He is waving bye-bye while getting out of Dodge, and at this stage I could not care any less about Boston politics -- or those of Rhode Island -- right now.
The fact that I had to go find my World/Nation co-leads is strange.
Why would the Globe website scrub those?
I used to celebrate such a thing until I found out I was deceived, and all of a sudden the pre$$ reverence makes sense (apparently it is okay to gather without masks if you meet certain criteria).
Republicans will be lucky to escape with their lives:
"In Minnesota, a GOP lawmaker’s death brings home the reality of COVID-19" by Trip Gabriel New York Times, January 18, 2021
Republicans in the Minnesota state Senate were feeling jubilant after the November election. They had held onto a slim majority following an onslaught by Democrats trying to win control. Now, it was time to party.
More than 100 senators, their spouses, and their staff members gathered for a celebratory dinner at a catering hall outside the Twin Cities on Nov. 5, two days after Election Day. Masks were offered to guests on arrival, but there was little mask wearing over hours of dining and drinking, at a moment when a long-predicted surge in coronavirus infections was gripping the state.
This whole CV thing has become such a crock a $hit it stinks to high heaven.
At least four senators in attendance tested positive for COVID-19 in the days that followed. One was the Republican majority leader, Paul Gazelka, the state’s most outspoken opponent of mask mandates and shutdown orders during the pandemic. He compared his symptoms to a “moderate flu” and recovered. So did two other senators who had tested positive after the dinner.
“Our future cannot be prolonged isolation, face coverings, and limited activities,” Gazelka said defiantly in announcing his positive test.
The fourth was Senator Jerry Relph, a Vietnam veteran and grandfather from St. Cloud, Minn. Struggling to breathe after testing positive for the coronavirus, he was admitted to a hospital in mid-November. He died Dec. 18 at age 76.
So the other guy is going to be charged with murder, and this guy was how old?
No co-morbidities or anything?
What do you do when you outlive the average age but are "killed" by COVD based on a faulty and flawed "test" that doesn't diagnose the alleged disease?
So many lies, so little time.
His daughter Dana Relph, who watched her father fight the disease as well as the cruel isolation it forces on patients and families, is still furious at Republican leaders for holding the dinner and the refusal of Gazelka to take responsibility.
Four Democratic members of Congress tested positive this month after being in lockdown at the Capitol on Jan. 6 with Republicans who refused to wear masks. Luke Letlow, just elected to Congress as a freshman Republican from Louisiana, died of COVID-19 in December, days before he was to be sworn in.
How odd.
According to the election data site Ballotpedia, six state lawmakers have died from COVID-19, including the speaker of the New Hampshire state House and a Virginia state senator who succumbed on New Year’s Day. All six were Republicans.
Looks like some WET WORK going on under the cover of the mythical and very useful CV.
Republicans better get their heads out of their asses, I mean really!
GOP officials and voters have amplified President Trump’s misinformation about risk factors. After two packed campaign rallies in Minnesota for the president over the summer, defying state orders and federal guidelines, coronavirus cases spiked in the surrounding counties, and while Republicans insist that their freedom was at issue in refusing to wear masks or enforce mandates, such events and the death of Relph raise urgent questions as to where individual “freedom” ends and where responsibility to others begins in a pandemic during which breathing shared air can be fatal.....
Sorry for sighing in exhale as I type here alone; however, the stench of totalitarian communism just overwhelmed me.
Freedom is NOT an issue when it comes at the expense of life-de$troying lockdowns on the basis of abominable lies, and when double-standard Democrats do the same no one dies and it is simply an embarrassment to a member of the Party before it is forgotten.
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
Bottoms up!
"Trump prepares to offer clemency to more than 100 people in his final hours in office" by Carol D. Leonnig, Josh Dawsey and Rosalind S. Helderman, Washington Post Jan. 18, 2021
President Trump is preparing to pardon or commute the sentences of more than 100 people in his final hours in office, decisions that are expected to be announced Tuesday, according to two people familiar with the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the plans.
Trump met Sunday with his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, daughter Ivanka Trump and other aides for a significant portion of the day to review a long list of pardon requests and discuss lingering questions about their appeals, according to people briefed on the meeting. The president was personally engaged with the details of specific cases, one person said.
In the past week, Trump has been particularly consumed with the question of whether to issue preemptive pardons to his adult children, top aides and himself, said the people familiar with the discussions.
Neither Trump nor his children have been charged with crimes, and they are not known to be under federal investigation, but the question of a presidential self-pardon has become more urgent and controversial since the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol by Trump’s supporters. Some aides say Trump could face criminal liability for inciting the crowd.
Others say a self-pardon, never before attempted by a president, would be of dubious constitutionality, could anger Senate Republicans preparing to serve as key jurors at Trump’s impeachment trial and would amount to an admission of guilt that could be used against him in potential civil litigation related to the Capitol attack.
I'm confused by all the speculation and BS coming from my pre$$, to be embarrassingly honest with you, and wonder WTF is this?
It is unlikely he will grant clemency to Stephen K. Bannon, his former campaign adviser, who was charged last year with defrauding donors to a private fundraising effort for construction of a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, or to his personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani, whose consulting business has come under scrutiny as part of an investigation that led to charges against two of his associates.
Bannon was truly his only friend, and was soon banished at the behest of Jared.
The news of Trump’s intention to make a slew of final pardons and commutations in the coming days was first reported by CNN.
The president has been besieged by lobbyists and lawyers for well-heeled clients who are seeking to have their criminal convictions pardoned, as well as by advocates for criminal justice reform who argue that their clients were wrongly convicted or were given unfair sentences and deserve to be freed from prison.
The Wa$hington Compo$t left themselves out of the siege!
Trump has told advisers for weeks that he wants to be liberal with pardons before leaving office. Aides have said the ability to grant clemency is one perk of the job Trump has particularly relished because the Constitution hands the power to the president alone, but the president’s review of pardon candidates was delayed by the intensifying dysfunction inside the White House since the election and by Trump’s focus on trying to challenge and undermine the results, according to the people familiar with the discussions.
Like he is the dictator when it is Biden who will be acting like it, day one!
He is going to start by granting amnesty to illegal immigrants, thus solidifying forever Democrat rule, but it doesn't stop there. Biden is also going to reimpose the travel ban that Trump just lifted.
In fact, I'm told he has a hefty to-do list that starts with a flurry of diktats, according to his smug chief of staff, and will kick off inaugural events with a ceremony honoring victims of COVID-19.
The Senate will then confirm his national security team in record speed as you meditate on this, and the masked Macron will welcome him but won’t wait for him.
Some candidates were told last week by the White House Counsel’s Office that no pardons could be granted that were not finalized by Friday. Then word of the president’s last-minute weekend review and preliminary decisions to grant numerous pardons and commutations began to trickle out.
So far, Trump has granted clemency to 94 people — mostly friends and political allies.
They have included people convicted in the special counsel investigation that dominated his first two years in office, such as his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and longtime confidant Roger Stone. Just before Thanksgiving, Trump pardoned Michael Flynn, who had briefly served as his first national security adviser and later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI during its investigation of Russian interference in Trump’s 2016 election win.
Other pardons issued in the closing weeks of Trump’s time in office have gone to Charles Kushner — the father of his son-in-law — as well as three Republican former members of Congress and four military contractors involved in the killing of unarmed civilians during the Iraq War.
About 14,000 people have filed petitions for pardons and commutations. For years, criminal justice advocates have criticized Republican and Democratic administrations alike for backlogs that have left thousands of rehabilitated people seeking mercy to instead languish in prison.
Trump has moved especially slowly in acting on pending petitions. Rather than consulting with the Justice Department’s pardon attorney for recommendations, he has routinely gone around the formal process and sought advice about pardons from a circle of friends, lobbyists and lawmakers.
Mostly Jared, and why has the pre$$ more or le$$ ignored the ma$$ive Medicare fraud?
What's the mi$$ing link?
Seems a little $elf-$erving at this point.
One person under consideration for a pardon is Lil Wayne, administration officials said. The rapper and music executive, whose real name is Dwayne Carter Jr., pleaded guilty in December to carrying a loaded handgun from California to Florida on his private jet. He was barred from owning the gun because of past felony convictions, including a weapons charge. He has not yet been sentenced. Lil Wayne, 38, met with Trump and posed for photos five days before the November election. He drew fire from other musicians and activists for posting the photo to social media and crediting Trump with helping the Black community.
Of course, Trump took in record amounts of the black vote and still lost.
Many of those to whom he has shown presidential mercy have not even filed applications with the Justice Department, and their cases violate rules the department normally imposes as preconditions for clemency, which include that people generally acknowledge their crimes and show remorse. Even when Trump has granted clemency to people who are not themselves politically connected, they have often come to his attention via a handful of his favored voices in the field of criminal justice reform.
For instance, a number of ordinary people granted clemency have been recommended to the president by Alice Johnson, whose own prison sentence after a drug conviction was commuted by Trump in 2018 following lobbying by the celebrity Kim Kardashian. Johnson later received a full pardon after speaking at the 2020 Republican National Convention.
Trump is isolated and angry at aides for failing to defend him as he is impeached again.
C'mon, he loves the limelight.
To upstage a sitting president with a trail the ma$$ media will endless cover?
Ratings will never again be so high!
Aides say they no longer expect a preemptive self-pardon or pardons for any family members, but the situation could always change with a volatile and mercurial president.
And yet he is leaving quietly with his tail between his legs and abandoning all those who supported him to the Democrat Communi$t mob.
Related:
That was the take of Maggie Haberman, Kenneth P. Vogel and Dana Rubinstein of the New York Times so don't waste your time.
The calvary isn't coming, folks, because the cavalry is being arrested by the DoJ:
"Justice Department charges militia members, including military veterans, in Capitol assault" by Katie Benner, Alan Feuer and Adam Goldman New York Times, January 18, 2021
The Justice Department has charged suspected members of the Three Percenters, a militia group that emerged some years ago from the extremist wing of the gun-rights movement, and of the Oath Keepers, a far-right militia group founded by law enforcement and military veterans, as it works to determine whether the extremist groups conspired to attack Congress.
That is what communists do.
They eliminate the people who may provide leadership to any resistance.
The charges include unlawful entry, assault on a federal officer, disorderly conduct, destruction of federal property, obstruction of an official proceeding and obstruction of justice.
On Sunday evening, Donovan Crowl, 50, a former U.S. Marine, and Jessica Watkins, 38, an Army veteran, surrendered to authorities in Ohio after they published photos of themselves on social media wearing combat gear and saying that they had stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 in order to stop Congress from certifying the Electoral College victory of President-elect Joe Biden.
The FBI said that Watkins’ group is a unit of the Oath Keepers and that she and Donovan were wearing Oath Keepers patches.
Why would they do that?
I mean, the antifa agents that stormed the Capitol in that staged production at least had the smarts to dress in Trump gear.
The recent arrests of veterans and former law enforcement underscore the Justice Department’s worry that some of the attackers may have been part of more coordinated efforts to attack Congress and that they employed specialized skills in the assault. Videos and photos have revealed chilling scenes of rioters in tactical gear weaving through the mobs inside the Capitol in tight formation, wearing tactical gear, carrying restraints and using hand signals to communicate.
Michael R. Sherwin, the acting U.S. attorney in Washington, said Friday that his prosecutors were working to build more serious sedition and murder cases against such groups if the evidence permits and that focusing on militia members and other extremists would be a top priority.
“All of these extremist groups are being looked at in terms of their participation at the Capitol,” Sherwin said.
It's what I said, and this reads weird.
What are they so damn afraid of if it is a few extremists after all the votes Creepy Uncle Joe allegedly won?
Federal prosecutors also unsealed charges over the weekend against Robert Gieswein, 24, of Woodland Park, Colorado, who they say is affiliated with the Three Percenters. The group’s name is a reference to the purported 3% of the U.S. colonial population who rose up to fight against the British army.
Gieswein, who runs a private paramilitary training group called the Woodland Wild Dogs, was among the early wave of invaders to breach the building, court papers say. Photographs from the attack show him clad in a military vest, goggles and an Army-style helmet, wrestling with Capitol Police officers to remove metal barricades and brandishing a baseball bat. In a criminal complaint, prosecutors cite a video that shows Gieswein encouraging other rioters as they smash a window at the Capitol with a wooden board and a plastic shield, and then climbing through the broken glass into the building.
Gieswein, huh?
Yup, the whole thing, no matter which side, is a Jewi$h operation!
The FBI also arrested Guy Wesley Reffitt of Texas and charged him Saturday with obstruction. The FBI said he belonged to the Texas Freedom Force, a militia extremist group, while Reffitt’s wife said he was a member of the Three Percenters.
The deadly assault on the Capitol is expected to be a “significant driver of violence” for armed militia groups and racist extremists in the days ahead, federal authorities have said in recently issued intelligence bulletins.
Thus providing the basis for any false flag f**kery, so don't fall for it.
That article originally appeared in The New York Times, which also added this in print:
Riley June Williams, a Pennsylvania woman accused by federal law enforcement of taking a laptop from the office of Speaker Nancy Pelosi during the assault on the Capitol this month, turned herself in to the local police on Monday.
Williams, 22, was seen on video taking “a laptop computer or hard drive” from the office of Pelosi, Democrat of California, according to a complaint filed by the Justice Department on Sunday. The authorities accused her of unlawful entry, disrupting the conduct of government business and disorderly conduct.
A former boyfriend of Williams contacted the F.B.I. to identify her in videos recorded during the attack. According to the court filing, he told the F.B.I. that she had intended to sell the laptop to a friend in Russia, who hoped to sell it to Russia’s foreign intelligence service. He also told the F.B.I. that the sale had fallen through.
HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!!
Former boyfriend turned her in, huh?
Was the break-up metal or acrimonious?
Local law enforcement agents in Harrisburg, Pa., told the F.B.I. that Williams’s father had told them he drove with her to Washington to protest the election results, and that they returned to Pennsylvania together after splitting up during the day.
Her mother told local law enforcement officers that she had since fled, and the police discovered that after the attack she had changed her telephone number and deleted what seemed to be her social media accounts, the F.B.I. said in the court filing.....
Is she another psyop agent or what?
So WHERE IS the LAPTOP anyway?
Related:
The good old boys were useful for 150 years worth of wars around the planet, but no longer, as the Pentagon pulls a Stalin and PURGES its troops.
That should open things right up for any invader, as it did Russia to Germany.
As for the infamous Q, in the immortal words of Admiral Ackbar, "it's a trap!"
I know some think things are happening and God bless her for it, but I'm afraid her hopes are going to sink like a Stone. This isn't 1776, there will be no EBS broadcast, and the perversions will be covered up.
That will simply ignite rage:
"Why rage over the 2020 election could last well past Trump" by Sabrina Tavernise New York Times, January 18, 2021
WASHINGTON — For many Trump supporters, the inauguration of Joe Biden Jr. this week will be a signal that it is time to move on. The president had four years, but Biden won, and that is that, but for a certain slice of the 74 million Americans who voted for President Donald Trump, the events of the past two weeks — the five deaths, including of a Capitol Police officer, the arrests that have followed, and the removal of Trump and right-wing extremists from tech platforms — have not had a chastening effect.
On the contrary, interviews in recent days show that their anger and paranoia have only deepened, suggesting that even after Trump leaves the White House, an embrace of conspiracy theories and rage about the 2020 election will live on, not just among extremist groups but among many Americans.
“I can’t just sit back and say, ‘OK, I’ll just go back to watching football,’ ” said Daniel Scheerer, 43, a fuel truck driver in Grand Junction, Colorado, who went to the rally in Washington last week, but said he did not go inside the Capitol and had nothing to do with those who did. He said he did not condone those who were violent, but believed that the news media has “totally skewed” the event, obscuring what he sees as the real story of the day — the people’s protest against election fraud.
“If we tolerate a fraudulent election, I believe we cease to have a republic,” he said. “We turn into a totalitarian state.”
There is truth in the pre$$; however, it doesn't come from their own mouths.
Scheerer said he was not advocating violence, nor was he part of any group that was, but he echoed the views of many who supported the events in Washington last week: A fervent belief that something bad was about to happen, and an instinct to fight against it.
A Washington Post-ABC News poll showed that 8 percent of adults and 15 percent of Republicans support “the actions of people who stormed the US Capitol last week to protest Biden’s election as president.” That is far from most voters, but enough to show that the belief in a stolen election has entered the American bloodstream and will not be easy to stop.
Going to have to leech it out.
“It’s a dangerous situation,” said Lucan Way, a political scientist at the University of Toronto who writes about authoritarian regimes. “The ‘election was stolen’ narrative has become part of the political landscape.”
OMFG.
You know, it isn't the first time those charges have been leveled.
In fact, they seem to be every four f**king years when you think about it!
The country’s political divide is no longer a disagreement over issues like guns and abortion but a fundamental difference in how people see reality. That, in turn, is driving more extremist beliefs. This shift has been years in the making, but it went into hyperspeed after the Nov. 3 election as Trump and many in his party encouraged Americans, despite all the evidence to the contrary, to believe the results were fraudulent.
The belief is still common among Republicans: A Quinnipiac poll published Monday found that 73 percent still believe there was widespread voter fraud.
They are not all Republicans, and anyone who wants to see it can.
Now, with Biden’s inauguration Wednesday and so many Americans enraged about the election, state capitals and Washington are on high alert, with soldiers and security perimeters, bracing for further acts of violence.
“Polarization is not the problem anymore,” said Lilliana Mason, a political psychologist at the University of Maryland. “Now it’s the threat to democracy.”
She and her co-author, Nathan Kalmoe, found that the share of Americans who say it is “at least a little bit justified” to engage in violence for political reasons has doubled in three years, rising to 20 percent after the election, from 10 percent in 2017.
Democrats were always for it, as last summer showed.
In interviews with Trump’s more fervent supporters, people expressed a pattern of falsehoods and fears about the coming Biden administration.
Like selling an invasion based on lies on the front pages, right?
Theda Kasner, 83, a retired medical worker from Marshfield, Wisconsin, who was originally interviewed for a New York Times polling story before the election, has been in an RV park in Weslaco, Texas, near the border with Mexico, since December.
She has been spending lots of time in her motor home reading books and watching videos. One featured rousing, emotional music and footage of Trump and crowds of his supporters, with a voice talking darkly about a looming confrontation.
It ended with the Lord’s Prayer and the date Jan. 20, 2021, flashing on the screen. Another, 48 minutes long, was of Jovan Hutton Pulitzer, an inventor, testifying before the Georgia state Senate about election fraud. She and her husband watch Newsmax TV, a right-wing network, in the evenings.
She says she was sitting home in tears because with their Senate wins, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff illustrate the changing face of Georgia.
For Scheerer, the fuel truck driver in Colorado, the multiple catastrophes of the past year — the coronavirus, the economic disruption that came with it, the political fear across the country — all fused into a kind of looming threat. The lockdowns infuriated him. He sees mask mandates not as public health but public control. Both, he believed, were signs of a coming tyranny. He left a truck-driving job he liked when, by his account, his boss told him he had to wear a mask or leave.
Then came the election.
On Jan. 6, he arrived in Washington for the rally to protest the results. Afterward, when pressed on how he felt about the event given the number of white supremacists in the riot, he said that they were only a fraction of the people there. Anyway, he said, their presence was insignificant compared the broader issue of fraud. “It’s way more than just being some kind of a Trump fanatic,” he said. He said he sees himself as “a guy up on the wall of a city seeing the enemy coming, and ringing the alarm bell.”
In western North Carolina, Kevin Haag, a retired landscaper who was at the Capitol last week, but did not go inside, said people in his conservative community have grown increasingly alarmed about what has happened in the days since.
They should be alarmed.
The Communists are coming under the cover of CV!
His electric power company, Duke Energy, has announced it would pause donations for Republicans who voted against certifying the election results.
That wasn't the kind of alarm I thought he was ringing.
It all feels like a vast piling on against Trump supporters, he said. To top it off, the Senate, the House, and the White House now belong to Democrats. “Now it’s pretty scary, people are alarmed, they own it all now,” said Haag, who was first quoted in a Times story about the December rally in Washington for Trump. Haag, who is 67, is also a member of his local town council.
In a telephone conversation this week, he said he is part of a group called the Armed Patriots, people from his area whose purpose, he said, is to protect the community. On Tuesday night, the group met, he said, and invited the public for a gun instruction session with two experts who talked about how to use an assault rifle. Sixty people attended, he said, including women.
They also held a raffle of a gun to raise money for a website, he said, “because they are taking down our communications.” The meeting, he said, “was to educate and to relieve fear.” Haag insisted that the group was not a militia.
“We are not here to take over the country,” he said. “If that’s what you are here for, we are not your group. We are here to protect our citizens and to stand up for our country.”
Then, in Democrat and Globe eyes, you need to be put down.
The country is finished, folks, as Pompeo leaves a dubious legacy and the Census Bureau director resigns amid criticism over data.
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
That's when I opened the Letter from Washington:
Flags, not spectators, will fill the National Mall on the day of Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’s inauguration (Alex Brandon/Associated Press)
Why did Germany, 1934, just spring to mind?
"A locked-down and transformed Washington braces for Biden’s inauguration" by Liz Goodwin Globe Staff, January 18, 2021
WASHINGTON — One decisive electoral loss and one failed insurrection later, the Capitol has been transformed into a fortress, guarded by thousands of troops, surrounded by miles of razor-wire-topped fences, and monitored by drones and buzzing helicopters.
The “peaceful transition of power” will now happen under the watchful gaze of up to 25,000 National Guardsmen who have been deployed to Washington, several times more troops than are currently serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That’s a lot of muscle to ensure the most basic facet of democracy occurs.
That is because it is not ensuring that at all.
The juxtaposition of the pre$$ swill and what they describe couldn't be more stark.
“It’s a wartime atmosphere,” presidential historian Julian Zelizer wrote in an e-mail, adding that parallels exist to inaugurations around World War II and in 2005, the first after the Sept. 11 attacks, “but in many ways this seems even more intense. The combination of a pandemic and an actual attack on government on Jan. 6 has heightened the fears,” and unlike those wartime inaugurations, this time, the fear is of threats internal.
It is, but not in the way they describe.
The threat is inside the gates.
Four extremist groups, including white supremacist organizations, may target the Capitol, lawmakers were told in a briefing last week. “We are seeing an extensive amount of concerning online chatter,” FBI Director Chris Wray said. National Guard officials said they were conducting extra screening of troops deployed inside the security bubble to ensure none posed a threat to President-elect Joe Biden.
PFFFFFFFFT!
Of course, there is NO EVIDENCE, NONE, of any kind of attack coming.
It's just ONE LIE after ANOTHER coming from this illegitimate government and its whoreporate pre$$.
There are some signs that the shock-and-awe military response may be working to deter those threats. Rumors of an armed protest at the Capitol on Sunday did not materialize, and it’s no wonder. Even with credentials, it’s difficult — and confusing — to get anywhere close to the building. The maze of barriers and road closures expands deep into Washington, with tactical vehicles and armed soldiers standing sentry all around the city, blocking cars and pedestrians from reaching where the inauguration will take place on Wednesday.
Or keeping those inside from leaving, right?
A secure “green zone” limited to local vehicle traffic surrounds a “red zone” closer to the Capitol, where only authorized vehicles and people are allowed. The allusion to Baghdad’s militarized zone has not gone unnoticed among locals.
“When they started talking about green zone, red zone, everyone thinks about Baghdad,” said Virginia resident Robert Shapiro, 57, who was checking out one of the secured entrances on Monday.
Look wjho she talks to, and better get out of town now Liz!
The National Mall, which stretches like a giant green bowling alley for more than two miles from the steps of the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial, is now behind a police line. That meant residents on Monday weren’t able to visit the Martin Luther King, Jr. statue on the federal holiday commemorating his birth. It also means Biden and Kamala Harris will look out and see only a sea of flags, instead of thousands of cheering Americans on Wednesday.
A combination of pandemic restrictions and the significantly heightened security measures have scaled down the usually elaborate inauguration week to a bare-bones swearing-in ceremony and inaugural address on a socially-distanced platform. Security concerns forced Biden to shelve his idea of riding to Washington on Amtrak, as a nod to his years commuting by train from Delaware as a senator.
“This isn’t a normal year,” Maju Varghese, executive director of the Presidential Inaugural Committee, explained at a Georgetown Institute of Politics event last week. (A “virtual parade” and “Celebrating America” special featuring celebrities and musicians will be online.)
The tense atmosphere has some lawmakers, who are among the only people allowed to attend the inauguration in person, taking extra security precautions.
Representative Stephen Lynch of South Boston is leaning toward not taking his wife to the proceedings, even though she is a big fan of Biden and has loved attending past inaugurations.
“In the event something happens, I’d have to find my wife in the crowd and get her out of there,” Lynch said. “The likelihood of violence is not something I want to expose my wife to.”
How?
The reporter says you can't get anywhere near the place; therefore, if violence were to take place it could only be from or abetted by government!
Representative Norma Torres of California told Axios she planned to wear a tactical vest and was urging her colleagues to do the same.
Representative Jake Auchincloss, a freshman from Newton, said he plans to attend with his wife as “a statement that we will not be cowed by a mob of white supremacists.” The stepped-up security is “sadly necessary” at the moment, Auchincloss said, but he hoped it would not become permanent.
Of course, they will be cowed by BLM and leftist thugs like Antifa as we saw this past summer.
“We don’t want it to feel like a fortress,” he said of the Capitol. “We don’t want a green zone in Washington, D.C., in the long term,” but no one seems to know what Washington security will look like in a post-Jan. 6 world. Some reporters (including this one) are stocking up on gear that would protect them in a riot, so they can be better prepared to cover violent protests, should extremists descend upon the city again, and city officials are reminding residents to remain on guard.
She is a PREPPER now as the stench of totalitarianism emanates from D.C.
“We are going to go back to a new normal,” D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said of security in the city after the inauguration. “I think our entire country is going to have to deal with how our intelligence apparatus, security apparatus at every level deal with a very real and present threat to our nation.”
The heavily fortified downtown Monday bore a striking contrast to the relatively sparsely guarded Capitol building on Jan. 6. During the siege, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders begged a neighboring governor to send National Guard troops to secure the besieged building — to no avail.
That's a distortion. Pelosi and McConnell declined help and told the Capitol Police to stand down.
That's why the chief resigned, and now the blame is being passed to House Sergeant-at-Arms Paul Irving, who balked when the chief of Capitol Police suggested activating the National Guard and resisted the request because of lawmakers’ wariness.
They were worried about the optics!
Now, the troops literally surround the Capitol.
Uh-huh.
Guardsmen, guns slung over their shoulders, are stationed at the perimeter of the fence that encircles the building. Inside the Capitol Visitors’ Center, which in pre-pandemic times was generally swarmed with tourists, Guardsmen were sleeping or resting on hard, foldable cots, some with their uniform placed over their eyes to block out the fluorescent lighting. Crates of Monster Energy drinks and brightly colored boxes of Dunkin’ doughnuts awaited others outside the nearby Dirksen Senate Office building.
Those Congre$$ critters must feel like Palestinians!
Locals are processing the fact that in a year of sickness and strife, they also won’t be able to watch the inauguration or the ceremonial parade from the Capitol to the White House, generally an open and free event that brings the region together and celebrates the peaceful transfer of power.
“I’m really, really disappointed,” said Christine Suchy, a 53-year-old Arlington, Va., resident who drove to Washington’s Union Station on Monday afternoon to see the militarized zone around the Capitol before authorities shut down the bridges into the city to further tighten security. “To me it’s not about being Democrat or Republican — this is history, right? And it’s sort of taken from us.”
Like the rest of our lives, but he's not complaining about that.
Related(?):
Did you see the little bastard in the photo as he steadily dials up the pressure on President-elect Joe Biden, and what is with the mobster's hat?
The sub will have a naval escort, and we are really going to need that oil pipeline now:
"World Economic Forum organizers are expecting leaders including Chinese President Xi Jinping, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa for a virtual gathering next week — after the COVID-19 pandemic doused plans for the annual in-person event in Davos, Switzerland. Forum founder Klaus Schwab said the aim of the virtual “Davos Agenda” meeting starting Jan. 25 is to restore trust and engage all stakeholders in business, government, civil society and beyond to help build a “more peaceful and prosperous post-corona era.” The event runs throughout the week with daily themes on subjects like economic systems, responsible growth, cooperation and the harnessing of technologies in the 4th Industrial Revolution - a common theme at Davos events. Borge Brende, the forum president, said Xi and Modi will be joined also by Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga and South Korean President Moon Jae-in for the event, and such leaders will consider “the role that Asia will play in the recovery.” Others expected include Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, French President Emmanuel Macron and President Ivan Duque of Colombia. The annual event in Davos typically draws thousands of elites to the Alpine snows to discuss ways of building a better future."
Where they will own everything, you will own nothing, and be happy about eating insects and weeds and washing it down with sewer water.
That is who my pre$$ is pimping for, and it is $ickening.
Also see:
Well, China’s mining industry has a reputation for skirting safety requirements amid massive demand for coal and precious minerals, although increased supervision has reduced the frequency of accidents that used to claim an average of 5,000 miners per year.
I'm told Tunisians are angry at the state of the economy and of public services, and many feel disappointed that on the 10th anniversary of the uprising that ousted the autocratic former president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, because little seems to have improved and there is also added frustration over coronavirus restrictions as a pall of disenchantment still hangs over Tunisia, marked by extremist attacks, political infighting, a troubled economy and unfulfilled promises.
Looks a lot like America, doesn't it?
The term suddenly arose in the media once the election was stolen, and Israel’s education minister says he is banning groups that call Israel an “apartheid state” from lecturing at schools — a move that targets one of the country’s leading human rights groups after it began describing both Israel and its control of the Palestinian territories as a single apartheid system, because the explosive term, long seen as taboo and mostly used by the country’s harshest critics, is vehemently rejected by Israel’s leaders and many ordinary Israelis -- even as the rights group B’Tselem said that while Palestinians live under different forms of Israeli control in the occupied West Bank, blockaded Gaza, annexed east Jerusalem and within Israel itself, they have fewer rights than Jews in the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
Meanwhile, the New York Times is focused on Russia.
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
The Globe says it is time lawmakers support an ‘open’ House because that is how government should work for Americans.
As for what we can expect from the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, it's all here for everyone to see.
COVID-21 is coming, and Biden will not be able to put out the flames (I hope he burns in hell), even though the case and death counts are now an afterthought (the placement on page B4 is the proof).
Meanwhile, the Globe's top bu$ine$$ concern is whether the Moderna miracle can keep investors happy, not whether their vaccine will cure or prevent COVID (it won't), and the concern comes in the literal wake of deaths of patients in Norway and California.
Of course, they should have read the Globe's Fine Print because there is a $ilver lining in the $camdemic (more people developed and died from cancers that could have been treated, yaaaaay!)
We have all been had as the state goes after the $malle$t of $mall fries, and she will soon be a footnote brief in history.
Time to face the music, folks.
