FREE WHITEWATER

Daily Bread for 2.1.21

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of twenty-eight.  Sunrise is 7:07 AM and sunset 5:09 PM, for 10h 01m 20s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 83.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1893, Thomas Edison finishes construction of the first motion picture studio, the Black Maria in West Orange, New Jersey.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Jim Rutenberg, Jo Becker, Eric Lipton, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Martin, Matthew Rosenberg, and Michael S. Schmidt report 77 Days: Trump’s Campaign to Subvert the Election:

For every lawyer on Mr. Trump’s team who quietly pulled back, there was one ready to push forward with propagandistic suits that skated the lines of legal ethics and reason. That included not only Mr. Giuliani and lawyers like Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, but also the vast majority of Republican attorneys general, whose dead-on-arrival Supreme Court lawsuit seeking to discount 20 million votes was secretly drafted by lawyers close to the White House, The Times found.

As traditional Republican donors withdrew, a new class of Trump-era benefactors rose to finance data analysts and sleuths to come up with fodder for the stolen-election narrative. Their ranks included the founder of MyPillow, Mike Lindell, and the former Overstock.com chief executive Patrick Byrne, who warned of “fake ballots” and voting-machine manipulation from China on One America News Network and Newsmax, which were finding ratings in their willingness to go further than Fox in embracing the fiction that Mr. Trump had won.

As Mr. Trump’s official election campaign wound down, a new, highly organized campaign stepped into the breach to turn his demagogic fury into a movement of its own, reminding key lawmakers at key times of the cost of denying the will of the president and his followers. Called Women for America First, it had ties to Mr. Trump and former White House aides then seeking presidential pardons, among them Stephen K. Bannon and Michael T. Flynn.

As it crossed the country spreading the new gospel of a stolen election in Trump-red buses, the group helped build an acutely Trumpian coalition that included sitting and incoming members of Congress, rank-and-file voters and the “de-platformed” extremists and conspiracy theorists promoted on its home page — including the white nationalist Jared Taylor, prominent QAnon proponents and the Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio.

 Daniel Drezner writes of The retro presidency:

Much like during the campaign, Biden is betting big on how post-Trump governance will work. Biden wants to keep the White House focused on high-priority issues such as the pandemic and ameliorating the economic downturn. He is delegating secondary issues to other components of the executive branch. And his White House is not going to comment on everything that animates political Twitter.

Journalists and commentators can debate whether this strategy will work (no doubt it helps that the former excessively online president is cut off from his waning agenda-setting power). For the hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts, it represents an interesting reversal in presidential power.

How 800 Million Pounds of Himalayan Salt are Mined Each Year:

Subscribe
Notify of

0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments