Good morning. 
Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-one. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:35 PM, for 9h 09m 56s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 70.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is both the one thousand five hundred eighteenth and the fifty-ninth day.
On this day in 2004, Spirit, a NASA Mars rover, lands successfully on Mars.
Recommended for reading in full —
All 10 living former defense secretaries write Involving the military in election disputes would cross into dangerous territory:
American elections and the peaceful transfers of power that result are hallmarks of our democracy. With one singular and tragic exception that cost the lives of more Americans than all of our other wars combined, the United States has had an unbroken record of such transitions since 1789, including in times of partisan strife, war, epidemics and economic depression. This year should be no exception.
Our elections have occurred. Recounts and audits have been conducted. Appropriate challenges have been addressed by the courts. Governors have certified the results. And the electoral college has voted. The time for questioning the results has passed; the time for the formal counting of the electoral college votes, as prescribed in the Constitution and statute, has arrived.
As senior Defense Department leaders have noted, “there’s no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of a U.S. election.” Efforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory. Civilian and military officials who direct or carry out such measures would be accountable, including potentially facing criminal penalties, for the grave consequences of their actions on our republic.
Steve Schmidt describes The Seven Aspects of Trumpism [three excerpted below]:
Trumpism is an American autocratic movement with fascistic markers. There are seven specific parts that comprise its core.
1. THE LEADER: Donald Trump is the unquestioned leader of this movement. It is a cult of personality, and there are no serious challengers against his leadership.
2. THUGS: The Proud Boys are but one example in a toxic stew of heavily-armed militias, white nationalists and other right-wing extremists. As is always the case, their ranks are filled with people on the fringes of society; the lonely, dispossessed, aggrieved and resentful. Not so long ago, there would have been a near-societal consensus around describing these people as losers. These people bring the menace of violence to politics and are akin to the same thuggish rabble that were wearing brown and black shirts 100 years ago.
4. PROPAGANDISTS: Autocratic movements are built on and sustained by lies. Political lying and conspiracy theories have become billion-dollar businesses. Fox News, Newsmax, One America News Network, social media, talk-radio dividers, Infowars, and others have poisoned the American polity and created the conditions for Trump to create an alternate reality that is now a lethal threat to American liberty.
We have now reached the semi-hot stage of a coup staged by self-identified patriots. We’ll see how hot it gets in a couple of days. Trump is rallying his Motley Crue of insurrectionists to come to town on Wednesday for a “Wild Time”. No doubt, many will. They will wear red hats and no masks, proudly wave the same flag that they are shitting on, and riot in the name of democracy. It’s not going to be pretty.
It’s also a serious enuf threat to rally all 10 living ex-defense-secretaries, including two of Trump’s, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, to explicitly warn against what is going to come down. That is a cross-cultural enuf group that if they come together to warn us, we really ought to listen. The Secret Service is taking the possibility of a palace coup seriously enuf that they are purging the diehard MAGAts from Biden’s security detail. It is good to remember, in times like this, that Indira Gandhi was snuffed by one of her supposedly-loyal Sikh bodyguards. The next two weeks will shape the path of the country. More to the point, the next two weeks will indelibly stain what is left of the legacy of the Republican Party.
The Republican Party is now at a point of cataclysmic inflection. Which way they go is very much up in the air. 140 R-Team US house members, including the ranking member and Wisco-World’s ever-execrable Tom Tiffany, along with 12 sitting Senate members, including the bizarrely obsequious RoJo, and Mike Pence, the sitting vice President, are all aboard the coup-train. That metaphorical train is going downhill fast, with iffy brakes, toward the sharp turn at the bottom of the hill.
The R-Team is in Whig territory, now. The issue of race is splitting the party, as it did in 1840. The issue of race has long been the most important issue for the Republican Party. It split the party in 1860, rejuvenated the party with segregationist Democrats after LBJ passed the civil rights act, and is now splitting the party once again.
Trump has done one valuable service to the country. He has outed the closet racists, so we can all see who they are. 70 million Republicans back him, despite his demonstrably violating every expressed value of the GOP. What he didn’t violate was the overriding party value of hard-core racism. 70 Million Republicans were willing to ignore all of his myriad crimes, treasonous acts, blowing-off of a pandemic, and appalling behavior, because he was out there, loud and proud, with his racism. His appeal lies in how his willing to elucidate, at great and vicious length, all of the racist bullshit that they were too embarrassed to say themselves.
The Republican Party has an existential choice to make in the next two weeks. Are they Americans, or Confederates? If they take the more-likely path of rebellion, they will light the fuse on a war they are not likely to win. If they choose the “American” path, their party disintegrates. In either case, as I have been opining for five years, the modern Republican party has been nuked by Trump. More accurately, self-nuked, rather than Trumped. Trump is not source of the problem, but merely the logical endgame for the party of white supremacy that has been heading in this direction since the days of Nixon. 70 million citizens know that they will never get another man as overtly racist as Trump. How far will they go to enshrine him?
We are about to find out…
Four years bring us to these two weeks of greatest risk. True and true: “Are they Americans, or Confederates?” and the “endgame for the party of white supremacy that has been heading in this direction.”
Our forefathers defeated the British, Know Nothings, Confederates, Copperheads, Klan, and Bund. Millions upon millions have come to America, ennobling beyond measure this nation by their choice and commitment.
Defenders of liberty and justice have seen decisive electoral victories for our cause in 2018 and 2020, and held on against cages, racist hordes, lies, crimes, and even against direct federal force at Lafayette Square and Portland.
This is our home: our people and our republic. We will hold fast, come what may, in the hard weeks ahead, and hard work long afterward.