February 11, 2021

Saudi driving activist's family credits Joe Biden for release.

Saudi driving activist Loujain al-Hathloul's family said Thursday US President Joe Biden's election win helped secure her release after nearly three years' imprisonment, but cautioned she was still far from free.

Hathloul, 31, was provisionally released in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday after being detained in May 2018 with about a dozen other women activists just weeks before the kingdom's historic lifting of a decades-long ban on female drivers -- a reform they had long campaigned for.

"I would say thank you Mr President that you helped my sister to be released," Alia al-Hathloul told a virtual press conference.

https://www.rawstory.com/saudi-driving-activists-family-credits-joe-biden-for-release/

February 10, 2021

Aw, tanks for da harts. Ala dem!!

And thank you for giving to DU. I wish I could, but it's been a really difficult year for me and my wife. Thank you!!

February 10, 2021

If conviction isn't the end game, we may still have recourse to prevent it from running again.

In an opinion piece published in The Washington Post, Yale Law School professor Bruce Ackerman and Indiana University law professor Gerard Magliocca argued that members of Congress have another, perhaps easier, path to barring Trump from office.

They pointed to the Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, aimed at preventing people from holding federal office if they are deemed to have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against” the Constitution.

The professors write that if a majority vote of both houses agree that Trump engaged in an act of “insurrection or rebellion,” then he would be barred from running for the White House again. Only a two-thirds vote of each house of Congress in the future could undo that result.

The sole article of impeachment adopted Wednesday cites that provision of the Constitution and says Trump should be disqualified from holding future office.


https://apnews.com/article/barring-trump-holding-office-again-f477c7ddc7ad0cc91a5fb86d12b007f0

Old article from January, but it still brings me hope.

February 9, 2021

David Schoen blasted for 'despicable' defense -- threatening more violence by Trump supporters

Trump defense lawyer David Schoen was harshly criticized on Tuesday for his defense of Donald Trump during his second impeachment trial in the United States Senate.
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Schoen gave a fiery speech arguing that impeachment would disenfranchise Trump supporters and could result in more violence from the former president's base.

https://www.rawstory.com/trumps-lawyers-terrible-impeachment-defense/

February 9, 2021

New drinking game.

Every time that lawyer drinks and touches the top of his head...

February 9, 2021

While the republican defense is that the Democrats are suppressing the vote

Trump’s Election Lies Are Fueling a New GOP Voter Suppression Crusade

Fresh off Congressional Republicans’ attempt to overturn the 2020 election, state-level officials are on a disenfranchisement blitz, introducing more than 160 bills this year to restrict ballot access going forward.

By Eric Lutz
February 9, 2021

Even an inveterate liar like Donald Trump is capable of the occasional fugitive moment of honesty, however unintentional. The former president had just such an instant last spring, when he first began laying the foundation for the attacks on the integrity of the election that would, months later, lead to a deadly insurrection at the United States Capitol. Railing against proposals to ensure Americans could cast ballots safely in the pandemic, Trump in March betrayed the real reason efforts to expand the vote irked him so: “They had things,” he said, “levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

Like much of what Trump says, this idea didn’t originate with him; it’s been implicit in the GOP’s longstanding efforts to suppress votes among likely Democratic constituencies, particularly those cast by Black Americans. What Trump did was to put it all more crudely, to be more obvious about it, and then to push it to its logical endpoint: An attempt to cling to power by force after literally demanding his vice president throw out millions of legally cast ballots in states he happened not to win. He’s recently been impeached for a second time over the ignoble episode and this week is once again facing conviction, with Democrats—and a few Republicans—hoping that some measure of accountability will keep such an outrage from playing out again in the future. But the GOP, the majority of which is likely to acquit him once more, seems to have its own ideas for preventing future insurrections: Steal the election before it gets to that point.

Dozens of states have continued to expand voting access following the 2020 election, which saw historic participation. But across the country, particularly in key battleground states Trump lost to Joe Biden, Republicans are mounting an equally powerful counter-campaign to restrict voting, with state legislatures—largely under GOP control—introducing more than 160 bills aimed at limiting ballot access just in the 2021 session alone. That’s more than four times the number of similar bills that had been proposed this time last year, according to a Brennan Center analysis released Monday. Republicans have framed the bills and laws, many of which involve mail-in voting and voter ID requirements, as a concerted effort to strengthen the electoral process against nonexistent mass voter fraud. “Heading into 2022, ensuring we have security and integrity in our election system is extremely important,” Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said earlier this month. But after an election with record historic turnout put Democrats in charge of the White House and Congress, the impetus behind the blitz of Republican voting legislation is obvious.

“The only reason they’re doing this is to make voting harder because they didn’t like the results,” attorney Marc Elias, who led the response to Trump’s slapstick legal challenges to last year’s election results, told the New York Times last week. “And that’s shameful.”




https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/02/trumps-election-lies-are-fueling-a-new-gop-voter-suppression-crusade




This was my one free article at Vanity Fair.

February 8, 2021

Georgia Officials Review Trump Phone Call as Scrutiny Intensifies.

Source: New York Times

ATLANTA — The office of Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, on Monday started an investigation into former President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to overturn the state’s election results, including a phone call he made to Mr. Raffensperger in which Mr. Trump pressured him to “find” enough votes to reverse his loss.

Such inquiries are “fact-finding and administrative in nature,” the secretary’s office said, and are a routine step when complaints are received about electoral matters. Findings are typically brought before the Republican-controlled state board of elections, which decides whether to refer them for prosecution to the state attorney general or another agency.

The move comes as Fani Willis, the Democratic district attorney of Fulton County, which encompasses much of Atlanta, is weighing whether to begin a criminal inquiry of her own. A spokesman for Ms. Willis declined to comment on Monday.

The January call was one of several attempts Mr. Trump made to try to persuade top Republican officials in the state to uncover instances of voting fraud that might change the outcome, despite the insistence of voting officials that there was no widespread fraud to be found. He also called Gov. Brian Kemp in early December and pressured him to call a special legislative session to overturn his election loss. Later that month, Mr. Trump called a state investigator and pressed the official to “find the fraud,” according to those with knowledge of the call.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/08/us/politics/trump-georgia-election-investigation.html

February 8, 2021

Another Capitol attacker blames Trump in court for 'egging on' the insurrection

Source: Rawstory

In court, Ethan Nordean, a 30-year-old bodybuilder known in the right-wing world as Rufio Panman, said that Trump "egged on" those that were present into attacking the Capitol, noted Scott MacFarlane in a screen capture of the documents.





Read more: https://www.rawstory.com/capitol-attacker-blames-trump/

January 26, 2021

Does anybody know if the Impeachment can be a secret vote?

It has been talked about a lot, but I am not sure if it is even an option. A lot of them may be in fear for their and their families lives.

On CNN:

"It's so interesting because you have the sense that if this was a secret vote, I mean, it's pretty clear how a lot of these Republican senators would vote," said anchor Anderson Cooper. "For so many of them, I mean, this is a chance for the Republican Party to rid itself, to distance itself, from the former president and try to kind of, you know, reinvent itself if it wants to. It seems like that would be a pretty strong motivation if in fact there were enough Republicans in the party who really did want to return to where the Republican Party once was."

January 11, 2021

Breaking on CNN.

VP pence arrives at white house.


Ok, I saw it on the ticker, and now nothing...