Threatening the Soul of the United States of America

[Gunnar]

Where in the heck do I put this? Here...

New footage shows January 6 rioters yelling at GOP lawmakers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wem5KJu8HI

Rioter: Do you understand we're fighting for you?

Me: Do you understand you're delusional?

(Notice that not one word of profanity came out of my keyboard.)

Even if only 10% of the American electorate fell for Trump's transparent and easily debunked lies, that would be astonishing enough! But 25% of the general electorate, and 39% of Republicans?! That is truly mind boggling to me! It is a testament to the failure of the American education system to resist the decades long efforts by wealthy, hard-right conservatives to dumb down and delude a scarily high proportion of their fellow Americans by weakening and underfunding secular public education and discouraging critical, fact-based thinking and education for their own selfish and avaricious ends.

[Gunnar]

Donald Trump Refuses to Sign Pledge Against Overthrowing Government

That alone should be enough disqualify him from appearing on the ballot or being otherwise seriously considered for any public office, let alone the office of President.

During Trump's bid for president in 2016 and again in 2020, the MAGA leader signed a loyalty oath document and submitted it to Illinois election authorities. However, this time around, Trump did not sign the document. The oath, which political candidates in Illinois have been signing for over 50 years comes from a Cold-Era law that was made non-mandatory in the 1970s.

The oath, which is a pledge of allegiance to the U.S. government and state of Illinois, is not required, but it is a tradition when presidential candidates turn in their nominating petitions to the Illinois State Board of Elections for the state's primary held on March 19.

In part of the oath, candidates declare that they are not communists nor affiliated with communist organizations and in another part, which is more applicable to today, candidates swear that they "do not directly or indirectly teach or advocate the overthrow of the government of the United States or of this state or any unlawful change in the form of the governments thereof by force or any unlawful means."

The highlighted part of the oath is the important part. The part about requiring that they "declare that they are not communists nor affiliated with communist organizations" is somewhat questionable on constitutional grounds, though, because like it or not, even the Communist Party, as hated as it is by most Americans, is a legal political party in the U.S., as long as they do not advocate the violent or unlawful overthrow of the government or abolishment of any other political party other than their own or violate any of the rights guaranteed by our constitution, especially the freedom of religion, speech, press and the right to participate in free and fair elections, including the right to vote them right back out of office again if they fail to serve the best interests of as many of the general electorate as possible.

George Conway pointed out the main problem with Trump and his lawyers' objections to applying the 14th Amendment against his bid to run again for the presidency:

"And that's the problem that Donald Trump has here is that the words are very simple and very clear, and in fact, they are clearer than other provisions of the 14th Amendment ... Section III is rather narrow. It's not hard to know what an insurrection is. It's not hard to define an insurrection and not many people engage in insurrection. So, it's really not a difficult, difficult provision to understand or to enforce."