This article was originally published on
this site
We’re still in the middle of the economic fall-out from a pandemic, and the new weekly jobless claims figures are out today.
The number of Americans filing first-time claims for jobless benefits unexpectedly fell last week – but stayed very high. Initial claims for state unemployment benefits were 787,000 in the week to 2 January compared to 790,000 the previous week, the Labor Department said. Economists had forecast 800,000 applications in the latest week.
The figures come ahead of the closely watched non-farm payrolls data on Friday. Wall Street economists are forecasting the creation of 71,000 jobs (compared with 245,000 in November), which would be the smallest increase since the jobs recovery started in May, and mean the economy recouped 12.m of the 22.2m jobs lost in March and April.
A woman shot and killed by police during the storming of the US Capitol by a pro-Trump mob has been named as a 14-year veteran of the US air force and of four foreign military tours, including to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Ashli Babbitt, 35, had travelled to Washington DC from San Diego, her husband told the local news station KUSI, adding that she was a passionate Trump supporter.
Three other people died from “medical emergencies†during Wednesday’s siege of the Capitol, according to the Washington DC police chief, Robert Contee.
Contee has confirmed to reporters a woman was shot by Capitol police – a federal law enforcement agency responsible for protecting the US Congress – but has not released further details.
Less than a day before she joined the Trump loyalist protest, Babbitt, an avowed and public Trump supporter as well as a subscriber to a number of alt-right conspiracy theories, had vowed the insurrectionist movement could never be halted. “Nothing will stop us… … they can try and try and try but the storm is here and it is descending upon DC in less than 24 hours… … dark to light!†she wrote on Twitter.
Babbitt, 35, was reportedly shot as she and other rioters tried to break through a barricaded door in the building where Capitol police officers were armed on the other side.
Read more of Ben Doherty’s report here: Woman shot and killed in storming of US Capitol named as Ashli Babbitt
Today have just put up a clip of Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Jeff Merkley talking about their experiences yesterday being inside the Capitol when it was stormed by the pro-Trump mob which caused the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory to be delayed.
It’s quite a lengthy clip, but in it Klobuchar again praises the staff who protected the integrity of the electoral process, and spoke of the Democrats determination to get the job done. She said:
We were doing our jobs, and taking on the scurrilous objections that Senator Cruz was making to a verified vote in the state of Arizona, and then we heard that there had been a breach. We were eventually told to leave the chamber, we were hustled out of there, knowing that people had entered the Capitol complex. One of the smart things that some of the staff did – and this has been little noted – was take those verified ballots with them from each state, because they would for certain have been ransacked and taken if they had been left. So we went to another room, and the entire time our goal was to get back no matter what state that chamber was in, to show the American people, as horrific as this was, that people engaged in an insurrection would not prevail.
You can watch the full clip here:
After four years supporting Donald Trump, yesterday several senior Republican figures and former members of his White House team finally peeled away to condemn the president’s actions in attempting to overturn November’s election result and inciting a mob to storm the Capitol. Here’s a selection of what some of them said:
Mitch McConnell, Republican Senate majority leader:
The voters, the courts, and the states have all spoken. If we overrule them all, it would damage our republic forever. If this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral. We’d never see the whole nation accept an election again. It would be unfair and wrong to disenfranchise American voters and overrule the courts and the states on this thin basis. And I will not pretend such a vote would be a harmless protest gesture while relying on others to do the right thing.
Sen. Lindsey Graham:
Trump and I, we’ve had a hell of a journey. I hate it to end this way. All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough. I’ve tried to be helpful. They said 66,000 people in Georgia under 18 voted. I said give me ten. Haven’t had one. They said 8000 felons in prison in Arizona voted. Give me 10. Haven’t got one. I don’t buy this. Enough’s enough. We’ve got to end it.
Mick Mulvaney, former Trump acting White House Chief of Staff, who has resigned today as Trump’s special envoy to Northern Ireland:
Now is the time for the president to be presidential. He can stop this now and needs to do exactly that.
Ronna McDaniel, RNC chair:
What these violent protesters are doing is the opposite of patriotism. It is shameful and I condemn it in the strongest possible terms. Anyone who thinks they are helping the country by participating in this is wrong.
Kevin McCarthy, Republican House minority leader:
I condemn any of this; this is appalling. This is un-American. This should never happen in our nation and whatever is going on right now has got to stop. I want everybody to take a deep breath and understand we all have some responsibility here. I don’t care what we’ve ever said on Facebook, what we’ve ever done to one another, we are all Americans, we need to stop. We can disagree with one another, but to take it to how this has gone is beyond anything I’ve ever envisioned that was possible in this nation.
Giovanni Russonello has made this assessment of yesterday’s events in the New York Times “On Politics†newlsetter this morning:
If Trump has driven the Republican Party off a political cliff, most of the momentum is still inside the car: Well over half of rank-and-file Republican voters still think that the election was stolen from him.
While the Senate’s Republican caucus mostly came together to allow Biden’s win to be confirmed, some senators logged official objections in the record. And on the House side, well over 100 legislators voted in support of objections that the Democratic majority overruled.
While conservative news outlets like Fox News and Newsmax were heavily critical of the rioting at the Capitol, it remains hard to imagine that the coalition Trump has assembled will easily disintegrate or meaningfully change course — even after such a traumatic event.
The fact remains that a violent protest was able to delay the adoption of the election’s legitimate results, and a president who still holds his followers in thrall garnered significant support in refusing to give up power.
Donald Trump’s brief suspension from Twitter has come to an end, after the outgoing president deleted three tweets the social network says violated its “civic integrity policyâ€.
Trump did not immediately return to the social network as his ban was lifted, at 7am Washington time. Just a few hours earlier, his deputy chief of staff, Dan Scavino, had shared on his behalf a short statement committing to an “orderly transition†of power – albeit maintaining that he “totally disagrees with the outcome of the electionâ€.
On Facebook, Trump’s suspension for the same posts will last a full 24 hours, the social network said.
The 12-hour suspension, the first the president has faced in his four-year term of office, was derided by many as not being severe enough for the harm inflicted by the tweets, which appeared to support and encourage the far-right mob that stormed the US Capitol building.
“Facebook, Twitter and YouTube must terminate Donald Trump’s social media accounts,†said Eric Naing, media relations officer for American civil liberties group Muslim Advocates. “After today’s mob violence inside the US Capitol, it is clear that the president’s social media accounts are the world’s most prominent organizing tool for violent white nationalists. For years, social media companies have done little or nothing at all while President Trump used their platforms to foment violence, spread hate and put people’s lives in danger – all in clear violation of the companies’ policies.â€
“Weak warning labels or a policy of selectively deleting certain posts after the damage has been done will do little to stem the fire hose of hate, violence, conspiracy theories and white nationalism that comes from the president’s Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts. What we saw today was not the beginning of this violence and it will not be the end. The only way to protect the public is to permanently terminate Donald Trump’s social media accounts.â€
Read more of Alex Hern’s report here: Donald Trump Twitter ban comes to end amid calls for tougher action
Former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney has resigned his post as special envoy to Northern Ireland. He told CNBC in an interview:
“I called secretary of state Mike Pompeo last night to let him know I was resigning from that. I can’t do it. I can’t stay. Those who choose to stay, and I have talked with some of them, are choosing to stay because they’re worried the president might put someone worse in.â€
Mulvaney leaves his post as Donald Trump has thirteen days left in office.
Yesterday he tweeted critically of the president’s actions while the Capitol was being stormed, saying “Now is the time for the president to be presidential. He can stop this now and needs to do exactly that.â€
On 7 November Mulvaney wrote on op-ed for the Wall Street Journal entitled: “If he loses, Trump will concede gracefullyâ€
Lawrence Douglas writes for us today saying: Don’t blame Trump for the chaos in Washington DC. Blame his enablers
The Trump supporters who stormed the Congress were not the only insurrectionists in the Capitol building yesterday; a sizeable number were already gathered in the lawmakers’ chambers well before any barriers were breached. In contrast to the agitators in their MAGA hoodies and army fatigue coats, these insurrectionists were seated in their crisp suits when Nancy Pelosi gaveled the opening of the joint session. They are products of our elite schools: Stanford and Yale Law School, Princeton and Harvard Law. They are fully aware that Trump decisively lost a fair election. Yet they have opportunistically chosen to ally themselves with a potentially mortal attack on our democracy.
Yet blaming Trump for the violence is pointless. Those who have followed this president knew he would never concede defeat. For the last two months, Trump has essentially become our subversive-in-chief, working overtime to overturn a democratic election. Yesterday, Mitch McConnell finally said, “back in your cageâ€â€” overlooking the fact that for years he had fed and nurtured the beast. Yet McConnell’s belated defense of democracy rings heroic compared to the tinny sounds emerging from Ted Cruz.
Cruz is already positioning himself as Trump 2.0; as a smoother, more intelligent and articulate demagogue. Trump lies in gross profusion; Cruz dresses his lies in the mantle of reasoned argument. Yesterday, we heard him speak of a “better way†that would help lawmakers avoid two “lousy†choices. The first lousy choice was “setting aside the electionâ€. Only that choice wasn’t lousy, it was seditious – and two-thirds of congressional Republicans were, before the ugly scenes, scurrying to embrace it.
The second lousy choice was the one mandated by our constitutional democracy – certifying the results that had been duly ratified by the states and upheld by the courts. What makes that choice lousy? The fact, Cruz said, that “nearly half the country believes the election was riggedâ€. Well, yes, but perhaps the senator might have mentioned that this is only because of the disinformation that he and the president have been force-feeding the American people.
Read more here: Lawrence Douglas – Don’t blame Trump for the chaos in Washington DC. Blame his enablers
It looks like the social media manager at Arizona’s Republican Party needs to have a stern word with themselves. These two tweets are just a month apart.
The Washington Post have an interesting look this morning at the security implications of yesterday’s events, when a pro-Trump mob easily broke into the Capitol. They report Kim Dine, chief of the Capitol Police from 2012 to 2016 saying “It’s like watching a real-life horror movie. I mean, we train and plan and budget every day, basically, to have this not happen.â€
Dine said he was surprised to see that, on Wednesday, the Capitol Police had allowed rioters to gather so close to the building, on the Capitol steps — and that, once they forced their way inside, the rioters were not immediately arrested.
“We protect the people, the place and the process that makes us the United States. That’s why we’re there,†Dine said. But, he said, on Wednesday, “The people, the place, the process — all were attacked.â€
One source told the Washington Post that the police were simply unprepared.
Law enforcement officials said the Capitol Police and other federal agencies also seemed to underestimate the potential threat posed by Trump’s supporters — even as the DC police grew more alarmed. DC police patrol the streets around the Capitol but do not usually have any role in protecting the building itself. In recent days, DC officials said, they had tracked reservations for incoming buses, and read Trump’s calls for supporters to gather for a “wild†protest in Washington. “It was then that we realized this could be a stadium-sized crowd — a full-fledged Trump rally, and much bigger than anything we had seen previously,†said a senior District official.
Former commissioner of police in Boston, Ed Davis, told the Post as he watched events unfold that the force’s preparations around the perimeter were inadequate:
A good perimeter, and then a show of force. Enough people that can deal with the crowd that’s coming at you. Right now, there’s almost nothing here. This is incomprehensible.
Read more here: Washington Post – Capitol breach prompts urgent questions about security failures
