Derps. No other explanation.
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One possible element of the conspiracy not mentioned here is brought up by the reluctance of the general on call for such things at the Pentagon on January 6 to send troops to defend the Capitol.
The refusal to send in troops is often seen as foot-dragging at best, and sympathy with the insurrectionists at worst, but my initial reaction, one that has not been refuted by anything publicly revealed, is that this was more likely done to avoid cooperating with the conspiracy. Any troops sent into DC, activated NG or active duty, would have come under the operational control of the Commander in Chief, who was the obvious the insurrection leader. While it is true that such troops were eventually sent in, and the Insurrectionist in Chief did not at that later point in time use them to overthrow the govt, it is likely that exactly who would control them was not obvious in the moment.
Trump had, after all, insisted on changing the civilian leadership at DoD after he lost the election. What was the point of that? Did even insiders understand the point of that well enough to totally exclude the possibility that these apparatchiks were being put in a place so that they could control the actions of military forces activated to “restore order” at Trump’s direction?
Consider the events of the summer of 2020, when BLM protests were used as a pretext for using military assets to “restore order” in our major cities, dominated as they are by all those urban voters. That attempt at a coup seems to have energized the Joint Chiefs to both squelch the immediate attempt to use activated NG and active duty troops to overthrow the govts of D states and cities, and to take measures against future attempts.
I suspect that the general who responded initially to calls to send troops to defend the Capitol on January 6 was acting on a carefully thought-out strategy. There would be no sending of military units into Trump’s potential and theoretical operational control until and unless it could be determined that he and his newly installed DoD apparatchiks wouldn’t actually be able to control their actions. That took some time. My idea is that that delay might have been dictated by a reasonable exercise of caution in the face of a coup plot led by the Commander in Chief.
One of the few paths for Trump to stay in office that was still open as late as January 6, was for civil disorder to be used as a pretext for the invocation of martial law by the Commander in Chief. Our side was ingracious and uncooperative enough to fail to provide such civil disorder as the clock ticked down on the Trump presidency, so the other side had to supply their own civil disorder to be used as the pretext. Of course, Congress, for its own safety’s sake, would not have been permitted under martial law conditions to reassemble to continue its business and complete the certification of Biden’s election win. That would have been a sad and tragic necessity, of course. By itself, that course could not be sustained for very long, but the idea was undoubtedly to use troops under martial law to act in such a way that there actually would soon be real civil disorder from people opposing the coup that would seal the coup’s long term acceptability to most white voters.
These folks base their political world-view on the Turner Diaries. The idea is that a race war is inevitable, because non-whites have an agenda that is just flat incompatible with all that is just and fair in civilization. The immediate problem for the white supremacists is all the squishy soft race traitors among whites, people who have been propagandized into kumbaya acceptance of their inferiors as if they could ever be equals. Well, the solution is to start a race war to force most whites, all but the hopelessly compromised race traitors, into choosing the white power side. Victory for the right is at that point assured, because whites are the majority. These people really do not have anything to offer but variants, in this case minor variants, on the Turner Diaries.
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Incongruously, a comedy line from THE GOOD PLACE: the Bad Demon Shawn (played by the great Marc Evan Jackson) says: “There’s a reason I took the form of a 45-year-old white man: I can only fail upward.”
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I’d rather leave it to New York, both the State and the City are very good at enforcement. With that said there must be the will to take action.
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But how? The first order of business might be to revisit those DoJ memos prohibiting the indictment of a sitting president. Surely some brilliant legal mind - say, AG Garland - can come up with wording that would at once protect the president from petty legal harassment and still protect the us from a rogue president.
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Should have been done the minute income tax laws were written. Unfortunately at that time there was still the understanding that any POTUS was honorable, at least on the surface.
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$22K is about 40,000 miles at regular reimbursement rates.
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Most of Greene’s toys are in her attic.
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250K miles / 183 days = 1,366 miles per day
1,366 miles per day / 16 nonsleep hours = 85 miles driven per nonsleep hour
At that rate, when would she have time to actually campaign? 
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It’s going to be absolutely critical for Democrats to frame this as rescuing and restoring our democracy. Republicans will shriek and whine that it’s “revenge” or “snow-flake -ism” or “political correctness” or some other dumb thing, and Dems need to have the words, slogans, and even arguments (brief and cogent) to show how this is false.
Based on past Democratic performance using words, though, I’d say the US experiment in self-rule is doomed.
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This:
And this:
. . . together tell us that right-wing extremism is much bigger, and better armed and trained than we might think, and has access to police and the military – which means they can sabotage government operations against them.
They have to be thoroughly stamped out, purely as a matter of self defense. They will keep trying until they succeed if they’re not eradicated.
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I don’t agree with the conclusion. Conviction in the senate trial carries no penalty beyond ineligibility to run for an office he wasn’t going to run for, and he cares about the optics about as much as a dog taking a shit. The second impeachment was begun with the sure knowlege that the senate would never convict. The “civil and criminal” penalties mentioned a few lines up are the deterrent. Sending people to jail and/or financial obliteration (the Dominion suits) are the deterrents that actually work.
Those criminal or civil penalties might ultimately be “window dressing,” Levitt said, without the sweeping repudiation that an impeachment conviction would bring.
“The one thing that we really should do is what we are probably not going to do,” Levitt said.
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RICO all their fat asses.
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This headline is accurate.
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Thank you for that! Best explanation I’ve heard.
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Fat or toned shouldn’t make a difference.
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Beyond Trump, there’s a big structural problem. There are too many pressure points in the electoral system where politicians are capable of throwing sand into the works. Just look at the whole Michigan situation-county boards had to certify and then a state board, all made up of party hacks. We saw near monkey business at both Wayne County and the state levels. And now the R’s are going to replace the one R on the state board who wouldn’t play games with a more compliant hack.
There needs to be an electoral system run by non-partisan professionals, who can only be fired for actual misconduct, not for counting the votes. Until that happens, even if Trump goes to jail, monkey business will still occur.
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Stamping out should have started with exploring McVeigh connections to the Michigan Militia, which might have nipped this in the bud. Instead, he was put forth as a “lone wolf”.
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So if this is Trump’s sex offender team, where is Acosta of Epstein farcical Florida sentencing fame?
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“To justify those reimbursements, Boebert would have had to drive 38,712 miles while campaigning, despite having no publicly advertised campaign events in March, April or July, and only one in May. Furthermore, because the reimbursements came in two payments — a modest $1,060 at the end of March and $21,200 on Nov. 11 — Boebert would have had to drive 36,870 miles in just over seven months between April 1 and Nov. 11 to justify the second payment.”
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