When the Trump team and the president himself pressured Michigan Republican officials to overturn the vote in their state, only one man said no. He said he had to follow the law. He was a hero of democracy.
His name is Aaron Van Langevelde.
“We must not attempt to exercise power we simply don’t have,” declared Van Langevelde, a member of Michigan’s board of state canvassers, the ministerial body with sole authority to make official Joe Biden’s victory over Trump. “As John Adams once said, ‘We are a government of laws, not men.’ This board needs to adhere to that principle here today. This board must do its part to uphold the rule of law and comply with our legal duty to certify this election.”
We need more like him.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
And we need some checks and balances on the system that would mean we never again have to depend on a couple of people to certify that an election is legitimate. Montesquieu this thing. Power checks power. Anything else is a blueprint for totalitarianism.
State officials who are Republicans have stopped the Trump circus train in more states than Michigan. The Governors and elected US Congressional Representatives and Senators are noticeably quiet of accepting the falsehoods in Trump’s rants about election frauds.
Complicit: Paul, McConnell, Rubio, and so many more
There is a massive shortage of courage in the corrupt GOP.
But isn’t it a sad statement that he is called a hero of democracy when all he was doing was following the law of the land? Am I a hero for obeying laws and doing the right thing? No, I am not. It is just because he is one of few in his party willing to do the right thing, and that makes me sad and angry and often frightened of what is coming in the future.
Elaine, agreed. When faced with a tyrant, simple acts of decency look like heroism.
Well observed, Diane!
Fact Check | Bob Shepherd
The fact that you even have to say
that Black Lives Matter
The fact that Donald Trump
The fact that if you tell people
it’s about their freedom,
it’s about their jobs,
its about home, sweet home
The fact that Jesus on a plate
holding an AR-15 at the fireworks concession
The fact that I’m so good at facing facts
they should name a recovery center after me
or one of Bill Barr’s firing squads
The fact that the Mystic Massacre
The fact that men in three-cornered hats told other men
that it was about THEIR freedom,
that it was about THEIR equality,
when it was really about (their, shh) not paying (their, shh) taxes
The fact that same as the old boss
The fact that the Fort Pillow Massacre
The fact that you could go on all day like that
The fact that you learned the facts of life
but don’t even want to know the facts of death
The fact that if you are brown in America
someone else’s de jure
is your de facto
And the fact that that’s a fact
The fact that if you’re poor,
fact finding is easy because
there’s always a fact of the day
and if you’re not,
then you are an accessory
before, during, and after the fact
The fact that all markets look pretty free
if you’re spending some poor person’s labor
The fact that everybody wants their Mama
and no one wants to admit that
is two facts
The fact that 27,375 days
The fact that Jimmy Carter said
he had sinned against Rosalynn in his mind,
which was so JC of him,
I wanted to kiss him on the peanut.
Revised version: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2020/12/01/fact-check-bob-shepherd/
Years ago, I owned a small publishing house. We started work on a history project–a series of booklets on document-based questioning. At the beginning of this, I called my staff together and told them, “I want to be very, very serious about fact-checking on this project.” We’re going to check EVERYTHING, even the stuff we’re certain we already know. And that’s what we did. Wow, was that eye-opening. Sorting out truth from myth is a complex matter, and dig into almost any statement in the K-12 history textbooks, and you’ll find that, like relationship statuses, “It’s complicated.” We swim in inherited mythologies.
I know how one does it with scientific matters , which is hard enough in some cases, but how does one even go about sorting out fact from fiction in something like history when so much of history has been slanted in the writing?
This is a fascinating question, isn’t it? My introduction to it was reading Hayden White’s seminal essay in historiography, “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” as an undergraduate. White’s thesis is that we say we understand an historical event when we have imposed a narrative frame on it–identified heroes and villains, settled on a protagonist and antagonists, identified a central conflict and worked out its plot from inciting incident(s) to denouement. Another crucial experience for me, with regard to this question, was reading Heidegger on the hermeneutic (interpretive) cycle. In his essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” he says that in order to answer the question, “What Is Art?” we have to gather a bunch of artworks together and look at them, but this presupposes some sort of answer to the question. So, he says, this must be a cyclical process in which we examine, rethink, gather examine rethink, gather, etc. The same, as other thinkers like Gadamer have pointed out, is true of history. We look at past events and texts through the lens of our current understandings and encounter anomalies that change our current lenses and so on, in a cycle. I think that we can begin to approach this question of the recoverability of historical fact with this observation: some things actually happened. Some did not. So, “the truth is out there” at least to that extent. However, there are all kinds of issues with recovering it, and these include the inability then and now to see except through particular lenses–to separate observation from interpretation. The mere choosing of something to examine colors what will be found. Where do we direct our attention? That says a lot about us and determines to an enormous extent what we will find. But we cannot, we cannot, when doing history dispense with the precept, as troubled as it is, that some historical accounts are warranted, and some are not. Heuristics like “the preponderance of the evidence” definitely apply, as does Yeats’s observation about “the fascination of what’s difficult.”
What you point out about Carter was a fact
I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.”
But the statement he made right after that was not a fact.
This is something God recognizes I will do — and I have done it — and God forgives me for it.”
Even if there is a God, there is certainly no guarantee that She forgives Carter for his sin. In fact, if She is like most women I have known, she probably does no but instead reminds him of it every time he starts to step out of line.
Good man!
King Donald the Wurst
Dumb Donald Trump
sat on his rump,
eating cheeseburgers all day.
He called for his Miller
and brownshirted killers
and hypocrite fundies to pray.
He called for his Barr
to make him a czar
and all rule of law to allay.
And to meet his requirement
that it trash the environment,
he neutered the EPA.
“To switch out democracy
for rank kakistocrasy,
I had but to bellow and bray.
I’ve drawn to my Trump
many millions of chumps
and given sweet Vlad complete sway.”
“I’ll call it a day,” the con man did say,
“Though I’m still president anyway.”
Then he farted and stood
and called it all good,
and went to a golf course to play.