With each hearing, the House Select Committee has methodically uncovered evidence that Trump and top aides knowing attempted to carry out plans to overturn Biden’s election victory

_{^{Photo by Michael Judkins on Pexels.com.}}

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
June 29, 2022

The House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the Capitol has held six public hearings to date, with more expected in the coming weeks. I have listened to nearly every minute of the live hearings, and it’s been an interesting experience.

Even as the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrectionist riot at the Capitol unfolded, it was clear to nearly every rational, fair-minded person that then-President Donald Trump had deliberately incited a mob to interrupt Congress’s receipt of Electoral College votes — essentially the final step in ratifying Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election. But Trump is an undisciplined man who prefers seat-of-the-pants improvisation. It was hard to be sure to what degree Trump had encouraged supporters to attend that morning’s so-called Stop the Steal rally and then directed them at the Capitol, as opposed to simply capitalizing on a toxic situation set up by others without his advance knowledge.

The House Select Committee hearings have revealed beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt that all of Trump’s actions between Election Night in November and the day of the riot were part of a coordinated effort. Allies, including Trump’s hand-picked attorney general, Bill Barr, and campaign manager, Bill Stepien, repeatedly told the president that no fraud of a scope significant enough to affect the election’s outcome had been detected, despite multiple investigations.

Reflections on the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Jan. 6, 2022

Today marks the first anniversary of the 2021 Capitol insurrection, one of the darkest days in American history. The Capitol riot is the worst attack to have taken place on American soil since the Civil War, despite claiming only five lives and causing a relatively small amount of property damage.

Over the last century and a half, only two attacks on U.S. territory were nearly as grievous to the nation as last year’s riot: The bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack.

Pearl Harbor was the most significant (although not the only) battle fought on American soil since the 19th century. The attack by Japanese forces on a key naval base resulted in the damaging or sinking of around 20 vessels and the destruction of scores of military planes. The U.S. death toll was 2,403. Ultimately, the U.S. declared more than 111,000 of its military personnel who fought in the Pacific dead or missing, as compared to about 405,000 total American military deaths in both the Pacific and European theaters.

The 2001 terror attacks perpetrated by al Qaeda claimed even more lives than the Pearl Harbor bombing, 2,977. Repairing and replacing buildings and infrastructure damaged in Lower Manhattan and at the Pentagon and compensating families and businesses directly affected by the attacks cost more than $77 billion, according to a 2011 tally by CBS News.

Apocalypse last year (and now): A Yale professor and a magazine journalist document the ongoing Covid-19 outbreak in ‘Apollo’s Arrow’ and ‘The Plague Year’

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
July 30, 2021

Although the world is still beset by Covid-19, even in nations where wide swaths of the population have been vaccinated, the publishing world began to produce volumes on the pandemic last year. One of the first to appear, in October, was Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live. Its author, Nicholas A. Christakis, is a physician and sociologist. He has appointments to five different departments in addition to other positions that he holds at Yale University.

Christakis approaches the pandemic like the polymath he is. The book begins with a passage from Homer’s Iliad in which Apollo unleashes a plague that spreads from mules and dogs to the army of Greeks besieging Troy. The text then walks readers through China’s discovery of a cluster of severe acute respiratory syndrome cases in Wuhan. Officials initially attempted to suppress or ignore information on the illness before acknowledging, at the end of December 2019, that they were facing a serious problem.

To their credit, China responded with what Christakis calls “the largest imposition of public health measures in human history,” including the placement of toothpick dispensers in elevators so passengers could push buttons without exchanging germs. By April, the nation seemed to have successfully suppressed the disease:

[T]he enormous reduction in cases once China mobilized to control the epidemic was an astonishing achievement from a public health point of view, even if some of the Chinese numbers were fuzzy.

To be clear, China, and other countries that subsequently implemented their own lockdowns, had not eradicated the virus; it had merely temporarily stopped its spread. When the lockdowns were lifted, the virus would come back.

Reflections on a half-century

Lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin looks at the lunar lander during the historic Apollo 11 moonwalk. Aldrin had just deployed the Early Apollo Scientific Experiments Package. In the foreground is the Passive Seismic Experiment Package; beyond it is the Laser Ranging Retro-Reflector (LR-3). The photograph was taken by the mission commander, Neil Armstrong.

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
July 22, 2021

This week, the Milwaukee Bucks won the National Basketball Association championship. It was the team’s second, having won the title in 1971.

The Bucks swept the Baltimore Bullets — now the Washington Wizards — in a four-game series at the end of April that year. As it happens, the games took place roughly halfway between the third and fourth Apollo moon landings. Apollo 14 touched down on Feb. 5, while Apollo 15 descended to the surface on July 30. The sixth and final successful mission, Apollo 17, would land in December 1972.

When I grew up, Apollo represented humanity’s pinnacle of technological achievement, the most daring exploration in history. It never would have occurred to me that nearly five decades would pass without any further crewed missions to the moon or Mars.

Cheeps and Chirps for Jan. 31, 2021: Trump / Hawley / Cruz insurrection edition

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Jan. 31, 2021

This edition of Cheeps and Chirps is devoted to Donald Trump’s attempted autogolpe. Here were some of my reactions to the violence of Jan. 6, 2021.

• The coup attempt begins

Lisa DesJardins describes how pro-Trump protesters gained unauthorized admission to the Capitol. https://t.co/gBGAaTZ5UG via @YouTube

— Matt Milliken | masks on for safety | mostly @HOME (@memomoment) January 6, 2021

You’re not wrong.

However, I think Trump’s removal by the Senate might have led to exactly the sort of fascist riot we’re seeing today. https://t.co/xNOXwJB7Cq

— Matt Milliken | masks on for safety | mostly @HOME (@memomoment) January 6, 2021

You should tell this to the mob of lawless rebels who invaded the Capitol.

You should tell it to them in person.

— Matt Milliken | masks on for safety | mostly @HOME (@memomoment) January 6, 2021

Trump’s coup failed, but America’s political split will endure

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Jan. 22, 2021

Donald Trump departed Washington early on the morning of Wednesday, Jan. 20. In doing so, the disgraced businessman became only the fourth living outgoing president to skip his successor’s inauguration, and the first since Andrew Johnson in 1869.

All four leaders were single-term presidents, but Trump has a notable commonality with Johnson. The 17th president was the first to be impeached, while the 45th was the first to be impeached twice.

It’s safe to say that most of official Washington wasn’t sorry to see Trump go early, and not just because the native New Yorker cum Florida man used lies about the 2020 election to incite rally goers to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6. One police officers was killed by the mob, and four others died, but the rioters came within seconds of getting their hands on Vice President Mike Pence and members of Congress. This coup attempt occurred during a joint session in which the legislature voted to finalize election results in what is usually a little-noticed formality.

Donald Trump, sower of violent sedition, must be removed from office

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Jan. 6, 2021

Let’s start with the facts.

Joseph Robinette Biden won both the popular vote and the electoral college in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. In doing so, he defeated incumbent President Donald John Trump Sr., who sustained his second popular-vote defeat in his only two campaigns for public office.

Violent seditionists stormed the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday afternoon in an attempt to disrupt what would normally be a routine event: Congressional certification of the electoral college results. These seditionists were Trump supporters egged on by the president himself, by Trump allies, and by a right-wing media ecosystem that is designed to spread propaganda.

“[A]fter this, we’re going to walk down there, and I’ll be there with you, we’re going to walk down … to the Capitol and we are going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women,” Trump told a group of supporters in Washington, D.C., in the hours before the Capitol was stormed. “And we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them. Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.”