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happy like a pig in muck...Lawmakers resumed counting votes on Wednesday, after the Capitol building was cleared from a mob. Senators and members of the House had evacuated when Trump supporters disrupted Congress’s debate of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.
read more: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/01/06/us/electoral-vote
South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham just had a field day with his remarks, saying that “the mob has done something nobody else could do, get me and (Rand Paul) to agree.” “Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are lawfully elected and will become the president and the vice president of the United States on January the 20th,” he said.
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taking a bullet for the cause?...
On Wednesday, US Congress was about to begin verifying the results of the US election but the Senate and House of Representatives went into recess due to the protesters entering the building. The storming of the building led to an armed standoff between protesters and police.
A terrifying graphic video emerged online reportedly showing a woman being shot inside the US Capitol building in Washington, DC.
It was reported that she was in critical condition and was fighting for her life, as she was loaded into the ambulance.
According to the DC police, the woman has later died from her wounds at the hospital. The police did not immediately provide any details on the shooting incident, and the name of the victim remains undisclosed.
The circumstances under which the woman received a gunshot wound remain unknown.
The media claimed that the woman killed inside the Capitol was identified as Ashli Babbit from San Diego, California. Babbit apparently was a Trump supporter, and, reportedly, a 14-year veteran, who served in the US Air Force.
Babbit, who supposedly held a high-security official post during her service, was an enthusiastic supporter of the Stop the Steal movement, whose participants endorse the claims of US president Donald Trump that massive irregularities took place during the 2020 presidential election.
Read more:
https://sputniknews.com/us/202101061081675879-graphic-video-of-woman-being-shot-at-us-capitol-building-emerges-online/
on a virtual parade...
President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration will include a “virtual parade across America” consistent with crowd limits during the coronavirus era.
Following the swearing-in ceremony on January 20 on the west front of the US Capitol, Biden and wife Jill will join vice president-elect Kamala Harris and her husband in a socially distanced Pass in Review on the Capitol’s opposite front side.
Those are military traditions where Biden will review the readiness of troops.
He will also receive a traditional presidential escort with representatives from every military branch from 15th Street in Washington to the White House.
That, the Presidential Inaugural Committee says, will be socially distanced too, while “providing the American people and world with historic images of the president-elect proceeding to the White House without attracting large crowds”.
Workers in recent days began dismantling an inaugural parade reviewing stand in front of the White House as Biden’s transition team continues to prepare for festivities that will be mostly virtual.
Read more:
https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/world/us-news/2021/01/04/nancy-pelosi-narrowly-re-elected-as-us-house-speaker/
putin did (not) it!...
As thousands of Trump supporters gathered in Washington, DC on Wednesday for a 'Stop the Steal' rally and Congress met to certify the Electoral College votes that would make Democrat Joe Biden the next US president, a group of protesters stormed the Capitol and interrupted the lawmakers.
READ MORE: Twitter JAILS Trump over ‘go home’ message to protesters, threatening to delete US president’s account over ‘policy violations’
So naturally, former President Barack Obama’s adviser Ben Rhodes declared it was a day “Putin had waited for” since the Cold War. Other blue-checkmark activists echoed the sentiment.
Wednesday’s events were Trump’s “gift to Putin,” declared former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul.
“Putin won,” declared Robert Reich, who had been Bill Clinton’s secretary of labor. His tweet prompted African-American activist Margaret Kimberley to quip, “No, this is America.”
“If Putin didn't exist liberals would invent him,” added Kimberley.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign came up with the accusation that Trump was “colluding” with Russia as an election tactic in 2016, and funded a dossier compiled by a British spy based on rumors and wishful thinking to suggest that.
This ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy theory was later used to justify Clinton’s loss to Trump and conduct a two-year investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller that effectively neutered his presidency. Mueller found no evidence of “collusion” with Russia, and while accusations that Moscow ‘hacked’ the Democrats to make Clinton look bad have persisted, no evidence has ever been offered for them either.
Read more:
https://www.rt.com/usa/511752-russiagate-democrats-putin-capitol/
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remove him after he's gone?... in the end of your freedom... in a anti-fascist penalty shoot out.
how did we get there?... in questions arise for holding congress' open day when the members were discussing joe biden becoming president...
Inside a Deadly Siege: How a
Inside a Deadly Siege: How a String of Failures Led to a Dark Day at the Capitol
Poor planning among a constellation of government agencies and a restive crowd encouraged by President Trump set the stage for the unthinkable.
By Mark Mazzetti, Helene Cooper, Jennifer Steinhauer, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Luke Broadwater
Jan. 10, 2021
WASHINGTON — Huddled in a command center on Wednesday afternoon, Mayor Muriel Bowser of Washington and her aides saw a photograph of blood stains on the temporary grandstands at the Capitol, a makeshift structure built for the inauguration of a new president in two weeks.
The enormity of the deadly failure sank in.
Rioters had broken through the thin police line on the Capitol steps and were descending on hundreds of lawmakers conducting the ceremonial, quadrennial act of certifying the presidential vote — and the mayor and her aides were not able to stop the attack.
Ms. Bowser and her police chief called the Pentagon, asking for additional D.C. National Guard troops to be mobilized to support what officials were realizing was inadequate protection at the Capitol. But they were told that the request would first have to come from the Capitol Police.
In a call to Chief Steven Sund of the Capitol Police, they learned that his force was under siege, lawmakers were being rushed to safety, and rioters were overrunning anyone in authority. He kept repeating the same phrase: “The situation is dire.”
Cutting through the cross talk, one person on the call posed a blunt question: “Chief Sund, are you requesting National Guard troops on the grounds of the Capitol?”
There was a pause.
“Yes,” Chief Sund replied, “I am.”
Yet the Capitol Police and the city’s Metropolitan Police had rebuffed offers days before for more help from the National Guard beyond a relatively modest contingent to provide traffic control, so no additional troops had been placed on standby. It took just over four hours for them to arrive.
It was just one failure in a dizzying list that day — and during the weeks leading up to it — that resulted in the first occupation of the United States Capitol since British troops set the building ablaze during the War of 1812. But the death and destruction this time was caused by Americans, rallying behind the inflammatory language of an American president, who refused to accept the will of more than 81 million other Americans who had voted him out of office.
Read more:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/10/us/politics/capitol-siege-security.html
The US Congress after the English had dealt with it:
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questions arise for holding congress' open day when the members were discussing joe biden becoming president...
remembering not to forget a small pair of boots: history re-begins.
a field of sagging flags in the middle of the avenue…
G.O.P. lawmakers were unlikely to convict Trump. But a different approach to impeachment would have been more difficult for them to ignore.
By Michael W. McConnell
Mr. McConnell, a former federal appeals court judge appointed by President George W. Bush, is a professor and the director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School. He is the author, most recently, of “The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power Under the Constitution.”
The sole article of impeachment was for “incitement of insurrection.” It focused on the afternoon of Jan. 6, when then-President Trump addressed an initially peaceful crowd of supporters and egged them on to go to the Capitol and to “fight like hell” against the recognition of an Electoral College victory for his opponent Joe Biden.
Presumably, the drafters of the House impeachment resolution chose to frame their charge as incitement because this is an actual crime. The first impeachment of Mr. Trump was criticized (wrongly, in my view) for failing to allege a crime. But it is not necessary for an impeachment to be based on criminal conduct. As Alexander Hamilton explained in The Federalist No. 65, impeachment proceedings “can never be tied down by such strict rules” as “in the delineation of the offense by the prosecutors” in criminal trials. Rather, he wrote, the target of impeachment proceedings is “the abuse or violation of some public trust.”
By charging Mr. Trump with incitement, the House unnecessarily shouldered the burden of proving the elements of that crime. This is not to say that senators may vote to convict only if those elements are proved, but that the terms of the impeachment article invited the defense to respond in the same legalistic terms presented by the House impeachment managers. They tried to broaden the focus during the trial, though not successfully.
Read more:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/opinion/trump-impeachment-acquitted.html
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Gus: this guy, Michael W. McConnell, lives in law school fairyland… The battle here was not about the “law” nor about “justice” but about coloured politics — emotional politics. Some Republicans went with the Democrats, strangely thinking about their career by believing that they could get ahead with Trump out of the way — and not really thinking about their future, because they would have had to know their careers would be shot in flame should the impeachment go arse up, with an emboldening of Trump, which it did… Imagine, you want to appear moral and juste, when there is no such thing in US politics (despite what Biden claims). Everything is for sale. Trump was a fool to demand a protest at the Capitol. He did not suggest concrete violence (“fight like hell” is often used by anyone in an abstract fashion). Trying to broaden the terms of reference for the impeachment, would only have had less emotional impact on the Republican Law makers and would have been more complicated for jo-public… The Republican senators would not have “squirmed” either… They would have laughed.
And whether the charges of incitement stick in the mind of just and fair-minded people, Trump was turned into a victor by an impeachment that was always going to be a failure. This is why the Pelosi woman is a moralisationing loonie and should not be in charge of the Democrat's business in the Lower House.
In politics, NEVER EVER instigate something like this when “you don’t know the result or when you know the result isn’t going to be in your favour. One would have had to guess that shifting the vote of another 10 Republican senators against Trump was not going to happen. Not only this, the impeachment was non-constitutional as Trump wasn’t president anymore. Whether the lawmakers voted it was constitutional or not, IT WASN’T, please!… The whole theatre stank of vengeance and vindictiveness... Bolton got it right for once, when he said something like “leave Trump alone to fall on his own…” Don’t even mention his name. Who?…
The first Trump impeachment was a farce — a set up. Since his election to the presidency, the Democrats had been trying to link Trump and Putin, while they would have had to know there was zip there. But this provided the media with some warm soup to digest. Not only this, the Democrats also encouraged violence in the streets against Trump… One wonders who was the most idiotic in this game... Trump or the Democrats? So when Trump enquired with the President of that country (a former comedian) about Biden’s crooked deals in Ukraine, this was deemed an offence… notwithstanding that Joe Biden had publicly admitted to doing a major political blackmail in that country…
But this is history. Trying to impeach Trump once more, under whatever rule of law, was a stupid idea. The more you mention him as an impeachable moron or whatever, the more you enlarge his support base. His idiotic ways have this effect on the “deplorables”...
So what was Trump’s grand game — secret game?… Who knows… He achieved something people did not think was possible. Everyone ridiculed Trump when he claimed there was more people at “his” inauguration than at Obama’s (which was not true, but Trump did not think that was a lie) but instead of the hundred of thousands at Biden’s inauguration, the only crowd there was 20,000 troops in full warrior gear, and a field of sagging flags in the middle of the avenue…
You've got to laugh…
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