“According to Hutchinson’s testimony, Trump told a Secret Service agent, “I’m the effing president, take me up to the Capitol now.”

Saints are playing on the Field of Elected Sinners, again, so they can look that more righteous? No, they can not LIVE without The Opposition and the Contentious Jesus – who does no believe in playing fair. He’s out to win – at all costs! To be A WINNER he needs Bad Guys to His Good Guys! This has been the bane of all religions. If there are no Bad Guys, the God Guys – WILL INVENT THEM! We saw this with the Donald Trumpites of Jesus in regards to our Ex-Normal Elections. All the Democrats ARE GUILTY OF – is winning a Fair Election.

Saint Boebert of The Pence Killing Field said this;  Boebert told a religious service: “The church is supposed to direct the government. The government is not supposed to direct the church. That is not how our founding fathers intended it.”

If the Church was in power when the Constitution was signed, why didn’t The Elders give women the right to vote, and, free the slaves? When were freed slaves allowed to vote in the Red States? 1964? Looks like our white male fathers – favored THE STINGY JESUS!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

The Stingy Jesus CAN’T LOSE! “Vote for me! There can only be ONE JESUS – and the Republican Party’s GOT HIM!”

After yesterday WHY SHOULD THE DEMOCRATS TAKE PART IN ANY MORE ELECTIONS? They are IN POWER. Cancel the midterms and the next Presidential Election due to Extreme Christian Terrorists – and Armed Insurrectionists. The Republican Party has proven – they would do this to the Democrats. Why give them a second chance? They have SECEDED FROM REALITY AND DEMOCRACY! They don’t believe in the peaceful transfer of power. Think about it. If they lose any seats – they might not vacate them. They have KILLED THE IDEA OF DEMOCRACY. Hold on to it – while you got it! Democrats can hold closed elections amongst themselves, while American Saints For Jesus-Trump, try to turn our Nation into a Giant MEGA-CHURCH. The Democrats got the Armed Forces – and NATO on their side! Yeehaw!

HOLD ON! TO WHAT WE GOT!

John Presco

The extremist Colorado Republican congresswoman Lauren Boebert won her primary on Tuesday night, shortly after attacking the separation of church and state under the US constitution.

Related: January 6 testimony puts Donald Trump in even greater legal peril

“I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk,” she said.

A dedicated controversialist first elected in 2020, backed by Donald Trump and described by NBC News as a “Maga lightning rod”, Boebert convincingly beat Don Coram, a state senator, for the nomination to contest the midterm elections.

At one event recently Coram, 74, told voters: “My politics are very similar to my driving. To the chagrin of both my wife and my Republican colleagues, I tend to crowd the center line and sometimes I veer over a bit.”

In contrast, Boebert has heckled Joe Biden during the state of the union address; made racist attacks on Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota; vowed to carry a gun onto the House floor; and voted to object to results in key states in the 2020 presidential election.

Boebert beat Coram by 31 points.

On Sunday, two days before the primary and in comments first reported by the Denver Post, Boebert told a religious service: “The church is supposed to direct the government. The government is not supposed to direct the church. That is not how our founding fathers intended it.”

The first amendment to the US constitution, from 1791, says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

This is widely held to mean church and state should be separate. Critics charge that the US supreme court is now among rightwing bodies which dispute that.

This month, the conservative-dominated court has ruled that Maine cannot exclude religious schools from a tuition programme and ruled in favour of a public school football coach who lost his job for leading prayers on the field.

In the Maine case, the liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote: “This court continues to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state that the framers fought to build.”

Boebert, however, said she was “tired of this separation of church and state junk that’s not in the constitution. It was in a stinking letter, and it means nothing like what they say it does”.

The “stinking letter” seemed to be one written by Thomas Jefferson to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut in 1802.

The third president referred to the constitution establishing “a wall of separation between church and state”. His words have been mentioned in supreme court rulings.

Gwen Calais-Haase, a Harvard political scientist, told the Washington Post Boebert’s claim was “false, misleading and dangerous”, and said she was “extremely worried about the environment of misinformation that extremist politicians take advantage of for their own gains”.

The supreme court has also recently ruled on abortion, overturning the long established right in a ruling last week.

At the service on Sunday, Boebert said: “Look at what happened this week. This is the fruit of your labor, of your votes and of your prayers – this is your harvest.”

Perhaps the most revealing of Donald Trump’s numerous tirades about the House select committee’s hearing on Tuesday was one targeting the day’s sole witness.

“Her body language is that of a total bull … artist,” Trump wrote, for some reason hiding his long-demonstrated predilection for vulgarity in an ellipsis. “Fantasy Land!”

He’d posted on his bespoke social media site a number of other times about the witness, Cassidy Hutchinson, and about the hearing itself. It was a “Kangaroo Court,” Trump declared and Hutchinson’s writing, as displayed on a note shown during the hearing, “that of a Whacko?” If you’ve been conscious at any point during the past seven years, you can guess the sorts of complaints Trump offered.

But that “body language” comment Trump posted to Truth Social evoked something other than Trump Trumping. It was immediately reminiscent of the response to another young woman who recently gave high-profile testimony in a heavily watched proceeding: that of actress Amber Heard.

“Amber Heard 2.0” was soon trending on Twitter. The intent of using that phrase was to disparage Hutchinson as a liar and an opportunist, as supporters of Johnny Depp believed Heard to have been in the recently concluded defamation trial. The comparison was fostered by a rapid effort to undercut Hutchinson’s testimony and Hutchinson herself wherever possible. And describing the situation as “Amber Heard 2.0” is, in fact apt: not because the two women were particularly similar but because the reaction was.

Because, in other words, “Amber Heard 2.0” ended up trending.Sign up for How To Read This Chart, a weekly data newsletter from Philip Bump

It is necessary first to acknowledge that Hutchinson’s testimony did not provide a full picture of what happened in the Trump White House during the post-election period. Hutchinson testified under oath to remarkable anecdotes with compelling details, at times conveying what she remembered or had noted and at times conveying things she’d been told. Those details about what happened as Trump was leaving the Ellipse after his speech on Jan. 6, 2021, for example, were conveyed to Hutchinson, she said, by a member of Trump’s Secret Service detail.

That story — about an enraged Trump demanding that he be driven to the Capitol, about Trump then attempting to grab the wheel of the vehicle, about Trump then putting his hands on an agent sitting near him — quickly became the focus of the effort to discredit Hutchinson. Figures from the right-most fringe of Republican politics seized on a diagram of the presidential limousine published by the Daily Mail. See! Couldn’t have grabbed the wheel! But Trump wasn’t in that limousine on Jan. 6; it was a less compartmentalized SUV. What’s more, previous reporting from Politico indicated that the agent Trump allegedly accosted had described to committee investigators a dispute between himself and the president in that vehicle.

People speaking on behalf of the Secret Service told reporters that Hutchinson’s description of what she was told is inaccurate. In a statement, an official for the agency indicated willingness by those present to provide sworn testimony about what occurred. The specific details, then, remain hazy.

That it was necessary to start by adjudicating that question is, of course, the point. This conflict is not an insignificant one either for our understanding of what happened on that day or for our assessment of Hutchinson’s credibility. But that credibility depends not on what happened but on whether Hutchinson was told those things happened, since she doesn’t claim she was in the vehicle. The focus on the limousine and how it is structured and if the steering wheel could be reached is part of the familiar process of digging deep enough into a claim to find something that can be presented as fishy — allowing that doubt to swim back upstream to impugn the claimant.

At least this effort to diminish Hutchinson is rooted in something like evidentiary analysis. Hutchinson also was disparaged broadly and on a personal level, dismissed as being merely some low-level staffer, despite her time in Republican politics. Things like Trump’s “body language” assertion or the breathless disparagements by Newsmax host Greg Kelly ( “How the hell did ‘CASSIDY’ get her job. Does she have ANY ability? Or is she just a Good looking GOSSIP??”) hew to the more grotesque efforts to tear down Amber Heard.

In his excellent distillation of the Heard-Depp trial, Michael Hobbes compares the scrutiny and disparagement the actress faced with long-familiar patterns.

“All of this — the bad-faith scrutiny, the obsession with minor discrepancies, the confidence that vast conspiracies can be discovered on Google — is instantly recognizable from previous explosions of internet-enabled misogynistic bullying. The ‘body language experts’ that swarmed around Heard spent years applying the same junk science to Amanda Knox, Meghan Markle, and Carole Baskin. The gremlins who targeted Anita Sarkeesian during GamerGate pretended to be offended by the (extremely minor) technical errors in her videos rather than her presence in their boy’s-only treehouse.”

“All of this — the bad-faith scrutiny, the obsession with minor discrepancies, the confidence that vast conspiracies can be discovered on Google — is instantly recognizable from previous explosions of internet-enabled misogynistic bullying. The ‘body language experts’ that swarmed around Heard spent years applying the same junk science to Amanda Knox, Meghan Markle, and Carole Baskin. The gremlins who targeted Anita Sarkeesian during GamerGate pretended to be offended by the (extremely minor) technical errors in her videos rather than her presence in their boy’s-only treehouse.”

“GamerGate” refers to one of the first prominent explosions of misogyny-driven hyperscrutiny fueled by the internet. A cadre of men, frustrated by new attention to the lack diversity in the video game industry, directed attacks and criticism at those drawing that scrutiny and their defenders. It raged for months and the relative novelty of the style of attack — group-bullying on the internet, digging up anything that might look like dirt — meant a lack of ability to respond effectively. Doxing and swatting both emerged as common online harassment tactics in part thanks to GamerGate.

Writing for the New York Times, Amanda Hess explored how similar dynamics were deployed against Amber Heard — often but not exclusively by women who supported Depp — which again mirrors the scrutiny quickly applied to Hutchinson. It wasn’t just that Hutchinson was offering testimony, it was that she was offering testimony that impugned a cultlike figure: Donald Trump. She was daring to speak out against someone whom thousands of Americans have spent years reflexively defending. She was confronting a well-oiled system used to both downplay Trump’s actions and eviscerate his opponents.

To an objective observer, the idea that Hutchinson would intentionally lie under oath — in a hearing sufficiently scripted that she undoubtedly knew what was coming — bears the burden of proof. Her firsthand accounts comport with what we know about Trump and with his actions and statement before and after the Capitol riot. If she is shown to have lied under oath, she should and likely would face legal repercussions.

She has not been shown to have lied under oath, though you might not know it from the MAGA world reaction on Wednesday morning. Those desperate to defend Trump at all costs are deploying a network of allies and an established pattern of scrutiny to try to tear Hutchinson down.

A young woman offering credible testimony against a popular public figure to whom she was once loyal — and invoking the wrath of his defenders. Amber Heard 2.0.