~ Raphael Warnock (newly elected US Senator from Georgia) in his victory speech on 2021-01-05
The first three weeks of 2021 gave me whiplash.
On 01-05, progressive Democrats displaced Trump toadies by winning both runoff elections for Senate in Georgia. Knowing how badly the Dems had fared in several other Senate races that seemed close at the start of November, I had expected both Warnock and Ossoff to be swept away by a tsunami of dark money pouring into Georgia. But they both won, by narrow margins much like Biden’s margin in Georgia.
Great Seal of the State of Georgia
On 01-06, a mob stormed and trashed the US Capitol. The Capitol Police had been complacent while Trump cultists swarmed into DC. Some of the cops (and some members of Congress) may even have been complicit in the violence that Trump incited. Yes, he did incite it. His mild late admonition to be peaceful was meant to cover his ass, not to walk back his continued strident lying about the urgency of radical action to undo a “stolen” election in Georgia and other states that Biden won narrowly.
On 01-20, Biden took the helm of what remains of the USA. Fortunately, what remains of the USA includes soldiers who remembered what they had sworn to defend and responded to the danger of an insurrection on 01-20 that would be better organized and better armed than on 01-06. The National Guard was out in force.
© Getty Images | Poughkeepsie Journal for 01-20
For now at least, civil war has been averted. Fireworks were the only explosions on 01-20.
© Evan Vucci/Associated Press | Washington Post for 01-21
We are not home free. That Trump is a fascist was obvious after truly nonviolent protesters were driven from Lafayette Square to make way for a sleazy photo-op on 2020-06-01. (To some observers, Trump’s fascism was obvious long before then.) And yet, as Molly Ball wrote in TIME for [01-18/01-25]:
Whether the USA values constitutional democracy enough to forgo white supremacy and the rest of Trump’s cult will be severely tested over the next few years. Get ready for more whiplash.
Build Back Better
With luck and hard work,
we may yet build a future
better than the past.
– above post (on phone) or beside it (on desktop). –
Mellow Curmudgeon 
We can only hope that Biden somehow will be able to untwist the minds of at least some of the bigots and other fools who make up a distressingly large percentage of the USA’s population.
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Nice blog
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I have never understood why the Dems don’t push back harder every time the former President or any of the GOP refers to them as Socialists. That label has become the basis of the rabid base’s fear that a Democratic Administration will turn America Socialist at the very least (although I don’t think they understand that means the government would own the means of production) — or Communist at the very worst. Not even America’s most ardent democratic socialists advocate for either of those outcomes.
Can anyone explain how a federal minimum wage of $15/hour is socialistic? (A piece of Greene’s idiocy.)
Pay attention. Vote again in 2022.
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Yeah, I am old enough to be familiar with the traditional usage of the word [socialism] to describe an economy where the only car maker is owned by the government. Without competition, it makes clunkers and sells them at a loss. Remember the Lada or the Yugo?
Sadly, many Dems are clueless about George Lakoff’s concept of framing: fixing the terms of a debate has a big impact on the outcome.
The Dems who call themselves “democratic socialists” are spectacularly clueless when they run with Bernie Sanders’ bizarre use of the phrase [democratic socialism] for proposals to make the USA work more like Denmark (a capitalist country with a robust safety net, a growing commitment to ecosanity, and the progressive taxation to pay for it all). Whether the USA should be as much like Denmark as Denmark may be debatable; whether 4 decades of coddling billionaires has left us needing a push in that direction is not.
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