1. What @WillieGeist is trying to get across to @NikemaWilliams on @Morning_Joe is that the GOP is nationalizing their message & making their message high stakes, tapping into voters anger at Trump's loss to get them to vote in a Jan. run-off & that Ds NEED TO DO THE SAME. Its

1. The ideal outcome @JRubinBlogger & @AliVelshi IS that the MAGA faction turns on the "establishment" part of the party & they tear each other apart. This is why only 20 M.O.Cs are acknowledging Biden- they are TERRIFIED of this. But I should make something clear & this is

2. something that @rickwtyler and this panel doesn't seem to be sending a vibe off that it gets and that is that absent some type of intraparty Civil War 2, the Republican Party is not a party in decline, heading into a sunset, its a party primed to go into the 2022 cycle & take

3. the Speaker gavel from @SpeakerPelosi! I mean, jeez guys- all of the stuff just talked about in terms of its abandonment of sanity, of the rule of law, of its dereliction of duty to the Constitution while it performs gross fealty to a swamp creature, all of that was true 1

4. month ago and what happened?? They gained 11+ House seats and potentially will hold the senate majority even though Ds had 6 pathways to it. 6! No, as craptastic as it is, despite the fact that it stood ready to execute a coup it spent months preparing for w Trump, the GOP is

5. STRONG right now. Its voters- and NOT just the nuts you see at the MAGA rallies, I'm talking about mild-mannered regular folks you run into at the bank and work with at Progressive Insurance- those folks are STOKED on the Trump Admin (albeit the Right Wing media over the past

1. Yes, @FareedZakaria's new book, Ten lessons From a Post-Pandemic World argues we don't need a big or small gov- we need a GOOD one.

We don't have that now & that is bc for decades now, the GOP has intentionally hallowed it out. Stripping it of funding under the auspice that

2. the only goal should be small. And as it turns out- that was stupid. And now we have a dysfunctional, as @maddow says, "big, bad" gov. Something that has been "wasted, and rotted and ruined." And its been intentional. Its been murdered, with no thought for how people would

3. suffer for it. COVID just put that suffering in a streamlined spotlight. But as @FareedZakaria points out- its the cherry on top of a 40 year plan that Bannon termed the final "deconstruction of the administrative state." As with the decimation of the economic tools that had

4. allowed the world's 1st middle class to emerge & flourish before The Great Lie ushered in the greatest wealth transfer in history. Not only were Americans bamboozled into voting away their wage increases, their pensions, & their health care (at least till 2010)- they were also

5. tricked into pissing away their country's superiority- its claim to fame, its ability to puff its chest out & say "look over here, we have the best _____. " I had no idea when I was a kid that we were not, in fact, the greatest country on Earth- at least not if you care about

1. We've got @dananessel, killin' like usual on messaging w @HallieJackson on @MSNBC stating, objectively (accurately) that if SCOTUS were to grant the relief sought by TX & these other states & invalidate the votes of millions of Americans due to COMPLETELY FABRICATED claims of

2. of fraud, it would be the end of democracy in America. PERIOD. It would serve, functionally, as the moment of SC's succession, Dec 20, 1860 & also as a function of anti-democratic, unpatriotic, and TREASONOUS behavior post a presidential election they simply didn't want to

3. accept and spend 4 years living under. So instead, they "invalidated" it by refusing to continue to be part of the U.S. Here, if the Court was to play along (and to be crystal clear, the ONLY constitutional, pro-America position here is a full and unequivocal rejection of this

4. suit and frankly, a "supreme" legal tongue lashing at the ideologues that now control the modern Republican Party and by controlling it, have now forced the United States of America into its first constitutional crisis since the fields of her were strewn with bodies and blood

5. as she ripped herself apart to rid herself of her original sin of slavery, and in that process lost 620,000 Americans which at that time was 2% of the country's population. That Trump & his good squad fabricated a story of trucks in the night sneaking in 100Ks worth of ballots

☀️ This morning’s newsy @PunchbowlNews AM

"Trump's role in the riot"

Here’s a challenge: Make the argument that Donald Trump had nothing to do with the riot at the Capitol after the first few days of the impeachment trial.

It’s damn tough.
The Democratic impeachment managers did something Wednesday that desperately needed to be done: They laid out in a thorough, comprehensive and digestible manner what Trump said and did in the months and days leading up to the bloody Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

They covered all aspects of Trump’s shocking behavior -- his provocative tweets, TV interviews and speeches claiming the election was being stolen; his months-long campaign to undermine the American public’s faith in the election results;

his efforts, both public and private, to overturn those results once it was clear he lost, especially his attempts to pressure former Vice President Mike Pence;

his repeated appeals to his supporters to come to Washington on Jan. 6, the same day Congress was set to certify Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory;

The Great American Forgetting Project starts today. They're going to simultaneously try to tell us the last four years were an aberration that is over, and that it never happened.

And it's natural to want to forget these awful years.

It's our moral duty not to.

Those who benefit from our country's malicious priorities will do everything they can now to get us to forget how incontrovertibly Trump exposed those priorities.

Many of us thought we were something better than we were, but now we know.

We've seen our nation's face.

And many among us knew the truth all along. Many of us always saw our nation unmasked, because they were the ones who suffered it.

They told us all along, and the rest of us didn't listen.

Now that they've been proven correct, we're going to be asked to not listen again.

We can't deny anymore, that there are people among us, everywhere, for whom no lie is so obvious they won't believe it, as long as they think it serves their ends.

They don't care about truth, and never did.

We should care about truth, and speak it plain.

This is us.

We've seen our national tolerance for open racism, for cruelty, for corruption, for false equivocation.

Not just the tolerance, but the enthusiasm.

Trump didn't create it. It was there. He exploited it.

We'll never become what we want to be if we don't admit what we are.