Prickly City by Scott Stantis for December 18, 2020

Why? You think they’ll be embarrassed and not wear them? Hell to the No!

At our current rate, we will have 400,000 covid deaths by the time The Messiah leaves office.

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“We want them infected!”

See today’s “Reality Check”.

https://www.gocomics.com/realitycheck/2020/12/18

Black arm bands still put me off…

Democrats in Texas and New Hampshire are forming committees to examine the party’s failings in last month’s election. Less formal autopsies are underway in states across the country.

But the party that lost the presidential election isn’t soul-searching at all.

For the final act of his showman-like presidency, Donald Trump has convinced the Republican Party that despite losing the White House by 7 million votes — and despite seeing five states flip in 2020 — things could hardly be better inside the GOP.

Even as the Electoral College this week confirmed Joe Biden’s victory, interviews with more than two dozen GOP state and local chairs and Republican National Committee members reflect a party that, far from reassessing its embrace of Trumpism, is hell-bent on more of the same.

“Our president absolutely grew our party,” said Jennifer Carnahan, chair of the Minnesota Republican Party, noting the GOP’s down-ballot victories and explosive turnout with Trump on the ticket. “He totally advanced our party … I think that as Republicans, we just need to continue to remain on the course.”

It hardly matters that Trump couldn’t beat Biden in the Rust Belt. Or that Trump ceded the longtime Republican strongholds of Georgia and Arizona to Democrats and, in defeat, became the first incumbent president since 1992 to fail to win a second term.

Six weeks after the election, Republicans are beginning to chart a multi-state effort to undo mail ballot expansions that disadvantaged the party in November. But that’s a mechanical concern. As it prepares for the midterm elections and 2024, the direction of the party is set.

“As far as I’m concerned, everything’s great,” said Stanley Grot, a district-level Republican Party chair in Michigan, a state Trump won four years ago but lost to Biden in November.

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https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/17/gop-ditches-election-postmortem-447091

The DOJ really wants to make El Presidente’s antifa dreams come true. The anti-police brutality protests have been cast by the administration as a leftist conspiracy to… um… demand better policing and better police officers.

In addition to sending federal officers to clamp down on unrest in “Democratic” cities, the FBI has been sending analysts to crack phones taken from protesters in hopes of finding some sort of antifa org chart the feds can use to dismantle this “group.”

If you think it’s weird a free world government would be obsessed with tracking down people fighting fascism, you’re not alone. Seems like the time and effort would be better utilized to neutralize the threat posed by homegrown extremists, many of whom align themselves with white supremacist movements.

But this is what this Administration is diverting resources to, even when available evidence suggests the antifa movement isn’t filled with dangerous individuals.

More evidence suggests the government might want to focus on another loose assortment of anti-government individuals: the so-called “Boogaloo Bois.”

If antifa is a collective in the loosest definition of the word, the Boogaloo Bois are similarly unstructured. Small groups exist but there’s no organizational head to bring down or nationwide structure to dismantle.

While the president complains about “violent” BLM/antifa protesters, real violence is being perpetrated by actual anarchists Trump has never criticized publicly.

In the wake of protests following the May 25 killing of George Floyd, a member of the Boogaloo Bois opened fire on the Minneapolis Police Third Precinct with an AK-47-style gun and screamed “Justice for Floyd” as he ran away, according to a federal complaint made public Friday.

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https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20201025/10215845582/another-arrest-shows-pretty-much-everyone-antifa-engaging-anti-government-violence.shtml

Bill Barr will not be missed by most of the hundreds of nonpartisan career prosecutors inside the Department of Justice.

Least of all, though, by the lawyers working for the Southern District of New York, whose jurisdiction covers most of Donald Trump’s hometown—and whose continuing probes of the president’s associates, including an investigation of Rudy Giuliani, are far less likely to be squashed.

“Everything depends on the facts and witnesses in those cases,” a former senior SDNY official says. “But certainly they are more likely to proceed without Barr in there, who was just a disgrace. In every way.”

Barr—whose departure from the office of attorney general was announced on Monday after taking a Twitter battering from Trump—politicized nearly every corner of the Justice Department.

His most prominent, and most effective, interference took place in Washington, whether he was preemptively and misleadingly spinning the findings of the Mueller report or intervening in the cases against Michael Flynn and Roger Stone.

But his attempts to meddle in New York were unrelenting, an SDNY insider says—and the stakes were higher because the investigations threatened to come closer to the president.

Only a few of Barr’s moves to mess with SDNY cases have become public so far. The most glaring known episode was plenty bad.

✁

Barr suggested—wink, wink—that (Geoffrey) Berman accept a transfer or a new job, so that a New Jersey golfing buddy of Trump’s could be installed as U.S. attorney.

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https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/12/with-barr-out-new-york-prosecutors-are-freer-to-zero-in-on-the-president

Red America: Failing the cookie test every day.

We could have had nice things, but they’d have had to control themselves for a little while, so we’re doomed.

The observation of a MAGA red hat knuckle walker will no longer be a combination of disgust and apprehension. Soon their impotency should be obvious even to them. Perhaps they will eventually realize how their idolatry of a Fat Orange Clown did so much damage to our country by undermining cyber security and the continual lies about the pandemic.

In a little more than a month the MAGAts proudly wearing their little red cap will be a reminder to the rest of us that we have to find more resources for social uses. Funds are needed to be channeled to treating mental illness and for public education for civics and American history/government at the end of the 18th century.

Live by the Faux Spews sound bite then die by the inane chant of a catch phrase.

Want to BET??

Knowing what you know now…

If you could go back in time, how would you stop Donald Trump from becoming President?

And will the Universe let you do it? (cf. Stephen King’s 11/22/63.)

I see the ones wearing red hates in the same light as someone wearing a swastika arm band.

It’s been established that Winslow is a Cubs fan. Anyone in a Cardinals cap is still going to make his skin crawl.

It’s sad that Trumpism has ruined red hats. I used to like red hats. I can’t even wear my red hats in public anymore, for fear that I’ll be even loosely associated with those “people”.

MAGA (Make America Great Again) is a harkening back to the 1930’s America for anti-war pro Nazi groups. They did not want to go to war with Germany they wanted to copy them. And amongst the plutocracy they weren’t turned off by Germany’s moves after Hitler came to power and took over in 1933. They also liked Fascism and got involved with names like Bush and Chanel among others.

We were fortunate the right people were in charge or ours and the world’s history would be quite different today. I have been writing an ongoing story about that other possible American Empire.

“Proud Boys plan to ‘wreak havoc’ at Biden’s inauguration — while dressed in disguise: report”

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/12/proud-boys-plan-to-wreak-havoc-at-bidens-inauguration-while-dressed-in-disguise-report/

Major fail on their part.

The first rule of successful sabotage: Don’t tell anyone what you’re planning to do!