U.S. National

t can happen four ways.

But one thing is clear: No viable democracy can endure 14 full days ruled by a deranged madman who’s just instigated an armed fascist coup attempt.

Reports from long-time staff and close personal associates working within the White House indicate that Trump is dangerously “out of his mind” and “has lost it.”

Trump has access to nuclear codes that could end all human life on Earth.

As a fear-mongering fascist, he’s just incited the storming of the House and Senate, an armed assault aimed at the processing of the Electoral College votes for president.

At least one person was shot dead while invading the Congress. Three others died under varied circumstances. Countless more who rioted without masks were certainly infected with Trump’s virus, and will soon pour into hospitals that can’t handle them.

Trump could easily instigate further such coup attempts, especially by creating a fake “Reichstag Fire” disaster.

Why did Capitol Police stand down for this violent invasion? If the rioters were citizens of color, they’d have shot them all.

The Republicans may lose majority control of the United States Senate if they are unable to pick up one of the last two seats, both in Georgia where automatic run-off elections will be held Tuesday, January 5th.

The Republicans have secured 50 of the 100 total US Senate seats leaving them one seat shy of a majority. In Georgia, the two US Senate races were so close last November that local laws triggered automatic run-off elections scheduled for January 5th. 

With the two Senate races neck and neck, voting rights activists have been fighting to get hundreds of thousands of disenfranchised voters back on track to vote.

The races will impact the Senate in the coming years since with Biden as president, if Republicans are not able to pick up another Senate seat, Vice President Kamala Harris will be able to cast a tie-breaking vote in the Senate overpowering the Republican voting bloc for votes along party lines.

Trump’s team filed multiple lawsuits in battleground states alleging voter fraud even though, according to most major news outlets, Presidential Candidate Joe Biden won.

he whole world is watching Georgia’s US Senate runoff elections. Set to finish January 5th, the elections will decide who controls the balance of power in the pivotal next US Congress.

With them comes a “hidden” down-ballot Georgia Public Service Commission race that hovers over America’s last two big nuke reactors … and that could upend the whole Senatorial outcome.

Hundreds of millions of dollars are pouring into the state. Every nanosecond of radio/TV time has been bought and overpaid for.

The preliminary battles have raged over voter registration and turnout, precinct closures, misinformation about where people can vote, intimidation of citizens waiting in line during early voting, rejection of “flawed” ballots, and much more.

But they all pale before one issue: will there be a fair and accurate vote count?

The answer depends on whether grassroots citizen groups can muster the expertise, the staff, and the clout to make sure ballots are correctly marked, properly scanned, and accurately counted — and then rightly recounted.

It’s a decisive undertaking.

Vermont’s only prison for women is, by all accounts, a ghastly place. The facility was never intended to be a prison. The facility was never intended to house women. Built as a men’s detention center in the 1970s, the facility is inadequate to provide what any reasonable person would consider adequate health and safety conditions for as many as 160 incarcerated women.

The Vermont women’s prison, formally known as the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility (CRCF) in South Burlington, came into being in August 2011 as a political effort to reduce the state budget pushed by then Governor Peter Shumlin, a military-industrial Democrat who also supported basing the nuclear-capable F-35 in Winooski. Shumlin pushed both projects with grand promises of benefits that have yet to be fulfilled.

Being a careful proofreader, I provided some volunteer assistance to Mayor Pete:

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Pete Buttigieg <info@wintheera.com>
Date: Wed, Dec 16, 2020
Subject: Thank you

Smedley Butler won’t be around next year to save us.

       The former Marine Corps general was offered a ton of money in 1933 to murder newly-elected president Franklin Roosevelt and stage a fascist coup.

Armed with the then-huge sum of $3 million, infamous billionaires funded a “Banker’s Plot” with 500,000 armed thugs set to erect a corporate dictatorship atop FDR’s grave.

Butler had led US troops throughout Latin America during the “Dollar Diplomacy” 1920s. He crushed grassroots uprisings and installed brutal dictators. America’s richest barons now wanted him to do the same thing here.

But they chose the wrong guy. In shocking Congressional hearings, Butler blew the whistle on (until then) US history’s best-funded attempted coup. “War,” he warned, “is a racket.”

The super-rich plotters hotly denied Butler’s account. None of them went to prison.

Butler won’t be around next year to expose the Trump coup attempt, already in progress. He won’t have to. It’s already visible for all to see.

But can we stop it?

See Trump flail.

He dreams the Supremes will hand him the presidency. (They could.)

Or that a closed session of Congress will flip him the Electoral College. (It could.)

Each would be a coup against American democracy. Because no matter how loud he screams ELECTION THEFT, Trump lost the 2020 popular vote by more than six million. Only two US incumbents — Hoover and Carter — have lost by more.

The reasons are threefold: paper ballots, Millennials, and what passes for “socialism” in this country.

Paper ballots accounted for as much as 90% of the 2020 totals.

If those votes had been cast on easily-hacked electronic voting machines, Trump could’ve won in a landslide.

The paper ballots came mostly by mail, because COVID made voting in person unsafe.

But the demand for hand-cast/hand-counted paper ballots has been at the core of the Election Protection movement since Florida 2000. Getting a paper ballot to all registered voters is now the gold standard for our democratic elections.

In June 2019, Joe Biden promised wealthy so-called donors that nothing would fundamentally change. At this moment hundreds of millions of people — from those shooting off fireworks to those ranting as though they will soon shoot up public places in their MAGA hats — seem convinced that everything will fundamentally change. Biden was wrong. Everybody else is right. Either everything will change for the better or one or both of the twin dangers of environmental and nuclear apocalypse will change everything for the worse.

What should someone who cares about ending war think? How can we get from the euphoria of electing a warmonger to mobilizing people to end war? How should we talk with the people who are celebrating? And how with the people who are outraged?

Many readers will remember how Republicans rigged the elections in Florida in 2000. A violent mob prevented volunteers from completing the recount in contested southern counties.  As a result, the recount could not be completed in time to meet the deadline of December 20, 2020 for legally choosing the state’s Electoral College delegation. The Bush campaign sued and took the case, Bush v Gore, to the U.S. Supreme Court, which by an infamous 5-4 decision, handed the presidency to Bush.

"There is a kind of an official view about democracy—it says that you, the public, are spectators not participants,” activist and scholar Noam Chomsky points out in a new video. “You have a function. The function is to show up every couple of years, push a lever, go home, don't bother the important people who run the world, you’ve done your job. We can’t accept that.”