Busy today. Use this space to check in if you’ve gotten any responses from your Senators or Congresspeople.
Has anyone spoken with staff from Murkowski or Collins’ offices?
This is what I’m talking about
From reader No One of Consequence:
As luck would have it, I was fortunate enough to be ahead of this curve. I called Senators Grassley and Earnst (ETA: on last Friday). I prefaced the reason for my call with the fact that I was proud of both of my senators for not siding on with the Electoral Results Deniers, and that indeed they should not have. I then followed with my belief that the events of Wednesday provided evidence of a clear and present danger to the Country in the person of Donald J Trump, and that he should be lawfully removed from office as quickly as possible. I left my name, address and the fact that I am a born-and-raised Iowan.
My last call to their local offices was to express my belief that their actions and votes in the most recent impeachment trial were unconscionable, and I was disgusted with my Senatorial representation.
After you call, please use this thread to note how the offices reacted, if you got a reaction. CaseyL voices a concern that I have heard a lot:
I don’t know if that is a rule or SOP, but the rule of thumb for years has been, there is no point calling a Representative or a Senator if you’re not in their district/state. Their policies affect all of us, for pity’s sake.
You have to call your own representation because American democracy, refreshingly, works more or less exactly as intended. Representatives represent their district and only their district. The only exception is the few people with enough money to get the Congressperson or Senator’s personal attention, and that does not describe you or me. If you call someone who does not represent you, you will waste your time and annoy their staff.
I’ll post a Max pic when I see more reports in the comments. Yes, that’s extortion. No, you can’t send a screenshot to Bad Legal Takes.
Someone should do something
Hi folks, for those who don’t know me, I’m a relic of the blog’s George W. Bush era. Someone unwisely said my name three times and here I am. Apparently the republic is in trouble again and we need you people to light some fires under Congressional asses.
I’ll be honest, calling Congress feels inadequate at a moment like this. Insofar as the Trumpist mob has any plan, they seem to want some combination of the Argentine dirty war, the Handmaid’s Tale, and Rwanda. If a Republican leader knowingly signs onto that then there’s no reaching them with phone calls.
However, I can assure you that not every Republican wants to wear an armband and pick up a machete. You have never Trumpers like the Lincoln Project, Amash, Walsh, etc of course. And yes, while that whole crew could fit in a laundromat, you can tell that in-party disunity stings by how bitterly Trump cultists loathe them. Among Republicans who stayed loyal, you can see that plenty of them put up with Trump exclusively for the judges. Well, the judges are confirmed now. The tax cut’s passed and signed. Since Biden won, Trump’s value for the Party has depreciated faster than a 500-Guilder tulip.
Why do you suppose Republicans are pleading for unity now? They don’t want national unity and they never did. We all know they’d gladly rule with a plurality like they won a landslide. Republicans want “unity” because Republicans are divided. Mitch and his old guard loathe Trump’s drooling maniacs, and Trump loathes Mitch so much that he threw his “$2,000 checks” grenade into the Georgia elections just to spite him. The party is at each other’s throats and eunuchs like Rubio are begging Democrats to help calm things down. Party leadership is desperately scared that party members who want to jettison the Trumpers will find a voice.
So why not help them? Obviously, wavering Republicans will only waver as long as Democrats stand together. I think we can count on that for the moment, but we should encourage it anyway. Call the Democrats who represent you and demand a full and relentless accountability for violent insurgents and those who aid them. However, if you have a Republican Congressperson or Senator(s), then you have an even more important job. Trumper maniacs are certainly mobbing the phone lines right now, but they always do that. What your average GOP office doesn’t hear is voices urging them to do the right thing. Get on the phone with a Republican’s office and urge them to stand up for American democracy, and I promise your call will have an impact.
If you make a call, please note how staff responds to you. I will post a thread later to collect how offices are responding, especially Republicans who might back an impeachment vote. We can use that information to target specific officials for follow-up calls.
If you’ve never called a Congressional office before, here is an old thread telling you how to do it. The only things I would add are:
1. the Senate switchboard is (202) 224-3121.
2. DC offices are likely in turmoil across the board. I would suggest using Google to find the number for your Representative / Senator’s local office(s) and call those instead.
What about email? Don’t use email. Pressure groups use online forms to send emails in batches of thousands at a time, and no one ever reads it. Unless you have the private address of someone in the office your email will go straight to the junk bin. Use the phone.
GOP Death Cult Open Thread: DC-Area (Social Media) Traffic Alert
New: The disparate tribes of MAGA Nation — Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, Infowars fanatics, Groypers, Proud Boys, white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and die-hard Trump fans — are promoting an impromptu, chaotic MAGApalooza rally in DC on Saturday.https://t.co/CMzrlNykVU
— Tina Nguyen (@tina_nguyen) November 11, 2020
From the Washington Post‘s ‘Local’ section:
GOP Death Cult Open Thread: DC-Area (Social Media) Traffic AlertPost + Comments (102)
They Promised Me There Would Be No Math…
This data update from the Gray Lady’s Upshot team (one of the good silos there) gives me hope–not (just) on the election, but for America as well. It says Trump’s problem isn’t simply, or even mostly the gender gap. Rather:
The more meaningful story in this race is the 2016-to-2020 election gap. Polls suggests that almost all groups are moving away from President Trump relative to how they voted in 2016.
The chart accompanying the article is fascinating–plotting different demographic subgroups in 2016 against their preferences now. Everyone including white guys, and men in general, have moved away from Trump. Not far enough in many cases, to be sure–the “all men” group has slid from just over 56% Trump in 2016 to (eyeballing here) about 52% now. But a 4 point shift in half the population ain’t chump change either.
Bigger moves become apparent in finer grained segments:
To see how the 2020 campaign has played out, however, you don’t have to look at independents or women in the suburbs — you can look at almost any group in the electorate.
Men, women, independents, suburban men and women, people 65 and over — people in these groups all report less support for Mr. Trump in 2020 than they did in 2016. But so do registered voters in rural America. Nationscape data reveals that among voters in rural America, men report moving away from Mr. Trump by six points (from 66 percent in 2016 to 60 percent in 2020), and women by four, from 54 percent to 50 percent.
The election will soon show us if these moves are enough to begin to rebuild American democracy. But even as we wait, these numbers help me with my despair over the state of the Republic. Yeah, the Trumpanzees are loud, violent, and unrelenting in their willingness to impose their foulness on the rest of us. But they are a shrinking minority: exposure to Trump over the last four years has persuaded more and more of our fellow citizens that he–and they–are unacceptable.
That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
Chat about whatever.
Image: William Hogarth, Canvassing for votes from the Humours of an Election series, 1754-5
They Promised Me There Would Be No Math…Post + Comments (232)
Yes. They Really Are Assholes.
Did what amounts to a symbolic bit of electioneering today–a lit drop in Salem, NH. I haven’t been nearly as active-on-the-streets as I usually am, for a variety of reasons; it’s been money and a bit of post-carding for me.
So this was my first real on-the-ground experience outside the Brookline, MA bubble–which really is a bubble. Our politics basically runs from tote-bag liberal to unreconstructed lefty, and that’s fine by me. (Like a lot of town-governed-towns, actual local politics is run by a small, deeply embedded cabal and it’s just as tricky as you might imagine, but that’s for a different post.)
New Hampshire, though it’s been pretty blue for a while now still has plenty of the Hamshirtucky that made it a rock-ribbed/crazy right wing state for a long time. So when we showed up at the local HQ in Salem NH, we were met by a wall of Trump signs and some very loud MAGATs, using a bullhorn to taunt Democrats for all kinds of things.
One of the weirder moments in that monologue, by the way, was a sudden diversion into California mandating all-electric cars by 2035, as the highly informed and judicious asshole with the bullhorn complained about the quality of CA’s current grid. He then asserted CA is a shithole of state, and as a scion of the place, I wondered what it was that so upset him: the weather? The food? The quality of higher ed in the state? Etc. Take it from me folks: New Hamster has its virtues–but it’s not going to win most competitions with the Golden State.
But I digress.
What struck me was the purity of the demonstration: this was simply an expression of assholery. This guy, at least, had some stamina, and he was a blessedly silent performer:
He was doing his Trump dance for at least three hours that I could check, so give the man some points for persistence.
But this captures the tone of what was being bullhorn across the street:
The good news is that all this involved a fair amount of local resources: ten or dozen people (none masked, of course), lots of signs, lots of energy. The D’s had three or four folks at the HQ–and all the volunteers (and there were a bunch) were out canvassing and dropping literature. The Trumpanzees went for what really amounts to political masturbation.
So yeah, it was uncomfortable, and it was intended to be so: these scumbags wanted to make some other folks lives miserable, and between the horns (some truckers driving big rigs really enjoyed leaning on theirs) and the blather, they did a pretty good job.
Except for the fact that the Democratic GOTV effort was completely undisturbed.
But besides being forced to come to some conclusions about how these losers were raised, it was a reminder that these are not people with whom one can respectfully disagree. From the top down, they are performative jerks–on their best days.
Oh–and they cheat all the time, large and small. One more photo (ETA: actually loaded the photo this time):
What you’re seeing is a Trump flyer, placed in a mailbox. As everyone here likely knows (at least everyone who has canvassed in the last many decades) that’s a big no-no. Just last night in our volunteer training Zoom, they told us at least three times that it is a federal crime to do that. We saw Trump leaflets in each of the open mailboxes we passed.
Admittedly, when the tally of Trump-era crimes are totted up, this won’t rank high. But to me that’s what’s telling: there is simply no rule, no matter how minor, that they won’t break.
Fuck ’em. Let’s roll their sorry asses through Tuesday. Even my cup of coffee agrees:
This thread.
It is open for anything.
Image: Jan Pietersz. Saenredam, The Fool, between 1590 and 1600.
“Outside Agitators”: It Was Right-Wing Boogaloo Bois That Burned That Minneapolis Police Station
Charges: A Boogaloo Bois fired on Minneapolis’ Third Precinct with an AK-47-style gun and screamed “Justice for Floyd” as he ran away, in part of a coordinated attack by the far-right anti-government group during unrest over the death of George Floyd. https://t.co/j7YMiS4HKG
— Star Tribune (@StarTribune) October 23, 2020
I lived in that neighborhood, & it was obvious to anyone who knew it that people leading violence & destruction were not from that neighborhood. Glad to see the FBI arrest dangerous criminals. Now, I hope the media reports that what happened in MSP was led by white supremacists https://t.co/gmZRtfnD2X
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) October 23, 2020
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune:
… A sworn affidavit by the FBI underlying the complaint reveals new details about a far-right anti-government group’s coordinated role in the violence that roiled through civil unrest over Floyd’s death while in police custody.
Ivan Harrison Hunter, a 26-year-old from Boerne, Texas, is charged with one count of interstate travel to incite a riot for his alleged role in ramping up violence during the protests in Minneapolis on May 27 and 28. According to charges, Hunter, wearing a skull mask and tactical gear, shot 13 rounds at the south Minneapolis police headquarters while people were inside. He also looted and helped set the building ablaze, according to the complaint, which was filed Monday under seal.
Unrest flared throughout Minneapolis following Floyd’s death, which was captured on a bystander’s cellphone video, causing Gov. Tim Walz to activate the Minnesota National Guard. As police clashed with protesters, Hunter and other members of the Boogaloo Bois discussed in private Facebook messages their plans to travel to Minneapolis and rally at the Cub Foods across from the third precinct, according to federal court documents. One of the people Hunter coordinated with posted publicly to social media: “Lock and load boys. Boog flags are in the air, and the national network is going off,” the complaint states.
Two hours after the police precinct was set on fire, Hunter texted with another Boogaloo member in California, a man named Steven Carrillo.
“Go for police buildings,” Hunter told Carrillo, according to charging documents.
“I did better lol,” he replied. A few hours earlier, Carrillo had killed a Federal Protective Services Officer in Oakland, Calif., according to criminal charges filed against him in California…