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From Heather Cox Richardson in Letters from an American:

Trump is turning to this group of misfits rather than advisers like his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, or White House counsel Pat Cipollone. The new advisers are encouraging him to declare martial law or to seize state voting machines to examine them for fraud or to appoint a special counsel to investigate Joe Biden’s son Hunter. Trump has floated the idea of naming Powell as a special counsel inside the White House Counsel’s office to investigate the election. Meadows and Cipollone argue, correctly, that this is crazy.

Nonetheless, far right House lawmakers met with Trump and Vice President Mike Pence on Monday to strategize challenging Congress’s certification of the states’ electoral votes on January 6. While several House Republicans are on board with the scheme, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is trying to stop senators from signing on, since challenges in both the House and the Senate would force Republicans to vote against Trump, publicly. The challenges do not have the votes to stop the certification of Biden’s ballots.

Previous loyalists are opening up water between themselves and the president.

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From driftglass:

By Axios:

Trump turns on everyone

President Trump, in his final days, is turning bitterly on virtually every person around him, griping about anyone who refuses to indulge conspiracy theories or hopeless bids to overturn the election, several top officials tell Axios…

This is Trump in the here-and-now: a cornered, raging madman stalking the hall of the White House, looking for some way to claw himself out of a pit that he dug for himself. And the very worst of the hateful, remorseless, paranoid inner gears and mainsprings that have driven him his entire life — that his defenders swore were never there at all — now spilling uncontrollably out into the open.

This is Trump in the here-and-now. But what about a year from now? Two years from now? History provides us with some clues.

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From The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser:

Atheists will argue amongst themselves over whether there is anything such as an “atheist community.” Sure, there are atheist, freethought, and humanist groups scattered here and there, but for the most part individual atheists are on their own. And here in rural America? Atheists are typically lone rangers. Is this how atheists want it to be?

Part of the problem is that American atheist groups are dominated by college educated white men. One of the things that irritated me during my Evangelical days was that the conferences I attended featured the same “stars” every time. These big-name preachers became the face of Evangelicalism. So it is with atheist groups. Year after year, the same people are featured at conferences. As a result, these people become the face of American atheism. While there has been an increase of non-white speakers in recent years, the fact remains white dudes rule the roost.

These conferences also tend to be prohibitively expensive for working-class people, and for those of us who live in the heartland, these conferences are often thousands of miles away. Thus, atheist conferences tend to attract the same people over and over and over again.

The future of any atheist group depends on attracting new members. If all godless outsiders see are the same people as the face of the various atheist groups, there’s not much incentive for them to want to join.

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From Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson:

In an interview with the New York Times, Hagedorn described some of the reaction his decision has received:

Talk radio in Wisconsin, particularly on the conservative side, is very prominent. I turned on the radio one morning driving to work and heard what a horrible person I was. So it’s hard to miss it.

Yes, I’ve been called a traitor. I’ve been called a liar. I’ve been called a fraud. I’ve been asked if I’m being paid off by the Chinese Communist Party. I’ve been told I might be tried for treason by a military tribunal. Sure, I’ve gotten lots of interesting and sometimes dark messages.

In his Tweets attacking Hagedorn, the president made a number of errors starting with the election results. Trump lost Wisconsin by over 20,000 votes and did not win in a “landslide” as the president claimed.

As far as endorsing Hagedorn, a search on Google, Twitter and Ballotpedia revealed no endorsement by the president. It’s possible that Trump did endorse Hagedorn but given it’s lack of visibility the endorsement, if it was made, did not impact the race. On Twitter, Trump did congratulate Hagedorn after his victory.

The president was also wrong in claiming “Hagedorn easily won!” Hagedorn managed a victory of just over 5000 votes out of 1.2 million cast.

Finally, Trump was incorrect in saying his state lawsuit to overturn Wisconsin’s election was about “fraud.” As National Review’s Andrew McCarthy (a Trump supporter and a former federal prosecutor) pointed out, there were no cases of fraud alleged in the lawsuit.

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From Infidel753:

Despite official warnings, despite the disaster which has already unfolded, it’s projected that 85 million Americans will be traveling during the “holiday season”, down only one-third from a normal year. Most will be going by car, but several million have already gone by plane. Large-scale air travel for family visits is the perfect scenario for a gigantic explosion in infections. With a hundred or so people together in a plane for a couple of hours or more, breathing the same air, one infected person could spread the virus to many more — and each of those newly-infected people will still be non-symptomatic and unaware while spending days with the group they are visiting.

That so many are taking such risks may seem incredible, but it’s likely that most of them are among the “stupid one-third” of the population who still mostly refuse to recognize the crisis, militantly disdain and reject basic precautions like mask-wearing, and diligently confine their “news” intake to sources that reinforce their delusions.

Red America no longer has the spirit that animated this country against the great challenges of the past.

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From Jonathan Bernstein:

In any case, Biden would be fooling himself if he thought that adding a Republican to his administration would buy him goodwill from Republicans in Congress. And any Republican who would be willing to do it would be attacked as a RINO who doesn’t belong in the party in the first place. Nor is it remotely plausible that Republican voters would be more inclined to support Biden because of such a gesture. Even for people who pay close attention to politics, the selection of a Cabinet secretary is a barely noticeable one-day story.

The idea of seeking to build good relations with interest groups is more worthwhile. Most of the task of hiring for the Cabinet and executive branch is about internal party relationships — such as rewarding allies and reassuring groups whose candidate didn’t win the nomination battle.

But even during these polarized times, there are interest groups that are either unaligned with either party, or only loosely aligned. A Trumpist Republican Party has frayed ties with business. While Republicans still offer low taxes, they also have become the party of trade wars, restrictions on immigration, and perhaps even a breakdown in the rule of law, none of which makes the Chamber of Commerce very happy.

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From Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger:

Some of those supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, including many progressive Democrats, have talked about defunding the police. They never suggested doing away with the police — only taking some of the money and funding others to do the work that police are not adequately trained to do (like having mental health professionals handle calls regarding a mentally-ill person).

But Republicans saw an opportunity in that. That campaigned saying Democrats wanted to do away with the police. It wasn’t true, but it scared a lot of people and probably did help the GOP in the election.

That’s why it’s strange that the Republicans in the U.S. Congress are doing the opposite of what they campaigned on. They are actually DEFUNDING THE POLICE (and many other services in both red and blue states). How are they doing this?

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From our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit:

Last May, the House of Representatives sent a second COVID relief bill to the Senate. Only now has the Senate gotten serious about getting something enacted.

Key for Trump was restoring the three-martini lunch deduction.

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From Hackwhackers:

Literally mocking the U.S., Russian thug Vladimir Putin today praised the efforts of his foreign intelligence service, the SVR, in a ceremony marking the 100th anniversary of SVR’s foreign intelligence predecessor, Cheka’s Special Section. This comes just days after Russia was exposed as the perpetrator of a massive hack of the U.S. government and major corporations, the extent of which has yet to be assessed.

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From libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara:

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos:

We’ve heard shrill calls to ‘cancel,’ to ‘forgive,’ to ‘make it all free.’ Any innocuous label out there can’t obfuscate what it really is: wrong.

The campaign for ‘free college’ is a matter of total government control. Make no mistake: it is a socialist takeover of higher education.

DeVos speaks the truth.

It’s not an overt takeover, of course. And that’s not what she meant. Government agents are not going to come in, kick the administrators out, and literally install government administrators in their place. It’s actually much more insidious than that, because the control takes place largely behind the scenes. But make no mistake. It’s government control. Making college “free” means the government will have to pay colleges directly. With the responsibility to pay comes the responsibility, and power, to set conditions for both the college and the student. “Who pays the piper, calls the tune.”

So, how does DeVos’s opponents respond? One opponent, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, fires back with:

“Tuition-free public college is a dangerous socialist takeover of higher ed, as opposed to the far superior capitalist takeover of higher ed, which reliably buries millions of Americans in trillions of dollars in debt & graduates them into low paying jobs without good healthcare.”

This self-described socialist is apparently ignorant of the difference between socialism and capitalism—or wants deliberately to deceive us on the true natures of both.

Capitalism logically cannot “take over” higher education, or any other industry, because its government is limited in the scope of its power. Capitalism is by definition individual self-governance and determination under a government limited to protecting the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and property of all individuals.

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