Pennsylvania Republicans refuse to swear in Democratic senator whose GOP opponent keeps fighting defeat

Stephan:  These have been an historic two days during which time the Republican Party took off its smiling mask and revealed its true face. That of a slavering monster dedicated to destroying American democracy.
Pennsylvania Democrat State Senator Jim Brewster

Pennsylvania’s Republican Senate majority refused to seat a Democratic state senator who narrowly won re-election over a challenger who won’t concede.

The GOP majority removed Democratic Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, who was to preside over the ceremony, and president pro temp Jake Corman took over instead and prevented Sen. Jim Brewster (D-Allegheny County) from being sworn in, reported the Inquirer‘s Abraham Gutman.https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=true&id=1346522564865253376&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rawstory.com%2Fpennsylvania-state-senate%2F&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px.

Republican Nicole Ziccarelli has challenged Brewster’s win, asking the courts to throw out 311 mail-in ballots from Allegheny County that lacked a handwritten date on the outer ballot envelope, as required by law, but the state’s Supreme Court permitted those votes to count.

Nearby Westmoreland County, which partially sits within Brewster’s district, did not count undated ballots, and Ziccarelli complained to U.S. District Court that her due process and equal protection rights were violated, although Brewster and Democratic officials argued federal courts had no jurisdiction to overturn a state court decision.https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-1&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1346524843584475137&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rawstory.com%2Fpennsylvania-state-senate%2F&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

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Trump auctions Arctic refuge to oil drillers in last strike against US wilderness

Stephan:  Trump has two weeks left, and you can be sure he is going to do everything he can to harm the United States because he did not win his election. Here is one example of what I mean.
Rivers run through the lush tundra valleys of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
 Rivers run through the lush tundra valleys of Alaska’s Arctic national wildlife refuge.
Credit: Acacia Johnson

WASHINGTON, D.C. — In one of its last strikes against the American wilderness, Donald Trump’s administration will on Wednesday auction off portions of the Arctic national wildlife refuge to oil drillers.

The lease sales are the climax to one of the nation’s highest-profile environmental battles. The lands on the northern coastal plain of Alaska are home to denning polar bears and migrating herds of Porcupine caribou that indigenous communities depend on and consider sacred. But the oil industry has long suspected that the ground beneath the plain holds billions of barrels of petroleum.https://www.theguardian.com/email/form/plaintone/4199Sign up for monthly updates on America’s public lands

Once the leases in the refuge, known as ANWR, are sold to energy companies, they would be difficult to claw back. The incoming president, Joe Biden, could, however, discourage development in the refuge by putting regulatory hurdles in the way of drillers.

The refuge has become central to America’s debate over how quickly to stop drilling for and burning fossil fuels as the […]

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Bird protections lifted in last-minute Interior rule change

Stephan:  There just is no limit to the nastiness of Trump and his orcs. I wonder where we will be two weeks from today, what other horrors will they perpetrate?
Interior Secretary and Trumpian Orc David Bernhardt. Credit: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call

Companies in the petroleum and other industries will not be held legally responsible for killing migratory birds as long as they did not mean to, the Trump administration said Tuesday, drawing swift condemnation from animal welfare and conservation groups.

The Interior Department is scheduled to finalize the rule change Wednesday, a boon to oil and gas companies that sought weakened protections of birds from an administration in its waning days.

A draft of the final rule comes two weeks before President-elect Joe Biden assumes the presidency, as well as on the heels of a new bipartisan conservation law protecting wetlands and waterfowl. It also coincides with a sharp decline in the overall population of birds in North America.

The number of birds on the continent has dropped by 3 billion, about 30 percent, since the 1970s, according to a survey published in the journal Science in September 2019.

The waterfowl-protection law (PL 116-188) that President Donald Trump signed Oct. 30 protects birds and bird habitats.

Under the new rule, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service […]

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Worse Than Treason

Stephan:  In my opinion, the activity of Trump and the Trumpers in this post-election period constitutes a text book example of sedition and treason.  The real question for me is will these people be held accountable Will anyone go to prison? The answer will determine whether this happens again. No accountability guarantees the Republicans will try this again, and do a better job of it.
Credit: Lambert/Getty

“We are what we pretend to be,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote in the opening of his 1962 novel, Mother Night, “and so we must be careful what we pretend to be.” Republicans in Congress are pretending to be seditionists—and so they have become, in fact, seditionists.

Forget all the whispered denials and the off-the-record expressions of concern in private; ignore the knowing smirks on camera from GOP officials who are desperately trying to indicate that they’re in on the joke. Brush aside the caviling of the anti-anti-Trump writers who would rather talk about that time in 2017 when some Democrats objected to the Electoral College vote (and were gaveled down by Joe Biden himself).

This is sedition, plain and simple. No amount of playacting and rationalizing can change the fact that the majority of the Republican Party and its apologists are advocating for the overthrow of an American election and the continued rule of a sociopathic autocrat.

This is not some handful of firebrands making a stand for the television cameras. In 2005, one Democrat in the House and one in the Senate filed […]

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Trump isn’t the only Republican who is refusing to accept defeat

Stephan:  Trump is not the only loser trying to undermine democracy in America, and I think that is an important point to bear in mind. This is an attack by a party on the fundemantal structure of the election system.

With the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden only 15 days away, President Donald Trump is still refusing to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election. And Dan Lavoie, who served as a speechwriter for former New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood, is noting that Trump isn’t the only Republican who has been challenging election results. Two others include Jim Oberweis in Illinois and Nicole Ziccarelli in Pennsylvania.

In Illinois’ 14th Congressional District, Democratic incumbent Rep. Lauren Underwood defeated Republican challenger Jim Oberweis in November — and she has been sworn into a second term in the U.S. House of Representatives. But only one day after Underwood was sworn in, Oberweis announced that he was challenging the election results. That election was quite close: Underwood, according to the Illinois Board of Elections, defeated Oberweis by 5,374 votes.
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In an official statement, Oberweis (an Illinois state senator) said, “I do not believe we found any rampant fraud, but what we […]

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