Wouldnt it just be part of their background check to review social media to make sure they are not posting radical shit...
Interestingly, this doesn't really apply to Congress and other elected officials. (Very doubtful Trump could have passed a background check for high-level government employment, imo.) (See link below.) Assuming it did, arguendo: What if a member joined QAnut after receiving their background check? Do elected officials need to pass background checks to obtain security clearances? https://politics.stackexchange.com/...ackground-checks-to-obtain-security-clearance
ugly precedent that would set don't you think? "We don't like Bernie's politics, oh look here, he identified as a commie in his youth and did some protesting! Barred"
Exactly. Our democracy relies on The Press, and the intelligence of the citizenry to ensure clowns don't get elected.
"Life expectancy in the America of 1787 was about 38 years for a white male. But this is not as bad as it sounds. It is longer than the average life span in England." Most people start lose important faculties in spotting deception as early as late 40s. So there are now an awful lot of easily enough duped people around due to technology. It may be we need to use the same tech gains to at least warn people that brain scans indicate an individual is psychopathic, before they vote for them. It is about 2 percent of people. Yes a person with a normal scan can be bad but, a psychopath cannot be any more than they are. They are not really capable of fulfilling an oath to a community.
Lawyers representing the Capitol insurrectionists are building a damning case against Trump https://www.businessinsider.com/cap...ake-case-trump-impeachment-prosecution-2021-1 Attorneys representing people arrested in connection with the Capitol riot are focusing on Trump. They're blaming him for inciting the deadly siege with his spread of disinformation about the election. The allegations bolster House Democrats' impeachment case against Trump and expose him to more legal risk. The rioters were adamant when they stormed the US Capitol: Joe Biden and the Democrats had stolen the 2020 election from Donald Trump. Congress wasn't doing anything to stop it, so it was up to patriotic Americans like themselves to save the country. Now many of the insurrectionists, facing a multitude of federal charges and lacking the protection of a presidential pardon, are changing their tune and laying the blame for their actions squarely at the former president's feet. It's an inconvenient development for Trump, who is not only staring down a looming Senate impeachment trial but also may face criminal liability for his actions. "Let's roll the tape," said Al Watkins, the defense attorney representing one of the defendants, Jacob Chansley. Chansley is more widely known as the "QAnon Shaman" and made headlines for roaming the halls of Congress while wearing a fur hat, carrying a spear, and covered in face paint. He was later arrested and charged with multiple felony counts, including unlawfully entering the Capitol and engaging in disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds. "Let's roll the months of lies and misrepresentations and horrific innuendo and hyperbolic speech by our president designed to inflame, enrage, motivate," Watkins told KSDK, a local NBC affiliate in Missouri. Jeffrey Cramer, a former federal prosecutor who spent 12 years at the Justice Department, didn't mince words when addressing the allegation. "This goes directly to Trump's impeachment trial" and any criminal case he could face, Cramer said. "His words and actions for months directly led to an armed and deadly insurrection at the Capitol. He can't argue that nobody took him seriously or that his words didn't provoke violence." A lawyer representing Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday. 'Wouldn't have been there if it wasn't for the president' Watkins also alluded to Trump's repeated assertion at a rally preceding the siege that he would join his supporters as they marched to the Capitol that day (which he didn't do). "What's really curious is the reality that our president, as a matter of public record, invited these individuals, as president, to walk down to the Capitol with him," Watkins told KSDK, adding that his client "regrets very very much having not just been duped by the president, but ... allowed that duping to put him in a position to make decisions he should not have made." "You'll never take back our country with weakness," Trump told his fanatics at the January 6 rally, which took place as Congress was convening to finalize Biden's victory. "You have to show strength, and you have to be strong. We're going to have to fight much harder. After this, we're going to walk down, and I'll be there with you. We're going to walk down — we're going to walk down." At the end of the 70-minute speech that was riddled with grievances and falsehoods about the election, Trump said: "If you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore." And then he unleashed the mob. One woman who was arrested and charged after she was accused of participating in the riot told a reporter that she and her friends traveled to Washington, DC, from Texas specifically because the president "asked us to go." "He said, 'Be there,'" Jenna Ryan told a local news outlet in Texas. "So I went and I answered the call of my president." Days after the failed coup, the House of Representatives charged Trump with "incitement of insurrection." The single article of impeachment accused Trump of having "repeatedly issued false statements asserting that the Presidential election results were the product of widespread fraud and should not be accepted by the American people or certified by State of Federal officials." It also accused him of having "willfully made statements that, in context, encouraged — and foreseeably resulted in — lawless action at the Capitol." Lori Ulrich, the defense attorney representing 22-year-old Riley Williams, struck a similar chord in a court appearance Thursday. Williams was arrested and charged with entering a restricted building, disorderly conduct, theft of government property, and obstruction. She has also been accused of helping steal a laptop from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office during the siege, and a person who claimed to be her former romantic partner told the FBI she "intended to send the computer device to a friend in Russia, who then planned to sell the device to SVR, Russia's foreign intelligence service," court filings said. At Thursday's federal court hearing, Ulrich acknowledged that Williams had participated in the insurrection but said, "It is regrettable that Ms. Williams took the president's bait and went inside the Capitol." She added that the charges against her client were "overstated." Enrique Latoison, a lawyer representing another man charged in connection with the siege, told The New York Times his client wouldn't have been at the Capitol at all if not for the president's words. The Justice Department's statement of facts accompanying its criminal complaint against Latoison's client Robert Sanford also indicated that he believed he was acting on the president's orders. In addition to participating in the siege itself, Sanford is accused of "hurling" a fire extinguisher at a group of police officers and injuring three of them. "The group had gone to the White House and listened to President Donald J. Trump's speech and then had followed the President's instructions and gone to the Capitol," the document said. 'Hard for him to argue that nobody would listen to his words and riot' The multitude of court filings stemming from the insurrection and recent allegations from the defendants' lawyers will likely play a pivotal role in Trump's upcoming impeachment trial in the Senate. The House will transmit the article of impeachment to the Senate on Monday, and according to the Constitution, the upper chamber must begin its impeachment trial by 1 p.m. the day after the article is submitted. But for Trump, an impeachment trial is the least of his worries. Democrats hold a slim majority in the Senate — 51 votes, including that of the vice president — and it's highly unlikely that enough Republicans will break ranks to reach the two-thirds majority that's required to convict and remove a president from office and bar him from ever holding public office again. Trump's bigger concern may lie in whether he'll face criminal prosecution over his actions. "The fact that the rioters are saying all they did was follow the urging of POTUS goes to whether or not Trump's words incited a riot," Cramer said, though he added the defense likely wouldn't help the rioters in their cases. "Hard for him to argue that nobody would listen to his words and riot." Michael Sherwin, the acting US attorney in Washington, DC, said earlier this month that federal prosecutors weren't ruling out anything or anyone as they investigated the deadly riot — and that includes the now former president. When asked if prosecutors would examine statements Trump made at the rally before the siege, Sherwin replied, "Yes, we are looking at all actors here, not only the people that went into the building, but ... were there others that maybe assisted or facilitated or played some ancillary role in this."
It appears that State GOP parties are overrun with Treason Weasels. Everyday they come out with even more insane nonsense. Oregon Republican party falsely suggests US Capitol attack was a 'false flag' Resolution suggests attack was ‘designed to discredit’ Trump and supporters, and condemns Republicans who voted to impeach https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/25/oregon-republican-party-us-capitol-breach-false-flag The Oregon Republican party has falsely claimed in a resolution that there is “growing evidence” that the 6 January attack on the US Capitol by a pro-Trump mob was “a ‘false flag’ operation”. The resolution, which was published on 19 January and was endorsed by the executive committee of the state Republican party, suggested that the storming of the capitol by Trump supporters was an orchestrated conspiracy “designed to discredit President Trump, his supporters and all conservative Republicans,” and to create a “sham motivation” to impeach the former president. To back up these false claims, the resolution cited links to rightwing websites, including the Epoch Times, a pro-Trump outlet that has frequently published rightwing misinformation, as well as the Wikipedia entry for “Reichstag Fire.” In a Facebook video released on 19 January, the Oregon Republican party chairman, Bill Currier, said that Oregon Republicans were working with Republicans in other states to release similar resolutions. “We are encouraging and working with the others through a patriot network of RNC members, the national level elected officials from each state, to coordinate our activities and to coordinate our messaging,” Currier said as part of the video conversation with other members of the Oregon Republican party. “We’re partway in the door of socialism and Marxism right now … and we have to fight,” Currier said. “It’s a time for choosing. People can decide what they want to believe and what they want to do, but there are people standing up and there are people sitting down.” Currier did not respond to a request for comment on Monday. The Republican National Committee did not immediately respond to a reques. In addition to labeling the Capitol attack a potential false flag operation, the Oregon GOP’s resolution also condemned several House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump over the 6 January assault. The statement called the legislators “traitors” who had “conspired” with the enemy, and described members of the Democratic party as “Leftist forces seeking to establish a dictatorship void of all cherished freedoms and liberties.” The resolution was a sign of the Oregon GOP “aligning itself with conspiracy theories,” the Oregonian, the state’s largest newspaper, wrote last week. The newspaper also reported that one of the members of the Oregon GOP’s executive committee, which produced the resolution, is the chief of staff to the Republican state lawmaker who opened the door to allow armed demonstrators protesting coronavirus restrictions to illegally enter the Oregon state capitol on 21 December. This invasion of the Oregon state capitol in December was one of the events that served as a model for the US Capitol invasion in January. Federal prosecutors in Washington have already charged more than 100 people in connection with the violence at the Capitol on 6 January, which was extensively documented in real time by journalists, as well as by many of the people who participated in the invasion, including well-known members of hate groups. Several of the people facing charges in connection with the invasion of the capitol have said they believed they were following Trump’s instructions. “I listen to my president, who told me to go to the Capitol,” a Texas real estate agent facing federal charges told CBS News. Family members and friends of the four participants who died during the Capitol invasion, including an air force veteran shot to death by a police officer, have also described them as dedicated Trump supporters.
Tracking Corporate America’s revolt against the Electoral College objectors https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2021/01/business/corporate-pac-suspensions/ After the deadly attack on the US Capitol on January 6, some of Corporate America’s biggest names denounced the rioters and pledged to halt their political giving. Among Fortune 500 companies, roughly 280 had previously supported Republican Congress members who objected to the 2020 election results. CNN surveyed those companies and found that many have not staked out a position on future donations. And among many companies that said they plan to pause their political donations, details about their changes remain vague. (Article includes extensive tables with complete details on donations.)