often mundane aspects of doing things which separate a civilian way of doing things and an organization’s way of doing things. When it comes to a tactical situation like the one we have been discussing, no manual can determine when to shoot or not to shoot.
“However, there are protocols for everything from cooking breakfast to revolutions.“
This is your quote above. This is where the misunderstanding is. This is false as it applies in this context. I assure you that there is no “protocol” that says an officer MUST use deadly force. In that situation an officer MAY use deadly force, but there is a huge difference between the two.
As for your Normandy invasion example, you’re confusing two levels of operation, if not three. Planning was a problem, yes. Like I said earlier, the perimeter was lost before the crowd arrived because of the plan. Now, the plan was either to intentionally field an insufficient guard, or they mistakenly did so, but the small number was the main reason why they could not handle 30,000 insurgents.
That plan may have involved management and the executive, or just management. That’s two of the three levels. The third level is the guard itself. They could not, in the planning phase, determine when to shoot. Everything they did involved tactical decisions. The one or two higher levels were strategic. S.O.P manuals are completely strategic, and can not possibly take tactical steps to completion. Ultimately, those take second by second decisions. Logistical decisions are strategic. When to shoot, and which target, or when to stab someone with a bayonet and what part of their body…is tactical.
Here’s a different scenario. Let’s say you’re driving to somewhere 5 miles away in your hometown. You have a standard path to get there. The directions involve regular surface streets and signal controlled intersections. There are other cars, pedestrians, homes and businesses. Your path between where you are and where you are going can be described as ‘standard operating procedure’. It would include traffic laws, etc. Now, if you are presented with a question at an intersection about when to turn left, what is the answer? Only generally can you know that answer before arriving at the intersection. The manual will say, turn when the light is green and the intersection clears. Once you are at the intersection, you can decide based upon other traffic, pedestrians, etc. SOP only goes so far.
Alan Milner
01/19/2021 @ 1:50 pm
I really have to introduce you to Victor Madeja, a high school classmate of mine, West Point ’70, Ranger, saw serious action in ‘Nam and now is a member of several veterans anti-war groups. Fascinating man. When we were high school, we got into a debate about the existence of God. I took the negative position, of course. He challenged me to sell him my soul, so I did. For five bucks, made out a bill of sale, had it notarized. He carried it throughout his service and gave it back to me, framed when we met at our 40th-year reunion in 2006. He is a rabid fan of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and has a newsletter that you might find interesting. Email him at victor@valorww2.com and tell him that you’re a friend of mine. You might find him interesting.
jpHart
01/18/2021 @ 7:53 pm
AM
No kidding many here among us can reassemble a Glock blindfolded. Coincidentally today’s postman brought me a water streaked postcard from Qatar. Buddy was ‘call of duty’ MP front gate when Senior Bush alighted at Truax Field ANG, Wisconsin. He asked, ‘Why didn’t they treetop the Blue Angels?! Swoop ‘dem pink plumes!’ My own thoughts minimally) what about that sound deterrent the Cubanos purportedly boinked around with?! Sure, sure wondering why. They hit the Congress and the damage done. I start to relax but too often monitor Tucker Carlson and Shin Kicker Hannity. Nutcracker sweets so slo – mo insidious! Minds well rebrand our major parties MSNBC and FIX NEWS. Ground control mite also spin the Ns flat: CZZ
(crawl lions) Like bare hands and screaming banshees! Young solders on a yellow bus.
RESTRAINT RESTRAINT RESTRAINT
As though wasting assets don’t rhyme with caskets.
Respectfully,
[…] oligarchs & swirling larks […]
00ld enough to flash on B. Arbitrary Haig ???
JP
Bitey
01/18/2021 @ 11:36 pm
Maybe I have been misunderstood. I am not saying that each officer was not justified in using lethal force. Certainly they were. What I said was, there is no S.O.P. about when to shoot. Tactically, it is always a judgement call. It can’t be done from a policy manual.
Also, a “police action” is a war. It is an undeclared war. I know the terminology is oxymoronic but it has become a police action…which means the use of police is not appropriate and the use of military is. A police action is an undeclared war. “Policing” in the military vernacular means to clean, and to restore order.
As for magazines. When I was a cop I carried a 9mm on my hip, and a .38 revolver in my back pocket. The 9mm had 15 rounds in the magazine, and one in the chamber. I had two spare loaded magazines on my belt. The revolver had 5 rounds. I had 51 rounds at my disposal.
NOW…that incident where an officer is surrounded by a crowd would not allow an officer to reload. He’d be lucky to get all 16 rounds off in the first place. So, yes. I do know full well, and I meant what I said. In close quarters like that, the officer would get a few rounds off. He’d be lucky to get 16 off. In the process he would be grabbed. And if someone really knew what they were doing, they could grab his 9mm and prevent it from firing. There is a method which is taught in hand to hand combat. At the range that they were at, the gun would almost be more useful as a club than a gun.
Most officers now carry an “M&P” something or other, which is made of a polymer. You’re probably familiar with Glocks. I’m not a fan. These are not as useful in close combat. When I decided that I had to go back to being armed, I had a .45 custom made. It is cut from forged steel. It weighs about 5 pounds, and it wont break. If I were in that situation, I could swing it like Thor’s hammer. I also would not use a 9mm in that situation. Too small, too fast. Fast rounds pierce targets and hit other things/people.
I am not proud of going back to being armed. I am also not proud of having had a gun made. But, if I have to go into combat, I want to be prepared, and I want to use the techniques that I was taught. I don’t trust polymers. The numbers that those few cops were up against, and the manner in which they were deployed gave them no alternative. Out on the perimeter, they didn’t have a chance. Inside, they at least had cover.
Alan Milner
01/19/2021 @ 12:07 am
I doubt that I will ever buy another gun. At one point I owned more than 60 firearms, including some real classics. I had to let them go when I moved to Florida. If I do buy another gun, it will be a 1911.
Ron Powell
01/20/2021 @ 12:43 am
“…but I think it’s what they think.”
This is the flaw in much of your commentary and I sincerely wish you would avoid or abandon your habit of responding to what you think someone else is thinking…
You’re not clairvoyant, you’re not a psychologist, you’re not a psychiatrist, and if you were a practitioner of phrenology, you can’t get close enough to these folks to study the lumps on their heads…
Since LBJ signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts the majority of white people in this country have voted for Republicans who are opposed to expanding or enforcing the rights of black and brown people in this country to this day.
No Democrats have won elections without the benefit of the heavy support of Black and Brown voters…
This is why Trump & Co. wanted to delegitimize and discount the votes of black and brown people…
The fight for the soul of America is about race and racism.
FULL STOP, PERIOD!
If I didn’t feel as though I know differently, I would characterize your continued refusal to acknowledge race and racism as the primary reason for the cultural, political, and social divide in America as an elaborate and convoluted denial of that which, in my opinion, is undeniable…
koshersalaami
01/20/2021 @ 12:47 pm
I don’t need to be clairvoyant to think that what they think is that they’re victims. It’s how they talk about themselves. Nor is their self-perception as victims contrary to racism. If anything, it’s based on racism.
Frankly, if you thought I of all people were in denial about racism, you’d be a blithering idiot. I just analyze it more carefully than you do. You think that the existence of racism means that most of America’s White people would favor the re-institution of Jim Crow. I have seen no evidence to support that and quite a lot to contradict it, all of which you ignore because you’d rather maximize racism than analyze it. It’s big. It’s huge. There’s no point to making it look like an even bigger obstacle than it is.
I’ve asked you a question several times which you continue to ignore and I’ll ask it again, because it is relevant to the question about the re-institution of Jim Crow:
Why wasn’t the racism of those who attempted that coup in the Capitol completely overt?
God knows they were overt about damned near everything else, from wearing a shirt saying Camp Auschwitz to chanting Hang Pence and building a damned gallows outside the Capitol for that purpose.
Why not racism?
You might be under the mistaken impression that I’m arguing that they aren’t racist. That is not my argument. What does their coding of racism indicate about American racism? And please don’t tell me that they’ve been coding for years because that doesn’t address the question.
If you want to counter racism, you have to understand what you’re countering. How many places have you read the maxim “Know your enemy”? How the Hell do you ever expect to stop a guy like Trump without understanding what exactly makes his followers follow him?
I’ve taught a lot of people technical things and I’ve noticed one of the fails in that kind of teaching. You’re a musician, you’ll get this: If I hit a tuning fork on my heel, hold it up and you can’t hear it, then touch the end to a wall, and you can hear it easily, why? If I ask that question, I guarantee you that someone will say “Because the wall amplifies the fork.” The problem with this answer is that it just means Because the wall makes the fork louder. We knew that already. There’s a difference between explaining a phenomenon and naming it. The same is true of American racism and of Trump support. It’s racism, therefore just go to the extremes of racism and assume it’s what most racists want? If nothing else, that’s intellectually lazy.
So I’ll ask you again:
Why wasn’t the racism of those who attempted that coup in the Capitol completely overt?
Ron Powell
01/20/2021 @ 10:36 pm
@Koshersalaami,
If I had a nickel for every question I asked you to answer, my retirement would be a bit less financially stressful and daunting.
There is no response that I could give that you wouldn’t find a reason or way to criticize…
The question is a rabbit hole that I refuse to be led into and since you have no leverage over my determination to avoid a foray into the proverbial rhetorical weeds I will not capitulate.
There’s a good deal of hubris in your remark about being intellectually lazy….
I find that the so-called assessments and analysis to be exercises in pompous and officious self- aggrandizement…
You say you have an answer to your own question.
Spit it out and let’s have at it…
Otherwise give it up because frankly I don’t give a damn….
koshersalaami
01/21/2021 @ 12:39 am
My answer was given to Bitey above at 10:54 in detail. Easier to read it there.
What’s a recent question of yours that I haven’t answered?
Alan Milner
01/20/2021 @ 2:32 pm
Let me try to answer Kosh’s question: Racism was certainly one of the motivations that drove some of the RIOTERS to attend the RIOT. It was one of the major motivations, but that wasn’t what the DEMONSTRATORS were demonstrating against on January 6. On January 6, they were protesting the deposition of their BELOVED LEADER. Demonstrations are organized according to their unifying principle, the one issue they are in agreement on,
Believe it or not, not all of the demonstrators were racists, unless you believe that the people of color among the rioters were racists. There were Jews among the rioters (and I am not at all sure that they weren’t self-hating Jews) marching side by side with anti-Semites, but neither racism nor anti-Semitism was the reason they were there.
Racism etc. was certainly the reason that the rioters were susceptible to Trump’s pitch, but there were people there who were angry about the treatment of our veterans, people who were angry about how the epidemic has hurt them personally, and all the other grievances that are out there.
But they weren’t there to protest any of those things. They were there for the specific purpose of overturning a legal election and to that extent, you could say that the riot was an inept insurrection, but it started as a demonstration that became a riot and achieved the status of an insurrection when the violence ensured.
Some of the same people who were at the riot will be going home to their covens and their klans and they will continue to hate black people and Jews, and anyone else who doesn’t look like them. Others will go home and distance themselves from the religion of Trump because, now that he is a loser, they won’t have much use for him anymore.
koshersalaami
01/20/2021 @ 3:14 pm
I know what my answer is. Ron and I are arguing about the nature of current Republican racism.
Alan Milner
01/20/2021 @ 3:32 pm
And now you know mine, too.
Ron Powell
01/20/2021 @ 10:47 pm
Alan, I’m glad that you’re not one of the floor managers of the impeachment of Trump for Incitement of Insurrection or a prosecutor in a federal court for charges of sedition and insurrection…
You’d have the case so fucked up it would be impossible to get a conviction on the charges against Trump and the other criminal defendants.
As for blacks and Jews being part of the mob…
People who are easily duped are either abjectly gullible or stuck on stupid…
Harriet Gunman often said of her accomplishment of freeing 100 slaves, that she could have freed 100 more if they knew they were slaves…
Ron Powell
01/20/2021 @ 10:49 pm
That’s Harriet Tubman
Alan Milner
01/20/2021 @ 11:30 pm
Well, that makes two of us. I used to install floors. I don’t know how to manage them,. If I understand you aright, and I am not always sure I do, I have to call them insurrectionists in order to get Trump convicted for inciting an insurrection. Why isn’t inciting a riot enough?
Were the Southern states that made up the confederacy insurrectionists? Well, yes and no. The United States considered themselves insurrectionists, but they considered themselves secessionists. They didn’t want to overthrow the existing government of the United States, which would be an insurrection. They wanted to leave the Union, which would have been secession, and go do their own thing. Their own thing was to perpetuate slavery, but that’s not why Lincoln refused to let them go. Remember, old Abe said that if he could only preserve the union by allowing slavery to continue he would, but if he could only preserve the union by freeing the slaves then he would do that. His mystical mission was to preserve the Union, not end slavery, as he said himself on numerous occasions.
Now, if you want me to call the rioters insurrectionists, well, I could do that, but since I am not going to be a floor manager for the Impeachment (wait, let me check my voice mail; nope, no replies to my offer to serve pro bono yet) and no one except a very small circle of friends (very, very small) is ever going to see this I have to ask, does it really matter, one way or the other?
If they were insurrectionists, as I have said before, they were very inept insurrectionists because they clearly had no plan of what to do after they hanged Pence and did whatever they planned to do to Pelosi…so they would have been gathered up, arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to life without parole…because they had no plan about what to do next and what to do after that…or, if they did, they forgot to publish it, because no one seemed to know what to do after they succeeded in taking the Capitol.
I mean what could they do? It’s too big to carry away into the night. You can’t resell it because, well, who could afford it and why would they want it. They could have burned it down but then they would have to leave, which would leave them running right into the arms of the cops and soldiers waiting outside. Or, they could have stayed inside and roasted weiners.
If this was an insurrection, it was the most inept insurrection since John Brown’s Folly. They figured out how to get in, but they never bothered to figure out what they were going to do next. Were they going to appoint themselves to fill the empty seats in the House and Senate and then vote to reject the electoral college vote and declare Trump the winner, or were they thinking about holding the Congress at gunpoint and demanding that make Trump Donald the First?
No, my friend, while you might be right and this might technically be considered an insurrection, it was a riot, and Trump is clearly guilty of incitement to riot….and that’s enough to convict him on BECAUSE incitement to riot is certainly either a high crime or a misdemeanor.
When I tried to study law way back when, I remember learning that you should never overcharge…at the time I thought that meant charging clients too much (no, I really did. I was that stupid) and then I learned that means proffering charges you can’t prove.
I don’t believe you can prove insurrection. I believe that rioting and incitement to riot is an open and shut case because, in order to prove insurrection, you have to prove that was their intent. With rioting (or even just criminal trespass) you have satisfied the prima fascia requirement for conviction, although you might find it difficult to impanel an impartial jury because we all saw it in living color in real-time.
Please don’t take offense. I am always surprised when people feel offended, probably because, well, I have a very, very high boiling point, and I sort of expect the same from everyone else, and it always surprises me when they go off on me. The last time I said anything that anyone took seriously it was “I do” and boy was that ever a mistake.
jpHart
01/21/2021 @ 4:05 am
AM
‘They figured out how to get in, but they never bothered to figure out what they were going to do next.’
O really? Saw a glimpse ‘aftermath’ news vid wherein one of the blowhards yells: [sic] “…they’re all in the tunnel…GET THE GAS….” Shucks even a tight perimeter of sundry hay bales say 3′ high could have been lit a fire. Who’s it that said, ‘…a little bit of buckshot…spares the mob agony….’ Like all this sharp intellectualism discoursing innuendos (no manure) of what? Crime and Punishment??? And this rout deification of our Founding Fathers affronting a flintlock plausible land rights (monetary) revolution PRE-ElECTRICITY (let alone WWW instant cognizance and recognizance) […] I’ve no doubt that free energy is just around the proverbial corner … right in front of those rem-valued sleepy garden walls. A fascinating dormant thread is the suspect would-be Soviets’ money wash via the NRA. Merely I ask: what if the fervor were invested in truncation of inner city violence? No chicken feathers the high priests laboriously retool and write off their lobbyist bird splats in CPA-level tax codes. That insurrection the other day was colder than a fracker’s ass. As though there’s a synthetic X the lb. APATHY. Take care!
jp
Alan Milner
03/02/2021 @ 11:26 pm
I gotta tell you, after all these years, you can still bring me back down to a semblance of reality. I appreciate your comments more on second readings. I suspect mine don’t even deserve the first reading.
Bitey
03/02/2021 @ 7:28 pm
I had to search for where this discussion of Jim Crow occurred. It is suddenly current again. There has been discussion of whether or not the GOP is attempting to construct a new Jim Crow. I find it fascinating that this is happening just weeks after several of us were tossing this around. Eugene Robinson wrote about it today or yesterday. Numerous bills around the country are being passed to limit voting my minorities. Here we go again, folks.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/03/02/future-voting-rights-is-looking-pretty-bleak/
Jonna Connelly
03/03/2021 @ 1:06 pm
Bitey – your link goes to the wrong place. Not your fault – when I searched for Robinson’s piece on the WaPo site the first result took me to the same place. I had to look further for Robinson’s actual piece which is here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-republican-party-is-making-jim-crow-segregationists-proud/2021/03/01/80036fce-7ac7-11eb-b3d1-9e5aa3d5220c_story.html
Jonna Connelly
03/03/2021 @ 1:17 pm
The court arguments yesterday brought out the admission of the need to suppress minority voting from the AZ Republican lawyer:
Out-of-precinct voting “puts us at a competitive disadvantage to Democrats,” Carvin said. “Politics is a zero sum game, and every extra vote they get through unlawful interpretations of Section 2 hurts us.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/supreme-court-justices-suggest-support-for-arizona-voting-curbs/ar-BB1ea0MW
The same article gives me some hope unless I am not reading carefully enough:
“But Kavanaugh and fellow Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett also suggested they weren’t comfortable with the standards being proposed by Republican lawyers. Barrett challenged Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich’s argument that courts should allow individual restrictions, even if they might have some discriminatory impact, as long as the election system as a whole gives voters a fair opportunity to cast ballots.
“If it takes one opportunity away, I guess I still don’t understand why that isn’t reducing the ability of those voters to vote, relative to other white voters that don’t share that same burden,” she said.”
koshersalaami
03/03/2021 @ 11:44 pm
So out of precinct voting for some reason hurts one party. How? Because more voters get their votes counted. Forgive me here, but elections are about whoever gets more votes from legal voters. I’m sure the Republicans would profit from ending womens’ suffrage, and it’s obvious why we don’t go there, but it should be just as obvious why we don’t go anywhere that serves the equivalent function.
jpHart
02/19/2022 @ 9:42 am
Born Free, Just Me
{::::} all the words {::::}
{::::}of Sensurround{::::}
{::::}pieces on ground{::::}
{::::}theater by the pound{::::}
{::::}child of God{::::}
{::::}blue velvet echo{::::}
{::::}best of which{::::}
🩸STAND DOWN🩸