Insurrection fallout

[TGHusker]

2 minutes ago, BigRedBuster said:

This was the Republican strategy from the beginning.  Put someone up who is the worst candidate.  Then, complain that it's all false and political when the results are shown to the public.  They knew this was going to be really really bad for Republicans and this was the only way to combat it to their base.

 

 

Brain Kilmeade knows better. He knows what FoxNews leaves on the 'cutting room floor'.   These people who are testifying are all public people. They can correct the record if they feel it is being presented inappropriately.  They can speak out.  But they haven't contradicted/corrected  the testimony that has been presented thus far. 

[BigRedBuster]

4 minutes ago, TGHusker said:

They are slowly, methodically building a case and tightening the noose.  There is no question that this was a planned insurrection, coup, and clearly words like treason and sedition can be  used to describe his activity.  

And, that this was not something that just came out of Trump on November 4th.  It is something he has worked very hard to build for almost the entire time he's been in office.  So, statements like ...."Well, I supported Trump till what he's doing after the election" are pretty hollow words.

 

This is what Trump has been ever since prior to 2016.

[knapplc]

19 minutes ago, BigRedBuster said:

So, they are answering one question.  Were there people telling Trump his voter fraud idea was BS?  That is clearly, YES.  So, he has chosen to go a different direction, ignore the fact that he actually lost the election and instead, attack our form of government for his own personal gain.

 

15 minutes ago, Guy Chamberlin said:

 

Again, I really, really wish these Congressional hearings would expand to cover stuff like this as well as Trump leaning on the Secretaries of State to find him votes after the fact by any means possible. It paints a much bigger picture and makes it really difficult to excuse Jan. 6 as a a "dust-up" of high-spirited patriots when it's both a betrayal of democracy and a direct con job on his loyalists. Loyalists -- it's worth pointing out -- that Trump would throw under the bus in a second.

 

7 minutes ago, TGHusker said:

They are slowly, methodically building a case and tightening the noose.  There is no question that this was a planned insurrection, coup, and clearly words like treason and sedition can be  used to describe his activity.  

 

I get the impression they J6 Committee is going the same route as the Mueller probe - they're building the case, and then they'll hand it off to the DOJ to prosecute.

 

This entire hearing likely has one intended person in their audience - Merrick Garland.

[BigRedBuster]

1 minute ago, knapplc said:

 

 

 

I get the impression they J6 Committee is going the same route as the Mueller probe - they're building the case, and then they'll hand it off to the DOJ to prosecute.

 

This entire hearing likely has one intended person in their audience - Merrick Garland.

I think it has more than that.  But, he's extremely important.  They have got to show enough information on what happened to convince as many people as possible of the truth.  So, the American public are all major members of the audience.

[Guy Chamberlin]

On 6/11/2022 at 9:32 AM, Archy1221 said:

I wonder why coach Ron Rivera downplayed the summer of riots in 2020?  He talks about lives being lost Jan 6th (it’s actually one life, a rioter.  The rest were health complications) yet talks nothing of the 30+ lives lost during the 2020 riots.   Both riot situations were bad and him saying one was peaceful makes him sound like a virtue signaling clown. 

 

 

In fairness, the death of George Floyd and the violent invasion of the nation's capitol building during the election certification were both outrageous incidents. Suggesting that the insurrection was likewise a response to a legitimate injustice is where the comparison falls off a cliff.

 

Rivera definitely had to play to the PR demands of an organization with longstanding management issues, and a team made up largely of Black men, but Jack Del Rio probably could have skated if he hadn't referred to Jan. 6 as a "dust-up."  That really tipped his hand. I wouldn't have fined him or forced him to make an insincere apology myself. 

 

If you want to talk about the lives lost during the 2020 riots, it's a pretty interesting breakdown. But read carefully. It doesn't necessarily make the case you want it to make. 

Violence at US protests

The new data on fatalities and violence at American protests comes from a database created by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project (ACLED), a non-profit, working in collaboration with a group of researchers at Princeton.

 

 

ACLED, a widely cited source for data on civilian casualties in Yemen, has been a non-partisan monitor of protests and violence in the Middle East, Asia, Europe and Latin America, and launched its US Crisis Monitor in July, citing concerns over hate crimes and rising political violence.

 

ACLED found that the overwhelming majority of the more than 9.000 Black Lives Matter demonstrations that took place across the US after the killing of George Floyd have been peaceful. News reports at the height of demonstrations over Floyd’s killing cited dozens of deaths in connection with protests, but many of those turned out to be examples of deadly crimes carried out in the vicinity of protests, rather than directly related to the demonstrations themselves, the researchers concluded. ACLED’s dataset only focuses on political violence.

 

Most of the protesters killed this year were shot to death, and many of the incidents involved confrontations at protests that escalated and turned deadly when at least one of the people involved had a gun.

 

 

Lee Keltner, a navy veteran who made custom western hats, was shot after a “patriot rally” in Denver on 10 October. Video and photographs of the incident appear to show Keltner slapping a security guard for a local news crew, who responds by pulling out a gun and shooting him.

 

Aaron “Jay” Danielson, a far-right Trump supporter, was shot after a rally in Portland in August. Danielson’s suspected killer, Michael Reinoehl, was a leftwing protester who called himself an “anti-fascist”, and who was later shot to death by law enforcement officials, an outcome Donald Trump referred to as “retribution”.

 

Garrett Foster was reportedly carrying an AK-47 rifle when he was shot to death in July by an armed man who had been driving a car through a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters in Austin. Whether Foster threatened the driver with his gun is still disputed. The man who shot and killed Foster, the US army sergeant Daniel Perry, had previously tweeted “Now is the time to take up arms and protect yourselves against violence” and responded to a Trump tweet in June about “protesters, anarchists, agitators, looters” by saying, “Send them to Texas we will show them why we say don’t mess with Texas.”

 

 

Citing those tweets, analysts at a thinktank that monitors domestic terrorism classified the shooting as an act of “violent far-right” domestic terrorism. But Perry has not yet faced any criminal charges, and a local prosecutor in Texas said the incident was still under investigation. Both Reinoehl and Perry have claimed they were acting in self-defense when they opened fire and that they felt their own lives were in danger.

 

In Kenosha in August, a 17-year-old carrying a rifle he was not old enough to legally possess shot and killed two people, Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, and seriously injured a third at a volatile late-night protest. His lawyer has argued the teenager, who came to Kenosha from Illinois, was also acting in self-defense.

 

In Louisville, the photographer Tyler Gerth was shot and killed at a downtown park where protesters gathered. The alleged shooter, Steven Nelson Lopez, was homeless and had a history of severe mental illness, and had reportedly been asked to leave the park earlier because of his behavior. Many of the protesters in the park were armed and on edge, and returned fire when Lopez started shooting, local news outlets reported.

 

In Las Vegas, Jorge Gomez was wearing body armor and carrying several guns when he was shot to death by Las Vegas police at a protest in June. Before he was shot, several protesters told Gomez they disapproved of him being armed, and even a journalist questioned him about why he was holding his gun in his hand with his finger on the trigger, the Las Vegas Sun reported. Las Vegas police officer Shay Mikalonis was shot in the head during the same protest, and reportedly remains paralyzed from the injury. Officials have said the 20-year-old Las Vegas resident charged in the shooting had not been participating in the protest before the attack, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported.

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Other law enforcement officers have been injured in non-fatal shootings this year, including two Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies shot in Compton while sitting in their patrol car in mid-September, and two Louisville police officers shot in late September during a protest over the lack of serious charges against police officers in Breonna Taylor’s killing.

 

James Scurlock, a Black Lives Matter protester with an infant daughter, was shot to death in Omaha in May after a confrontation with a white bar owner outside the man’s bar.

 

 

Other demonstrators died when cars drove through or rammed into crowds of Black Lives Matter protesters. Summer Taylor, a Black Lives Matter protester who worked in a veterinary clinic, was killed in such an incident in Seattle. So was Robert Forbes, a black protester from Bakersfield whose sister recalled him demonstrating decades earlier over the brutal police beating of Rodney King. In St Louis, Barry Perkins, a father of two, was killed after being dragged and run over by a FedEx truck during a protest in May.

Killings amid political unrest

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In addition to the people killed while demonstrating, at least 14 more Americans have been killed in other incidents linked to political unrest this summer, including seven people shot during alleged looting of businesses, among them David Dorn, a retired police officer shot during the robbery of a pawn shop in St Louis; two California law enforcement officers murdered by an alleged anti-government “Boogaloo” extremist, one person found dead in a pawn shop in Minneapolis that had been set on fire; an eight-year-old shot to death in Atlanta; and a Louisville restaurant owner who was shot dead by the national guard.

 

Some of those killings remain unsolved.

One of two fatal shootings of young black men in Seattle’s self-declared “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” was not politically motivated, according to ACLED’s review of details in the case, but the June shooting of Antonio Mays Jr, a 16-year-old, was found to be connected to the broader unrest. A Seattle Times review of footage linked to the chaotic scene of the shooting suggested that some people in the protest zone might have believed they were under attack when they fired their guns at the stolen Jeep Mays and another young teenager were driving into the zone.

 

Jessica Doty-Whitaker, a white woman, was shot to death early one July morning in Indianapolis. Her fiance told media outlets that her shooting had been preceded by a tense argument with some passerby about the use of a racial slur and the statements, “Black Lives Matter” v “All Lives Matter”. While they walked away from that confrontation, the fiance said, someone opened fire later and the 24-year-old mother was killed. Indianapolis police have not verified those claims or released any details about the circumstances of the shooting, and no one has been charged, but ACLED categorized the shooting as potentially politically motivated.

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Victor Cazares Jr was described by friends and family as a supporter of Black Lives Matter. On 1 June, a day of widespread protests across the country, he was shot to death outside a neighborhood grocery store in Cicero, Illinois, that he was reportedly trying to protect.

While a Chicago resident was quickly charged in the shooting death of another man, Jose Gutierrez, that same day in Cicero, the Cicero police department did not respond to requests for comment about whether anyone had yet been charged in Cazares’s death.

“He was just standing there making sure that everybody is OK,” Cazares’ sister told the Cicero Independiente. “He wasn’t there to cause any violence. He didn’t even have a weapon.”

[knapplc]

1 minute ago, BigRedBuster said:

I think it has more than that.  But, he's extremely important.  They have got to show enough information on what happened to convince as many people as possible of the truth.  So, the American public are all major members of the audience.

 

Maybe. The American people know Orange Man Bad was lying the whole time - both those who voted for and against him. They're not going to convince his followers and those of us who don't follow him need no convincing. 

[suh_fan93]

No way

 

 

[knapplc]

It's a good point. The insurrectionists were willing to be violent because of Orange Man Bad tweets.

 

 

[Guy Chamberlin]

20 minutes ago, BigRedBuster said:

This was the Republican strategy from the beginning.  Put someone up who is the worst candidate.  Then, complain that it's all false and political when the results are shown to the public.  They knew this was going to be really really bad for Republicans and this was the only way to combat it to their base.

 

 

 

I am forced to admit Kilmeade is correct in that the interviews and montages are carefully selected to align with the case being made by the Democrats. It does have an infomercial tone to it.

 

But man, I would love to hear "the other side of the story" and have a crackjack team ready to question those witnesses. That might be the only way to break this delusion. 

[Guy Chamberlin]

18 minutes ago, knapplc said:

 

 

 

I get the impression they J6 Committee is going the same route as the Mueller probe - they're building the case, and then they'll hand it off to the DOJ to prosecute.

 

This entire hearing likely has one intended person in their audience - Merrick Garland.

 

That's my understanding. It's also why I expect the J6 Hearings to have similar consequences as the Mueller probe, the two Impeachment hearings, the IRS tax investigation, and the supposedly airtight case compiled and virtually abandoned by the Southern District Court of New York. 

[knapplc]

Just now, Guy Chamberlin said:

 

That's my understanding. It's also why I expect the J6 Hearings to have similar consequences as the Mueller probe, the two Impeachment hearings, the IRS tax investigation, and the supposedly airtight case compiled and virtually abandoned by the Southern District Court of New York. 

 

Sadly, same. My expectations are exceedingly low.

[TGHusker]

24 minutes ago, knapplc said:

 

 

 

I get the impression they J6 Committee is going the same route as the Mueller probe - they're building the case, and then they'll hand it off to the DOJ to prosecute.

 

This entire hearing likely has one intended person in their audience - Merrick Garland.

Agree 100% since the committee has no authority to charge trump wt a crime.  They are doing an amazing service to dig in and research this whole topic in a way that the DOJ could not.  Garland should grab the baton and take it across the finish line whereby trump et al are charged with serious crimes and eventually locked up.  

After that the decision falls on Biden to pardon or not to prevent civil unrest and to help the nation move on.  

In this case, I don't think Biden should pardon Trump as Ford did Nixon.  While Nixon's crimes were serious, they weren't near this level.  We didn't hear words of sedition and treason tied to the actions of Nixon and those caught in Watergate scandal.  Trump's actions are a direct attack on our democracy, the rule of law, the constitution and interference in the government's function. 

 

[BigRedBuster]

22 minutes ago, Guy Chamberlin said:

 

I am forced to admit Kilmeade is correct in that the interviews and montages are carefully selected to align with the case being made by the Democrats. It does have an infomercial tone to it.

 

But man, I would love to hear "the other side of the story" and have a crackjack team ready to question those witnesses. That might be the only way to break this delusion. 

Technically yes. But, the Republicans had a chance to play a bigger part in the committee and they chose to do what they did. 
 

Now, if they have a counter argument, fine, let’s hear it.  But, it better be something better that My Pillow Guy. 

[BigRedBuster]

16 minutes ago, knapplc said:

 

Sadly, same. My expectations are exceedingly low.

My expectations are very low due to my growing lack of confidence in a segment of our population and their chosen politicians. 

[suh_fan93]