I briefly attended a school in America when I was six years old and had never heard the word "eraser" before. There is a family-favourite story about me loudly insisting to my teacher that I needed a condom.
]]>Why? Because a President removed from office cannot stand again. But if he resigns he could run in 2024, and knowing his narcissistic hunger for his base's adoration, he will run again in 2024. And I really want that happen because it denies the GOP access to his base and splits the right wing vote.
]]>DeVos too. However he can lose the Transport and Education secretaries with no impact on his ability to organise his base to action. And frankly my assumption is that they've resigned in order to avoid being embroiled in any attempt to invoke the 25th. If resigning from the White House was any form of effective protest against his policies and actions then we should have seen some effect from the resignations that have been happening since the start of his administration.
He could try for a police coup, but on January 20th Biden gets sworn in and then he is Commander-in-Chief, and if I was a cop I would be really leery of going up against the US National Guard and the Army.
I wonder if Trump's restructure at the top of the Pentagon in the wake of the election would have anything to do with trying to subvert a change of CiC.
And finally, remember who Trump's base is. They're heavily armed, completely divorced from hard reality, significant in number, and ready to die for him. He's been setting them up for a coup for years, and he can command them from any public channel he can reach. Yes, it may not be an effective coup, and the bloodshed among his own people will by great measure outweigh the bloodshed among the police and army, but a lot of people will die including innocents caught in the crossfire.
I have to admit Charlie, it feels strange when I'm the one who believes in a grimmer immediate future than you!
]]>So the invasion of the Capitol was a test, with 14 days to go, of what happens if Trump orders a full on coup from his people. he now knows the capital police will aid the seditionists. He now knows that the DoD won't send in the national guard unless ordered to by himself or Pence (and Pence can be trivially controlled on that). He knows that Pence will not invoke the 25th amendment. He knows that even if the Democrats' motion to impeach passes, there probably isn't time to bring the mechanism into action before the 20th, and anyway that's irrelevant.
In short, Trump now knows that the fallout for trying to incite a violent revolution in the US is to lose his tweeting privileges for 12 hours and get a suspension from Facebook. He will do more, and worse, on or before Jan 20th.
]]>I'm seeing a combination of the exclusionary single-philosophy colonies from Peter F Hamilton's Night's Dawn, crossed with the politics of A Libertarian Walks Into A Bear/.
]]>I just realised what a flex this is by Putin on Farage. Farage is desperate for a knighthood or a seat in the Lords, and here's Putin showing him how easily it can be done... but not for him.
]]>From a direct influence point of view, this leaves Johnson in a bit of a pickle as he no longer has an ideological match driving a trade deal from the US side. And in fact Joe Biden has signalled very strongly that he won't put up with comedy capers involving the GFA and infractions of international law.
Meanwhile that nice Mr Putin will be looking to re-distribute his assets in the countries where the psyop is still largely running to plan. I notice Nigel Farage has just started a couple of new ventures but I'm sure that's just a coincidence. Similarly Evgeny Lebedev getting a seat in the Lords probably has nothing to do with anything.
]]>This is actually fairly accurate literal translation of Russian, as it lacks definite (and IIRC indefinite) articles such as "the" and "a." A Russian speaker would literally say "we are in library." "How the fuck" is of course a translation of a whole phrase rather than the individual words.
]]>My guess? Combined with Rupert's 'greater hold' and the fact you said we haven't seen the last of him, this is analogous to how we no longer have an Angleton but we still have an Eater of Souls. He's literally living rent-free inside her head.
]]>