Skyline Happenings

On ABC’s This Week this morning, Representative Steve Scalise (R-LA) refused to admit that Democrat Joe Biden had legitimately won the 2020 presidential election.

It’s hard to overestimate how dangerous this lie is. It convinces supporters of the former president that they are actually protecting American democracy when they fight to overturn it. Jessica Watkins is one of 9 members of the right-wing paramilitary group the Oath Keepers indicted for their actions on January 6. Yesterday, her lawyer told the court that Watkins behaved as she did because she believed that then-President Donald Trump would use the military to overturn what he falsely insisted was the rigged election.

“However misguided, her intentions were not in any way related to an intention to overthrow the government, but to support what she believed to be the lawful government. She took an oath to support the Constitution and had no intention of violating that oath….”

Watkins claims she was given a VIP pass to the pro-Trump rally, had met with Secret Service agents, and was charged with providing security for the leaders marching to the Capitol from Trump’s January 6, 2021, rally.

Supporters of the former president are portraying the deadly attack on the Capitol on January 6 as a legitimate expression of anger over an election in which states did not follow their own rules. This is a lie that the Trump wing hopes will resurrect their lost power. Politico’s Gabby Orr and Meridith McGraw report that Trump is planning to “exact vengeance” on the Republicans who have turned against him, running his own candidates in 2022 to undercut them. Earlier this week, he met with Scalise.

Trump’s big lie is deeply cynical, and yet it is falling on the ears of voters primed to believe it.

by Gail Collins in the NYT

So if you were a dog, would you rather belong to Ted Cruz or Mitt Romney?

Yes, you have to choose.

Perhaps you remember that many, many years ago, Romney drove to Canada for a family vacation with his Irish setter Seamus on the roof of his car. I mentioned this fact about two million times when Romney ran for president, mainly to break up the tedium of a very boring campaign.

This week Cruz made headlines when he got caught taking a plane for a family escape to Mexico while Texas was suffering through its stupendous weather crisis.

Michael Hardy, a Texas journalist, went to check the on the empty Cruz house in Houston and discovered the neighborhood had indeed had a power outage. He also saw “a small, white dog looking out the bottom right pane of glass in the senator’s front door.”

Ted had abandoned Snowflake the poodle! OK, that’s a little tough. A security guard parked outside the senator’s house volunteered that he’d been doing some caretaking.

We will not stop to investigate whether Snowflake is a boy or a girl, or even if we’ve got the breed exactly right. Suffice it to say that he/she was among the millions of weather-bound Texans Cruz had left behind when he went on, um, a planned vacation.

Cruz’s story keeps evolving, naturally. His original claim that he was just dropping his girls off for a visit with friends faded when many Americans noted the guy was dragging a really big suitcase for a dad who wasn’t planning to hang around.

The crucial question is whether Snowflake got a worse deal than Seamus. Any doubts out there, people? One dog is being taken on a family vacation and the other is being left behind in a weather crisis/power outage. In a house Cruz’s wife described to friends by text as “FREEZING.”

Serious citizens might also want to note that Romney has lately been reborn as the champion of independent thinking. Taking the lead in standing up to Donald Trump during the impeachment crises does tend to overshadow driving with a dog on the roof in 1983.

Cruz, however, stuck with the crazed conspiracy theorists after the election and voted against certifying Joe Biden as president. Romney said Cruz and his fellow Biden denialists would “forever be seen as being complicit in an unprecedented attack against our democracy.”

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And then he went off to Cancún after Texas was battered by snow, ice and rain, cut off from lights and deprived of reliable clean water. While he scurried back after getting caught in the act, it’s not likely a whole lot of his fellow Texans appreciated his explanation that he was just trying to “be a good dad.”

Yeah, tell it to Snowflake.