Not Militias

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

So goes the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. Nonetheless, at 26:56 of the (very choppy) video below, Max Brooks can be (sort of) seen remarking

The real danger we're facing is homegrown insurgency. Think about it. This is the first time since the 1990s that militia enlistment has gone up during a Republican administration. It always goes up during Democrats, down during Republicans.

Thankfully, Bill Maher asks ""Militia,' meaning"? and Brooks replies "militia meaning any sort of armed government- anti-government group...."

A tweet from Matthew Ingram, self-described as a writer "about digital media for the Columbus Journalism Review," thus presumably a credible individual:

Militia leader Stewart Rhodes says he has men stationed outside of D.C. ready to engage in violence on Trump’s order https://t.co/H7P9945sCa

— Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) November 12, 2020

The article, from the solidly left Media Matters For America, to which Miller links is entitled "Militia leader Stewart Rhodes says he has men stationed outside of D.C. ready to engage in violence on Trump's order." Timothy Johnson writes

Oath Keepers militia leader Stewart Rhodes said that he has armed men on standby outside of Washington, D.C., to supposedly prevent the 2020 presidential election from being stolen from President Donald Trump....

Rhodes also indicated his militia will be involved in a rally to support Trump planned for this weekend in the nation's capital.

Johnson goes on to note "the organization’s purpose has shifted from opposing the government to instead act as a pro-Trump vigilante group." However, Johnson twice otherwise invokes "militia" in his article of eight paragraphs.

But it is absurd to refer to such right-wing paramilitary groups as "militias".

The Second Amendment specifically grants to members of a "well-regulated militia"- and to no one else- the right "to keep and bear arms." The framers were not speaking of, nor anticipating, individuals forming an armed anti-government group.

The founders conceived of either "a part of the organized armed forces of a country liable to call only in emergency" or "the whole body of able-bodied male citizens declared by law as being subject to call to military service." They did not mean individuals banding together to upend the government or intimidate the government, or to keep in power their hero against the popular will.

Nonetheless, we have reasonable, well-meaning, even ideologically liberal people referring to the Proud Boys and other armed groups as "militias." 

It is probably a stretch to label them all "terrorists" because their intended target generally are not innocents but the targets of their vendetta. Nevertheless, they do not comprise a "militia." Rather, they are vigilantes and affording them the credibility of "militias" is linguistically nonsensical- and strategically dangerous.

 

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Armed, Sometimes Dangerous

As in the cliche, there is a lot to unpack here:

The right uses a single weather event like snow in Oct to discount climate change, just as the left seizes on anecdotal videos to make sweeping dishonest claims about policing. The videos rarely tell the whole story, data shows police killings of unarmed have rapidly declined.

— Lee Fang (@lhfang) November 12, 2020

Climate change is a matter of science and of fact. However, problems with policing go well beyond unarmed citizens being killed and is subject to interpretation- and misinterpretation- of data.

The videos do indeed rarely tell the whole story. And so it should be helpful to learn that The Washington Post in 2015 started recording the more than 5,764 incidents that have occurred by an on-duty police officer of a fatal shooting by an on-duty police officer. It found 3,344 victims were armed by a gun, some others with any combination of gun, knife, vehicle, toy weapon, or "other." It listed 169 cases as "unknown" and 366 as "unarmed."

As extensive as is the data presented, we cannot determine whether the number of unarmed individuals killed by a police officer has declined or increased in recent months or over the period of the (ongoing) study. However, we do know not only that the vast majority of victims has been armed but we do know of the demographics of the victim, as well as the annual number and circumstances of the killings. The Post explains

... the FBI in 2015 committed to improving its tracking and last month launched a system to track all police use-of-force incidents, including fatal shootings. The new system, however, is still voluntary...

The Post’s reporting shows that both the annual number and circumstances of fatal shootings and the overall demographics of the victims have remained constant over the past four years.

The dead: 45 percent white men; 23 percent black men; and 16 percent Hispanic men. Women have accounted for about 5 percent of those killed, and people in mental distress about 25 percent of all shootings.

About 54 percent of those killed have been armed with guns and 4 percent unarmed.

“We’ve looked at this data in so many ways, including whether race, geography, violent crime, gun ownership or police training can explain it, but none of those factors alone can explain how consistent this number appears to be,” said Geoffrey Alpert, a criminologist at the University of South Carolina who has studied police shootings for more than three decades.

Year to year, the statistics have remained relatively constant. It being Twitter, when Fang stated "police killings of unarmed have rapidly declined," he did not specify what time frame he was using, nor note that many of those armed lacked a gun. But if Fang was trying to make the point that most victims of police shootings are armed, he was being accurate. Moreover, killing a civilian is not justified merely because the victim was armed or even armed and threatening. and statistics never bring back the dead.

Nonetheless, one thing is clear. When a police officer shoots an individual, the odds that he (or she) is armed with a weapon of one sort or another is very, very good.  Often lost in the swirl of emotions and the appeal of identity politics, it is a fact is no less significant than it is inconvenient.

 

 

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Never Assume A Candidate Wants To Win

A Democratic-leaning political scientist would like a word with the Democratic Party:

 

a large turnout of R voters like @marcorubio and MAGA headliners.

I can tell you RIGHT NOW who is winning these run-offs.

I mean, they just failed to flip NC on this crap!!

For God's sake @ossoff don't you want to win???

— Rachel "The Doc" Bitecofer 📈🔭🍌 (@RachelBitecofer) November 12, 2020

The answer is "no."  Bitecofer believes Ossoff (presumably Reverend Warnock, also) should nationalize the campaign, which is to culminate in a vote on January 5, 2021. 

She's probably right that national issues should be featured by the Georgia Democratic Party to excite partisans to move them to vote, which otherwise may be difficult because the presidential election has concluded.  That is what occurred in that presidential race, which ended in Joe Biden gaining more popular votes than any candidate ever. Donald Trump now stands at #2, which did not prevent a Democratic victory. It was a base election, which the Georgia runoff also probably will be.

Bitecofer legitimately believes also that Jon Ossoff may not want to win.  It's impossible to determine because almost no one can know what he, or the Party, has in mind if he loses.  However, a candidate of one of the two major political parties disinterested in winning an election would not be unprecedented.

John McCain may have had no inkling when he selected Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential running mate that she would prove to be an albatross around his neck in November. He may not have realized that courageously telling a supporter at a general election rally that no, Barack Obama is not an Arab, would dampen enthusiasm among Republicans. He may not even have understood that emphasizing that he and Palin are "mavericks" (accurate, within Republican Party politics) would be counter-productive when running against a guy who was aiming to be the first black President ever.

Yet, there is another clue. In a period when we are reminded of the graciousness of each losing presidential candidate to the winner over at least the past few decades, that of John McCain demands particular attention. On November 5, 2008 he stated in his concession speech

I've always believed that America offers opportunities to all who have the industry and will to seize it. Sen. Obama believes that, too. But we both recognize that though we have come a long way from the old injustices that once stained our nation's reputation and denied some Americans the full blessings of American citizenship, the memory of them still had the power to wound.

A century ago, President Theodore Roosevelt's invitation of Booker T. Washington to visit — to dine at the White House — was taken as an outrage in many quarters. America today is a world away from the cruel and prideful bigotry of that time. There is no better evidence of this than the election of an African-American to the presidency of the United States. Let there be no reason now for any American to fail to cherish their citizenship in this, the greatest nation on Earth.

"There is no better evidence," McCain maintained, that "America today is a world away from the cruel and prideful bigotry of that time," than "the election of an African-American to the presidency of the United States." Barack Obama not only emerged victorious but "has achieved a great thing for himself and for his country."

It's hard to understand the reason even to vote against an individual whose victory he believed illustrated the fairness of the nation and its people. It would have been fair to ask the Arizona senator why he ran against the man whose victory confirmed that this is "the greatest nation on earth"  and whose election was needed to erase the stain of "the cruel and prideful bigotry" characterizing the first half of the 20th century. 

In the absence of concrete evidence to the contrary, issuance by a candidate lauding the election of his opponent must suggest that the loser never intended to win. So if victory in the Georgia runoff is not the highest priority for Jon Ossoff, other Georgia Democrats, or someone well-connected to the state party, they can take solace with the likelihood that twelve years ago, the GOP candidate for the presidency of the USA did not run his own race with steely-eyed determination.

 

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No Joking Matter

It was on Wednesday night, when things were already looking bleak, but not hopeless, for President Trump when in Orlando, Florida the President's religious advisor, Paula White, appeared with son Brad Knight and 

led a marathon prayer service at the New Christian Destiny Centre, calling on the almighty for divine intervention in the presidential race.

In a video widely circulated on social media by Right Wing Watch, the “prosperity gospel” pastor can be seen denouncing the “demonic confederacies” working against Mr Trump and declaring that “angels from Africa, from South America” are coming to his aid.

"Angels are being dispatched from Africa right now," she said, adding, "They're coming here."

Speaking in tongues, in which a person utters sounds thought of as a secret language unknown to the speaker, features in Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity, as well as other religions.

Joined by Knight, White led a prayer service also on Thursday night. Not only is she a White but preaches a prosperity gospel, a happy coincidence for Trump. On Thursday, she vowed her followers would "override" the will of man and "we overturn it, we overturn it right now, and it will be no more, it will be no more because it is our right by the blood of Jesus, and you will give it to us."

In the video below, if you can look beyond the childish laughter of Ana Kasparian- who lends a note of childish levity- The Young Turks' Cenk Uygur can be seen explaining

Apparently God loves Joe Biden because the sound of victory seems to be headed on to Joe Biden. And she says God chose so I guess God chose Joe Biden. So once Biden is declared the winner, Paula White and all those pastors are just immediately going to flip and go "well, that's it, God wanted Joe Biden, we love Joe Biden then."

I remember when they all flipped and were in favor of Barack Obama because God had chosen everything and they said God was going to choose in 2008 and they said God was going to choose in 2012. And he did- he chose Barack Obama.

A little surprisingly Uygur, a secular Muslim, largely nailed it.  The of se individuals will not claim to love Joe Biden. Nonetheless, most white evangelicals (as the term is generally understood by non-theologians), whether or not advocates of the prosperity gospel, do believe God chooses. Moreover, they maintain that God chose (even) Barack Obama, however few actually voted for him.

They believe, as it's most often characterized, that God is in control. To them, this means not only that God controls human activity in the same manner that a parent controls her child, in which some minor decisions are left to the child, lest she grow up hopeless and helpless. It means that God is determinative; the Almighty is intimately involved with everything and everyone and at every time. God not only can make the final decision but does so invariably.

Uygur reminds us of Jesus' legendary concern for the poor and maintains "media, Democrats, as usual, are so scared to point these things out." He continues in a mocking voice "We don't want to offend religious people, we don't want to offend religious people." Yet

If you can't make fun of that, what has this world come to. Do you have any courage? That is why we allow fundamentalists- not all religious people- run roughshod over us because they just throw the religion card.

There are serious consequences when Republicans run roughshod over Democrats.  The left- and most Americans- will pay for decades in part because of the unwillingness or inability to challenge the GOP on religion in the recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court. Democrats

trod extremely gingerly around anything involving Barrett’s religion or personal life. They instead sought to focus extensively on how her past comments suggest she might have prejudged cases on abortion rights and Obamacare.

In fact, the words “religion,” “Catholic,” “Christian” and “faith” were invoked in relation to religious issues about 80 times over two days of question-and-answer sessions with Barrett. Republicans and Barrett accounted for 75 of them; Democrats, only five.

Among the few times that Democrats did invoke faith, they praised Barrett for hers or sought to insulate themselves from the perception that they might be raising it as an issue.

It's probably tactically wise, except perhaps for professional comedians, to resist the urge to make fun of Paula White or other evangelical/Pentecostal Christians in favor of challenging them.  It is past time for media figures to ask such theologically and politically conservative Christians about the incidence of liberal or Democratic outcomes. A sample series of questions might be

-Was God responsible for the election of Joe Biden?

-If so, did you vote for him?

-If not, why were you defying the will of God?

That's only a start. But it's a necessary one, and cowardice is not a good look for journalists or a major political party.

 

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Bloodletting

On Monday, President Trump fired Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, as had been almost expected. So the most significant (and telling) news might have been that

Richard Pilger, director of the elections crimes branch in the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section, told colleagues in an email that the attorney general was issuing "an important new policy abrogating the forty-year-old Non-Interference Policy for ballot fraud investigations in the period prior to elections becoming certified and uncontested." Pilger also forwarded the memo to colleagues in his resignation letter.

Pilger's resignation email didn't make clear whether he plans to stay in the department in another capacity.

Barr's densely worded memo had told prosecutors they could take investigative steps such as interviewing witnesses during a period that they would normally need permission from the elections crimes section.

But as of yesterday afternoon, that was the only the most recent ember because, as David Cay Johnston had noted Sunday, on Friday

Trump forced the resignation of Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, who since 2018 had run the National Nuclear Security Administration. Thet agency keeps high-grade radioactive elements, known as fissile material, out of the hands of terrorists and rogue states. Trump’s Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette wanted to cut the budget for this work while Gordon-Hagerty sought increased funding.

Senator James Inhofe, a far-right Republican from Oklahoma, criticized the Trump administration for going soft on keeping nuclear materials from rogue states and terrorist groups. “People who should be doing all they can to support the critical work of the NNSA are instead trying to undermine it,” Inhofe said in September.

After Gordon-Haggerty was ousted, Inhofe challenged the competency of the Energy secretary, a rare break with the obsequious deference to Team Trump by Republican lawmakers over the past four years. The firing, “demonstrates he [Brouillette] doesn’t know what he’s doing in national security matters,” Inhofe said.

Trump also fired Bonnie Glick, deputy administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, in what appears to be a move to ensure that Islamophobes exercise greater power in the agency.

The third appointee, Neil Chatterjee,  was demoted from the chairmanship of the powerful Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to being just one of the five commissioners. Running diversity training, which Trump generally banned by executive order, was behind the demotion, Chatterjee told The Washington Post. “Guilty as charged,” he told EE News.

However, it wasn’t diversity, but Trump’s love of dirty coal that was behind Chatterjee’s demotion, both Green Tech Media and  The Wall Street Journal reported. Chatterjee had supported a tax on carbon, which economists across the spectrum have said for years would be the most efficient way to create incentives that speed the shift away from fossil fuels.

Friday was a particularly vindictive day for the President as he removed also Michael Kuperberg, executive director of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which produces the National Climate Assessment. The action,CNN reported, has been interpreted by "critics" as "the latest sign that the Trump administration intends to use its remaining months in office to continue impeding climate science and policy."

These are only the six highest-profile individuals canned ("sacked," as the British would say) by the President whom we have been criticized as so unfairly and rashly accusing of being a fascist or would-be dictator.

There may have been others, and there will be others because that's what an arsonist does. This wouldn't be the first person who, asked to leave his home because of bad behavior, determines to burn the house (or apartment building) down. He's only by far the most important.

Much of what President Trump will be doing in his remaining months in office will be legal; some of it will not be. Some of what he did in the nearly four years before the recent election was legal; much of it was not. These actions, as well as the lies spewed at a record rate intended to overturn the election and upend confidence in democracy generally, must not be forgotten- or forgiven.

In his waning days in office, President Trump may pardon himself, resign and have a President Pence pardon him, or may do neither. The first is of dubious constitutionality and the second obviously enormously corrupt. Either one gives a President Biden and his Attorney General an opportunity for legal action, and the third an even greater opportunity.  In the absence of a finding that they are not sufficiently serious, crimes of the other 330,569,399 (as of this moment) Americans  are not (or should not be) ignored. Nor should they if committed by the  President of the United States of America.

 

 

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Decisiveness Of SARS-CoV-2

Start with the truth and end with the truth, with the nonsense in the middle. Washington Post reporters

Ashley Parker, Josh Dawsey, Matt Viser and Michael Scherer have written a revealing post-mortem on the 2020 presidential campaign with the apt heading "How Trump's erratic behavior and failure on coronavirus doomed his re-election." In the following paragraph, they start and end with the truth, with nonsense in the middle:

But the president finally lost, aides and allies said, because of how he mismanaged the virus. He lost, they said, over the summer, when the virus didn’t go away as he promised; when racial unrest roiled the nation in the wake of George Floyd’s death and protesters ran rampant through the streets; and when federal and local authorities gassed largely peaceful demonstrators in Lafayette Square across from the White House so Trump could stage a photo op. And he lost, they said, during a roughly three-week stretch from late September to mid-October, when an angry and brooding Trump heckled and interrupted his way through the first debate and then, several days later, announced he had tested positive for the coronavirus.

Bless our liberal hearts that we comfort ourselves by believing there was in Trump's defeat a significant ideological component, that voters were so antagonized by urban violence that it upended the campaign of the right-wing racist. The Lafayette Square incident was a fiasco, demagoguery gone awry; however, there is little evidence that it had a significant impact on the election.

For all of Trump's bigoted values, the issue of urban violence receded into the background not only because the B/black L/lives M/matter protests declined in number but also with the campaign's failure to play its hand to the fullest. If it had understood that the election would be lost by the candidate who became the issue, it would have emphasized the following, here with a partisan, conservative, and misleading spin from The Federalist:

.... the Democrats’ vice presidential candidate was a huckster for a bail fund that sought to free violent criminals who were rioting on the streets of Minneapolis, and she was very effective at it. In the wake of deadly fires and looting, Harris asked her five million plus Twitter followers to donate money to bail out the “protesters” arrested in the riots.

Instead, and as the Post quartet writes

From the beginning, Trump and Biden made wildly different bets on the path to victory in 2020, taking divergent routes on nearly everything: from tone and message, to how to run their respective campaigns — and whether to wear a mask.....

Yet through it all, Trump kept returning to a faulty strategy of trying to wish, tweet and riff away the deadly virus. He forced his team to create an alternate reality in which he held massive rallies — supporters packed together, few sporting masks — and said that the coronavirus was only a modest threat and was going to disappear any day.

That was obviously going to prove a losing strategy as it made Donald Trump, rather than Joe Biden, the issue in the campaign.  Deaths from the coronavirus continued to mount and then...... Donald Trump got sick.

Trump's poll numbers significantly declined- more than I had expected- after that, probably for two reasons:

1) Trump had signaled many times that it was unnecessary to wear a mask and especially for him, the "Chosen One" and man of superior genes;

2) It represented a bad bet by the allegedly master deal maker, who gambled that Covid-19 would not intrude upon his recklessness.

Ronna Romney McDaniel, chairperson of the Republican National Committee (and obvious source for much of the Post story), said "shortly" before November 3 "if he loses, it's going to be because of covid." He did, and it was.

 

 

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For Some, The Time Is Right

It's not summer, but autumn. However, across much of the country- especially the upper Midwest and the Northeast- the weather is even better than in the summertime. Therefore, cue up  Martha Reeves:

Calling out around the world

Are you ready for a brand new beat

Summer's here and the time is right

For dancing in the street

They're dancing in Chicago (dancing in the street)

Down in New Orleans (dancing in the street)

In New York City (dancing in the street)

This weekend they have decided to party hearty, hopefully understanding

- Heading into the election, Democrats were counting on record-breaking fundraising and a vulnerable GOP to flip a number of state legislatures in a crucial Census year. That would have allowed Democrats to redraw unfavorable congressional and state legislative maps that would influence election results for the next decade. Instead, it’s the Republicans that will do just that after Democrats seem poised to miss nearly all their statehouse targets. (Fortune)

- Speaker Nancy Pelosi has so far lost seven incumbents in Tuesday’s election, and that number could increase to about a dozen as more votes are tallied in New York, California and Utah. That would leave Democrats with a razor-thin margin — and an even more emboldened GOP minority — as the party looks to govern under a potential President Joe Biden.... The most likely scenario for Democrats is a net loss of between seven to 11 seats. (Politico)

- The potential for such far-reaching legislation all but vanished barely 24 hours later as Democrats saw their chances to reclaim the Senate slip away — and with it the ability to pass legislation on a party-line vote. Instead, House Democrats will be forced to make deals with a Senate that is still led by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who is likely to have little interest in legislation of the scope the Democrats were envisioning. (The Washington Post)

Democrats got beaten in state elections, lost seats in the House of Representatives after being expected to gain them, and are extremely likely to remain the minority in a Senate they were expected to gain control of. However, they did win back the presidency over a fellow whose empathy and love for Americans stricken by Covid-19 was encapsulated in "it is what it is."

Hence, the celebrations. House Democrats are attacking each other while there is dancing in the streets in big cities throughout the USA over Joe Biden's victory, House Democrats are attacking each other, diminishing what little chance Reverend Ralph Warnock and Jon Ossoff have in their upcoming Senate election runoff. If either of them loses, Mitch McConnell will remain in charge of the gov- uh, er, the Senate.  In what is an understatement and bullish- for Democrats- view of the political landscape, AP News on Thursday observed

And even if Trump were to ultimately lose, the closeness of the presidential contest raised the prospect that a Biden presidency would have difficulty enacting progressive priorities or quickly move past the cultural and partisan fissures of the Trump era.

In June, 2008, Barack Obama maintained his presidency would be seen as "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." Ocean rise didn't slow, the planet did not begin to heal, and now it's President-elect Joe Biden who "seeks not to divide but unify, who doesn’t see red states and blue states, only sees the United States."

Good luck with that. Fortunately, a large hunk of the celebrants realize it's not going to happen.  Unfortunately, Joe Biden may not, and unless Democrats begin to realize that control of state legislatures, the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the Supreme Court are important political objectives, such celebrations in the future will constitute empty gestures.

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