2020 Election: Predictions, Results and Reactions

[N.E. Brigand]

This could go either here or in the 2022 election thread, but I'll put it here both because it directly relates to the response to the 2020 election and I am quite sure that it won't have any real impact on the 2022 election.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene testifies for more than 3 hours in hearing on whether to disqualify her from seeking reelection

While I am quite sure that Taylor Greene will not be disqualified from running for reelection, just the fact that this is happening is pretty extraordinary.

Thanks for that, V. As you know, this is the third part of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which is at the heart of the lawsuit against her:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Greene took her oath of office three days before the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol.

I think the three major questions are:
--Who has the authority to enforce this part of the Constitution?
--Were the events of January 6, 2021 an "insurrection" for the purposes of this amendment?
--Did Greene give "aid or comfort" to the participants in those events?

Among the many questions put to Greene was this one: "Did you advocate to President Trump to impose martial law as a way to remain in power?"

Greene's answer was: "I don't recall."

She was asked a follow-up question: "So you're not denying you did it? You just don't remember?"

And Greene said: "I don't remember."

And she gave the same reply to a lot of questions: basically she didn't want to tell the truth and she didn't want to take the Fifth, so she pretended repeatedly not to remember. I think most people would remember if they said that the President should declare martial law.

At least it's all under oath and on video.

[RoseMorninStar]

It's obvious Marjorie Taylor Greene has memory issues. Perhaps that should disqualify her for running for office.

[N.E. Brigand]

This could go either here or in the 2022 election thread, but I'll put it here both because it directly relates to the response to the 2020 election and I am quite sure that it won't have any real impact on the 2022 election.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene testifies for more than 3 hours in hearing on whether to disqualify her from seeking reelection

While I am quite sure that Taylor Greene will not be disqualified from running for reelection, just the fact that this is happening is pretty extraordinary.

Um...

[N.E. Brigand]

Apparently we already knew this from the Lafayette Square incident, but apparently during Trump's presidency there was "a Secret Service official who also held the role of a political advisor at the White House".

That seems bad.

His name is Anthony Ornato, and he's come up in the January 6th investigation because he told White House chief of staff Mark Meadows two days before the attack that there was a risk of violence at the Capitol.

[N.E. Brigand]

CNN has published a number of previously unseen texts sent or received by former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

In one of those messages, dated December 17, 2020 January 17, 2021, Marjorie Taylor Greene, recently elected to Congress but not yet sworn in, says that in a "private chat with only Members" -- presumably meaning current or incoming members of Congress -- "several are saying the only way to save our Republic is for Trump to call for Marshall Law [sic]". There are others messages from Greene as well.

1. Can this information be used in the determination of whether or not she violated the 14th Amendment -- in the suit she testified Friday -- or is it too late?

2. The new messages make it even more clear that she probably perjured herself by repeatedly responding "I don't remember" to the specific questions she was asked last week. But it's rare for someone to be charged for lying under oath in that way. (Although I bet there is evidence that proves she knew she was lying.)

3. Who are these other insurrectionist members of Congress who wanted Trump to impose martial law?

Also among the messages is one from Trump campaign aide Jason Miller sent on November 6, 2020 not only to Meadows but to senior White House advisors Hope Hicks, Jared Kushner, and Dan Scavino (plus another Trump campaign aide and former White House staffer Bill Stepien) in which Miller says, correctly, that Trump has won a higher share of the vote in Philadelphia in 2020 than he did in 2016, but that Philadelphia represents a smaller portion of the overall vote this time. Miller says this fact "cuts hard against the urban vote stealing narrative."

In other words, this shows that the highest-level White House staff knew from right after the election that one of their claims of fraud was bogus.

Edited to correct the date of Greene's text. This means that after Joe Biden's election had been certified by Congress, there were members of Congress calling for Donald Trump to impose martial law to prevent Joe Biden from becoming President. That sounds nearly treasonous to me.

[N.E. Brigand]

Also it seems fairly likely that Twitter, under its new private ownership, will restore Donald Trump's account.

[RoseMorninStar]

Also it seems fairly likely that Twitter, under its new private ownership, will restore Donald Trump's account.

I do not belong to Twitter, nor do I intend to, but this morning I tried to look at a tweet and noticed it wouldn't allow me to scroll at all. I wonder if that's something new or if it was particular to that comment.

[N.E. Brigand]

Also it seems fairly likely that Twitter, under its new private ownership, will restore Donald Trump's account.

I do not belong to Twitter, nor do I intend to, but this morning I tried to look at a tweet and noticed it wouldn't allow me to scroll at all. I wonder if that's something new or if it was particular to that comment.

I also do not have a Twitter account, although I browse certain journalists' feeds pretty regularly, and I find from time to time that the settings have changed and it's harder to view tweets. Usually that means that for a few days, I have to regularly clear my browser cache, and then for unknown reasons the problem goes away.

[N.E. Brigand]

I wonder if there are similar texts between MSNBC anchors and President Obama's chief of staff in 2016:

[N.E. Brigand]

And here you can see a clip of Sean Hannity in November 2020 saying that he is "independent" and "not told what to say."

1. I would like to know whether these texts are evidence of the violation of federal election laws.

2. These texts show that the Trump White House knew that these states would be close.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

More evidence that Marjorie Taylor Greene committed perjury (that will never be charged)

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's comments in since-deleted videos contradict testimony on close ties to Capitol rioter

[RoseMorninStar]

Marjorie Taylor Greene is obviously a pathological liar, as is Trump. What can be done about pathological liars? I have no answers. The sad thing is, I think most of their supporters know they are liars and they are envious? proud? of their audacity and that they can get away with it rather than being angry or disgusted.

[N.E. Brigand]

I have questions about the justice of any such move, given that anyone who already paid off their student debt won't benefit.

I get extremely irritated with arguments like this. It sounds sort of like "Some people were convicted on marijuana charges and served their full sentences, it's not 'fair' to do away with anti-marijuana laws now." Is it? Or is the thing itself perhaps unjust and doing away with it late is still better than not doing away with it at all?

Student debts may not be unjust in the truest sense of the term, but often times there is certainly an unjust factor in it - students being coerced into such debt when they are barely old enough to make that kind of life-altering decision, going into fields that may not support them in 6 years when they finally graduate, coming out of college into a economic shut-down they could not have anticipated, unable to find a job in their field and struggling to make payments to sometimes predatory lenders, to pay tuition fees that absolutely have skyrocketed far beyond where they should be if all stayed relative to inflation or income.

I would say the tuition and loans are already unjust, continuing them unchecked does not balance some imaginary playing field.

I had the good luck to get a scholarship that covered my tuition, and the room-and-board was cheap enough then that my family could afford it, so I never had a student loan to pay off. So I can only speculate about what it might feel for someone else, who had $50,000 or more in student debt, and who worked hard to pay it off, giving to the lenders a lot of money they might have used in other ways, seeing other people now get that debt wiped off while they get nothing.

Another point that may be worth considering is that a majority of people never went to college in the first place and likewise will get nothing from this. Does a plan like Schumer describes risk pushing even more working class voters away from Democrats?

This story has just convinced me that Joe Biden must do something about student loan debt:

[RoseMorninStar]

I have a friend who went to college at one of the major universities in California in the 1970's. She was able to work a part time job, live on her own (I'm sure in cheap student housing) and pay for college.. without incurring debt. That is no longer even remotely possible. Something has got to change. While it might not seem 'fair' we need to invest in our youth, who is the future of our country, while giving them hope for their own future.

[narya]

My husband and I worked our ways thru college, back when it was affordable to do so. And more recently, we paid for my master's degree and our sons' college degrees instead of putting the money in our retirement account or our car replacement savings account (we have an 18 yr old car and a 10 yr old car). Now one son is going for a master's, partly paid for by an employer he's not happy with, but it pays the bills. We supplement that by send him money monthly because he can't really afford to live in a studio apartment in the Bay Area on one salary. So we have gone into retirement with less than we would have liked to, but debt free, and our kids are debt free.

I would still like to see college debt reduced or eliminated for others. The comment below, which was the first one after the tweet quoted above, sums up my feelings.

Jenny Lawson
@TheBloggess

My husband and I worked hard to pay off our student loan debt and we’ve saved for decades for our child’s college fund, so is it fair that others might just get their student debt forgiven?

Yes. It totally is.

I don’t need others to suffer just bc I did.

[N.E. Brigand]

Last week, someone anonymously gave $1 million in the cryptocurrency Bitcoin to conservative fringe media personality Alex Jones. In 2021, Jones received another $266,000 in cryptocurrency from an apparently different but also anonymous donor.

I post in this thread because Jones played a prominent role in the events of January 6th.

Jones has also been in the news lately because of lawsuits filed by families of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, in which twenty young children and six teachers were shot to death at a school in Connecticut. Jones alleged repeatedly that the whole thing was a fiction and that the grieving parents were actors. Last fall, two different judges entered default judgements against Jones, who they determined had engaged in various chicanery to undermine the legal process. Recently, the plaintiffs have alleged that Jones has been hiding his assets and/or moving them to shell corporations in order to avoid paying them.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
CNN has published more texts sent to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and they are absolutely damning for two Fox News hosts.

Maria Bartiromo conducted the first post-election interview with Donald Trump on Nov. 29, 2020. That interview has been widely pilloried for its ridiculous pro-Trump bias (she even referred to Biden's victory as a "coup"), but to make things worse, it turns out that shortly before the interview, she told Meadows exactly what questions she would be asking the President so that he could prepare his answers. Remember when CNN contributor Donna Brazile was (quite rightly) forced to resign from CNN when it was revealed that she had learned in advance questions that would be asked of Hillary Clinton in March 2016 "town hall" appearances and shared that information with the Clinton campaign? Brazile at least had been hired by CNN as a political commentator, which Bartiromo nominally is not. When will she be forced to resign?

Unsurprisingly, texts to Meadows from Sean Hannity are just as bad. In one of them, Hannity notes that he wrote the script for a Trump campaign ad. Last fall, when that fact was reported in a book by Michael Bender, Hannity denied it.

In another text, Hannity talked about what he would do if Trump lost: "Also if this doesn't end the way we want, you me and Jay [=Jay Sekulow?] are doing 3 things together. 1- Directing legal strategies vs Biden 2- NC Real estate 3- Other business I talked to Rudy. Thx for helping him."

(I don't know if there's a connection, but remember when former Trump attorney Michael Cohen was forced to admit in court that he only had three clients and that one of them was Sean Hannity? At the time, Hannity claimed that he only used Cohen's services for some "real estate" issues.)

The post-Biden "legal strategies" idea also appears in a text from Meadows to Hannity, where he wrote that if Biden was indeed sworn in, then he had a plan for 2024: "I think we set up a group of administrative lawyers, with a communication arm that fights election laws in every state and fight Biden actions every day, starting on Jan 20. ACLU filed over 400 lawsuits against Trump administration. We need to do the same. I think I can raise around 10 million dollars to hire a team to make sure the fight continues and prepares the way for 2024." (My emphasis.)

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Finally, today a member of the Oath Keepers named Brian Ulrich pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy for his actions on January 6th.

[Túrin Turambar]

Something that I’ve noticed is a bit of an all-or-nothing trend in progressive American politics. Like proposing that the police be abolished as a solution to problems in policing. Forgive all student loan debt looks like the same sort of thing to me. There’s a lot of countries which have some system between “university is free” and “you need to take on crippling debt to go to university”.

[RoseMorninStar]

Unfortunately extremists & their statements make the news.

I don't know how it's been reported in other parts of the world, but I don't know of anyone here seriously proposing the police be abolished. That is something only extreme people have claimed &/or opposing programs have CLAIMED that is what the 'left' wants to create fear/controversy, but I've never heard that proposed by any Democrat/politician or responsible journalist. What I've heard (in that regard) is that they would like to see some police funding going to special units within police departments to specifically handle social issues; such as homelessness,the mentally ill, or domestic disputes. US police officers are not trained to handle these situations. Police in the US get far less training than police in many other countries.

Biden has not proposed 'University is Free'. Here's an article from the NYT, Biden Says He Is Taking a ‘Hard Look’ at Student Loan Relief. A few quotes from the article:

(...)“I am considering dealing with some debt reduction,” Mr. Biden said after a speech in the Roosevelt Room of the White House.

The comments were the clearest signal yet from Mr. Biden that he may make good on a promise to cancel at least some debt for student loan borrowers. During the campaign in 2020, he said he would “make sure that everybody in this generation gets $10,000 knocked off of their student debt.”
(...)
“I am not considering $50,000 debt reduction,” Mr. Biden said. But he added that he was “taking a hard look” at debt forgiveness.

“I’ll have an answer on that in the next couple of weeks,” he said.
(...)
The president has in the past expressed concern that forgiving $50,000 would amount to a giveaway to well-off college graduates, a position that has led to pushback from advocacy groups.

I'm not up on the latest costs of attending a university, but about 10 years ago costs in my state for a small public/in-state university 4 year degree was about $60,000-$65,000 (that includes housing).


If you are ONLY seeing extreme views presented, I'd consider the possibility that the source may be questionable/biased.

[N.E. Brigand]

Judge Tim Kelly, who was appointed by Donald Trump, has upheld a subpoena from the House January 6th Committee for internal data from the Republican National Committee pertaining to the RNC's efforts to raise money by claiming that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election. (The RNC has until Thursday to appeal, and the organization says it will.)

(Marcy Wheeler notes some irony in that one of the precedents that Judge Kelly cites is a 2018 decision that a Republican-controlled House committee to obtain internal documents of Fusion GPS, the research firm that hired Christopher Steele to investigate Donald Trump.)

[N.E. Brigand]

I missed this item in the New York Times in December:

"The committee is also examining whether there is enough evidence to make a wire fraud referral over how Mr. Trump’s campaign and the Republican Party raised $255.4 million from donors as he and his allies fund-raised off the false claim that the election had been stolen."

A letter sent last year by the committee to Trump's 2020 campaign manager said this:

As manager of the Trump 2020 re-election campaign, you oversaw all aspects of the campaign. You then supervised the conversion of the Trump presidential campaign to an effort focused on ‘Stop the Steal’ messaging and related fund-raising. That messaging included the promotion of certain false claims related to voting machines despite an internal campaign memo in which campaign staff determined that such claims were false.