Insurrectionists have breached the Capitol

[Scooter]

[Bicycle Bill]

Vegan food?  Buffalo-horn headdress?
Take him outside and let him graze to his heart's content.

-"BB"-

[Joe Guy]

He's not really a vegan. You can buy organic meat. But he does look like he probably eats more grass than meat.

[Guinevere]

And the Trumpanzees call liberals “snowflakes.”


Exploding irony meter, please.

[eddieq]

[dales]

He's not really a vegan. You can buy organic meat. But he does look like he probably eats more grass than meat.

Prolly smokes a lot of it, too.

[Gob]

Where does America go from here? Is Trump an aberration, or a symptom of a deeper national malady? Can the US be trusted? In four years, will the forces that gave rise to Trump, and the party that overwhelmingly supported him, triumph again? What can be done to prevent that outcome?

[ex-khobar Andy]

She's baaaaaack!



Her 'logic' is that Twitter turning off the Trump spigot is what would happen in China. You know, how Weibo sometimes locks out Xi because they don't like what he's saying.

It's good to know that Ms Sanders hasn't changed and still makes as much sense as she ever did.

[ex-khobar Andy]

For some reason Ozymandias springs to mind this week.

Percy Shelley's version.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

[Scooter]

Have you seen this man? He murdered a Capitol police officer with a fire extinguisher:



Report info here: https://tips.fbi.gov/digitalmedia/aad18 ... GHCWFO9mk4

[Sue U]

Band name: Jerk Division.

The one thing I don't quite understand — for the past four years it has pretty much been all Democrats vs Republicans; Red vs Blue; liberals vs conservatives; 'Patriots' vs 'The Deep State'.   Whatever happened to the independent parties — the Libertarians, for example, or the Greens?

I can understand that, with no one from these parties in the halls of Congress that they have had little to say or do and no forum from which to do so, but isn't there a Libertarian Facebook page or Twitter account on which they could hold forth?

And one would surely think that given the actions of this past week, SOMEONE from within their ranks would have had something to say about things, one way or the other, or to otherwise join the dogpile on Trump and the rest of the MAGA-heads.   But they have been conspicuous by their silence.   It's as if they've completely dropped off the face of the planet.

-"BB"-

Libertarians have always been a political joke, and with the Republicans moving so far to the extremist right the GOP has co-opted the anti-government, anti-regulation laissez-faire capitalist bloc -- not only the voters, but more importantly the donors who purchased the GOP at its 2009 fire sale (Koch brothers, Scaife Foundation, Art Pope, etc.). The Libertarian presidential campaign in 2020 was virtually invisible due to a lack of funding and the selection of no-name candidates, and got only 1.2% of the popular vote (having previously scored 3.3% in 2016 with Gary Johnson and Bill Weld).

On the left, the Green Party and Socialist Party USA combined to both select Howie Hawkins as their presidential candidate. But between the terrible Jill Stein debacle of 2016 and the Bernie Sanders candidacy (actively backed by the DSA) in the Democratic Party, the Dems pulled the vast majority of left-leaning voters for 2020. Given the existential threat to America posed by Trump, the usually-fractious left decided that if the only way to get rid of him was to vote for a bland centrist old white guy, that's what we'd have to do. (Even Angela Davis said to vote for Biden to get rid of Trump.) As a result, the Green/SPUSA alliance barely got 0.3% of the vote.

The "minor" parties left and right have never been much of a factor in American presidential politics (with the exception of Ross Perot in 1992 and arguably Ralph Nader in 2000). Given the hyper-polarization of politics over the last 30 years -- most notably on the right -- and the structurally rigged "two-party system," the American electorate is really forced into binary choices between the "major" capitalist parties, regardless of whether they actually reflect any individual's political views. Speaking only for myself (but I know many who felt the same), Joe Biden was not my first, second, third or even fourth choice for President -- even among Democrats -- and I rarely even vote for Democrats at all in general elections. I could have safely voted for a third party knowing my state would reliably go against Trump. But I voted for Biden to make sure the popular vote margin was as big as possible -- and apparently, so did millions of others.

[liberty]

"May 2, 1967: Two dozen armed Negroes entered the state Capitol at noon today and 10 made their way to the back of the Assembly Chamber before they were disarmed and marched away by the state police.

The Assembly was in session at the time and Speaker Pro Tem Carlos Bee ordered the men removed from the chamber.
Outside the chamber, the police took away the weapons. The men argued they could carry the weapons as long as they were not concealed.

Apparently the fact the weapons were not concealed was the reason the men were able to get as far as the Assembly Chamber before they were disarmed.

After the state police questioned the men, they returned the weapons to them because the intruders had broken no law.

Following their release by the state police, the men left the Capitol and rejoined some companions who remained outside during the incident. They then drove off.

Four or five carloads of the Black Panther group later drove into a service station at 15th and L Streets. Several police officers took the demonstrators to the city jail.

An officer said they had not been charged with any offense, but added: “We’re going to take them all down and check them all out and we’re going to check out all these weapons.”

Outside of the police office ... one man who identified himself as Bobby Seale of Oakland read a page-long statement of the Black Panther Party. It declared: “The Black Panther party for self-defense calls upon the American people in general and the black people in particular to take careful note of the racist California Legislature which is considering legislation aimed at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless at the very same time that racist police agencies throughout the country are intensifying the terror, brutality, murder and repression of black people.”

Source: https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/histo ... 67224.html

[Scooter]

[BoSoxGal]

The joint chiefs have today issued a rare statement reminded military personnel of their constitutional oath to defend against extremism.

This country is on the brink. We are about to find out how deep the cancer goes into the institutions charged with protecting and serving us.

[BoSoxGal]

Some good reading here from Seth Abramson.

https://mobile.twitter.com/SethAbramson ... 8061478912

https://mobile.twitter.com/SethAbramson ... 5281095680

[rubato]

I would just feed him stewed rotten pig meat and tell him it was 'organic'

yrs,
rubato

[ex-khobar Andy]

Have you seen this man? He murdered a Capitol police officer with a fire extinguisher:



Report info here: https://tips.fbi.gov/digitalmedia/aad18 ... GHCWFO9mk4

That's a Chicago Fire Department hat available to anyone on line:

[Sue U]

That's a Chicago Fire Department hat available to anyone on line:

My mistake; seeing it on that guy, I thought CFD stood for Complete Fucking Dipshit.

[Scooter]

This is where you are. This is the sort of bullshit that 75 million Americans believe in.



Your country is fucked.

[BoSoxGal]

How are you feeling about that undefended border these days?