Category Archives: current events

nashville police and the christmas day bombing

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I’m hearing/seeing a lot of variations on this theme:

Unbelievable. Anthony Warner’s girlfriend reported he was making bombs in an RV eighteen months ago and the Nashville Police Department did nothing. If he’d been black or brown, they’d have found a reason to arrest him.

It sounds bad, doesn’t it. Really bad. I mean, Nashville police officers could have prevented the Christmas morning bombing if only they’d done what the police are supposed to do. Right?

Well, no. Here’s the problem with that. Folks are evaluating this case through a lens of known guilt. We KNOW Anthony Warner made a bomb in his RV, drove it into the city, blew it (and himself) up. We’re criticizing the police for not knowing in August of 2019 what we know right now. It’s like complaining that somebody bought the wrong Lotto ticket after seeing what the winning Lotto number is. Okay, that’s an unfortunate analogy; I’m not suggesting detonating a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device is anything like winning the Lotto. What I’m saying is the odds of knowing the winning Lotto number before the drawing is 1 in 292,201,338, but the odds of knowing the winning number after the drawing 1 in 1. We’re basing our understanding of an extremely improbable event after learning the probability was 100%.

Let’s look at what actually happened and evaluate the behavior of the police based on what they knew at the time. On August 21, 2019 MNPD received a report that Pamela Perry was suicidal and sitting on her porch with two handguns. Police arrived and found her with two unloaded pistols. She told the officers the firearms belonged to her boyfriend, Tony Warner. She didn’t want the guns in her house. She also told them Warner was making bombs in an RV parked behind his house, which was located about a mile and a half away. The officers called for an ambulance which took Ms. Perry to a mental health facility for an evaluation.

Based on what they knew at the time, the incident could have ended there. The officers could easily have dismissed Perry’s bomb-making claim as the delusions of a suicidal person. I mean, the police have a long history of ignoring the complaints of folks with mental health issues. Or they could have dismissed her allegation as baseless accusations made by an angry, unstable woman in an unhappy relationship. Again, the police have a long history of not listening to women and dismissing their concerns. I’m not saying that would have been appropriate; I’m just saying knowing only what they knew then nobody would have been surprised if, after the ambulance drove off with Perry, the officers had just continued with their routine patrol.

But they didn’t; they actually followed up on the claim. They spoke to the attorney (who was also the person who reported Perry was suicidal). He told them Warner had spoken about bomb-making and military stuff. So they went to Warner’s home and saw that there was, in fact, an RV parked in back yard behind a fence. There was no answer at the door, and they lacked any exigent circumstance to climb the fence and invade the privacy of a citizen. They didn’t even have enough information to ask a judge to issue a search warrant. All they had was the accusation of a suicidal person who was undergoing a psych evaluation at that very moment. So they informed their supervisors of the incident and sent a report to MNPD’s Hazardous Devices Unit.

The next day the Hazardous Devices Unit checked Warner’s police record — nothing but an old marijuana case (for which he’d been placed on probation). That could have been the end of the matter too. Knowing only what they knew then, nobody would have been surprised if the report was filed away and treated as a low priority. But they didn’t. They got in touch with the FBI, who had no record of Warner.

At that point, knowing only what they knew then, they let it go. All they had was 1) a claim by a possibly mentally ill person that her boyfriend, who had no serious criminal record, who had no known ties to violent groups, who was gainfully employed and owned a home in a decent suburb was making a bomb in an RV, and 2) he actually owned an RV. That’s it. That’s all they knew. There wasn’t any reasonable legal grounds to expend policing resources on any further investigation. So they let it go.

Had he been innocent, that would have been the end of it. And remember, in the US we’re all operating under the presumption of innocence. We don’t have to prove we’re innocent. Totalitarian regimes operate on an assumption of guilt.

But as we know now, Warner wasn’t innocent. He was doing exactly what his former girlfriend said he was doing.

The folks who say, “If he’d been black or brown, they’d have found a reason to investigate and/or arrest him” are correct. If he hadn’t been a suburban white guy with a job, the police might have leaned on him, pressured him, intimidated him. They might have cobbled together some excuse to barge into his home and search his property. But we’ve spent much of this year demonstrating against the casual, routine violation of the civil liberties of people of color. Are folks really suggesting the police should treat everybody as badly as they treat POC?

No, not really. What they’re saying is police should have violated Anthony Warner’s civil rights. Not everybody, just him. Why? Because we know he’s guilty. It’s easy to deny the rights of guilty people.

But here’s a horrible-wonderful thing about civil liberties: they apply to everybody, the guilty as well as the innocent. They have to apply to the guilty in order to protect the innocent, because we don’t always know who is guilty or innocent.

If we want to stop future Anthony Warners, the answer isn’t to give the police more power or to encourage them to ignore civil liberties. If we want to stop bomb-makers, we should make it more difficult to buy and sell (and re-sell) the common ingredients necessary for making bombs. It’s fairly easy to buy the ingredients to make a triacetone triperoxide explosive (I haven’t bothered to check, but I won’t be surprised to learn Warner had purchased significant amounts of hydrogen peroxide and acetone — the primary ingredients of TATP). If we can limit the monthly amount of Sudafed (“Provides Powerful Sinus or Cold Relief!”) an individual can purchase, we can do the same with bomb-making ingredients.

DISCLAIMER: I spent seven years as a criminal defense investigator. I’m not accustomed to defending the police. But I try to be consistent. The Nashville police followed the law. They didn’t let us down. We were let down by legislators and regulators who are in the pockets of pharma-chemical lobbies.

3 things about the texas lawsuit

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To the horror and astonishment of many, Ken Paxton is the actual Attorney General of the State of Texas. Our boy Ken has filed a lawsuit asking the Supreme Court of the United States to basically shitcan the election results in the States of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin. None of those states, you may have noticed, is Texas.

You already KNOW that Comrade Trump and his squad of Orc lawyers have had their asses handed to them in around forty courtrooms where they’ve had the audacity to present their arguments. They’ve been claiming they have gigantic mounds of real honest no-shit evidence of fraud and they’re going to produce it any minute now — but they never get around to showing it. So if you’re a semi-normal functioning adult, you’re probably wondering what’s different about Ken Paxton’s suit.

“Who farted?” Trump’s elite legal team.

Three things are different. First thing: Kenny is straight up admitting they don’t have any evidence of actual voter fraud. Because it’s invisible.

“[T[he media has consistently proclaimed that no widespread voter fraud has been proven. But this observation misses the point. The constitutional issue is not whether voters committed fraud but whether state officials violated the law by systematically loosening the measures for ballot integrity so that fraud becomes undetectable.”

Kenny is basically saying voter fraud is like a fart at a tea party — you can’t see it, but you know it happened. And it happened because Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin were just too fucking stupid to stop it. So he wants SCOTUS to light a match and burn a Republican-scented candle.

“Who farted?” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton

Second thing: Ken Paxton is pimping for a pardon. His own staff in the Texas Attorney General’s office snitched on him, accusing him of corruption, bribery and abuse of office. The FBI is investigating, and things look a wee bit grim for Kenny. But lo, what corrupt light through yonder window breaks? It is the East, and Comrade Trump is the sun. Trump has been offering pardons to his family, friends, and staff like a fishmonger trying to get rid of day-old tuna. Nobody is saying it very loudly, but our boy Kenny has his hand out.

Third thing: didn’t nobody in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, or Wisconsin ask Texas to come fart at their tea party. In fact, Pennsylvania filed a response with the Supreme Court calling Kenny’s suit a “seditious abuse of the judicial process.” (Sedition, by the say, refers to the act of inciting revolt or violence against a lawful authority with the goal of destroying or overthrowing it. It’s one step below treason; the difference between sedition and treason is treason requires an overt act — the difference between farting at a tea party and dropping a turd in the punch bowl.)

Is SCOTUS likely to take this seriously? Almost certainly not (and yeah, it should be ‘certainly not’ but Trump has winkled all the integrity out of the judiciary, so who the hell knows?). But at the heel of the hunt, the Texas lawsuit seems to be nothing more than a corrupt attorney general hoping to please a corrupt president enough to get a pardon.

MAGA, bitches. Smell the Republican roses.

i really don’t know anymore

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For several years I made a habit of checking in on what I like to call ‘Right-Wing Absurdist Nut-Case’ blogs (I call them that because they’re right-wing blogs that attract nut-cases who seem to be engaged in performative absurdist theater). I usually did it once or twice a week, just in order to see what the crazy fringe believed it.

I haven’t done it very often in recent months, mainly because there was no need. What used to be right-wing absurdist nut-cases have now become mainstream Republicans in Congress. But now that Comrade Trump is being pried out of office, I thought I’d revisit the fetid swamplands of RWANC blogs.

Make America Confederate Again!

Here’s what I learned:

  1. Former President Barack Hussein Obama was arrested by federal agents in Hawaii and charged with Espionage. He was apparently working for the People’s Republic of China to overthrow the US government and establish a New World Order.
  2. President-elect Uncle Joe Biden was detained and fitted with an ankle bracelet. Biden was also working with Chinese communists on that New World Order business, in addition to doing massive voter fraud in his spare time.
  3. CIA Director Gina Haspel was arrested and detained — perhaps at Gitmo — on unspecified charges. But unlike Obama and Biden, she’s cooperating with authorities and dishing the dirt on her co-conspirators.
  4. These arrests and detentions apparently mean a) the China coronavirus is a hoax so we don’t have to wear commie masks, and b) the edict issued by Pope Boniface in 1302 was now revoked, so banks can no longer foreclose on people’s homes.

I confess, I was a wee bit shocked by all this. I figured Obama was still a secret Muslim and was trying to overthrow the US government to establish a New Caliphate. I feel like such an idiot now that he’s been arrested for conspiring with China. And Biden? It’s not clear to me why Uncle Joe was detained instead of his son Hunter, but I’m sure there’s a logical explanation for that. However, it never occurred to me that he’d need an ankle bracelet to monitor his movements. I’d assumed the contingent of US Secret Service agents guarding him would be a fairly reliable source of intel on that. Who knew? And Gina Haspell? I’d no idea she was even a suspect in that China voter fraud business. It seems obvious now. And of course, she’d be a snitch. I mean, she’s a girl, right?

Marching to revoke the swelling knob of the Papal Edict of 1302.

I totally understand how these arrests reveal how China sent us a hoax virus that killed (allegedly!) a few hundred thousand crisis actors, but I’m still a tad confused about Pope Boniface’s ‘1302 edict.’ I thought that was your basic papal bull (okay, slight tangent here — a ‘bull’ is an authoritative document issued by the Pope; it’s called a ‘bull’ because the term comes from the Latin bulla, meaning — and I am NOT making this up — “a round swelling, knob”, which is the description given to the physical seal used to stamp the edict in order to make it official. Got that? Okay, good) stating that a person can only be sure of salvation if they belong to the Church AND in order to belong to the Church you have to submit to the Pope. (Yes, there are LOTS of round, swelling knob jokes to be made here, but c’mon this IS SERIOUS BUSINESS here.) But apparently, unknown to me (and, as far as I can tell, unknown to the Church), the Pope also claimed ‘dominion’ (that name — coincidence or conspiracy?) over the air and all the birds within it, plus the sea and all its creatures, and the land including all the living things and structures on it. So by revoking that edict (which was done by arresting Obama, I guess) it became illegal for banks to foreclose on somebody’s home because they defaulted on a home loan? I don’t know, but I’m sure it makes sense.

I think the Supreme Court is supposed (or maybe legally obligated) to take the 1302 Papal bull into account when they decide whether or not to agree to hear the argument made by Texas that the 2020 election should be given to Comrade Trump because Texas doesn’t like the manner in which the states of Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin held their elections.

Yeah, okay, well, there it is. If the old school right-wing absurdist nut-cases have become mainstream Republicans, then the new right-wing absurdist nut-cases were forced to become more right-wing, more absurdist, and more nut-casier than they were before. And to my horror, they’ve succeeded.

technically, it wasn’t an axe

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The American People: You knew he was an axe murderer during the primary.

Senate GOP: Nobody expected him to win.

TAP: But he did, and you said nothing.

SGOP: We respect the will of the voters. Mostly. Some of the time.

TAP: You helped elect an axe murderer

SGOP: Technically, it wasn’t an axe. More of a hatchet.

TAP: Axe murderer, hatchet murderer, what’s the difference?

SGOP: An axe requires two hands, whereas a hatchet can be wielded with only…

TAP: IT WAS A RHETORICAL QUESTION.

SGOP: Oh. We’re just simple Republican Senators. We don’t use big fancy East Coast elite words like…

TAP: You elected a chopping tool murderer.

SGOP: Well, the American people did. Elections have consequences.

TAP: For the last four years you’ve supported an axe…a chopping tool murderer.

SGOP: Not all of us. Some of us remained silent. Nobly silent.

TAP: You are all complicit. You didn’t try to stop him from murdering people with his…you know, chopping tool.

SGOP: Many of us felt he sometimes went a bit too far.

TAP: TOO FAR?

SGOP: We often said he should tone it down, be more presidential.

TAP: He tried to axe murde…use a chopping tool to murder the president of Ukraine.

SGOP: Nobody murdered the president of Ukraine. That’s fake news.

TAP: He TRIED to. He had his chopping tool in his hand when he asked the president of Ukraine for ‘a favor’.

SGOP: But that favor wasn’t granted and yet no axe murder took place. Nor was there any other chopping, hewing, lopping, hacking, severing, or cleaving-related death. No harm, no foul, that’s the law.

TAP: He was impeached for attempting to chopping tool murder the Ukrainian president, and you acquitted him.

SGOP: There wasn’t enough evidence. Besides, we believed he’d learned a valuable lesson and would stop threatening people with an axe. Or other chopping implement.

TAP: HE TRIED TO AXE MURDER DEMOCRACY.

SGOP: Well. But the thing is, he didn’t.

TAP: HE’S STILL TRYING. HE HAS A MOTHERFUCKING AXE AND HE’S SWINGING IT.

SGOP: We need to give him time to come to terms with possibly maybe having been defeated in the recent election. You can’t expect him to be happy about this. In time he’ll graciously accept the possibility of defeat.

TAP: We need to take away his axe NOW. And all his chopping implements. We need to remove him from the White House.

SGOP: That will happen. If it’s determined that he actually lost the election, then we…

TAP: HE LOST THE ELECTION A MONTH AGO.

SGOP: But the Electoral College hasn’t voted yet, so…

TAP: HE’S KILLING PEOPLE RIGHT NOW.

SGOP: Not with an axe. Or other chopping implement.

TAP: He’s doing NOTHING about the Axe Virus Pandemic.

SGOP: Fake news. He stopped the importation of Chinese hatchets. And he’s radically cut the time it takes to produce a vaccine. See what we did there? Cut? Axe? Get it? Hah, we are a hoot.

TAP: This isn’t funny. People are dying.

SGOP: You people have no sense of humor. Bad enough you try to keep people from saying, “Merry Christmas” but now you…

TAP: You need to DO something. This madman has to be stopped.

SGOP: We will. We will act swiftly and deliberately, just as soon as we get back from the holiday recess. Merry Christmas!

stop playing the sap

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There’s a pivotal scene in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon where Sam Spade stands up to the beautiful but murderous blond Brigid O’Shaughnessy. “I won’t play the sap for you,” he says.

I’m waiting — hoping — for Democrats to say that to Republicans. The situations are similar. There’s a prize; an election in one instance, a jewel-encrusted statue of a bird in the other. Somebody is attempting to steal the prize; Trump in our case, Brigid O’Shaughnessy with the falcon. The attempted theft is abetted by others; Republicans in Congress, Kaspar Gutman and his international band of crooks. And there’s somebody trying to stop the theft; Uncle Joe Biden, Sam Spade.

Even though it clear the theft is almost certainly not going to work, the crooks continue to try to finagle it. Despite the fact that he lost the election, Comrade Trump is still trying to break democracy, even while grudgingly agreeing to a transition. Despite the fact that Brigid O’Shaughnessy killed Spade’s partner, she continued to try to get Spade to trust her and help her steal the Falcon. She wants him to help her get away with the crime.

“You’re a liar. Don’t brag about it. Was there any truth at all in that yarn?”

There are already political pundits suggesting Democrats need to let Trump get away with trying to steal the election. They say Democrats should find a way to ‘work with’ the complicit Republicans. They say Democrats need to be the adults in the room, that Democrats need to meet Republicans halfway, that Democrats should try to understand how angry and disappointed Republicans are.

Basically, they’re saying Democrats should play the sap. Well, fuck those guys. Fuck them in the neck.

Democrats should NOT be vindictive. I’ll agree with that. But neither should they be sensitive to the feelings of a political party that spent the last four years telling Democrats, “Fuck your feelings.” We shouldn’t be looking for retribution, but we should enforce norms and laws. The argument that holding Trump or his family accountable for any crimes they may have committed would only further inflame partisanship is bullshit. The notion that we can only heal and unite the nation by overlooking the transgressions they’ve committed is bullshit. The idea that Sam Spade can trust Brigid O’Shaughnessy is bullshit.

We played the sap with Nixon. We did it with Reagan and we did it with George W. Bush. What did we get by playing the sap? Trump.

“I won’t play the sap for you.”

I want Democrats to play that pivotal scene with Republicans.

Dems: Well, if you get a good break, you’ll be out of the White House for 20 years and you can come back to me then. I hope they don’t hang you, precious, by that sweet neck. Yes, angel, I’m gonna send you over. The chances are you’ll get off with life. That means if you’re a good girl, you’ll be out in 20 years. I’ll be waiting for you. If they hang you, I’ll always remember you.
Republicans: Don’t, don’t say it even in fun. Ha, ha, ha. Oh, I was frightened for a minute. I really thought…You do such wild and unpredictable things.
Dems: Don’t be silly. You’re taking the fall.
Republicans: You’ve been playing with me. Just pretending you care, to trap me like this. You didn’t care at all. You don’t love me!
Dems: I won’t play the sap for you!
Republicans: Oh you know it’s not like that. You can’t say that.
Dems: Did you ever fight square with me for half an hour at a stretch since I’ve known you?
Republicans: You know down deep in your heart and in spite of anything I’ve done I love democracy.
Dems: I don’t care who loves who! I won’t play the sap for you. I won’t walk in Hillary’s – and I don’t know how many other’s – footsteps. You killed democracy and you’re going over for it.
Republicans: How can you do this to me? Surely, democracy wasn’t so much to you as… [crying]
Dems: When a man’s democracy is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of it, it was your democracy, and you’re supposed to do something about it. And it happens we’re in the politics business. Well, when one of your organization gets killed, it’s – it’s bad business to let the killer get away with it. Bad all around. Bad for every democracy everywhere.
Republicans: You don’t expect me to think that these things you’re saying are sufficient reasons for sending me to the…
Dems: [interrupting] Wait’ll I’m through. Then you can talk. I’ve no earthly reason to think I can trust you. If I do this and get away with it, you’ll have something on me that you can use whenever you want to. Since I’ve got something on you, I couldn’t be sure that you wouldn’t put a hole in me some day. All those are on one side. Maybe some of them are unimportant, I won’t argue about that. But look at the number of them. And what have we got on the other side? All we’ve got is that maybe you love democracy and maybe I love you.
Republicans: You know whether you love me or not.
Dems: Maybe I do. Well, I’ll have some rotten nights after I’ve sent you over, but that will pass. If all I’ve said doesn’t mean anything to you, then forget it and we’ll make it just this: I won’t because all of me wants to, regardless of consequences, and because you counted on that with me the same as you counted on that with all the others. I won’t play the sap for you.

Democracy. It’s the stuff dreams are made of.

coin in his pocket

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Four days ago I thought there was a chance that Comrade Trump’s refusal to concede the election could be a deliberate attempt to break democracy. I was wrong.

I’m not saying Trump loves democracy; he doesn’t. I’m saying he doesn’t care enough about democracy to do the work necessary to break it. Trump isn’t stupid. Wait…strike that. He’s fairly ignorant, but…wait, strike that too. He’s massively ignorant, profoundly and deeply ignorant, extensively and exhaustively ignorant. But he’s got a sort of feral business-oriented shrewdness that alerts him when he’s about to lose or when he has something to gain.

We’ve actually witnessed this several times. He’s got a business that’s about to fail in a spectacular way, and boom he’s got bankruptcy lawyers thick as ticks in every possible court making sure other folks get hurt while he walks away with some coin in his pocket. He’s got a building about to finish construction, and boom he’s got a wolfpack of carnivorous lawyers finding ways to stiff his contractors and leave him with a bit more coin in his pocket. He’s about to lose a lawsuit, and boom he’s got a squadron of legal Uruk-hai negotiating a settlement that will allow him to escape responsibility and keep some coin in his pocket.

Comrade President Donald J. Trump is all about coin in the pocket.

“Help me fight voter fraud and, you know, keep America great and all that. Gimme money.”

I feel pretty confident that’s what Trump is doing now. He knows he lost the election, so he’s turned loose the lawyers — partly in a desperate but lazy attempt to find some sleazy way to stay in office, but mostly making sure Trump walks out of the White House with a bit of coin in his pocket.

Trump, his ethically challenged brood of kids, his Congressional lickspittles, and his army of lawyers have been inundating his much-aggrieved citizen-supporters with fundraising emails, begging for money to ‘stop the Left from ripping power away from the American People.’ They ask for contributions to the Official Election Defense Fund which, contributors are told, will “increase your impact by 1000%.” It’s an OFFICIAL fund and increases impact…impact…by a full one thousand percent. Who wouldn’t want to get in on that?

Ignore the fine print.

It’s just that this is Comrade Trump. Who just lost an election. This is Trump on his way out of DC. And what does Trump want? To put a wee bit of coin in his pocket.

Careful readers (and c’mon, how many Trump supporters are careful readers?) would note the fine print contained at the bottom of the linked page. The fine print the lawyers put together to keep Trump and themselves from committing crimes. The fine print that tells contributors that 60% of their contribution (up to US$5000) goes to a political action committee called ‘Save America’. That money can be used in just about any way Trump wants; he can contribute it to other politicians, he can pay his kids, he can use it to weigh down his pockets. But wait…there’s more. A full 40% of money over the $5000 legal limit (up to $35,500) goes to the Republican National Committee’s operating account. The other 60% will go to offset the costs of recounts OR other legal expenses.

In other words, if one of his supporters contributes $5001, only sixty cents would go toward stopping the Left from ripping power away from the American People; five thousand dollars will go toward filling Donald Trump’s very big pockets, forty cents will go to the RNC.

The longer Trump draws out this post-election drama — the longer he can keep his followers believing he’s really fighting for them — the more coin he can stuff in his pocket. This isn’t about breaking democracy; it’s about keeping the grift alive as long as possible. Hell, he can keep this grift going even after he’s left DC and established himself at Mar-a-Lago. He can tell his believers they’re funding his 2024 re-election campaign. A lot of them will fall for it.

Credit where it’s due: Comrade Trump’s priorities have never wavered. He is now, just as he was before, just as he always will be, about coin in the pocket.

breaking democracy

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I’m not an alarmist by nature. I’m not one of those people who worry a lot. I’ve never spent much time fretting about things over which I have little or no control. I can’t recall ever waking up because I was worried about something.

Until this morning. I woke up a little after 0500 this morning, worried. Why? Because Donald Trump is trying to break democracy — and I genuinely don’t know how alarmed we should be about it.

The more rational part of my brain is saying, “Dude, chill the fuck out. This is Donald Trump we’re talking about. Ain’t no way this guy could pull that off. He’s too stupid and too lazy to break democracy.” And I believe that to be true. If it was just Trump, I wouldn’t be worrying. But Trump has surrounded himself with venal, amoral, self-serving, dishonest, corrupt assholes. In other words, he’s surrounded himself with people just like himself, but smarter, more competent, and more energetic.

Even with that information, I wasn’t really worried. And then a friend — Sue Wilkinson, living in what I like to think is a small idyllic village in England — alerted me to this:

It’s a long video — sixteen minutes. If you skipped right over it and kept reading, I understand. But I’d encourage you to make the time to watch the whole thing at some point. It will scare the holy shit right out of you, but watch it anyway.

Because this is a thing we actually NEED to think about. Trump is actually PULLING THIS SHIT RIGHT NOW. He’s refusing to concede the election. He’s encouraging his followers to disrupt the election process and reject the results. Even though he has no evidence of fraud, he’s suing various states to overturn their election results. He’s actually accusing state governments — some of which are governed by his own political party — of committing crimes. He’s trying to stop the states he lost from certifying their results. And he’s got his pet Attorney General, Bill Barr, to ignore the Justice Department’s longstanding tradition of staying out of election investigations until after the results are in and certified.

But there’s more. Trump’s head of the General Services Administration has refused to sign the paperwork releasing the money and resources for Uncle Joe Biden’s transition team. In fact, throughout the federal government, Trump’s political appointees have ordered their staffs NOT to work with the Biden transition team. It’s like every Trump appointee in the entire government has their fingers stuck in their ears so they won’t have to hear that they’re out of a job. They are deliberately dodging their responsibilities to the America people.

And there’s still more. While he’s pulling all that other selfish undemocratic shit, Trump is also actively dismantling the US national security system. Yesterday Trump fired his third Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper (who replaced Trump’s second SecDef, Patrick Shanahan, who replaced Trump’s first SecDef, James Mattis). When asked about the possibility of being fired, Esper said this:

“I could have a fight over anything, and I could make it a big fight, and I could live with that. Why? Who’s going to come in behind me? It’s going to be a real ‘yes man.’ And then God help us.”

To be clear, Esper was about 75% a ‘yes man’. Still got his ass fired. Lots of people expect Trump to also fire Christopher Wray, his third FBI Director (after Andrew McCabe, who replaced James Comey — and it’s worth remember that the FBI Director is appointed for a ten year term in order to keep the director separate from politics). Trump is also said to be considering firing CIA Director Gina Haspel (who is, that’s right, his third CIA Director).

None of this is a surprise. A lot of us thought this was a possibility. Even a probability. But even knowing that Trump was likely to pull this shit, I still wasn’t really worried. Until that video taught me something I didn’t know. I knew that if the election mess ended up in the House of Representatives, they could hold a contingency election. They could ignore everything that happened before — the popular vote, the electoral vote — and elect a new president all on their own. But I DID NOT KNOW how a contingency election worked.

It works like this: there are 50 states with 435 voting members — 232 Democrats, 197 Republicans, and a single Libertarian (5 seats are vacant). Each state gets a single vote. The individual members of the House vote to determine how their state will vote. For example, the 53 members of California’s delegation would vote to determine how California’s single vote will be cast. Montana’s three members of Congress decide how Montana’s single vote will be cast. Nebraska’s three members of Congress decide how Nebraska would vote. It doesn’t matter that California has eight times as many representatives as Montana and Nebraska combined, and represents nearly 40 million US citizens, whereas Nebraska and Montana represents a total of about three million. What counts is that Montana and Nebraska would get two Republican votes and California would get one Democratic vote. Democrats may have more members of Congress and represent more citizens, but Republicans control more individual states.

So IF Trump and his people fuck up the post-election process to the point where the decision has to be made by the House of Representatives, a minority of Republicans in the House could literally override the electoral college vote and the popular vote and install Donald Trump as POTUS. That’s fucked up, right there.

That could actually happen. I’ve no idea how likely or unlikely it is. I’d like to believe it’s highly improbable. But I believed Trump’s election in the first place was highly improbable. The thing is, it COULD happen. I’ve no doubt at all that Trump wouldn’t hesitate to break democracy if he thought it would help him. And IF it happens — IF Trump somehow retains the presidency — it would shatter the notion of representative democracy into thousands of tiny misshapen pieces. It would probably be impossible to put them back together again.

That’s why I was awake at five o’clock in the morning.

donny and the joyful finger

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I wish I knew who took this photograph. I saw it this morning and I had an immediate emotional response to it. It’s a powerful photo. It’s not art, but it documents something critically important about yesterday’s announcement that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had won the 2020 election.

The finger is a gesture that’s been around since the Greeks and Romans. It’s a universal gesture of contempt, of anger, of disrespect, of defiance. It means Fuck you, it means Go fuck yourself, it means Shove this up your ass. It’s NOT a polite gesture.

We’ve seen this gesture a lot during the Trump administration. We’ve often seen it at Trump rallies, when Comrade Trump would point out the ‘fake news’ journalists. For these Trump supporters, the finger is an expression of rage and resentment and hatred. It’s Fuck you for who you are and for not supporting Trump.

We’ve also seen it used by folks opposed to Trump. Because Trump rarely appears in front of people who don’t support him, the finger has most often been displayed metonymically (yes, that’s a real word). People give the finger to some thing or object that represents Trump (like one of his properties). In this sense, it’s usually an expression of defiance as well as anger. It’s case of Fuck you and what you stand for.

There was, of course, the case of Juli Briskman, who was famously photographed in 2017 giving the finger to Trump in his motorcade as they passed her on her bike. She said,

“It was just sort of like, here I am on my bike. I’ve got nothing, right? This is pretty much the only thing I had to express my opinion. He wasn’t going to hear me through bullet-proof glass… So that was pretty much how I could say what I wanted to say, right?”

Ms. Briskman was subsequently fired from her job as a government contractor for taking advantage of the opportunity to say what she wanted to say. Her finger was an expression of Fuck you, you don’t represent me or my values. Happily, she was later elected to the Loudon County Board of Supervisors. There’s a bit of poetic justice for you.

The finger in all its manifestations has been a constant during the Trump years. But take another look at that first photograph. Look at the faces of the people. Notice the absence of anger. That’s what makes this photo important, I think. This finger isn’t an expression of “Fuck you, I HATE you, get out!” This is a joyful Fuck you, Donny. This is an expression of “I’m SO happy you’re leaving, now you can just fuck right off.”

To me, the the spontaneous celebrations were the most amazing and delicious aspects of yesterday. The unplanned, impromptu eruptions of joy and happiness and relief. It was an organic response to the release of four years of tension. It was the dancing and the laughing and the shared sense that years of darkness and horror and sickness and death and despair were giving way to a brighter future. Yesterday we weren’t just saying Fuck you Donald Trump, we were also saying Fuck you to ugliness and racism and hate and Covid and the constant weight of the gloom of Trump.

Yes, there’s a shit-ton of work to do. Yes, there are going to be ugly times ahead. But man, let’s not forget how we felt yesterday and how many of us still feel this morning. Let’s hang on to that joy. Joy is nourishment and it will sustain us through the coming months and years.

EDITORIAL NOTE: The photograph was taken by AP photographer Evan Vucci. Thanks to Patrick Power for alerting me to this.