Stop whining! Politics is hardball and always has been.

I get it. Republicans are shameless hypocrites. A dozen or more GOP senators have done an about face, turning their back on a Merrick Garland rule they made up in the first place. The excuses were all over the map, but they needn't have been. Over the course of the past half-century, the Republican Party has been animated by two objectives above all else: cutting taxes and appointing conservative judges. While Congressional Republicans hung their hat on "supply side" theories early on to justify their tax cuts, it did not take long before they decided that piling up debt was a price they were willing to pay – or have someone else pay – for piling up campaign cash and winning elections. Are Republican senators willing to vote to put Donald Trump's nominee on the Supreme Court days before a presidential election, violating whatever pledges they might have made in the past that they wouldn't? In a New York minute, as it turned out.

Despite the rage among Democrats about the hypocrisy and unfairness of it all, this will be an easy vote for GOP senators. After four years of prostrating themselves before Donald Trump, notions like honor and integrity and putting country before party have disappeared from their muscle memory.

Conservatives have been motivated by the Supreme Court for the past half-century with a singular focus that has simply not been true for liberals or progressives. When elections roll around, Democratic voters care about the Court, but it is just one of many issues that motivates their vote. For a large subset of Republican voters, on the other hand, the Supreme Court is all they care about. 

For all the success Republicans have had over the years in packing the courts with young, Federalist Society jurists, they have never achieved the solid majority on the Supreme Court that now appears at hand. Republican presidents have sat in the White House for 32 of the past 52 years, over which time they have placed 15 justices on the Supreme Court, compared to four for Democrat presidents. Yet, over those years, social conservatives have had to watch in horror as one Republican nominee after another – from Harry Blackmun to John Paul Stevens to David Souter – migrated to the left during their years on the Court, and even John Roberts and Neil Gorsuch joined liberal justices in ruling against conservatives on critical issues. 

For social conservatives, filling Ginsburg's seat is the stuff of their dreams, and Senate Republicans understand that voting on this nomination – and in doing so shifting the balance of the Court from an uneasy 5-4 conservative majority to a more definitive 6-3 majority – is an iron-clad obligation that they owe to their supporters. That the vote will happen is a fait accompli; the smartest thing that Democrats can do over the coming weeks is to treat the nominee with dignity and respect, and avoid letting the confirmation process devolve into the culture war that Donald Trump dearly hopes will tip the November election in his favor.

Anger on the left over a conservative replacing Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Court has an eerily familiar ring to it. It is the same outrage and indignation that Democrats felt when Clarence Thomas was nominated to replace Thurgood Marshall. Like RBG, Marshall was an icon of his generation, who had made unique contributions to American jurisprudence and social progress. But all of that outrage will not change what is about to take place. Decade after decade, Democrats have found themselves being schooled in the realities of winning elections and wielding power by the likes of Lee Atwater, Grover Norquist, James Baker, Dick Cheney, and Mitch McConnell, who understand that the difference between the political parties is as much, or more, about the focus on gaining and wielding power as it is about policy disagreements. To this day, the dynamics of power seem to elude Democrats, even as it comes naturally to Republicans. 

As the old adage goes, Republicans fall in line, Democrats fall in love. It reflects the historical willingness of Republican voters to rally around their general election candidate, regardless of how nasty the primary fight might have been, while Democratic groups continue their internecine fights long after the primaries are over, never letting go of the candidate of their dreams. The adage might well be stated differently: Republicans understand what is at stake when elections roll around; Democrats don't. The history of presidential elections over the past half-century is replete with Democrats who lost close races as elements of the Democratic Party coalition sat on their hands, while Republicans stood four-square behind their candidate. In 1968, progressives who had swooned over Eugene McCarthy or Bobby Kennedy never warmed up to Hubert Humphrey, and many opted to stay home as Richard Nixon won a razor-thin victory. In 2000, Ralph Nader – the high priest of the politics of purity – won enough Democratic votes to hand the White House to George W. Bush. 

After Donald Trump's narrow victory four years ago, you might have thought that Democrats would have learned that elections are won or lost at the margins. But even as the battle rages over the RBG seat on the Court, there are still those within the party demanding to know what Joe Biden is going to do to earn their vote. 

Republican senators have reacted bitterly to suggestions by Democrats that "ramming through" a new justice will be met with harsh retaliation next year should Democrats prevail in November. No one has argued that Mitch McConnell does not have the right under the Constitution to push forward with a vote on whomever Donald Trump chooses to nominate. By the same token, there is nothing that Democrats have suggested that they might do – expanding the number of justices on the Supreme Court, granting statehood to the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico – that Democrats will not similarly have the right to do should they win in November as many in the GOP now foresee. Should he find himself Minority Leader in January 2021, Mitch McConnell will no doubt inveigh against ending the filibuster – a necessary first step to the rest of the Democratic agenda. But warnings about the unintended consequences of steps Democrats might take will likely fall on deaf ears after four years of watching Donald Trump run roughshod over democratic norms and institutions and Congressional oversight, to say nothing of Mitch McConnell's own manipulations of the rules.

McConnell, an inveterate poll-reader, knew the moment he heard that Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died that he had a choice to make. He could have chosen to delay the Supreme Court vote, soothe the waters with Senate Democrats, and bet on Trump being able to run the table in the swing states a second time. But instead – perhaps sensing that his days as Majority Leader are numbered – he chose to take the sure thing. As the conservative pundit Jonathan Last commented. "You might think of Senate Republicans as a bunch of bank robbers, running around in the vault, stuffing every last wad of cash they can grab down the front of their pants because they hear the sirens and they know that the cozzers will be on the scene any minute."

A Biden victory in November once augured a return to normalcy. But notions of normalcy – like Joe Biden's wistful stories of mutual respect and bipartisan cooperation during his years in the Senate – seem increasingly like parables of a past that is lost to us. The irony is that even as Republicans are rushing to install a new justice on the Supreme Court, they are laying the groundwork for the whirlwind to come. While they imagine that their legacy will be a super-majority on the Supreme Court that will put a conservative stamp on the nation for decades to come, their legacy may instead be an historic contribution to the further fraying of the fragile bonds of trust that are the glue of the Republic. The filibuster could well be history by the end of January, and their cherished 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court gone by July. Rather than a return to normalcy, we will instead see retribution and rage – hallmarks of the Trump presidency that we thought we might be able to put behind us – rise to new heights and continue to transform the political landscape.

Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit! To Save Our Democracy, It’s Time to Let Alabama Be Alabama and Set California Free." 

Artwork by Joe Dworetzky.  Follow him on Twitter @joedworetzky or Instagram at @joefaces.

Will Woodward's tapes be the end of Donald Trump?

After her father's diagnosis with Covid-19, Caroline Brooks vented her frustration on Twitter. "Wearing a mask is a non-partisan issue. The advice of medical experts shouldn’t be politicized. My father ignored medical expertise and now he has COVID. This has been a heartbreaking battle because I love my dad and don’t want him to die." 

Brooks was barking up the wrong tree, however. Brooks' father, Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert, has been part of the problem for years now. A political fashionista of sorts, Gohmert eagerly signed onto whatever hyper-partisan, anti-establishment caucus came his way over his decade and a half in Congress. The fact that he was diagnosed with Covid-19, after months of making a show of his devotion to Donald Trump by refusing to wear a mask in the Capitol, changed nothing. He blamed his positive Covid test on his mask, and, after he recovered a few weeks later, attributed his recovery to Trump's recommended protocol of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin.

She then closed her July tweet with words that have become prescient with the release of the taped interviews between Bob Woodward and Donald Trump. "It’s not worth following a president who has no remorse for leading his followers to an early grave.”

As the world now knows, it turns out that Trump understood the risks posed by the looming pandemic from the get-go. On February 7th, he described to Woodward warnings from his national security advisors that the coronavirus would be the greatest challenge he would face as President, and a public health crisis on par with the 1918 Spanish flu that killed 50 million people. Ten days later, the President delved into the nuances of the threat. “You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed,” Trump said in a February 7th call with Woodward. “And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than... even your strenuous flus. This is deadly stuff.” At least five times deadlier than a severe seasonal flu, he added.

All along the way, Trump was lying to his followers. The hypocrisy is breathtaking. While he was taking great care to protect himself – visitors were not allowed to see him without first getting an instant Covid test, and those working in the White House were tested constantly – he actively encouraged his supporters to put themselves in harm's way. Even as he described the virulence of Covid-19 to Woodward beginning in early February, he has declined to this day to share that critical information with his supporters, choosing instead to use the disease as one more tool in his arsenal to divide the country against itself.

In any normal world, the publication of taped interviews that expose the extent of a President's duplicity and self-serving manipulation – leading directly to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths and continuing economic devastation – would not just spell the end of his career, but leave him to live out his life in shame and ignominy. He would be vilified by his supporters, as they came to realize that the person they worshipped – exactly as Caroline Brooks suggested – had absolutely no remorse for leading them to an early grave. 

But we do not live in a normal world. Instead, within the reality distortion field that Trump creates around himself – a world in which he is the sole arbiter of reality – his supporters appear to look past the depth of his cynicism and pathological narcissism, as well as the implications of his lies for their own lives. "We're the smartest people, we're the most loyal people," Trump declared to his supporters on the eve of his victory in the Nevada presidential nominating caucus four years ago that began to separate him from the GOP pack. That alleged two-way loyalty – the loyalty of his base to him, and the loyalty that they believe he had for them – has been the foundation of his presidency. The loyalty of his supporters has proven to be unbreakable through thick and thin. But never before this has his loyalty to them been so directly – and irrefutably – exposed as a sham. 

The rallies that Trump held in North Carolina, Nevada and Arizona over the days after the Woodward tapes came to light illustrate the irony of the moment. His supporters showed up, raring to go. Those seated in the bleachers behind the podium were properly masked, perhaps to provide an illusion of compliance with public health protocols to the television cameras, while the crowds that Trump faced were packed tightly together, unmasked, and raucous. The whole Covid thing is a Democrat hoax, those attending the rallies assured reporters. 

According to Pew Research, those who believe the whole thing is a hoax are the rule, not the exception, within TrumpWorld. According to Pew data, 68% of those who have relied on the President and his coronavirus task force for information about the virus believe that the outbreak of Covid-19 has been made into a bigger deal than it really is, and more than one-third of all Republicans and GOP-leaning independents believe the conspiracy theory that the pandemic was planned and spread by a cabal of powerful people in order to take down the President. Among Trump's most loyal demographic – those with a high school diploma or less – 48% believe the Covid conspiracy theory is definitely or probably true. 

It is now crystal clear from the tapes that Donald Trump knows otherwise, and has known from the very beginning. There is no hoax and no conspiracy, just a killer plague, as he described it to Woodward in April; "It's a horrible thing, it's unbelievable... This thing is a killer if it gets you. If you're the wrong person, you don't have a chance... It is the plague." After the rally in Nevada this past Sunday, a reporter asked Trump whether – in light of his comments about the virulence of the virus – it worried him that his supporters were putting themselves at risk, given that they were packed inside a closed space and following none of the public health protocols. Trump, bantering affably with the reporter, said "I’m on a stage, it’s very far away, so I’m not at all concerned.” He appeared to give no regard to the risks to his supporters and instead focused only on himself.

Looking back to Donald Trump's speech on the last night of the Republican National Convention in late August, one has to wonder what the members of Congress and other Trump loyalists who had gathered on the South Lawn of the White House that evening thought as they listened to Bob Woodward's tapes this week. Like those at Trump's rallies, they toed the party line. They largely eschewed masks and sat tightly together as the President addressed them from a discrete and safe distance away. 

Hearing his words this week on the tapes, they now know what the President knew and when he knew it. And listening to his comments to the reporter in Nevada, it is also clear that he had little or no regard for their well-being, or that of their families, as they gathered together to hear his speech. Did those members of Congress have a moment of epiphany as they grasped the breadth of Donald Trump's political manipulations around a pandemic that has now killed 200,000 of their fellow Americans. Have they come to realize his utter indifference to anyone's life but his own? 

Looking back, do those erstwhile leaders of the Trump movement now wonder about the price of their own sycophancy? Have their families or friends suggested that it is time that they recognize that the man they have supported – no questions asked – for years now, is every bit the liar and con man that Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio suggested early on. And have their children raised to them the question that Caroline Brooks addressed to her own father. It is the question every Trump supporter now must answer, as the depth of his duplicity has been revealed for all the world to hear: Why would you continue to support a president who has no remorse for leading his followers to an early grave?

Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit! To Save Our Democracy, It’s Time to Let Alabama Be Alabama and Set California Free." 

Artwork by Joe Dworetzky.  Follow him on Twitter @joedworetzky or Instagram at @joefaces.

Coda: If Trump loses, a friend points out, don't forget about Kanye West.

As a coda to my last piece, If Trump loses, could Nancy Pelosi end up in the White House? I wanted to offer the observation of a lawyer friend from the Bay Area.

My friend pointed out that while Kanye West is not in the line of succession under the Presidential Succession Act, he may well come in third in the presidential contests behind Joe Biden and Donald Trump, as he appears to have qualified for the ballot in at least eleven states. Under the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, which effectively rewrote the rules originally set forth in Article II, should no candidate receive the 270 majority required to win the presidency in the Electoral College, the choice open to the House of Representatives for selecting President must come "from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President."

In the 1824 election, as described in detail here, Andrew Jackson won the popular vote nationwide and had 99 votes in the Electoral College, but did not win a majority. John Quincy Adams had 84 votes, William Crawford, the Secretary of the Treasury, had 41, and Henry Clay, the Speaker of the House, had 37. Clay, being fourth, was not eligible under the Twelfth Amendment.

The House or Representatives ultimately elected John Quincy Adams as president, giving him 13 votes, with 7 votes for Andrew Jackson and 4 for William Crawford. Adams later nominated Clay to be Secretary of State.

This time, if neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump wins a majority in the Electoral College, and partisan hostility is such that neither candidate is able to garner a majority in the House under the one-state, one-vote rules, Kanye West could turn out to be the only other eligible candidate under the rules set forth in the Twelfth Amendment.

Stranger things have happened... 

Well, maybe not. 

As my friend closed his note to me, "I know it is a ludicrous proposition but it seems theoretically possible... There once was a time when Trump's becoming president was also a ludicrous proposition."

If Trump loses, could Nancy Pelosi end up in the White House?

The party conventions are over, Labor Day has arrived, and the presidential race remains pretty much as it has been for months. Joe Biden continues to hold a six to eight point lead nationally, and a similar range of leads in most of the key battleground states. Donald Trump surely hoped that Republican National Convention would spark a narrowing of the race. If the campaign's objective was to soften his image in order to boost his support among suburban women and independents, any material impact has been short-lived. 

Donald Trump is an open book, and you don't have to read excerpts of Michael Cohen's new book to know that Trump will do whatever it takes to remain in the White House on January 21, 2021. Continuing to incite violence in the street, pitting left against right, will no doubt remain central to his law and order campaign. Rolling out a vaccine – however preliminary the results of clinical trials might be – to an increasingly skeptical public is similarly ready to go; though that gambit may be foiled by pharmaceutical companies wary of becoming pawns to his ambition. Cohen suggested this week that he could easily imagine the President starting a war to stay in office, and current US movements in the South China Sea could be a precursor to Tonkin Gulf-type incident, mirroring LBJ's 1964 election year ploy.

Whatever other surprises lie in store, Donald Trump has made clear that he will pronounce anything short of an outright victory in November – a landslide even – the result of massive voter fraud. As he reiterated to the delegates gathered at the RNC convention last month – right after he suggested that they should be chanting 'twelve more years' rather than 'four more year' – he has no intention of conceding defeat, however the vote might turn out. "The only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election," he assured them, as delegates shouted their approval.

Whatever the outcome of the race, we will never hear Donald Trump deliver a gracious concession speech, where he thanks his supporters for all their hard work and commits to working with the incoming administration. After watching him trash every conceivable norm of presidential conduct, and undermine every institution that offered the slightest resistance, there is no reason to believe that Trump will treat an election defeat and the peaceful transfer of power – the singular, defining attribute of liberal democracy, and one that Americans take for granted – any differently.

The core underpinning of our democracy is faith, in all manner of institutions. Those institutions have no inherent durability without the faith of the citizenry and the support of our leaders. For several hundred years, electoral democracy in particular has relied on two things. First, it relies on public faith in the election process and the willingness of the electorate to accept election results. Vote counts are never accurate to the single vote – there is always noise in the system – which is why the willingness to accept the results is essential. Many Republicans held a grudge for years after Nixon's loss to John F. Kennedy in 1960, claiming that Joe Kennedy's allies manipulated the results in Illinois and Texas to throw the election to his son. And certainly many Democrats – John Lewis famously among them – continue to believe that Trump's election was illegitimate. But in each case, life went on.

Equally critically, democracy relies on the good faith of the candidates themselves. The election in 2000 tested that faith, and Al Gore – like Richard Nixon before him in 1960 – understood that a losing candidate willingly conceding to the outcome of an election can be as important to the perpetuation of democracy as the outcome itself. Gore and Nixon each lost elections that their supporters to this day claim they might have won if they had pursued every legal remedy – recounting every vote in Florida in Gore's case, and perhaps dredging Lake Michigan to find missing ballot boxes in Nixon's. Instead, they each made the judgment that the stability of the system was more important than their personal victory. 

Gore and Nixon each kept faith with the nation's founding principles in a manner that is nearly impossible to expect from Donald Trump. If there is one thing that Trump's supporters and detractors likely agree on, it is that when push comes to shove, he will never graciously step aside to preserve the integrity and survival of the system. 

Last week, Hawkfish, the election data analytics firm founded by Michael Bloomberg, indicated that they expect to see a scenario unfold on election night that they call the Red Mirage. As of election night Donald Trump will appear to have won – perhaps even by a landslide – with the race flipping to Biden (should Biden win) as the mail-in vote is counted. This is an outcome that the Trump campaign foresees as well, and is why Trump has been demanding that media networks declare a winner on election night. His objective is to delegitimize the post-election night vote count, but equally important, to garner a strategic advantage for the phases of the race that will follow Election Day; those who imagine that this race will end on Election Day should be forewarned.

On the evening of Election Day in 2000, the networks first called the race for Al Gore, based on exit polls. Then, as the evening wore on, those projections were retracted, and in the early hours of the next morning George W. Bush was ultimately declared the winner; a result confirmed later that day by Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. For the rest of the 36-day saga, before the Supreme Court ultimately decided the election in Bush's favor, the narrative from the Bush camp was whether Bush's "victory" would be taken away. 

A "Trump wins, now it's being stolen" narrative matters to the Trump campaign, and not simply as a way to rile up his supporters as the votes are being counted – though no one should be surprised to see gun-wielding caravans of Trump supporters showing up at county courthouses to intimidate vote counters as the process unfolds – but also to set the stage for upending the Electoral College vote itself. While determining the final vote tally could take weeks – the Florida recount lasted 36 days before it was stopped by the Court in 2000 – the timing of the meeting of the Electoral College has already been set by statute as “the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December" or December 14th. 

Should Donald Trump fail to win the election outright, he could get a second bite at the apple. His purpose in continuing to hammer away at the legitimacy of mail-in voting, and laying the groundwork to legally contest vote counts on a state by state basis, is about more than just trying to assure that he wins an Electoral College victory. For the electors won by a candidate from any given state to vote in the Electoral College on December 14th, that state's governor must first sign a Certificate of Ascertainment that designates the names of the electors for that state. For example, should Donald Trump lose the State of Florida in the general election, it will be the responsibility of his close ally, Florida Governor Ron deSantis, to certify the results of the vote and designate the Biden electors to represent the Florida in the Electoral College. This raises the possibility that should deSantis not move promptly to certify the vote – faced with the Trump wins, now it's being stolen narrative embraced by Florida Republicans, and ongoing litigation by the Trump campaign challenging the validity of the vote – the certification of Florida's electors could be delayed long enough that they are unable to cast their votes in the Electoral College on December 14th. In such an event, if the designation of electors from one or more states is delayed past that date, the result of the Electoral College vote could be different from what it appeared to be once all of the votes appeared to have been counted following Election Day. Absent an act of Congress, there is no wiggle room with respect to December 14th as the date on which the electors must vote – even if one or more states failed to designate their electors in time – and it is nearly impossible to imagine that Mitch McConnell would allow a bill delaying the December 14th date to come to the floor should it be to Donald Trump's advantage to force the Electoral College vote to proceed as scheduled. 

Whatever the result of the Electoral College vote on December 14th, the next step in the process is set forth in the Constitution. On January 6th, the House and the Senate meet together in the House chambers to officially tally the vote from the Electoral College. Should neither candidate win the 270 votes necessary to be deemed the winner – as could well be the case in a close election if one or more state governors fail to designate their electors – the ensuing steps are set forth in the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, as modified by the Twentieth Amendment. Under the Twelfth Amendment, the House of Representatives "shall immediately choose" the President. The vote in the House, however, would not be a majority-rules vote as many imagine, but rather would be based on one vote per state, with the vote determined at the discretion of each state's congressional delegation – meaning that each state's vote would presumably be determined by which political party holds a majority of the House seats in that state – with a simple majority of the states required to determine the President. The selection of the Vice President is simpler, based on a majority vote of the Senate.

In the current Congress, Republicans hold a narrow 26-23 edge in the House of Representatives – the 50th state, Pennsylvania, is tied – based on this Constitutionally-mandated method of voting, as there are currently 26 states whose Congressional delegation is majority Republican. Therefore, were the current Congress to hold the vote in a circumstance where neither Trump nor Biden won 270 electoral votes because one or more states failed to designate their electors, Donald Trump would win the presidency. Republicans similarly hold a majority in the Senate, meaning that Mike Pence would be elected to serve alongside Donald Trump. 

The current congressional term ends on January 3rd, however, and a new Congress, elected in November, is scheduled to be sworn in that same day. It is the new Congress that would actually hold the vote, should it come down to that, on January 6th. The configuration of both the House and the Senate could change, or they could remain as they are. For example, should the House remain as it is, but the Senate flip to the Democrats, a rather unimaginable circumstance could occur. For the first time since 1796 – when Federalist John Adams won the Presidency and served for four years with Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson as his Vice President – we could have a split result, with President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris elected to lead the nation for the next four years.

No doubt, there would be challenges along the way, should this scenario transpire, including challenges to the legality of a state governor delaying the designation of delegates for apparent partisan advantage. The Constitution also establishes quorum requirements of two-third of the members for the House and the Senate on January 6th to proceed. Should Democrats find themselves in the midst of a challenge to the election intended to overturn the result, it is hard to imagine them participating in a quorum call to preside over their own execution. And then there are challenges to the eligibility of Kamala Harris to serve as Vice President, which Trump has already foreshadowed, along with everything else. 

If the chaos that Donald Trump has long promised makes it this far, the Supreme Court has not effectively intervened, and we still do not have a President, the Twentieth Amendment allows Congress, in oblique terms, to "provide for the case." One thing is certain, Donald Trump's current term in office ends on January 20, 2021. Should no new President have been confirmed by that date, the Presidential Succession Act would put Nancy Pelosi in the White House, even if it requires Donald Trump to be frog-marched out by federal agents as his legal term in office comes to an end. 

Is this scenario unthinkable? Perhaps, but for more than three years we have watched time and again as the unthinkable has come to pass. A thorough legal analysis may determine either that the date of the Electoral College vote is not set in stone, or perhaps that a governor does not have the discretion to delay the designation of electors. But litigation takes time, which is exactly what Donald Trump would be counting on. If the process indeed relies on good faith, as history suggests, then it is ripe for abuse by a political leader that views good faith as weakness, and a political party that is now fully under his sway. After all, in the wake of the RNC convention last week, the Republican Party now stands for nothing less, and nothing more, than whatever Donald Trump might tweet from time to time, and "Trump wins" is the full and complete 10-character platform of the GOP. 

Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit! To Save Our Democracy, It’s Time to Let Alabama Be Alabama and Set California Free." 

Artwork by Joe Dworetzky. Check out Joe's political cartooning at www.jayduret.com. Follow him on Twitter @jayduret or Instagram at @joefaces.