During Tuesday night’s vote on the motion to open the Senate healthcare bill for debate, senators representing 143 million citizens voted in favor, while senators representing 179 million citizens voted against.

This was considered a tie.

To break the tie, a man who was elected with almost three million votes less than his opponent stepped in to bring the bill to the floor.

And with that, the Will of the People had been expressed.

The Senate is the only institution in American governance that does not even pretend to represent Americans. Instead, it represents territorial units of America, land instead of people. That land is not evenly divided, but the result of historical circumstance. And that land does not include the District of Columbia, which boasts more souls than Vermont or Wyoming.

There is no reason for any of this.

There are only excuses.

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You might say, with justification, that it has already happened: That the moment Donald Trump fired James Comey was the moment our government was overthrown by a hostile power.

Trump’s action was within his authority as president. But it went well beyond conventional abuse of power. He fired Comey to save his own hide. And the Republican traitors in Congress let him get away with it.

But if you’re looking for a line, a clear line that indicates Before & After, a red line that separates Democracy from Tyranny, that line hasn’t been drawn yet. It’s about to be. That line is about to be drawn so clearly that there can be no evading its consequences.

When Robert Mueller is fired, the coup against America will be complete.

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Treason, famously, is the only crime defined in the Constitution. Its conditions are specific: It requires warring against the United States, or — also famously — providing “Aid and Comfort” to its enemies. Only ten convictions exist across our history; half of those involve World War II.

Neither Tokyo Rose nor Axis Sally took up arms against their nation, but their roles as the voices of our enemies — propaganda broadcasters — were sufficient to merit trial and conviction. Their words were deemed as damaging as bullets.

Treason is a crime against a state, and the nation it represents. To commit treason is to undermine the state, to attack the nation, for the benefit of its adversaries.

We call such people traitors.

And right now, traitors are running our country.

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Trump Jr. Was Told in Email of Russian Effort to Aid Campaign [NYT]

We have found it.

Truth be told, we didn’t even know we were looking for it. For that matter, we didn’t know we needed it. We could have happily gone for days, weeks, months, not knowing, not caring, not realizing something was missing, because consciousness has a way of hiding the seams of reality.

Really. Ever notice your blind spot? Why doesn’t it show up as a hole in your vision, like a missing pixel?

Anyway, that’s where it was hiding, in our blind spot. And when we found it, we couldn’t look away, and we can’t stop looking away.

For we have found the most precious of treasures in these dark times. We have found…

A Distraction.

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So Joe & Mika said some nasty things about Don, and then Don tweeted some nasty things about Joe & Mika, and then Mika subtweeted a photo about Don’s tiny fingers, and then someone tweeted a photo showing Mika wasn’t a bloody mess, and then Joe suggested he had some tapes about Don’s friends threatening them, and then a magazine said Don’s friends were really Reince and Jared, and fuck, we hadn’t even finished coffee yet.

Just another day in These United States. Welcome to The New Normal.

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We spent a very pleasant Sunday devouring Al Franken’s new book, Al Franken, Giant of the Senate. In it, Al Franken explains how he took Al Franken hostage to run for Senate, only to discover that Al Franken was in his heart all along. If you’ve been missing Al Franken, it turns out Al Franken never went away.

There’s a callback to his previous book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, which prompted us to relive the bygone days of 2003, when it was first published. And while wallowing in the nostalgia of John Ashcroft being a public figure, we stumbled across this passage:

“Those early months were heady days for George W. Bush. Emboldened by his landslide victory, Bush passed a $1.6 trillion tax cut which went primarily to the rich, pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol, delayed rules that would reduce acceptable levels of arsenic in the drinking water, and implemented the enormously successful Operation Ignore.”

You might forgive us for wondering whether we’ve been actually waking up to Sonny & Cher the past five months.

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