"It Blows My Mind, Mr Garland"

by Mary W Maxwell, PhD, LLB

Now we're gettin' somewhere. Things are loosening up. The red-state/blue-state divide is not as bad as it was before the 2020 election.

In this article, I will comment on two so-called terrorist incidents, with an eye to claiming both were the usual set-ups. Man, don't you get sick of false flaggery!

The first is the January 6, 2021 storming of the Bastille, oops I mean the Capitol Building. The other is the Charlottesville Virginia event in 2017, "eerily like" the 2017 Bourke St rampage in Melbourne, Australia, by poor old Jimmy Gargasoulas who is now paying for our sins in prison.

Mary As Candidate

I believe I hold the clue as to which group should be blamed for the attack on the People's building (as Parliament House, Wash., DC is sometimes called). Yes, I know something the rest do not know. How zat? Because I am a lover of the Con and can zoom in on Amendment 12 practically in my sleep.

Amendment 12? Wha? It's about the Electoral College. We'll get to that in a minute. First, a bit of upfront disclosure. I am a registered Republican. I was baptized a Dem, back there in Forty Seven. I mean it is assumed that if you're a Boston Irish Catholic, you only know how to pull one of the levers in the Voting Machine and it's not the Republican one, which we poor always associated with wealth and uppityness. As in this verse:

This is the City of Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod,

Where the Lowells speak only to Cabots,
And the Cabots speak only to God.

OK. So late 2019 rolls around and I get this notion to run for prezz. Not really all the way run for prezz, but just try to get the New Hampshire nomination in 2020 as Republican candidate. Since another, somewhat better-known candidate, Donald J Trump, aka Incumbent, was also seeking it, my chances were not excellent.

Still, "the fight of my life" meant I had to sharpen up on campaign tactics. (I had no power base whatsoever and received zero in donations. But my ego was still in Earth orbit from the reception I got as a US Senate candidate in Alabama in 2017.) I realized that I could win a vote or two via a complete upset of the cranky old Electoral College which has been wanting a complete upset for yonks.

The Hidden Underbelly of January 6th

Amendment 12 gives the nation a way to make sure, every fourth year, that the office of president does not go wanting. In a nutshell, here's the gig. (I have loved the word "gig" ever since my law-school teacher in Australia said the outcome of the choosing of a new Chief Justice there, in 2008, was uncertain "until French got the gig.")

The Framers of the Con in 1787 were not big on having a powerful president. One delegate suggested a triumvirate; another recommended a quickly revolving position, maybe for a year. Eventually, in part to please the smaller states, Article II called for -- pay attention, this is relevant to January 6, 2020 -- a state-based choice of president. That is, he/she would not be elected by popular vote, his/her ("her," what a joke in 1787) votes would come from states.

Betcha way less than 1 percent of Seppos is aware of this.

Try to rid your mind of primaries, caususes, and the summer conventions of the DNC or RNC -- that is so much blather that mainly empowers the media, which hardly need any empowering.

Each election year, in December, the members of each state's little Electoral College meets, some being littler than others. Wyoming has only one member of the US House of Reps, New Hampshire has 2, Texas has 36, California has 53. You get one elector for each such member, and they throw in two more in each state. Thus, NH has 4 electors.

Well, there they sat, in the snows of December, 2020. Could the 4 have voted for Mary Maxwell for president of the United States? Sure. Or they could have voted for Tulsi Gabbard, Joe Biden, anyone who had signed up. Plus anyone who hadn't signed up! (Must be at least age 35 and native-born.) It is the Elector's duty, per the Con, to pick a suitable person for this tremendously responsible job.

Ah, but how does an Elector get to be an Elector? Each state is entitled to its own method. It is typically a party hack. Twenty-eight states now insist that the Elector vote only for the guy/gal who came out tops in the state’s November presidential election. The other 22 have their head.

And So to January 6

Per the parchment, the electors should mail their December ballots to the president of the US Senate (a more or less ceremonious job, always held by the US Vice President; this time it was Mike Pence.). On January 6, every four years, both chambers of Congress must meet jointly. The VP stands there while "tellers" open the ballots.

Thanks to Amendment XII (dated 1804), which is codified at 3 USC 15, if any member of either chamber wants to disagree, on any grounds, with the ballot count of any state, he can interrupt the count and announce his case. Then, (providing at least one member of the other house will sign that objection), the VP asks the senators to skip back to their chamber so each chamber can debate it privately, at a maximum of two hours.

A majority vote of both the Senate and House of Reps is needed for the rejection of any Elector's ballot. If the result is a decision to reject, that ballot must get dropped from the count. There is no constitutional or statutory mechanism by which the Congresspersons can revise an invalid ballot.

Conceivably, this paring down of the ballots could mean that the candidate who had been considered as having won the required minimum of 270 votes to become president (Biden had 302), would find himself having less than that number. So the January 6th procedure was to be very exciting.

On January 5, 2021, the day before the Electoral vote count, 139 members of the House of Representatives stated that they intended to challenge the ballots. Good heavens!

The opening of the envelopes from the states is done in alphabetical order. On January 6, we heard Alabama and Alaska called. Those ballots passed muster. Then Arizona was called -- this was the first state for which a challenge had been promised.

The "Timely" Invasion

But, just at that moment, the "invaders" broke into the chamber. The Congresspersons scattered to their offices for safety. At 8pm they resumed business.

Now ask: Did any of the 139 Reps challenge the states that were likely to be challenged -- Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and two others? No. Most likely the day's trauma had snuffed out the desire for controversy. The count went along smoothly with Joe Biden getting his expected 302 votes.

Long story short, in my opinion the invasion could not have been the work of Trumpers. See? I say that the timing of the Invasion of the Capitol had a specific effect: it took the mickey out of the challengers, and it occurred exactly at the moment when Arizona, the first of six challenge-worthy state was called. I have not seen any acknowledgement of this in the press.

Note: I do not claim that a big raft of objections would have brought Biden's number to under 270. No one knows, since it did not happen. A good guess is that Biden would still have got 302, thanks to the Party make-up of each chamber. The House was majority Democrat, and the Senate had just become Democrat majority also, with the new folks who arrived on January 3.

The debate-and-vote technique may not have led to a Trump win. But it was his only chance. He'd have been crazy to blow that chance by sending his followers to make mayhem.

The Non-Sorting of the January 6 Violence Issue

I have recently been writing articles about the Sandy Hook school massacre which I now believe was a hoax. Isn't that nice? Twenty children saved by the pen. So pardon me if I am attuned to seeing events that get saturation coverage on media as being most likely of media origin. Or FEMA origin, or whatever. Not from your basic citizen on the street. Emphatically not from "a lone gunman."

Anyone watching the January 6 invasion, live, could see that the first three security guards inside the building let the invaders in without even a reprimand. From that point on, we did not have an all-seeing eye to explore who did what to whom, but the "iconic clues" such as the broken glass outside, looked "scripted" right away.

Later, people were arrested at their homes for having been participants. I am unable to sort this out. Certainly, there should be punishment for the ringleaders. Will a court sort it? Not exactly, as in many cases the DoJ did quite a trick. They kept the person in jail for more than 6 months, then offered her a ticket home and a max penalty of "time already served" -- 6 months -- if they would sign a guilty plea.

Would you plead guilty? Probably yes, as it was a quick way to get out of a mess in this lovely Stalinesque situation in which we now find ourselves. Meanwhile the media shouts "So-and So Pleads Guilty of Capitol Hill Violence" making the issue look as if it has been sorted.

Mr Garland, Please Stop Evading the Question

What a pleasure it was to see the US Attorney General, Merrick Garland, getting grilled in Congress yesterday. Rep Greg Steube of Florida held up a photo of left-wingers storming a federal building, over "woke" issues, and asked Garland to compare it to similar photo of January 6th. Garland said he did not know of the later incident. Steube said "It blows my mind that you don't know." Anyway, the audience got the message -- the DoJ is acting strictly on party lines or ideological lines.

I have also heard, only very recently, that the 2017 Charlotte, Virginia event (I call them "events" now) was staged. A car, driven by a James Fields, was seen (really?) to have plowed through a crowd, killing one person (really?) and injuring twenty others. How can you be sure? Why, because the driver, James Fields, is in jail for it! That's supposed to settle it. Also, the photographer won a Pulitzer Prize for capturing it.

If God spares me, I hope to write that case up later. The fact that it was a car rampage makes me feel guilty that I did not do more to nose in on the case of the Burke St rampage in Melbourne, when I lived just down the road in Adelaide.

It had some blatant hallmarks of fakery, most famously that three silvery official cars stood by, in a row and let the reckless (or programmed?) rampager, Jimmy Gargasoulas, make "donuts" with his car in the busiest section of town, Federation Square, at the lunch hour. Jimmy then seemed to be directed (by a "homeless" man in a blue jacket) to head over to Bourke St. The three silvery cars followed him. Need we guess if that detail was brought up at his trial?

Here is Wikipedia on the Melbourne event:

"The maroon Holden Commodore sedan used in the attack was stolen from his mother’s partner who lived in the same block of flats as Gargasoulas. Upon being interviewed, the car owner alleged that on the night of 18 January 2017, Gargasoulas entered his flat with a Bible, sat down, started burning it and threw it into his face."

Ho hum.

I forgot to mention that the Charlotte rampage was said to have squared off a set of right-wing extremists (roughly, KKKers) and a group of hard-done-by left-wing activists.

Double ho hum.

Here is our new Congressional hero, Rep Greg Steube: