Bring in the New Guy
The election is over. Biden won easily. There is some counting to finish up but it's all over. Trump is throwing a fit, as expected. His tantrums demonstrate once again why it was necessary to get rid of him. An outsider, fine; a greedy criminal, no, that didn't cut it. He needs to know how America works, and he doesn't.
It will be interesting to see what happens now. I guess we have to expect some violence from Trump's Bubba Army. I don't really see how Joe Biden, fairly elected, is classified as a "tyrant," but then I don't watch Fox or follow QAnon. I have seen some of the things they believe and people it's time to turn off the TV and go outside for a while.
If you remember, Trump used to be a kind of mockery of a rich guy, he would go on professional wrestling and Howard Stern and talk about his money, with his stupid ties and his hairdo, brag about the women who fall all over him. Obama shredded him at the correspondents dinner, and I always felt like that's when Trump decided to run, so he could un-do all the good Obama had done. It's his one motivation: revenge.
In the Republican debates he was a kind of clown, a non-professional who sometimes did say the obvious thing out loud. You give money to politicians like these and they do things for you, he said, I do it all the time. It was kind of charmingly fresh but then as the debates went on, and the campaign, you realized that in fact he had no idea how to run a country. He had no understanding of history, no understanding of the migrations and movements, the personal creativity and independence, that have made America a powerful amalgam of the best the world offers.
During the campaign he started to take himself seriously. Debating Hillary Clinton, he didn't even try to appear competent. I remember her talking about arming the Kurds, and complex strategies we'd need in the Middle East, and all he could say was that he would "defeat ISIS." Like a comic book, he was going to kill the bad guy. He didn't know anything about anything, but he knew how to talk to uneducated, uninformed people, and he got them to vote for him.
Then there was the inauguration and mine-is-bigger and I think a lot of us smacked our heads in the realization that his idiot really was going to be in charge, and all he cared about was himself. He was inaugurated on January 20, 2017, and on January 22nd, with a straight face, Kellyanne Conway taught us about "alternative facts."
I won't go through the months and years.
Here is the one thing that I hope for from a Biden administration. I want them to fix this. My view has two parts to it: consequences for criminals and repairing the damage. I do not want to hear some mealy-mouthed crap about "let's not look at the past, let's look forward," I want to see a whole bunch of white-collar criminals in prison. I want to charge them for bribes and money laundering, emoluments and trademark violations, insider trading -- I want to see every instance of a Hatch Act violation, where federal employees used their positions for political purposes, sent to court. Kings are not above the law.
Second, we need to fix some things. In recent decades we have lost three key pieces of law. I want to see the Fairness Doctrine returned. The media should be held accountable for presenting objective news, and should not become mouthpieces for a political party. The doctrine was overturned under Reagan and we need it back. Government-licensed media should not be propaganda outlets.
The Voting Rights Act is pretty much dead and gone but obviously we need to protect our voting system. Voter suppression came out in the open during this election, and it might be hard to stay ahead of all the techniques -- who would have thought they would cripple the US Postal Service in order to get a little advantage? -- but it needs to be addressed. The basic principles of voting need to be secured in law.
Third, Citizens United needs to be undone legislatively. I know the politicians will hate to cut off the spigot but they need to put strict controls on corporate campaign contributions. The citizens need to be the ones who select their representatives, they should not be manipulated by media productions and communication strategies that have literally no budget limit.
Mainly, it will be refreshing to have someone in office who knows how to run a country. We have a carefully structured organization that is able to manage normal times as well as emergencies. The government has nonpartisan experts in every field, and their knowledge has been ignored or used for political and personal purposes by the Trump Family. We currently live in a dystopian nightmare, a plague where thousands die every day, where we can't work, can't go out to dinner, can't socialize with our neighbors. While China and other countries thrive, our American economy is crushed with no path to recovery. We need a leader with a vision and the intelligence to guide the government toward his goal. So yeah, let's bring in the new guy to fix this mess.
206 Comments:
That's the way it always is -- Democrats clean up GOP messes.
Clinton cleaned up Daddy Bush's mess.
Obama cleaned up W Bush's Great Recession.
And Biden will clean up what Rump has spoiled.
Alleluliah, let us unite and build back better.
Jim always starts off strong and descends into madness and delusion
I can agree with the first paragraph
then, he disavows the first amendments guarantees of free speech and free press
he seems to have peace with the establishment clause though - he used to rail about how "we" need to take religion down a peg
then, he thinks we should abandon democracy and let an "expert" class make all our value judgements
then, the final paragraph he completely breaks from reality
at this point, most Americans are going to work, going out to dinner, and socializing with neighbors
happening a little differently but in some ways it's desirable
unemployment is 6.9%, better than anything is Obama's first term
GDP in the third quarter grew at the fastest pace in history
we took a hit from the virus, like all countries
Trump managed the economy well
all Americans will pray for Biden's success but he will do well if he maintains three of Trump's accomplishments:
1. appoint judges committed to defending the Constitution
2. continue to push back on the aggressively totalitarian Chinese state
3. continue the many policies Trump used to move toward economically empowering minorities
And you always lower yourself to personal petty attacks.
But you can't fuck with this great headline:
BIDEN DEFEATS TRUMP
Former vice president is projected to be 46th U.S. president; Trump campaign pursues legal challenges in key states
"unemployment is 6.9%, better than anything is Obama's first term"
Thanks to Bush's great recession!
Hey anon, thanks for summarizing the things I said in your head.
To America: congratulations!
JimK
"And you always lower yourself to personal petty attacks."
nothing personal, its an evaluation of ideas
for all I know, Jim is a delightful fellow
and, if you want to say Trump is not, you won't get an argument from me
"But you can't fuck with this great headline:
BIDEN DEFEATS TRUMP"
well, I voted for Trump
America would be better off with the policies Trump pursued
we survived worse than Trump for the sake of the country
LBJ and Nixon, I'm looking at you
still, I must admit that listening to Biden speak since the election has felt like a relief
"Thanks to Bush's great recession!"
the worse thing about Bush's recession was the timing
because it was so close to the election, the Dems overplayed it and depressed confidence in the economy
psychology is important to economic health
four years later, at the 2012 Democratic convention, Obama and his minions were still blaming Bush for their failure to manage the economy
fortunately, for Joe Biden, without the Senate, he won't be able to raise taxes or reimpose draconian regulations that strangle the economy
or design a new Obamacare after Amy CB rules it illegal
"Hey anon, thanks for summarizing the things I said in your head."
he speaks
LOL!
I'll elaborate further on
it's a new day
enjoy the weather and fall colors
I agree with Jim that corrupt politicians should be held accountable, and sent to jail when the break the laws. Republicans will squeal like a stuck pigs if it starts happening, and of course they will retaliate with investigations and charges against Dems. It could be really ugly for a while.
For the long run though, stark evidence of real consequences is the only thing that has a chance of keeping our politicians in line. Maybe then it won't look so attractive for a takeover by a criminal like Rump.
"the worse [sic] thing about Bush's recession was the timing"
No idiot, the worst things were how severe it was and the fact that it was totally avoidable.
Regulations keeping investment banks out of the housing markets were there for a reason, and "liar loans" were illegal contracts that could have been stopped if anyone during the Bush administration had bothered to enforce mortgage laws.
"psychology is important to economic health"
Psychology can float an investment bubble for quite a while, but psychology can't magically bring back several trillion dollars in investment funds that disappear overnight. That's not the way economies work.
If it did, Hank Paulson & George Bush would have just told AIG and the other investment banks to "imagine you're doing just fine" rather than organizing the socialization of their private losses and covering them with US taxpayer dollars.
"because it was so close to the election, the Dems overplayed it and depressed confidence in the economy"
No. Hank made it quite clear how bad it was when all his Wall Street buddies so desperately needed to be bailed out. If it's wasn't that bad he would have just let the bad businesses fail, like what should be done in a capitalist system. But then he taught us about "too big to fail," and how when really rich capitalists lose too much money, then you have to turn to government intervention and socialism to keep them working.
"Free market" my arse.
“We all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged free market capitalism for the poor.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.
I am looking forward to seeing the fact-checker in tomorrow's Post revealing all of Joe's and Kamala's lies in their victory speeches tonight.
Well, the Post would never do that. He isn't a Republican.
I just read the speech. Not glowing rhetoric but not a bad speech for the moment. I actually taped it and tried to watch it last night but found it difficult to not nod off. Joe works better on paper than live.
As for lies, I didn't see any obvious ones. The stuff about what he grandfather and grandmother said when walking out the door was probably not true nor was Beau's favorite hymn, but we'll give him a pass.
And, of course, you can't tell a lie when you don't cite any facts. He mostly said what he's going to do. He made commitments to being the President even for those who didn't vote for him. Let's all give him a chance.
Currently, his followers are organizing a boycott of Home Depot. Why? The owner made a campaign contribution to the Trump campaign. If Joe wasn't lying last night, he should tell them to stop.
Recently, his supporters in the Senate unanimously voted against confirming a highly qualified woman judge to sit on the Supreme Court. If he's not lying, he should tell them to apologize.
He's on his honeymoon so we'll give him the benefit of the doubt. But we'll know soon enough if he told any lies last night.
It appears that the Democrats’ fevered dreams are going to become a reality: they have replaced one old white man as president whom they alleged had a history of racist comments, self-dealing with foreign countries to benefit his family, and major cognitive issues with an older white man with a more clear history of racist comments, stronger evidence of self-dealing with foreign countries to benefit his family, and a much more severe case of cognitive decline.
What a win!
In all seriousness, this is why many people consider our political class to be so farcical.
Thoughts?
Here we go:
1. We have to do a better job of counting votes for president and securing our elections.
Whatever your politics, the past four days of vote counting have made America look like a third-world country.
Our system for counting votes in many states is simply broken, especially when elections are close.
But we can and should fix this.
The longer it takes to tabulate results, and the more one-sided the voting counts become, the more people are going to believe the fix is in. That’s just natural. It’s why vote counting has to be rapid, transparent, and just.
I’ll leave it for the judges to analyze fraud claims, but in many legal cases, there’s a standard applied that requires not just avoiding impropriety, but avoiding the appearance of impropriety.
Can anyone say that still counting votes, almost all of which go to one side, four days after an election — or even longer as seems likely to be the case — instills confidence in our democracy?
Of course not.
Our elections often crumble when they are close, and this was the closest election of my life.
2. Will the Supreme Court get involved in the election?
I don’t think so.
Why not?
Because Chief Justice John Roberts has shown himself to be quite political, and I don’t think he views this election as worth expending his court’s political capital. I think he’ll work to avoid becoming entangled in this mess.
If the election was down to one state and there was clear fraud to examine, I think the Supreme Court might get involved because that one state could determine the election outcome, but I’m not sure we’ll have a Florida situation here — where one state determines the election.
Instead I think we’re going to have seven states where the election comes down to the slimmest of margins. And I think Trump is going to be behind in several of those states. Meaning he’d need to reverse the outcome in multiple states to become president.
Now, if Trump were to go on and win Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona, then I think the court might consider becoming involved in the Pennsylvania mess, but absent that occurring, I just don’t see the court weighing in in a substantial way.
Given how contentious the last two court appointments have been, I think Roberts will play the long game here. He can look at the court and see he has a strongly cemented conservative majority that is likely to be there, presuming decent health, for decades into the future.
Why rush into the fray of this battle when he can look at the results of the election and see, as will be discussed below, that Biden will have limited political ammunition or mandate upon his inauguration?
What’s more, if the court gets involved in a big way, and Biden still finds a way to win the election, then there may be even more of a push for an expanded number of justices.
I think the court is likely to sit this battle out.
3. Libertarian voters have to look themselves in the mirror and ask what the purpose of their vote is.
And I think if you’re a rational adult, you need to pick your favored candidate in incredibly close elections.
Otherwise, you’re avoiding making a decision about who your president will actually be.
Libertarian voters in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada may well have cost President Trump the election by deciding not to pick between Trump and Biden. That’s working on the theory that around 75% of libertarians, which is probably low, would be more likely to support Republican policies over Democratic policies, if forced to make a choice between the two parties.
I understand the desire for a third party to exist but if you’re in a competitive state, I think you are making a poor choice not to help select the president with your vote.
4. If he goes on to lose, what is the legacy of Donald Trump’s term in office?
His critics said Donald Trump would be an unmitigated disaster if he was elected president.
Yet assuming he loses this election, by an insanely narrow margin while increasing support among minority voters over what he received in 2016, what will he be leaving behind?
A country with a 6.9% unemployment rate that has weathered the biggest pandemic in 100 years. A new COVID vaccine that will be released early in 2021 and will represent the fastest vaccine ever created for a novel virus in human history. Three new Supreme Court justices and a remade federal court stocked with highly-qualified Republican appointees. Greater peace for Israel in the Middle East, the defeat of ISIS, more of our troops back home from never ending wars, and we saw no great danger from North Korea or Iran. Plus, he’s put China on notice that America will no longer be dominated by Chinese interests.
He reduced tax rates on businesses, making American companies more competitive internationally, spurring the greatest economy in American history.
Trust me, I understand that people don’t like his Tweets, but when you actually look at his record over four years in office, what can you point to that he caused that was truly bad?
I mean, if COVID doesn’t happen to hit in an election year — let’s say it hits in 2021 instead of 2020 — then Trump probably coasts to re-election on the greatest economy in American history. Even with COVID hitting, and the resulting mail-in ballot harvesting, he still appears to be on track to barely lose the election and to produce more votes than any Republican presidential nominee in history.
What’s more, the down ballot Republicans in the Senate and the House actually outperformed all fears too. At worst, it appears the Republicans will pick up House seats, and at worst, it appears we may have a 50-50 Senate. And to end up in a 50-50 Senate that would require Republican candidates to lose two special elections in January.
The Trump disaster that all of his critics alleged would happen never happened.
Heck, the Republican party didn’t even pay much of a price in the Senate or House for Trump, and they will be poised to have substantial gains, historically, in the 2022 midterms.
Sure, a pandemic hit and everyone wants to blame Trump for that because it helped their election prospects, but look at Europe. There are many different democratic leaders of European countries and all of them have as bad or worse COVID outcomes than our country.
I just don’t see how it’s Trump’s fault that COVID hit when it did.
And I don’t see how Trump can be accused of leaving office having done great harm to our country or his party.
I really don’t.
5. What will Joe Biden do in his first two years in office?
Biden will have just two years, probably, to be relevant in any way in office. And that might be giving him too much credit. He may not leave the White House for most of his first year in office. And I don’t see any way Biden runs again for office — he’d be 82 at his next inauguration — given he barely campaigned this year. That means the final two years of his presidency will be spent with everyone else angling to take his job.
We haven’t had a president enter office with no real prospect of running for reelection since…ever?
Which is why I think you have to consider this to be Biden’s second term already. He’s got two years to get things done, and then he’s overshadowed by everyone angling to replace him. (This is assuming that Biden is even healthy enough to finish his term, which I hope he is).
So what is Biden capable of actually doing in his first two years?
Not much, honestly.
He’s mostly a figurehead.
If Republicans win at least one of the Senate seats in Georgia, he won’t have a majority there. If Democrats win both, then he’d have a tiebreaking vote via Kamala Harris, but that would require that his entire party back his positions.
That would seem to take the idea of packing the court off the table.
Even if he could hold all fifty voters together in his Senate, does he want to begin his tenure with the most contentious move in American judicial history?
That seems unlikely. (Although we don’t know for sure because Biden still hasn’t been willing to tell us what his opinion is on this issue. Which is, frankly, an appalling failure of the American media.)
Worse than that for Biden, without hate for Donald Trump to unify his base, there’s likely to be a great deal of civil war among the far-left wing Democrat socialists ascendant on social media and the more moderate Democrats who still believe in capitalism.
Is Biden going to be able to bridge that divide and hold a fractious party together, or will they devolve into internecine combat? I think the latter is more likely than the former.
The most likely outcome of Biden’s first two years is likely to be gridlock.
6. What does Biden do about shutdowns?
This will be the most important decision Biden makes as president.
Partly the status of a vaccine will factor in here — when can it arrive and how capable of being widely distributed will it be when it arrives? — but Biden will also have to decide whether to support lockdowns.
Already Europe is beginning to lockdown again.
I think it’s fair to say that Trump will not attempt to lock us down between now and Inauguration Day, but come late January what will Biden do?
Will Biden support the idea of lockdowns? Will he offer any guidance at all to coronabro governors in Democratic states who may lockdown their communities even more than they already have? Will those Democratic governors begin to ease lockdowns because Trump is now beaten? There are a ton of issues at play here.
This will be the most consequential decision of a Biden administration, and I think it will override almost every other policy choice he makes in his first year in office.
The left wing of the Democratic party wants to shut down the country and provide massive payments to everyone while those lockdowns exist. I can tell you right now that another lockdown will be fought in a massive way by many small business owners.
Lockdowns don’t save lives, and they destroy our economy. They are a failed policy to combat a virus that is not a significant threat to the vast majority of our country.
I want our kids in school. I want everything open. I want people all back to work.
What’s more, I’m not going to consent to being locked down again. I feel like there are many people like me out there. Donald Trump would not have attempted to lock us down again if he’d won. Will Biden? I hope not.
But this will be messy for Biden given the platform he ran on, his election emboldens the coronabros.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "So what is Biden capable of actually doing in his first two years? Not much, honestly. He’s mostly a figurehead.".
I hate to burst your bubble sweetheart, but he's going to immediately issue a flurry of executive orders to undo most of the damage Trump did with his own executive orders that have wreaked havoc of the environment, allowed health care providers to discriminate against harmless lgbt people and made evangelical christians legally superior in the law to all others.
Biden will immediately rejoin the Word Health Organization and the Paris Climate Accord.
Given the obscene attacks of Trump and evangelicals on innocent lgbt people what Biden would be well advised to do is to steam roll them as Trump did and issue an executive order that bans evangelical christians from the military, allows medical personnel to discriminate against evangelical christians and bans them from adopting or marrying.
Republicans ran roughshod over Democrats busting norms and attacking democracy. Republicans broke the social contract first, now Democrats are no longer obligated to adhere to it until Republicans come back into compliance. Just as Republicans abused liberals by the unrestrained abuse of power Democrats should do the same to Republicans, otherwise we're just suckers for their abuse. Then and only then Democrats should demand Republicans renounce their pointless and destructive war on lgbt people and the 75%. Only after Republicans have made many positive steps to right the wrongs they've inflicted on the innocent should Democrats let up and start treating them fairly again.
Republicans must come back into compliance with the social contract! Until then Democrats need to pound Republicans at every turn with the unrestrained force of the presidency like they did to us.
American voters wanted Biden to be president over Trump by 8 percentage points.
The only reason the race was close is because of the massive multi-pronged Republican voter suppression effort. The difference between the polls 8 to 10 percentage point lead for Biden and the actual results is the number of Biden votes Republicans prevented from being cast, counted, or delivered by the Office.
The 2020 Election Polls Were Dead On - Republicans Cheated
Americans overwhelmingly rejected Trump's and Republicans' corruption and gross incompetence.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "unemployment is 6.9%, better than anything is Obama's first term"
You need to compare Obama's last year with Trumps, not the first year where Obama was undoing Bush's economic crash. Obama left Trump with a 5% unemployment rate and Trump ruined it. Current job growth is the slowest in five months due to the resurgence in coronavirus Trump allowed to happen.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "GDP in the third quarter grew at the fastest pace in history.
Utterly irrelevant given that GDP crashed and has been negative for the year. That there was a brief temporary rebound but now that Trump has let coronavirus spread unchallenged employment and GDP are dropping again.
we took a hit from the virus, like all countries
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "Trump managed the economy well"
Trump presided over the greatest economic crash since the Great Depression. The economy is under water and is now getting worse again due to Trump's coronavirus failure.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "all Americans will pray for Biden's success but he will do well if he maintains three of Trump's accomplishments:
1. appoint judges committed to defending the Constitution"
Republican judges attack the Constitution rather than defending it.
"[Professor Geoffrey] Stone concludes that the moderately liberal justices apply an approach in line with “the original concerns of the Framers of the Constitution and in their distinctive understanding of the special responsibility of courts in our constitutional system,” while the Court’s conservatives’ “votes cannot be explained by any consistent theory of constitutional interpretation” but are instead driven by their own policy preferences.
Conservative Justices Are The Real "Judicial Activists".
"2. continue to push back on the aggressively totalitarian Chinese state"
Trump didn't push back on the Chinese, he praised the Chinese president for setting up concentration camps for the Ugur minority (Wyatt and Regina Hardiman have called for concentration camps for lgbts). He has repeatedly praised the Chinese president and pursued business partnerships with China.
"3. continue the many policies Trump used to move toward economically empowering minorities"
Trump did nothing to economically empower minorities, he attacked them non-stop. He stopped the fair housing initiative which allowed minorities to move into the suburbs and move up. He then bragged to white voters that he saved the suburbs by preventing poor black people from living there.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "America would be better off with the policies Trump pursued".
Americans are in the biggest economic downfall since the great depression. Coronavirus is exploding with over 1000 people a day dying needlessly. Obviously the Trump policies have been a disaster and the country is in a mess as Trump leaves without taking responsibility for his failings.
Good anonymous said "[the unemployment rate was high during Obama's first year] Thanks to Bush's great recession!"
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "the worse thing about Bush's recession was the timing
because it was so close to the election, the Dems overplayed it and depressed confidence in the economy"
Obama couldn't snap his fingers and turn around the great Bush recession instantly, you fool. In one year Obama turned around the Bush economic crash and presided over the longest increase in job growth in American history...which Trump destroyed. A president couldn't have done better than Obama did. And then Trump destroyed it all.
Never forget, Trump has said government unemployment numbers are fake, that the real umemployment rate is 10 to 20% higher than what is reported.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "or design a new Obamacare after Amy CB rules it illegal"
This is how Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous says Trump's policies are making things "better", by taking away health care from tens of millions of Americans and taking away the protections for preexisting health conditions that 160 million Americans rely on. Now Republicans are arguing that Covid is a preexisting health condition that health insurance companies should be able to deny people insurance for.
Wyatt and Regina Hardiman's talk about the "good" Trump's policies do is Orwellian.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "As for lies, I didn't see any obvious ones.".
Trump's lies are mountainous. He promised he'd provide health care that would cover every American on day one. Instead he's fought to take away health care from those that have it. He promised to protect lgbt people and instead has attacked us mercilessly. He promised Mexico would pay for the wall. He promised to keep the country safe instead he has attacked American allies and enabled dictators like Putin, Xi, Erdogan, and Kim Jon Un. He spilled top secret intelligence information to America's enemies which resulted in American allies refusing to further share intelligence information needed to keep the country safe. Trump has been one lie after another.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "Recently, his supporters in the Senate unanimously voted against confirming a highly qualified woman judge to sit on the Supreme Court. If he's not lying, he should tell them to apologize."
Amy Covid Barrett is dangerously unqualified. She's only been a judge for three years, she's never tried a case in court, she is dangerously ignorant of the law, admitting she doesn't know that voter intimidation is against the law. She wasn't forthcoming in her confirmation hearing, instead dodging question after question about her knowledge and positions on the law.
Amy Barrett has announced that she sees her job as a judge to implement the kingdom of god. She has announced she will constantly violate the First Amendments separation of church and state by ruling to make evangelican christians legally superior to all others in the law. Amy Covid Barrett has completely disqualified herself as an impartial judge, she has crapped all over the Constitution.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "Lockdowns don’t save lives, and they destroy our economy. They are a failed policy to combat a virus that is not a significant threat to the vast majority of our country."
Lockdowns absolutely save lives! Look around the world, the countries with the best record of dealing with coronavirus have implemented lockdowns early. What is destroying the economy is the Trump policy of letting the virus spread unchecked. Sick and dying workers destroy the economy, not steps taken to improve the situation.
Republicans freaked out over 4 dead Americans at Benghazi. Now they pooh-pooh over 1000 Americans a day dying needlessly. Their mountainous hypocrisy is a disgrace to all that is good and right.
Our side is constrained by this quaint loyalty to telling the truth, the Republicans are not.
Wyatt and Regina defended Trump calling for the Justice Department to imprison his political rivals. So they should be fine with Biden directing the Justice Department to charge Mitch McConnell, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Barrett, Bill Barr and other top Republicans with crimes.
Lucky for them Biden has said unlike Trump he won't use the Justice Department as his personal tool for advancing his own interests.
You want to know how much the Navajo Nation dislikes Trump?
1. of the 85,000 registered voters on Navajo 76,000 voted. 89% turn out
2. Of those 76,000 voters 74,000 voted for Biden & 2,000 for Trump
3. Biden's current lead in Arizona sits at about 40,000
Maybe the Trump administration should have sent them personal protective equipment instead of body bags when the pandemic hit the Rez in April
Trump To Face Crumbling Business After Leaving WH
The Washington Post reports:
When Trump leaves office next year, he will return to a business that is facing significant financial and legal difficulties. Some of Trump’s best-known properties have struggled since he took office, according to records obtained by The Washington Post, as his divisive political rhetoric drove away the big-spending urban customers and nonpolitical conferences his businesses relied upon.
But this year, the coronavirus pandemic added new pain. The pandemic has decimated the hospitality business, forcing layoffs at several Trump properties and shuttering his hotel in Vancouver, B.C. (Four other Trump hotels have closed since he was elected in 2016.) Trump is facing more than $400 million in loan payments in the next four years. Some of the loans are on properties — including Trump’s Doral resort in Miami and his hotel in Washington — that are already losing money.
I think everyone agrees that Trump was a puerile narcissist and a bully. No one likes him.
There is same civil disagreement about whether his policies were the wisest, however.
Randy is a leftist version of Trump.
Trump rants about voter fraud without proof.
Randy rants about voter suppression without proof.
In both cases, you can find some evidence that the charges are true on a limited scale but nowhere near enough to be decisive.
Randy, our new President has asked Americans to stop demonizing each other.
I know you're Canadian but if you'd like to pretend to be American, you should get with the program.
Americans are moving on and unifying
We're getting namby-pamby and issuing pardons.
btw, did you hear Trump's 2020 LGBTQ vote was double what it was in 2016?
I think word is getting around that Trump was the most gay-friendly President, like, ever
Her name is Priya Lynn.
Stop demonizing her with the wrong name and gender.
"Her name is Priya Lynn.
Stop demonizing her with the wrong name and gender."
oh, there have been other transgenders here in the past and I refer to them according to their requests
but PL doesn't do the same to others
I'll give it a try
let's see how long PL will cooperate
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has criticised the Democratic party for incompetence in a no-holds-barred, post-election interview with the New York Times, warning that if the Biden administration does not put progressives in top positions, the party would lose big in the 2022 midterm elections.
Signaling that the internal moratorium in place while the Democrats worked to defeat Donald Trump was over, the leftwing New York representative sharply rejected the notion advanced by some Democrats that progressive messaging around the Movement for Black Lives and the Green New Deal led to the party’s loss of congressional seats in last week’s election.
The real problem, said Ocasio-Cortez, was that the party lacked “core competencies” to run campaigns.
Michael Steele, former chair of the Republican National Committee, said it’s time to clean house within the GOP now that President Donald Trump has lost reelection to President-elect Joe Biden.
“It’s particularly disappointing when I see members of my party’s leadership sycophantically kowtow to an egomaniacal henchman who has one view of the world and that’s himself,” Steele told Larry Wilmore.
Steele, a senior adviser to the never-Trump conservative group The Lincoln Project, which endorsed Biden, said he doesn’t want to fight his own party.
“But you gotta deal with stupid,” Steele said. “What the party’s gonna need when this is all said and done is a political enema. And I’m happy to deliver it.”
Steele also said he’s not planning to leave the party.
“They gotta deal with me, baby. I ain’t going nowhere until I decide to go somewhere,” he said. “And that’s how this works, I’ve been here since 1976.”
President Donald Trump may leave the White House for next month’s Christmas break and never return, according to his former personal attorney and fixer Michael Cohen.
But it’s not because Trump plans to concede to President-elect Joe Biden.
“I wouldn’t be shocked if there’s no concession speech at all,” Cohen told MSNBC’s Alex Witt on Sunday. “My theory is that Christmastime he heads to Mar-a-Lago and I don’t believe he comes back to Washington. I think he stays at Mar-a-Lago all the way through the inauguration.”
Cohen, who worked for Trump for years before turning on him in 2018, added that Trump was unlikely to attend the inauguration.
“He cannot let the camera look at him and basically pull down the curtain and see the wizard that’s standing beside,” Cohen said. “That he’s a loser, and it’s killing him.”
Since Trump can’t accept losing, he had to fabricate a conspiracy theory to explain it.
“Donald Trump cannot accept the fact that he lost,” Cohen said at another point in the interview. “To him, it’s tantamount to calling him a loser, which is the worst thing in the world that you can actually call him.”
As a result, Trump will fight the election’s results, even after leaving office, to damage the new administration.
“He’s gonna start his own media company,” Cohen predicted, noting that Trump wanted to launch one in 2015. “Every day he’s gonna sow more chaos with more fake information disseminated out there in order to be a thorn in President-elect Biden’s thigh.”
Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress and to campaign finance violations for facilitating hush-money payments on behalf of Trump to porn star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal. He was sentenced to three years behind bars, but was released from prison earlier this year and is serving in home confinement due to the coronavirus pandemic.
"Michael Steele, former chair of the Republican National Committee, said it’s time to clean house within the GOP now that President Donald Trump has lost reelection to President-elect Joe Biden."
poor Michael
it's tough yo be a has-been
"“It’s particularly disappointing when I see members of my party’s leadership sycophantically kowtow to an egomaniacal henchman who has one view of the world and that’s himself,” Steele told Larry Wilmore."
they made the best of a situation
they did pretty well too, considering they gained House seats, governor mansions, and state legislators
not to mention three Supreme Court seats
they did lose a couple of Senate seats but considering how many GOP seats were open and the amount of national Dem money directed at Susan Collins and Lindsay Graham, they have to feel good to be favored to keep control
there's no sign that their strategy of working with Trump has hurt the party
"Steele, a senior adviser to the never-Trump conservative group The Lincoln Project, which endorsed Biden, said he doesn’t want to fight his own party."
the Lincoln Project was founded by one of the most despicable guys in recent history
everyone is entitled to their opinion but when your wife is a senior advisor to the President, it's really a #$%# move to embarrass her like that
"“But you gotta deal with stupid,” Steele said. “What the party’s gonna need when this is all said and done is a political enema. And I’m happy to deliver it.”
Steele also said he’s not planning to leave the party.
“They gotta deal with me, baby. I ain’t going nowhere until I decide to go somewhere,” he said. “And that’s how this works, I’ve been here since 1976.”"
that oughta scare the hell outta 'em!
This is how the most colossal and fragile ego on the planet deals with losing the US election: he does not deal with it at all.
My uncle’s speech late on election night wasn’t just entirely mendacious from beginning to end. It was also deeply dangerous. It’s one thing for random Republicans to call a legitimate election into question, but this was the head of the government. The consequences of that action should not be underestimated.
This is what Donald’s going to do: he’s not going to concede, although who cares. What’s worse is he’s not going to engage in the normal activities that guarantee a peaceful transition. All he’s got now is breaking stuff, and he’s going to do that with a vengeance. I’ve always known how cruel he can be. Shortly after the 2016 election, when I’d see him being particularly cruel, I would think about how he treated my father [Fred Trump Jr, Donald’s older brother, who died of alcoholism at 43]. He took away our family health insurance after his father, my grandfather, died – this was when my nephew needed round-the-clock nursing care, which we then couldn’t afford. That is the kind of man he is.
He’ll be having meltdowns upon meltdowns right now. He has never been in a situation like this before. What’s interesting is that Donald has never won anything legitimately in his entire life, but because he has been so enabled by people along the way, he has never lost anything either. He’s the kind of person who thinks that even if you steal and cheat to win, you deserve to win.
But there is some poetic justice here because he has been cheating for months. Now his tactics are coming back to bite him. He told Republicans not to vote by mail and they didn’t, but the result is he has been experiencing this slow drip-drip of disaster over the past few days. Oh, you have these huge margins! Now your margins are shrinking. Oh, Joe Biden’s ahead. Now his margins are growing. It must have been like slow torture, but he set up this failure for himself.
The fact that the Republicans have done better than expected in Congress and the Senate will have made him extraordinarily angry. It means that people were voting against Donald Trump in this election, but not necessarily against this party. That will have added so much salt to his narcissistic wounds.
Also, his supporters are going away. From what I understand, the thing that really ruined his election night was Fox News – his safe zone – calling Arizona days earlier than everyone else. That burst his bubble. Then Twitter was flagging all his posts and deleting them, and other more legitimate news outlets were cutting away from his speeches. But this begs the question: why weren’t they doing this a month ago, or even four years ago, before the last election? It’s good this is happening now because maybe the next two-and-half months won’t be the nightmare we expect, but it’s too late.
I worry about what Donald’s going to do in that time to lash out. He will go as far as he can to delegitimize the new administration, then he’ll pass pardons that will demoralise us, and sign a flurry of executive orders. Remember, he will also still be in charge of the US response to the pandemic. There could be a million Americans dead by then under his watch.
After January, things look bleak for Donald. He has more than $400m of debt coming in the next four years. Why at this point would his lenders cut him any slack? He has never paid anyone back. His businesses are in the tank. He has destroyed his brand.
He is going to be a factor in courtrooms in New York City more than he’s going to be a factor in politics, I think. His secretary of defence has already submitted his resignation, and I think there will be more of that. The Republicans might need him for the January run-offs in Georgia, but he could be considered a liability. If he’s acting like a crazy person, senators are going to keep their distance. People will move away from him if there’s nothing in it for them any more.
It’s not like he has any friends, anyway. It’s grim for him. Donald Jr, Ivanka and Eric also know their relationship with their father is both conditional and transactional. I have been saying since 2016 that I was going to have to change my name. I think they’re going to have to change theirs.
As for saying he’ll run in 2024, that’s just a face-saving exercise. It’s a way of distracting him from the fact that he’s probably going to prison. But the worst thing Donald’s looking at isn’t financial difficulties or the prospect of jail. It’s becoming irrelevant. I don’t think he would ever recover from that.
Mary Trump is a psychologist and author of "Too Much and Never Enough"
Stock Futures Rally After Biden Wins Presidency
Indexes in Europe, Asia leap as investors welcome reduced uncertainty
https://disq.us/url?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farticles%2Fglobal-stock-markets-dow-update-11-09-2020-11604888729%3Fmod%3DdjemMoneyBeat_us%3Aj6UYGt2Xh2glg8LJbGkzThXn5so&cuid=1478235
U.S. stock futures rose Monday after Democrat Joe Biden’s electoral victory gave markets fresh impetus.
Futures tied to the S&P 500 gained 1.5%, suggesting that last week’s advance, the strongest since April, will resume after the New York opening bell. Contracts linked to tech-heavy Nasdaq-100 climbed 1.9%.
The new leg of the rally in stocks reflects the reduced uncertainty surrounding the U.S. elections, combined with expectations that a Democrat-controlled White House and divided Congress could result in moderate policy measures on taxes and spending.
“The market-friendly bits of Biden will be in place: the lack of volatility, more clear foreign policy,” said Altaf Kassam, head of investment strategy for State Street Global Advisors in Europe. “But at the same time, the bits that the market was worried about—higher taxes and more regulation—will not happen. That’s what’s been driving the market higher.”
Of course market regulation and taxing passive income is considered a bad thing by the Zombies and crooks who control our economy, but Biden promised to do both, so the loss of volatility is an early shake out of said crooks and bailout welfare queens, while pricing in political sanity, stability, rule of law and sound management of the pandemic.
We should never equate overblown profits of the gambler class with a healthy economy. Investment has to be driven by fundamentals, not the recent feeding frenzy provoked by unlimited quantitative easing and unregulated insider trading, shorting and margin trading. The emergent slowdown from the pandemic economy needs to be a return to fundamentals, not wishful thinking.
And so we see yet again an election where Wyatt and Regina Hardiman assured us, guaranteed us that the Republican would win. "Democratic prospects are dim!" - we hear that every presidential election from them and in almost every election since Reagan the Republican nominee loses the popular vote by a wide margin.
Its no different this election with Biden currently winning the popular vote by 4 percentage points and that expected to grow to 5 or 6 by the time all the votes were counted. 8 to 10 percent more voters wanted Biden to be president than Trump (the difference due to Republican voter suppression), its a landmark rebuke of the Republican party and Trump despite a corrupt GOP very nearly stealing an election they had no business even being close in.
Wyatt and Regina, constantly completely disconnected from reality did as they do every election, blindly insisted it was all in the bag for their guys. That's your standard evangelical christian worldview - pretend what you want to happen is happening and then it will.
Now look at Tony Perkins, Matt Staver, Franklin Graham and all the other christian nationalists wail over what they conned themselves into believing, that Trump couldn't lose because "god" was on their side. Yep, Trump's just like Jesus.
You can't make the world the best place it can be by cultivating an inaccurate picture of reality and then pretending its true.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "poor Michael Steele it's tough yo be a has-been"
You mean like Trump and the dictatorship you tried to bring about?
Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
"The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice."
HUD Secretary Ben Carson tests positive for the coronavirus
Carson, who tested positive Monday morning, was at the White House last Tuesday for an election night event, as was White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who also has tested positive for the virus. Carson was around senior administration officials and other Cabinet members during the event.
Good anonymous said ""Her name is Priya Lynn.
Stop demonizing her with the wrong name and gender."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said oh, there have been other transgenders here in the past and I refer to them according to their requests"
Not true. You insisted you would never refer to transwomen as "she" or "her" and you have never done that, instead using their first name where one would normally use "she" or "her". You repeatedly said that was a big deal and you were never going to refer to a transwoman by the "incorrect" gender.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "but PL doesn't do the same to others"
I have never misgendered anyone or refused to use their legal name in addressing them - unlike you.
"I'll give it a try let's see how long PL will cooperate".
I've repeatedly offered to refer to you by one name of your choosing as long as you stuck to that. You never did, you always went back on your promise to Jim Kennedy in short order:
rolling thunder at June 03, 2008 3:23 PM said...
Oh, alright. From henceforth, I'm Rolling Thunder.
If you weren't ashamed of how you present yourself here you'd post under your real name like I do. That is my legal name by the way just like yours is Wyatt and Regina Hardiman
“If Republicans don’t challenge and change the U.S. election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again,” Graham said Sunday on Fox News Channel.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "I think everyone agrees that Trump was a puerile narcissist and a bully. No one likes him.".
You support him unconditionally, you excuse his ever lie and attack on the rule of law, you defend his every corrupt act. Don't try to pretend you don't absolutely love Trump and would do anything for him. "Oh, all presidents show innocent people on fifth avenue" I can already hear you saying.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "There is same civil disagreement about whether his policies were the wisest, however.".
Civil? Wyatt and Regina call asking for lgbt people to be assaulted, imprisoned, put in concentration camps and executed "civil". Its just one lie after another with them.
"Priya is a leftist version of Trump."
You have yet to show a single time I've lied, let alone 20,000 times like Trump. You lie just as prolifically as Trump.
Trump rants about voter fraud without proof.
"Priya rants about voter suppression without proof."
There you go with your lies again. People waiting in line 8 to 12 hours is proof. Repubulicans passing 80 laws making it more difficult to vote is proof. The governor of Texas prohibiting Harris County with 4.5 million people from having more drop boxes than counties with a few hundred people is proof. Widespread Republican voter suppression is well documented
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "In both cases, you can find some evidence that the charges are true on a limited scale but nowhere near enough to be decisive."
Nonsense. Biden had an average lead in the polls of 8 to 10 percent and will win the popular vote by somewhere between 4 and 6 percent. The difference between the polls and the actual vote count is the percentage of the total vote for Biden Republicans prevented from happening. The Post office refused to sweep their facilities for 300,000 mail in ballots from mostly swing states that have heavily favoured Biden. With only thousands of votes separating the two in swing states this one act of voter suppression alone could have allowed the Trump run Post Office to steal the election from Biden.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "Priya, our new President has asked Americans to stop demonizing each other."
Pointing out your corrupt acts in service of a pointless and destructive war on harmless lgbt people is not demonizing you. It is not demonizing you when I accurately describe what you're doing. When you engage in evil acts I have a moral obligation to call attention to it.
You started the war on lgbt people. We are not obligated to continue to follow the social contract when you have broken it first. When you come back into compliance with the social contract then and only then will we have a moral obligation to treat you fairly. Renounce your unjust war on innocent lgbt people and agree to support the equality act and we need not be enemies. We will not stand idly by and smile while you do your best to harm us.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "did you hear Trump's 2020 LGBTQ vote was double what it was in 2016? I think word is getting around that Trump was the most gay-friendly President ever".
Like you, a minority lgbt people are attracted to Trump's bluster and bullying, they like that he abuses others, its the human evolutionary psychological tendency to want to attack and kill another tribe to take their resources:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxxylK6fR81rckQxWi1hVFFRUDg/view
As you know, Trump has relentlessly attacked the lgbt community. But research shows trolls like you are sadists so it gives you a cheap thrill to lie about this.
Republicans have blocked Democrats from appointing judges and instead have appointed a swath young terribly unqualified judges solely because they have viciously anti-gay records and a history of demonizing and attacking harmless lgbt people.
And now Wyatt and Regina want to say its time to unite and be touchy feely? Not until you renounce your war on innocent lgbt people. There is no "uniting" while evangelical christians still do everything in their power to harm us.
“If Republicans don’t challenge and change the U.S. election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again,” Graham said Sunday on Fox News Channel.
So, Lindsey wants to take a system that's already biased in favour of Republicans and make it even more biased so it continues to thwart the will of the majority. Eff you Lindsey.
Republicans need to adopt polices that the public wants if they want to win elections instead of coming up with increasingly devious and heavy handed methods of voter suppression:
The Polls were dead on, Republicans cheated
Anti-gay bigot Tony Perkins, like Trump, has just called the press the enemy of the people.
Evangelical christians are freaking out over the failure of Trump to complete his dictatorial power grab - the christian theocratic dictatorship that many wanted will not happen, at least not for another four years.
Evangelical christians put their foot on our throats and now that we've wrestled them off they want to talk about "healing" and "unity" when as soon as they get the chance they will again do everything they can to harm us and force us into second class citizenship.
No, there needs to be consequences for this unprovoked attack on lgbt people and the 70% of the public that are our allies. Otherwise they'll never stop harming us at every opportunity.
Mary Trump said "[Donald Trump]’s the kind of person who thinks that even if you steal and cheat to win, you deserve to win."
Just like Wyatt and Regina Hardiman, Tony Perkins, Franklin Graham, Matt Staver, Brian Brown....
Evangelical christians are now praying to their god, asking him to overturn the election.
When you ask christians why god lets people do evil, they say "People have to be able to do evil or they wouldn't have free will (not true by the way). And here they are asking their god to deny people their free will.
Its all a con. Evangelical christians will take the exact opposite position from where they previously were whenever its convenient for their immediate desires. There is no claimed value they won't betray in their pursuit of power over the population.
Here's evangelical christian Tony Perkins speaking to the KKK.
Racism runs deep in evangelical christianity.
Utah Governor Declares State Of Emergency, Imposes Statewide Mask Rule: “Our Hospitals Are Full”
Wyatt and Regina (paraphrasing): "Oh pooh pooh, lots of people die every year, this doesn't matter. Trying to do anything about this makes Trump look bad, so let it explode."
Evangelical christianity is a death cult.
Biden Taps Trump Whistleblower For COVID Task Force
November 9, 2020 Coronavirus, Joe Biden
The Associated Press reports:
As he begins his transition to the presidency, Joe Biden is pivoting from a bitter campaign battle to another, more pressing fight: reining in the pandemic that has hit the world’s most powerful nation harder than any other.
On Monday, Biden announced the members of his coronavirus task force that will develop a blueprint for fighting the pandemic. It includes doctors and scientists who have served in previous administrations, many of them experts in public health, vaccines and infectious diseases.
Notable among the members is Rick Bright, a vaccine expert and former head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. He had filed a whistleblower complaint alleging he was reassigned to a lesser job because he resisted political pressure to allow widespread use of hydroxychloroquine.
Republicons have lost the popular vote in 7 of the last presidential elections, yet they've been able to pack the Federal courts with conservative judges to entrench minority control.
This current system where both parties need 270 electoral votes to win the Presidency is unfair to Republicans. Lindsey Graham's proposed change is that Democratic candidates need 300 electoral votes to win and Republican candidates need 239.
Note to republicans: Perhaps basing your platform on ways to make rich people richer, hurt other people, and take away rights, isn't the best idea for winning friends and influencing people. Just a thought!
Philly Election Officials Report Death Threats
Compilation Video: Leading Evangelicals Who Claimed God Told Them Trump Was Guaranteed A Second Term
Hemant Mehta reports at The Friendly Atheist:
Just listen to some of those predictions: Trump will have an electoral “clean sweep.” There will be a “red wave.” Trump is going to gain significant ground among Black voters. None of those came true. Hell, right now, many white evangelicals are acting like the election will be overturned because it’s what God wants. It’s amazing how God’s Will always aligns with the desires of Republican officials.
Cultist Pastor Accepts That Biden Is President-Elect
Megachurch Pastor Robert Jeffress writes for Fox News:
"It appears that former Vice President Joe Biden will become the 46th president of the United States on Jan. 20, unless President Trump succeeds in legal challenges to the counting of votes in several states. For millions of Christians across our nation, this is a bitter pill to swallow."
Oh yes, such a bitter pill to swallow! They won't be able to persecute innocent lgbt people quite as much, such a tragedy! How will evangelical christians survive without being able to abuse lgbt people?
Supreme Court Won’t Hear Case Involving “So Help Me God” in Citizenship Oath".
This just shows you how ready and willing judges are to ignore the obvious intent of the law and come up with whatever convenient b.s. they can to excuse doing so.
Their pathetic sleazy excuse for violating the First Amendment's separation of church and state? ""So help me god" isn't really a religious phrase." How transparently dishonest and unconstitutional!
When judges are willing to rationalize a corrupt ruling like this you can't trust them on anything.
Trump has removed the scientists in charge of the nation's premier climate report. Sources say he will be replaced with a climate change denialist.
Johnathon Lemire - WASHINGTON (AP) "Barr authorizes DOJ to probe "substantial allegations" of voting irregularities despite little evidence of fraud."
"There were no irregularities. This is an attempted coup and every major figure in America needs to denounce it. US attorneys need to resign in protest. They are trying to overturn the election and subvert the will of the people
Trump and his hand picked Attorney General are taking another shot at turning the United States into a dictatorship.
Evangelical christians are anti-democracy.
Joe Biden’s Victory Marks a Triumphant Defeat for Christian Nationalism
With the call that Joe Biden is the president-elect, we will soon end four years with Christian Nationalists running the Executive Branch. Donald Trump was never devout himself, but he surrounded himself with Christian leaders who used the government to promote their personal conservative brand of evangelical Christianity — with all the harm that comes with it.
Those Christians used their influence to punish Muslims, install right-wing anti-abortion judges, reward their religious allies with taxpayer funding and access, while remaining silent whenever the government committed atrocities. (Ironically, they’re about to find out that karma is all too real.)
The Freedom From Religion Foundation (which doesn’t endorse candidates) celebrated the presumed shift to government neutrality on religious matters:
After years of playing defense, FFRF is no longer in that situation. It appears we have a path cleared to achieving gains for our movement to keep religion out of government and public policy.
President Trump was carried into office on a crest of Christian Nationalism four years ago, a wave that was hostile to everything FFRF works for. We trust the relentless religious assault we’ve been beating back for four years will diminish — and we’ll do everything in our power to ensure that.
FFRF rightly notes that their work will be much more difficult because Republicans have hijacked the federal court system. They refused to consider Barack Obama‘s nominees and pushed through many unqualified conservative judges to lifetime appointments on the federal bench as quickly as possible.
But the Senate remains in flux. Two races in Georgia, on January 5, will shape the future of what this administration can accomplish. We have one more chance to defeat Mitch McConnell.
Regardless of that outcome, though, Americans United for Separation of Church and State is already calling for Biden to adopt favorable policies:
“We call on President Biden to take immediate action to reverse Trump’s harmful policies and adopt policies that respect the separation of church and state. Americans United’s “Agenda to Restore & Protect Religious Freedom” for the Biden-Harris administration includes:
Repealing the Muslim Ban that unjustly targets adherents of one religion from entering or remaining in the United States.
Ensuring that people will not be denied access to health care, including insurance coverage for birth control, because of other people’s religious beliefs.
Protecting federally funded employees from religious discrimination.
Supporting the Do No Harm Act to prevent future attempts to use religious freedom to discriminate against or harm others.
"Now more than ever, we need to take a stand for church-state separation. Americans United looks forward to working with the Biden administration to make sure the United States lives up to its ideals of being a place where people of all faiths and none are welcome, equal and free to practice their beliefs as they choose, as long as they don’t harm others.”
Barr already has turned the Department of Justice into a political weapon for Trump. Now he has crossed the last line of independence, and violated DOJ's own policy, by using prosecutorial power to try to gin up support for Trump's desperate, last-ditch fraud narrative. He's way off the rails now.
The Justice Department official who oversees investigations of voter fraud stepped down hours after corrupt attorney general Bill Barr authorized inquiries into the election in a move that critics denounced as brazenly partisan.
Perhaps as consequential as President Trump firing Defense Secretary Mark Esper via tweet on Monday, which has been widely expected for months, was the hiring of Michael Ellis to be the National Security Agency’s general counsel.
As one of the most controversial staffers in the White House over the past four years, Ellis has shown himself to be as much a staunch Trump loyalist as anyone else in the administration. But his new job means that he will no longer be a political appointee. Instead, as a civilian member of the senior executive service, he gets protections that will make it quite difficult for President-elect Joe Biden to fire him.
Burrowing down into what Trump derides as “the deep state” will give Ellis, a former Republican campaign operative, a powerful platform from which he could seek to complicate or undermine the incoming Democratic administration’s agenda. This is a preview of the sort of behavior from Trump that many on Biden’s transition team expect, and fear, during the lame-duck president’s final 71 days in power, even as he refuses to concede defeat.
Ellis worked for Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) before joining the National Security Council when Trump took office. In March 2017, Ellis was reportedly one of the people involved in giving Nunes access to classified files related to the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. Nunes reviewed the records at the White House in the middle of the night. The notorious episode came to be known as “the midnight run.”
In July 2019, Ellis was allegedly the first person who proposed moving the transcript of Trump’s call with Ukraine’s president to a special server where fewer people would be able to see that the president had pushed his counterpart in Kyiv to announce an investigation into Biden and his son Hunter when the topic of Javelin antitank missiles came up.
Then-Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman testified under oath before Congress that Ellis was behind moving the transcript. But Ellis defied a subpoena to answer questions about his role in the donnybrook and what knowledge he might have had of the freeze on vital military assistance that Congress had approved for Ukraine. Ellis is named in the second article of impeachment that passed the House as a party to Trump’s obstruction of Congress.
After the GOP-controlled Senate voted not to convict the president, Trump ordered the removal of Vindman from the White House and promoted Ellis to be senior director for intelligence on the NSC.
Being general counsel for the NSA is one of the most immensely complicated and critical legal jobs in all of government, but it is somewhat insulated from politics. Ellis will report to the deputy general counsel for intelligence at the Defense Department, a civilian job. That person reports to the DOD general counsel, who is a political appointee. Once Biden’s eventual nominee for that job is confirmed by the Senate, he or she could choose to reassign Ellis to a different civil service position inside the military’s legal architecture.
“The appointment was made under pressure from the White House,” Ellen Nakashima reports. “NSA Director Paul Nakasone was not in favor of Ellis’s selection, according to three people familiar with the matter. However, the selection was not up to him, they said. … Ellis was selected over two other finalists: acting NSA general counsel Teisha Anthony and Bradley Brooker, acting general counsel at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Both are career civil servants.” The Pentagon and White House did not respond to a request for a comment.
Ironically, this is happening as Trump moves aggressively to roll back civil service protections for members of the bureaucracy. But it’s not surprising. Trump trying to burrow people inside the government shows just how much this president sees personnel as policy.
This is dangerous. He is putting loyalists in place everywhere.
Pence breaks silence to take credit for Pfizer vaccine - and drugs company immediately denies Trump involved
Its just lie after lie from these people. And now Trump's sychophantic attorney general Bill Barr is going against FBI policy and interfering in the election on the side of Trump. Barr has told prosecutors to look for election fraud even though there's no evidence to support such claims.
Moscow Mitch, Trump and Barr are seizing every opportunity to overturn the will of the people and now with Trump having placed his sychophants on the Supreme Court (Amy Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh) there's a non-zero chance of them overthrowing American democracy.
This is what dictators and their key supporters do.
That's right Priya Lynn. Operation Warp Speed had nothing to do with Prizer's vaccine.
"In July, Pfizer did agree to partner with the government on distribution of a vaccine, leveraging what will be a massive, complicated effort run by the federal government to ensure that as many people as possible can be immunized. But its development efforts weren’t part of the government’s program.
“Pfizer, unlike its competitors, did not join Operation Warp Speed, the government initiative designed to erase the financial risk of vaccine and therapeutics development by providing funding to companies and helping coordinate the trials,” The Washington Post’s Carolyn Y. Johnson reported Monday. “Instead, Pfizer plowed $2 billion of its own money into the project and then struck a $1.95 billion contract with the U.S. government to provide 100 million doses, contingent on the vaccine being effective.”
“We were never part of the Warp Speed,” Pfizer vice president Kathrin Jansen told the New York Times. “We have never taken any money from the U.S. government, or from anyone.”
The Department of Health and Human Services website makes the distinction clear. In March, HHS gave $456 million to Johnson & Johnson as it pushed to find a vaccine. In April, it gave $483 million to Moderna. In May, it announced that it would provide up to $1.2 billion to AstraZeneca’s effort.
Then, in late July, that agreement with Pfizer, described by the company as an agreement to “begin delivering 300 million doses of a vaccine for COVID-19 in 2021.”
“The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Defense (DoD) today announced an agreement with U.S.-based Pfizer Inc. for large-scale production and nationwide delivery of 100 million doses of a COVID-19 vaccine in the United States following the vaccine’s successful manufacture and approval,” the HHS news release read. Distribution, not development....
In September, the CEO of Pfizer, Albert Bourla, appeared on CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” where he was asked about not accepting government funding for development.
“The reason why I did it was because I wanted to liberate our scientists from any bureaucracy,” Bourla explained. “When you get money from someone that always comes with strings. They want to see how we are going to progress, what type of moves you are going to do. They want reports. I didn’t want to have any of that. I wanted them — basically I gave them an open checkbook so that they can worry only about scientific challenges, not anything else.”
“And also,” he added, “I wanted to keep Pfizer out of politics, by the way.”"
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick Offers $1 Million Reward From Campaign Funds For Evidence Of “Voter Fraud”
They're trying to steal the election. Patrick knows someone is going to fake fraud to claim this kind of money.
It's truly insane to see the Republican Party which gutted the Voting Rights Act, sabotaged the USPS, closed polling places, purged voters, attacked mail voting, tried to throw out ballots and fabricated "evidence" of fraud under oath...accuse the OTHER SIDE of cheating.
Donald Trump alleges fake voter fraud (as he did in 2016) and gets massive coverage. His chief "witness" in Philly is a convicted sex offender.
Meanwhile what happened at USPS - which is ACTUAL voter fraud and suppression - gets almost no coverage and we still have no answers.
Well, Randy was given an opportunity to change course a couple of days ago, which he declined.
I had stopped responding to Randy's incivil posts for a couple of years, during which ne maintained an obsession with me.
Mow that the election is over, I reinstate that policy. Until further notice, I will not respond to any posts by Randy.
Presumptive President-elect Joseph R. Biden’s call for “unity” is being greeted by many Republicans with disbelief and scorn, after four years of Democrats demonizing President Trump and his supporters.
Some Democrats, meanwhile, are itching for a Biden Justice Department to prosecute Mr. Trump and his advisers for perceived crimes after they leave office. As an alternative, they’re urging employers to blacklist former Trump officials from working again.
Several current and former White House aides are pointing to the “Trump Accountability Project” promoted by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York Democrat, to shun Trump officials after they leave office as proof of how out-of-touch Mr. Biden is with his troops. They say it reeks of McCarthyism.
“This is what we were all afraid of,” a former White House official said. “Joe Biden is going to be a Trojan horse of the radical left. We’re seeing this six days after the election.”
Some on the right say Mr. Biden‘s show of reaching out to Trump supporters also was presumptuous, noting that the president and his legal team are still challenging reported voting irregularities and fraud in several states. Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien said at a staff meeting Monday that the president is “still in this fight.”
American Conservative Union Chairman Matt Schlapp said on Twitter, “For Democrats calling for unity you may want to actually stop counting illegal votes in NV first.”
“We are not suckers anymore. We caught you red-handed,” he said.
The president called Nevada on Monday “a cesspool of fake votes.”
Trump allies, pointing to boarded-up storefronts in cities before Election Day, also say that some on the left were prepared to riot if Mr. Biden lost.
“If the election is reversed and President Trump wins, those same people calling for ‘unity’ are going to burn the country down,” tweeted Ryan Fournier, co-chair of Students for Trump.
Heaping insult and condescension on angry Trump supporters was former first lady Michelle Obama. In a statement over the weekend, she disparaged the roughly 71 million Americans who voted for Mr. Trump in language that evoked Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” comment in 2016.
“Let’s remember that tens of millions of people voted for the status quo even when it meant supporting lies, hate, chaos, and division,” Mrs. Obama said.
Conservative columnist Ben Shapiro commented on Twitter, “I’m sure that Democrats are looking forward to healing and reconciliation with the millions of Americans they think are racist, sexist, homophobic bigots. Or alternatively, they’re lying and using ‘unity’ to mean ‘shut the hell up.’ “
Even before Mr. Trump was inaugurated, many on the left called his election illegitimate.
The former White House official said, “I was standing in Trump Tower on Nov. 9 [2016], looking down at 5,000 protesters yelling ‘Not my president.’ I get that Democrats now are calling a truce, but there were plenty of other times when they could have called a truce. It implies there was active warfare [by the president] without cause.”
Several House Democrats then tried to block Congress’ certification of state results that won Mr. Trump the election.
Rep. Barbara Lee of California failed in her objecting “on behalf of the millions of Americans, including members of the Intelligence Community, who are horrified by evidence that the Russians interfered in our election.”
Then came the long-running Mueller investigation, which distracted the White House for nearly three years but found no “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Moscow.
House Democrats then launched an impeachment of Mr. Trump that carried into the election year. And now Trump supporters are, they perceive, being asked to grasp the Democratic hand extended to them.
Rep. Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican and a vocal defender of the president, said on Twitter, “Let me get this straight. Democrats want us to forget what they did to: Michael Flynn, Brett Kavanaugh, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, KT McFarland, The President and his family.”
Said former Bush White House aide Ari Fleischer, “Resist. Overturn. Boycott. Surveil. Leak. Impeach. And now they tell us it’s time to heal. Where were they for the last four years?”
The intolerance displayed in 2018, when then-White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her family were asked to leave a Virginia restaurant and there were other interruptions of Republicans in nonpolitical spaces such as restaurants and homes, now seems almost quaint in retrospect.
A few moderate Republicans, such as Sens. Mitt Romney of Utah, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, have congratulated Mr. Biden on his apparent win. They also were among the few GOP lawmakers who regularly distanced themselves from Mr. Trump.
WASHINGTON – Secretary of State Mike Pompeo refused to say if the State Department would cooperate with President-elect Joe Biden's transition team and said instead that he expected "a smooth transition to a second Trump administration."
President Donald Trump has disputed the election results, and many of his Republican allies are supporting his bid to challenge the vote counts in key swing states.
But Pompeo's remarks Tuesday went much further than others, by suggesting those legal challenges might result in a Trump victory. Legal experts have said his claims are weak, and even Trump's allies in Congress concede the lawsuits are unlikely to change the Nov. 3 election outcome.
The Associated Press and other media outlets, including the Trump-friendly Fox News network, declared Biden the winner on Saturday...
McConnell’s comments show how hard Republicans are trying to portray Trump’s refusal to accept the election results as an ordinary part of the process, even as it’s nothing short of extraordinary. There is no widespread evidence of election fraud; state officials say the elections ran smoothly. The delay has the potential to upend civic norms, impede Biden’s transition to the White House and sow doubt in the nation’s civic and election systems.
Trump remained out of sight at the White House, tweeting his views, but the social media company Twitter swiftly flagged the president’s tweets that he actually won the election as disputed.
“It’s not unusual, should not be alarming,” McConnell told reporters on Capitol Hill. “At some point here we’ll find out, finally, who was certified in each of these states, and the Electoral College will determine the winner. … No reason for alarm.”
WASHINGTON – President Trump has made wholesale changes in the Pentagon's top civilian leadership, a purge that began with the firing of Defense Secretary Mark Esper and continued Tuesday through the senior ranks.
Three top senior officials resigned on Tuesday, including the under secretaries for policy and intelligence. Esper's chief of staff also resigned. The moves sparked concern on Capitol Hill that perceived instability at the Pentagon could embolden U.S. adversaries during the presidential transition.
James Anderson, the acting under secretary for policy, the Pentagon's No. 3 spot, resigned Tuesday and was replaced by Anthony Tata, a retired Army general who once called former President Barack Obama a "terrorist leader." Tata had withdrawn his name for that Pentagon post in August before facing a contentious confirmation hearing in the Senate. He was then placed in another job that did not require a hearing.
Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, called the changes alarming.
“It is hard to overstate just how dangerous high-level turnover at the Department of Defense is during a period of presidential transition," Smith said in a statement. "The top policy professional in the department resigning the day after the Secretary of Defense was fired could mark the beginning of a process of gutting the DoD – something that should alarm all Americans."
"If this is the beginning of a trend – the president either firing or forcing out national security professionals in order to replace them with people perceived as more loyal to him – then the next 70 days will be precarious at best and downright dangerous at worst."
"Then came the long-running Mueller investigation, which distracted the White House for nearly three years but found no “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Moscow.
Even before Mr. Trump was inaugurated, many on the left called his election illegitimate."
Someone remind me again of how many years Rump and Fox News kept saying the previous president was illegitimate because he had a fake birth certificate. How much evidence did they have for that?
"Heaping insult and condescension on angry Trump supporters was former first lady Michelle Obama."
Why don't we compare the "insult(s) and condescension" you think Michelle has said with what President Rump has said. I wonder who will come out looking worse.
"remember when Stacy [sic] Abrams lost the Georgia governor race, she ranted about voter fraud and refused to accept the results"
That's yet another GOPer lie.
Wiki reports "Abrams lost the election by 50,000 votes. Abrams considered but ultimately did not mount a legal challenge to the election results."
Her GOP opponent who was also the GA Secretary of State and therefore in charge of elections and voter registration during the election, was a different story. Again Wiki reports "Kemp's office was found to have violated the law before and immediately after the 2018 midterm elections. In a ruling against Kemp, District Judge Amy Totenberg found that Kemp's office had violated the Help America Vote Act and said an attempt by Kemp's office to expedite the certification of results "appears to suggest the Secretary’s foregoing of its responsibility to confirm the accuracy of the results prior to final certification, including the assessment of whether serious provisional balloting count issues have been consistently and properly handled.""
What Abrams did was to found Fair Fight 2020, an organization that assisted Democrats financially and technically to build voter protection teams and the world sees her efforts have paid off nicely for President Elect Biden.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stacey_Abrams#2018_gubernatorial_campaign
Texas sets new daily record, nears 1M cases of coronavirus
The nation’s second-most populous state is the first to surpass 1 million coronavirus cases, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. The state has now reported 1.01 million coronavirus cases and 19,337 deaths.
There were 6,170 people hospitalized Tuesday with the coronavirus and 94 new deaths were reported that day, according to the state Department of State Health Services.
Texas has about 28 million people, 10 million less than California, which will soon surpass 1 million infections as well. The true number of infections for all states is likely much higher because many infected don't feel sick and have not been tested.
NOTE: Texas is not New York or California and it is not a blue state.
"Well, PRIIYA LYNN was given an opportunity to change course a couple of days ago, which SHE declined."
Here's what you originally asked for in this thread:
"our new President has asked Americans to stop demonizing each other.
I know you're Canadian but if you'd like to pretend to be American, you should get with the program."
As far as I can see, Priya Lynn has not demonized or mis-gendered anyone at all.
Priya Lynn presents cogent rebuttal to your constant GOPer lies and the GOP's bullshit attempt to forgo the will of the American people, clinging to their Liar-in-Chief pussy grabbing President Bonespurs.
If you're not smart enough to rebut her back, that's your problem, not hers.
But I'd like to thank you for your demonstration you not only lie like Rump but you whine about being "oh-I-got-the-vapors" victimized like he does too.
Poor rumpypoo and his little local lemming.
If you can't take the heat, get out of the comment section.
We don't want or need your lies or cries.
"As far as I can see, Priya Lynn has not demonized or mis-gendered anyone at all."
you should see an optometrist
they can help you
"Priya Lynn presents cogent rebuttal to your constant GOPer lies and the GOP's bullshit attempt to forgo the will of the American people, clinging to their Liar-in-Chief pussy grabbing President Bonespurs."
well, considering the hysterical demonization you're doing there, you're as guilty as Randy
anyway, you misunderstand
I'm not shunning Randy for his hyperbolic views
it's his incivility
he knows what to do
he refuses
fine with me
he doesn't ever present any type of rational argument
just bombast, hype, lies, and a bunch of assertions that have no evidence backing them up
Randy is the liberal version of Trump
just without the wealth, energy, or intelligence
"Poor rumpypoo and his little local lemming."
are you this puerile offline?
"If you can't take the heat, get out of the comment section."
thanks for the advice
I think I'll just continue to comment and ignore the foreign troll
"We don't want or need your lies or cries."
who is we? are you part of a group?
"“Republicans in disarray.” That was the three-word response from Senate Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff late Monday to the extraordinary infighting that’s divided the Georgia GOP over President Donald Trump’s effort to taint Joe Biden’s victory.
This was supposed to be the week that Republicans united behind U.S. Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue for a pair of Jan. 5 runoffs that could decide control of the Senate.
Instead, the two senators leveled unfounded claims of a disastrous “embarrassment” of an election at fellow Republicans who oversaw last week’s vote - and called for the resignation of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
It was a brazen effort to appease Trump, who has falsely claimed electoral fraud despite no evidence of any wrongdoing as he and his supporters try to discredit Biden.
We’re told the president and his top allies pressured the two Republican senators to take this step, lest he tweet a negative word about them and risk divorcing them from his base ahead of the consequential runoff.
And shortly after, Trump and some of his inner circle started tweeting attacks at Raffensperger, who was already unpopular with many in the Georgia GOP base long before Tuesday’s vote.
WSB radio analyst Jamie Dupree called it “an orchestrated election move the likes of which I’ve never seen before." Perdue’s camp pushed back on Tuesday:
“Neither senator nor anyone on their campaigns discussed with the president, White House or the president’s campaign before issuing their statement," said Perdue spokesman John Burke.
On Tuesday, U.S. Rep. Doug Collins jumped in. He’s leading Trump’s effort to recount Georgia’s race and he called for several steps, including a hand-count of every ballot cast in each county due to “widespread allegations of voter irregularities” but offered no evidence to back that up.
“We can – and we will – petition for this in court after statewide certification is completed if the Secretary of State fails to act, but we are hopeful he will preemptively take this action today to ensure every Georgian has confidence in our electoral process.”
The intraparty war included Gov. Brian Kemp, who echoed the two senators' criticism of Raffensperger but didn’t go as far as supporting his ouster. Georgia GOP chair David Shafer, who has recently staged “Stop the Steal” rallies as Biden’s lead in Georgia has grown, joined in.
Along with election officials, Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan was on the other side of the dividing line. He took to CNN in the morning - before the senators' statement - saying there was no evidence of any systemic wrongdoing. He has been lit up by Trump supporters for speaking the truth...."
Rump and his GOP cronies can not tolerate truth.
When the recount is finished, Biden's lead will grow.
Why?
Even Rump knows why:
"In an interview on “Fox & Friends,” Trump referenced proposals from Democrats in the coronavirus stimulus negotiations that would have vastly increased funding for absentee and vote-by-mail options. The final package included $400 million for the effort, which was far less than what Democrats had sought.
“The things they had in there were crazy,” Trump said. “They had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”"
"When the recount is finished, Biden's lead will grow."
maybe, maybe not
you seemed scared about it
Trump will win his legal challenge in Pennsylvania
in Michigan, there are multiple credible witnesses who have said they witnessed voter fraud
Arizona is also close enough for a recount
if the four flipped, Biden would be able to retire...again
"if the four flipped, Biden would be able to retire...again"
Look who got their medical marijuana card!
Barbara Res, a former top executive in the Trump Organization, on Wednesday warned what to expect next from President Donald Trump as he refuses to concede defeat in the 2020 election.
Res told MSNBC’s Ari Melber that Trump would “do anything” to overturn the projected win of President-elect Joe Biden.
“It’s a matter of wresting this loss from the victory of Biden and he’ll do anything,” she cautioned. “And if all else fails, he will burn down the house.”
Res worked for years as the vice president in charge of construction at the Trump Organization. She noted how her former boss just “can’t deal with losing” and was likely unable to process the loss.
“The notion of being a loser is something that he couldn’t possibly conceive or believe so I don’t think he believes that he’s a loser quite yet,” she explained.
Res also suggested Trump would be “so angry” and “in shock” because “all the plans he set up to make sure to guarantee him a win” didn’t work out.
The former Trump executive’s comments echoed those of Mary Trump, the president’s niece, who at the weekend predicted her uncle would never concede.
“He’s not going to engage in the normal activities that guarantee a peaceful transition. All he’s got now is breaking stuff, and he’s going to do that with a vengeance,” she wrote in an op-ed for The Guardian.
Karl Rove, the architect of former President George W. Bush's gubernatorial and presidential campaigns, acknowledged Wednesday that the 2020 presidential election will not be overturned regardless of the flurry of lawsuits from President Donald Trump challenging the results.
Rove -- who sources said advised the White House and Trump campaign leading up to the 2020 election -- wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that while the President is within his right to challenge the results, his efforts "are unlikely to move a single state from Mr. Biden's column, and certainly they're not enough to change the final outcome."
To prevail, Rove wrote, Trump would need to "prove systemic fraud, with illegal votes in the tens of thousands. There is no evidence of that so far. Unless some emerges quickly, the President's chances in court will decline precipitously when states start certifying results."
"Closing out this election will be a hard but necessary step toward restoring some unity and political equilibrium," he added. "Once his days in court are over, the President should do his part to unite the country by leading a peaceful transition and letting grievances go."
The op-ed makes Rove one of the highest profile GOP figures to encourage the President to accept the results of the election. Since CNN and other outlets called the election for President-elect Joe Biden on Saturday, Trump has refused to accept the results, instead pushing baseless conspiracies that his second term is being stolen.
In court, Republicans and the Trump campaign have lodged none of the types of serious legal challenges that could prompt recounts or challenges of vote counts over a significant numbers of ballots in the battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona and Georgia.
In order to use the courts to win the presidential election, the Republicans and Trump campaign would need to challenge enough votes in court to flip a state they're losing in their favor.
"That's a standard they haven't been close to meeting yet," said Ben Ginsberg, longtime Republican lawyer.
Still, Trump implied Tuesday he would continue contesting the results for at least another week.
And the White House, while offering little formal or explicit guidance, has nonetheless made known throughout the federal government that no steps should be taken that would imply Trump lost the election, according to people familiar with the matter.
"When the recount is finished, Biden's lead will grow."
maybe, maybe not
you seemed scared about it
Au contraire, I have complete confidence in the elections boards all over this country.
The one who is running scared, doing pirouettes suing state after state with bogus arguments that most lawyers say are doomed is your idol, the pussy grabber himself.
No recount has ever moved more than a few hundred votes and Rump is down by tens of thousands of votes in close states.
There is no way the lying loser who cannot accept defeat and make a concession speech will do anything but make a fool of himself on his way to being officially declared the loser on 2020.
Trump wants to make money off the fake 'stolen election' crisis he created.
For days, President Donald Trump has been blasting his email list with urgent pleas for contributions to fund litigation challenging the results of last week’s election. The consensus among elections experts is that these lawsuits have no chance of changing the outcome of the election, which former Vice President Joe Biden clearly won. But that’s not stopping Trump. He’s not only damaging American’s faith in our elections, he’s also misleading his donors and will probably profit off the endeavor.
The fine print on Trump’s fundraising solicitations makes his intentions clear. The funds are going to a new Trump “leadership PAC” called Save America (60%) and the Republican National Committee campaign account (40%) — with funds only going to Trump and RNC legal expense accounts if a particular donor has already given the maximum allowable amounts to Save America ($5,000) and the RNC campaign account ($35,500). This looks like a good old-fashioned bait and switch. Leadership PACs like Save America are notorious slush funds, raising money under higher limits than candidate committees and subject to fewer restrictions on how the money is spent.
Donor money isn't going to legal fight
These factors, taken together, compel me to say: Trump donors beware! President Trump is saying he needs your money for legal challenges to last week’s election outcome, but he’s showing you in the fine print that your money won’t be used for legal challenges. What will he do with your money? Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior. During his 2016 campaign, Trump’s campaign paid his businesses more than $12 million. Since taking office in 2017, Trump’s campaign has continued paying his businesses millions more of his donors’ dollars, together with millions of taxpayer dollars paid to Trump’s businesses.
And though federal campaign finance law prohibits a candidate from pocketing campaign funds (the so-called “personal use” ban), this legal restriction does not apply to party committees like the RNC or leadership PACs like Save America. The Federal Election Commission should close the legal loophole that allows leadership PACs to be used as personal slush funds.
It’s worth noting that Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle may be angling to take over the RNC, the other committee benefiting from Trump’s current fundraising. The funds President Trump is raising today may very well be used to pay himself and his family members big salaries, and to further line his pockets with payments to his businesses, after he leaves office.
"“The notion of being a loser is something that he couldn’t possibly conceive or believe so I don’t think he believes that he’s a loser quite yet,” she explained."
OK, that explains Trump
how about Gore, Hillary & Stacy Abrams?
why can't those three conceive or believe wat losers they are?
All 3 of them, Gore, Clinton and Abrams, gave concession speeches.
Rump can't admit he's a LOSER!
oh, OK
so Trump has until December, like Gore?
oh, that's right
Al Gore conceded on the night of the election
then, took it back
a real hero of democracy, that one
howzabout Hillary?
she had to be sedated on election night
then, she tried to pretend she lost because Russia somehow manipulated the election in coordination with Trump
yeah, that helped restore faith in democracy
and, Stacy
played every legal game in the book to try and overturn the Georgia election
hard to see how she could complain about Trump's recount there
if everything was reversed, Dems would howling at the moon
the proportion of the mail-in vote that went to Biden is suspicious and there are witnesses, more credible than Christine Lousy Ford, who say they saw vote tampering
might not be enough to change the outcome, but it should be looked into
what are you afraid of?
Let the "witnesses" prove what they saw and then recount all ballots Rumpypoo wants.
In fact, let Rump waste all the tax-payer money he wants on as many ballot recounts as he wants even though we all know Joe Biden’s lead in popular vote now more than 5 million over Donald Trump
Oh Rumpypoo's poor aching fat ass ego with 5 million jabs in it.
The fear is in Rump's camp because GOPers and Rump himself knows it's only a matter of time before President Elect Biden will be sworn in and Rump will be sent packing and told "You're fired!"
some details about the witnesses
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/thuammultiple-michigan-residents-swear-under-oath-they-witnessed
btw, courts in the US consider witnesses to be evidence and multiple witnesses to be proof
"Oh Rumpypoo's poor aching fat ass ego with 5 million jabs in it."
looks like a good motto for TTF
Jim should get the web designers on it
Dems wanted to delay the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett so the people could vote on it
they didn't get that, but voters had a chance to take it out on GOP Senators who dared to approve her nomination
let's see how those GOP Judiciary Committee Senators up for re-election did
Graham...WINNER!
Cornyn...WINNER!
Sasse....WINNER!
Tillis,,,WINNER!
Ernst...WINNER!
looks like the voters let their feelings about ACB be known!!!!!
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "btw, courts in the US consider witnesses to be evidence and multiple witnesses to be proof"
God you're stupid.
New study shows that the GOP is now more like authoritarian extremist parties in Turkey and Hungary than an American political party.
The stack of Michigan lawsuits filed in the aftermath of the election is continuing to pile up, with a new one in federal court seeking to toss out some 1.2 million votes in Michigan.
The lawsuit was filed by four voters on Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan. The litigation seeks to overturn ballots in Washtenaw, Ingham, and Wayne counties. Wayne County has already been the target of a federal lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign one week after the election.
Those three counties combined represent about 1.2 million votes of the state’s approximately 5.5 million votes cast in this year’s election. The plaintiffs are Lena Bally and Gavriel Grossbard, both of Oakland County, Carol Hatch of Eaton County, and Steven Butler of Jackson County.
The suit contends that “sufficient evidence exists to place in doubt presidential-election results” in the counties listed, specifically “issues with transparency, fraudulent changing of dates, a software glitch, clerical errors, illegal votes, and many other issues and irregularities.”
The legal relief being sought by the plaintiffs is for the judge to “declare that the inclusion of illegal votes in identified counties violates Voters’ right to vote under the First and Fourteenth Amendment by vote-dilution disenfranchisement” and to invalidate them.
If the lawsuit were successful, it would overturn enough votes to flip the election in President Trump’s favor.
President-elect Joe Biden leads Trump in Michigan by nearly 150,000 votes.
The Trump campaign on Thursday won a case that attempted to disqualify mail-in ballots for first-time Pennsylvania voters who were unable to confirm their identification by Nov. 9.
Commonwealth Court President Judge Mary Hannah Leavitt ruled that Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar lacked authority when she issued guidance to county boards of election to count mail ballots so long as voters’ IDs were confirmed by Nov. 12.
Ms. Boockvar argued to the court that the guidance came from a provision in the commonwealth’s election code that allows voters to prove their identities “within six calendar days following the election.” Because the Pennsylvania Supreme Court extended the ballot deadline to Nov. 6, then the deadline for voters to confirm their ID would also be extended.
But the Trump campaign disagreed. “If the deadline is calculated as the statute is written, then as it pertains to the November 3, 2020 General Election, this deadline for voters to resolve proof of identification issues is Monday, November 9, 2020, not November 12, 2020,” the campaign wrote in a filing. They also said Ms. Boockvar lacked the authority to give such guidance.
Judge Leavitt sided with the Trump campaign on that argument. In a footnote, she said Ms. Boockvar’s position would have been achievable if there was an amendment to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s order extending the ballot deadline.
It is not clear how many mail-in and absentee ballots fall into this category, and the Pennsylvania Department of State declined to comment on how many ballots would be affected.
Rudy Giuliani, a personal lawyer for President Trump, alleged that 650,000 ballots were counted unlawfully in the two largest cities in the state of Pennsylvania.
"We now are up to a count of about 650,000 ballots that are unlawful ballots that were cast in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh," he said in an interview with Fox Business's Lou Dobbs. "No doubt about the fact they're unlawful."
"What's being said in the mass media, that we have no evidence, is a complete, absolute lie, just like they've been lying for years," Giuliani said.
It's been more than a week since the final votes were cast and many of Donald Trump's 72 million voters still believe this election was fundamentally unfair. They're right about that. Democrats completely changed the way we voted in this election. Our system has never been more disorganized and it's never been more vulnerable to manipulation.
So was there voter fraud last week? In moments like this, truth matters more than ever. False allegations of fraud can cause as much damage as the fraud itself, and the last thing America needs right now is more damage.
What we're about to tell you is accurate. It's not a theory. It happened, and we can prove it. Other news organizations could prove it, too. They've simply chosen not to. The position of corporate media across the country this week has been very simple: There was no voter fraud. They say it again and again, but what exactly are they talking about? They won't tell you. So we're going to tell you right now.
Fewer than 15,000 votes separate Donald Trump from Joe Biden in the state of Georgia. It's close enough that it's worth getting specific about what happened there. Georgia's secretary of state has now confirmed there will be a hand recount of all votes cast.
Among those votes, auditors will find a ballot cast by a woman called Deborah Jean Christiansen. It'd be hard to find anyone who's got a bad word to say about Deborah Jean Christiansen. She was well known in her community for years as a birdwatcher, an avid gardener, a committed fan of the Georgia Bulldogs. Those who knew her were sad when she died last May. And they might be surprised to learn that even after her death, Deborah Jean Christiansen still managed to register to vote and then cast a ballot, presumably for Joe Biden.
In some ways, it's an inspiring story, the triumph of voting over death. And no one quite embodies that story like James Blalock of Covington, Ga. Mr. Blalock was a mailman for 33 years until he passed away in 2006. Fourteen years later, according to state records, he was still mailing things. James Blalock cast a ballot in last week's election. How did he do that? Maybe he was just one of those extraordinary mail carriers; neither rain nor snow nor gloom of night nor even death itself could keep him from the mail. In his case, maybe voting from the grave wasn't really fraud, it was just commitment.
Then there's Linda Kesler of Nicholson, Ga. Linda Kesler died in 2003. Seventeen years later, she was still voting in presidential elections. Edward Skwiot, of Trenton, Ga., spent his life working construction and teaching school. In his spare time, he loved bluegrass music. According to those who knew him, he played multiple instruments and enjoyed jam sessions. When he died five years ago at the age of 82, it seemed like he was gone from this world for good. But no, last week he voted for president and he wasn't the only one.
As of right now, there aren't enough of these votes to alter the outcome. But the point is this: They are dead, but they voted anyway. The question is, how did they do that? How exactly did they cast their ballots? And the short answer is: by mail. Dead people, like any other group, tend to vote more often when you make it easier for them to vote, and this year, we made it much easier for the dead to vote. States sent ballots and registration forms to millions of people, totally unsolicited. The pretext was COVID and a public health emergency. The effect was to encourage fraud.
One 2012 study by Pew found there were close to two million dead people still on voter rolls around this country. The study also found that approximately 24 million voter registrations -- that is, one out of every eight in America -- were either no longer valid or they were significantly incorrect. Close to three million people in America had registrations in more than one state.
So what happens if you start sending ballots and registrations to lists like this? You're guaranteed to increase the amount of fraudulent voting, and that's exactly what Democrats did. Republicans, we should add, let them do it.
Take the state of Nevada, where Joe Biden is currently leading Donald Trump by fewer than 40,000 votes this year. State Democrats and their lawyers made certain that Nevada sent ballots -- not ballot applications, but actual ballots -- to every single registered voter in the state, whether they requested those ballots or not. They did this even though they were perfectly aware that more than 41,000 people who are registered to vote in Nevada haven't voted or updated their registrations in more than ten years. Many of these people are dead or gone, but they got ballots anyway.
One of those people was a former elementary school teacher called Rosemarie Hartle. According to her 2017 obituary, Rosemarie Hartle was "loving, fun, sassy and sarcastic (in a fun way), beautiful, powerful, relentless, and inspiring."
Sadly, even though she's gone, her voter registration remains. She's still on the rolls. Someone received Rosemarie Hartle's ballot in the mail and then cast it. We don't know who did this. We wish we did, because it's fraud. It's a threat to our system, and it's being hidden by a news media totally vested in a Joe Biden presidency.
We have a right to know. We have an obligation to know much more about this. But thanks to the media blackout, it is left to independent conservative sites like The Federalist to report what the rest should be reporting but are not. Thanks to The Federalist, we know that on Oct. 9, a man called Fred Stokes Jr. received an unsolicited ballot in Clark County, Nev. Three weeks later, the county received his ballot back by mail. Voting records indicate that ballot was "completed." Fred Stokes voted for president, but Fred Stokes had been dead for three years. He died in June 2017 at the age of 90.
In Pennsylvania, the state that made Joe Biden the president-elect, there are likely quite a few dead voters. How do we know that? Because the state told us.
According to a report last December from the commonwealth's Department of the Auditor General, nearly 3,000 potentially deceased voters remained on the voter rolls. The Trump campaign says it has found evidence that some of them voted this year.
For example, on Oct. 24, Allegheny County officials mailed a ballot to one Denise Ondish. She had died two days before. Yet somehow, records show that county officials received that ballot back completed on Nov. 2.
Why did this happen? How can we prevent it from happening again? Those are the questions. The first is very simple to answer: Democrats did it. They understand that when you send mail-in ballots to an entire unverified voter roll, you can't really know who's voting. But just to make certain that fraud remained likely, Democrats filed lawsuits in Nevada to eliminate signature verification.
In 2019, well before the coronavirus pandemic, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., sponsored the Vote by Mail Act. The Vote by Mail Act demands that every state mail ballots to their entire unverified voter list. Whether you ask for it or not, whether you're alive or not, you get a ballot. There's no other way to interpret this except as Democrats abetting fraud.
This summer, Democrats in the House of Representatives passed something called the HEROES Act. It wouldn't simply have mailed absentee ballots to all voters in America. It also would have prevented states from restricting ballot harvesting in any way. That means that anyone could collect and return bundles of ballots from dead or living voters to polling stations, and there would be no oversight of this at all. That's insane, but expect more of it. Loose voting rules are too useful for the left to pass up.
In January, Democrats could very well gain control of the United States Senate. If that happens, much will change. But one of the things that will happen is that they will pass the HEROES Act into law. Right now, they're claiming universal mail-in balloting is necessary because of coronavirus, but they're lying. They've been pushing for this very thing for years for one reason. It gives them an advantage because it increases the incidence of fraud.
If we care about our democracy, we must demand clean and honest voting regardless of the outcome. The system is what we must protect. Sending ballots to entire unverified voter lists unsolicited gets you dead people voting. And what does that do? It puts us where we are now: Cynical, distrustful, withdrawn. If you want to run a democracy, you need one thing above all: Social trust. If you want people to have social trust, if you want them to believe in the system, it's not enough to yell at them on television and tell them that they must believe. You have to create a system that is worth believing in.
Original release date: November 12, 2020
WASHINGTON – The members of Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council (GCC) Executive Committee – Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Assistant Director Bob Kolasky, U.S. Election Assistance Commission Chair Benjamin Hovland, National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) President Maggie Toulouse Oliver, National Association of State Election Directors (NASED) President Lori Augino, and Escambia County (Florida) Supervisor of Elections David Stafford – and the members of the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Council (SCC) – Chair Brian Hancock (Unisyn Voting Solutions), Vice Chair Sam Derheimer (Hart InterCivic), Chris Wlaschin (Election Systems & Software), Ericka Haas (Electronic Registration Information Center), and Maria Bianchi (Democracy Works) - released the following statement:
“The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history. Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the result.
“When states have close elections, many will recount ballots. All of the states with close results in the 2020 presidential race have paper records of each vote, allowing the ability to go back and count each ballot if necessary. This is an added benefit for security and resilience. This process allows for the identification and correction of any mistakes or errors. There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.
“Other security measures like pre-election testing, state certification of voting equipment, and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s (EAC) certification of voting equipment help to build additional confidence in the voting systems used in 2020.
“While we know there are many unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation about the process of our elections, we can assure you we have the utmost confidence in the security and integrity of our elections, and you should too. When you have questions, turn to elections officials as trusted voices as they administer elections.”
Look at all those pirouettes of lies!
Poor TTF Trollypoo.
He backed the LOSER!
"let's see how those GOP Judiciary Committee Senators up for re-election did
Graham...WINNER!
Cornyn...WINNER!
Sasse....WINNER!
Tillis,,,WINNER!
Ernst...WINNER!
looks like the voters let their feelings about ACB be known!!!!!"
And yet you keep saying these elections are tainted by fraudulent votes and dead voters... clearly this must be fraudulent too.
I guess you must be saying the dems were devious enough to rig the presidential election, but somehow completely forgot to undermine Moscow Mitch's power - and the reason the SCOTUS is stacked against them - while doing it.
"And yet you keep saying these elections are tainted by fraudulent votes and dead voters..."
I didn't say the election was tainted
I said, contrary to the inane assertions of liberals, that there were fraudulent votes and dead voters
I doubt there are enough to overturn the election
but Trump isn't am enemy of democracy for saying it should be looked into
Everyone knows by now that the Dem advantage in the House to four seats, meaning Pelosi and Biden will be nard-pressed to do anything
it's a libertarian's dream!
what a lot of people don't know is that the GOP was awarded control of so many state houses that the GOP will lock in their advantage or the next decade
we just had a census so next year is GERRYMANDER YEAR!
mwahahahahaha!!!
Democrats may have won the presidency, but they failed to fulfill one of their biggest hopes of this election cycle: taking control of state legislatures and the power to draw electoral districts.
Now, organizers and party officials said, they will be forced to bank on litigation, friendly state courts, Democratic governors, recent state reforms and a growing grassroots movement to try to stop Republican gerrymandering — embedding a political advantage in the drawing of electoral maps.
"Let's have fair maps. Let's have an actual battle of ideas," whined Patrick Rodenbush, communications director of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee.
After each census is completed, state legislatures take up the responsibility of drawing the maps for congressional and legislative districts. Republicans took control of the majority of state Houses after the 2010 census, and they were able to maintain much of that dominance this year.
Republicans said they plan to try to cement their power in the drawing of 31 state maps. Democrats control 19 legislatures.
The goal once the new census data come in, said Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, is to redraw maps to "protect our legislative majorities, protect our congressional incumbents and then expand our ability to take over the House in 2022 and beyond."
That Republicans maintained their hold is a major disappointment for Democrats, who invested more than $50 million from the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee and millions more from a constellation of progressive groups.
you'd almost think the voters rejected Trump and endorsed the GOP!
actually, it's a lot like that....
I've got GOP Senator Rand Paul and GOP Senator appointee Kelly Loeffler begging this lifelong Democrat for money for their side of the Georgia run-offs.
GOPers in Georgia are up against Stacey Abrams' GOTV group that enabled Biden to move Georgia into the blue column.
Of course GOPers are desperate!
But really Senator Rand, these people???
GOP GA Senator appointee Kelly Loeffler (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Loeffler#COVID-19_insider_trading) has done some insider trader just like the other GOP GA Senator David Perdue (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Perdue#COVID-19_pandemic).
Sorry Senator Rand, but showing your support for insider traitors is low.
We all know you do it because for GOPers like you, party means more than honesty and decency and abiding the law.
"I've got GOP Senator Rand Paul and GOP Senator appointee Kelly Loeffler begging this lifelong Democrat for money for their side of the Georgia run-offs."
fascinating
I've been getting daily begging for money from Dems this week
the stakes are high
"GOPers in Georgia are up against Stacey Abrams' GOTV group that enabled Biden to move Georgia into the blue column."
Abrams is a loser
and a bad loser
"Of course GOPers are desperate!"
why would they be?
they will likely retain the Senate
narrowed the Dems' House lead
hold most state legislatures
and have a very friendly Supreme Court
and Dems have: no ability to do anything
"GOP GA Senator appointee Kelly Loeffler (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Loeffler#COVID-19_insider_trading) has done some insider trader just like the other GOP GA Senator David Perdue (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Perdue#COVID-19_pandemic)."
how heinous!
she's another Martha Stewart
I'm sure such a charge will bore Georgians to tears
"Sorry Senator Rand, but showing your support for insider traitors is low."
look who can't spell
"We all know you do it because for GOPers like you, party means more than honesty and decency and abiding the law."
don't you make fun of Bill and Hillary
or Joe and Hunter
hypocrisy: it's what Dems do!
‘Catastrophic’ lack of hospital beds in Upper Midwest as coronavirus cases surge
Some miracle, huh?
"‘Catastrophic’ lack of hospital beds in Upper Midwest as coronavirus cases surge
Some miracle, huh?"
the governors should have set up temporary hospitals in large empty spaces
they have a few of those in Detroit
btw, inane sarcasm is not a contribution to society
the vaccines on the verge of becoming the fastest developed in history are a miracle
and Dems didn't do a thing to help
they whined, mocked, and attacked in the midst of a crisis
glad this crowd wasn't around in WWII
when FDR said we had nothing to fear but fear itself, there was actually much else to fear
but courage and optimism won out
every negative battle for the allies would be met by the current Dems saying "I thought you said we had nothing to fear, you rich fat cat!"
Despite the presidential race being called for Democrat Joe Biden, November’s elections set up Republicans well for 2022 and beyond.
President Trump remained competitive enough in the battleground states to help down-ballot Republicans across the finish line. In other cases, Republicans such as Sen. Susan Collins of Maine were able to run well ahead of Trump to defy pollsters and hold onto their seats.
"Republicans might not be happy over the presidential election, but we are poised to take back the House and are likely going to do very well with redistricting,” said GOP strategist Ron Bonjean. “Additionally, the party was able to attract a sizable amount of Hispanic and Latino voters as well."
The party is within a January Georgia double runoff of retaining the Senate, keeping Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in charge for at least the first two years of an anticipated Biden administration. But the GOP also gained seats in the House, reducing the Democratic majority to just 219 to 202 with over a dozen races still uncalled.
This puts Republicans in a potentially good position to regain the speaker’s gavel in a typical midterm election year when the White House is in a first-term Democrat’s hands. Republicans gained 54 seats in 1994, Bill Clinton’s first midterm election, and 63 seats in the House in 2010, Barack Obama’s first.
Both elections were more than enough to flip the House to GOP control — in Clinton’s case, for the first time since the 1950s under Dwight Eisenhower. Clinton and Obama were both elected by larger margins than Biden and entered the White House boasting bigger congressional majorities.
But it is the Republicans’ state legislative gains that could pay the longest-term dividends for the party, especially when it comes to congressional redistricting. Democrats failed to pick up a single state legislative chamber this year.
Next year, states will apply the new census data to redraw congressional districts across the country. Republicans retained their majorities in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which emerged as swing states in the Trump era. The third Rust Belt battleground, Michigan, voted in 2018 to turn over redistricting to an independent commission, though Republicans are still contesting this on state constitutional grounds.
In Florida, Georgia, Texas, Ohio, Iowa, North Carolina, and Kansas, Democrats are effectively going to be shut out of this process. Not only did Democrats fail to turn Texas blue at the presidential level, but they did not win a single House seat that they were trying to add in the state. Democrats hold only 11 of Florida’s 27 congressional seats even before the maps will be redrawn by the GOP-controlled legislature. North Carolina strengthened its Republican legislative majorities.
All this makes Republicans optimistic about life after Trump
I have become Jim !
Hello Jim...
Theresa
www.westopthesteal.com
Theresa
Did you start your own blog?
LOL!
well, not really I put this up 3 days ago when I was so mad about the fact that none of the massive voter fraud was being reported ANYWHERE. And anytime you tried to link to articles..."oh that's not a reputable News source"... Like the Washington Post, that hid the Holocaust, is a reputable news source. I have zero comments on my new site... , I don't even know how to process comments... but putting up a website is really pretty easy these days(and cheap... took 30.00 and 5 hours... .the news media isn't the news media anymore. Since FoxNews Murdoch died and the younger Murdoch took over, there is no news source for real people... ie not one associated with the cabal. Go make a comment .. I could use a test drive, LOL. Hey, I don't get mad and stew about it... I DO something ....
Theresa
Jim, just so we are clear, I am Peter Pan and YOU are Hook. and with that I am signing off for the evening. I do appreciate that you still allow open debate.
Theresa (aka Peter Pan)
Clarks Mills, Pennsylvania
Driving through this rural area late Thursday morning, nine days after Election Day, it’s clear the extraordinary enthusiasm for Donald Trump has not waned. “TRUMP 2020: NO MORE BULLS—” remains a popular sign, as does “DRAIN THE SWAMP,” as does a placard protesting Gov. Tom Wolf and Pennsylvania Democrats: “FIRE THE LOCKDOWN LIBERALS!” Trump flags fly alongside the American flag in front yards. As usual, there’s not a Biden–Harris sign for miles. Ask folks in these parts, and they’ll tell you that Donald Trump couldn’t have possibly lost Pennsylvania.
“There’s no way,” says Marty, a 55-year-old president of a manufacturing company down the road, off Rt. 79. He attended the massive Trump rally in Butler, which drew an estimated 58,000. “I will go to my grave believing this election was stolen through mail-in ballots.”
Marty works with the huge Shell Chemical ethane cracker plant being built in nearby Beaver County — the largest construction project underway in North America. The $5 billion–plus project will create almost 20,000 jobs in the area. It’s a symbol of how the energy sector and fracking have resurrected once-dead mill-towns like Monaca, Pennsylvania.
“A buddy of mine there tells me that there’s a not a guy in that plant who didn’t vote for Donald Trump,” says Marty of the 5,000-employee factory. “And those are just the guys at the plant. Add in their families and the various support industries. It’s doesn’t add up. There’s no way that Donald Trump lost Pennsylvania. It’s statistically impossible.”
At the least, it’s statistically hard to imagine. Consider these numbers:
The morning of the election, Donald Trump trailed Joe Biden in the RealClearPolitics national average by 7 percent. The actual difference (as I write) is 3.4 percent. Trump outperformed by 3.6 percent. Everyone in Pennsylvania figured Trump would achieve at least a 5 percent overperformance in Pennsylvania polls, especially given Trump’s relentless campaigning here, his booming popularity, and Biden’s (not to mention Kamala Harris’s) suicidal statements on the energy and fracking industry. The RCP average for Pennsylvania the morning of the election was Biden +1.2 percent, with Trump besting Biden in three of the latest polls by Susquehanna (+1), Insider Advantage (+2), and Trafalgar (+2). Trump was surging; the man was on fire in Pennsylvania.
And how did Trump ultimately do in Pennsylvania? He’s currently losing to Biden by 0.8 percent (49.8 to 49.0 percent).
In other words, Donald Trump vastly outperformed his numbers nationally but vastly underperformed them in Pennsylvania. And if you believe that, then I have a thousand acres of farmland to sell you in Philadelphia.
The numbers seem even more improbable when you compare 2020 to 2016:
In 2016, Hillary Clinton was favored to win Pennsylvania in the RealClearPolitics average by 1.9 percent. Trump outperformed that easily, by 2.6 percent. And somehow in 2020, even with Biden’s statements on fracking, Trump is allegedly underperforming by 2.0 percent.
As for total vote margins, Trump beat Hillary in Pennsylvania by 44,000 votes but is losing to Biden by 55,000 votes (and counting).
Does this make sense? To people around here, no. Nor for a lot of pundits around the country. It’s why many are suspicious.
Pollster Robert Cahaly of the Trafalgar Group said weeks ago that Donald Trump in 2020 would “need to win Pennsylvania by four or five [percentage points] to overcome the voter fraud that’s going to happen there.”
That’s a very common sentiment among Trump supporters here. The night of the election, I marveled to a Trump supporter in Montgomery County that the Donald was trouncing Sleepy Joe by over a half million votes, or 58 to 41 percent, a seemingly insurmountable margin for Biden. The Trump supporter sighed, “He may need even more than that. To overcome the Philadelphia machine, Trump may need another 300,000.”
Not possible, I reassured him. Joe Biden could not and would not catch those numbers. Well, according to the current vote tabulation, he did. That tabulation includes another shocking number: Donald Trump has nearly 400,000 more votes in Pennsylvania in 2020 than he got in 2016. Yet somehow, that will not be enough for him to carry the state. No-enthusiasm-Joe has 465,000 more (and counting) than Hillary totaled in Pennsylvania in 2020.
“I don’t believe it,” says Marty. “No way. This has to be fraud, from Erie to Philly.”
The mention of Erie is no coincidence.
When I saw Erie County painted blue on CNN’s county map of Pennsylvania, I grabbed the TV controller and froze the screen and stared in disbelief.
Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 2 percent in Erie in 2016. He received 57,168 votes. In 2020, he’s losing to Biden in Erie by 1.0 percent. The Democrats (Hillary) got 54,820 votes in Erie County in 2016. In 2020, the Democrats (Biden) got 68,336 votes in Erie. Look at that increase for Democrats from 2016 to 2020: almost 30 percent. That’s staggering for a county adorned with Trump signs.
“I was at the Trump rally in Erie,” observes Emily, a college student. “There literally were not enough busses to transport everyone there.” She asks with a bewildered look: “Where did all of those Biden votes come from?”
She’s not alone in her Biden bewilderment.
Of course, Erie right now is the subject of a major case of alleged fraud with mail-in ballots. The county is receiving national attention because of a sworn affidavit by postal worker Richard Hopkins, who said that Postmaster Rob Weisenbach directed him and co-workers to hand over ballots received after Election Day, which he then back-dated. “Weisenbach was back-dating the postmarks on the ballots to make it appear as though the ballots had been collected on November 3, 2020 despite them in fact being collected on November 4 and possibly later,” said Hopkins.
Liberals this week (including the Washington Post) pounced on Hopkins’ account as fake news, insisting he had “recanted” his story. Not at all. Hopkins stands by his story. “I’m here to say I did not recant my statements,” says Hopkins on video. “That did not happen.” He wants the Washington Post to recant its story.
And for every big story like that of Hopkins, there are an untold (and unreported) number of smaller cases in counties throughout the state.
I was contacted by Julianna Heiby, the judge of elections for a precinct in Washington County near the Allegheny County border. She reached out to me because she witnessed activity that she believes might constitute “fraudulent actions.” She has reported this information to the authorities.
“The county provided us with blank ballots for use in the voting machines,” Julianna told me. “After voting, the ballots are counted in the ballot box. The number of voters who signed our poll books matched the number of ballots cast: 1254 for our precinct.” As judge of elections, “one of my tasks at the end of the night is to account for all the ballots. We are told how many ballots are packaged in our equipment. We were, supposedly, given 2250 ballots, packaged into three bundles of 750 each. One bundle was used completely. One bundle was still sealed at the end of the night. Of the partially used package, 205 remained.” Her math: “We cast 1254 ballots on Tuesday. 1500 – 1254 = 246.”
There should have been 246, but in fact there were only 205. That means that 41 ballots were missing.
As Julianna put it, “41 unaccounted-for ballots may not seem like a big issue, but if 41 ballots are missing from many precincts, we now have a discrepancy worthy of attention.”
Julianna told me that she believes in retrospect that these 41 didn’t disappear at the precinct but, in fact, never arrived to begin with: “My guess is that the package of ballots arrived at our precinct incomplete. We got them from the Washington County Board of Elections, which delivers them to the precincts throughout the county. So, they would not have been missing or potentially taken while at my precinct but prior to arriving.” Says Julianna: “I don’t know for sure, and I can’t say for certain if they were stolen, but I do know that there were at least 41 missing.”
According to Julianna, “From what I can tell they are the same type of paper ballots and scanners that are used in Philadelphia.” She sent a link to the vendor site for the equipment that her precinct and county use (click here). “The ballots that were missing are this type,” says Julianna. “One thing to investigate would be which counties also used this system.” Julianna likewise included a link to the equipment used by counties throughout the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Julianna believes the number of 41 missing ballots for her precinct actually might be closer to 60, given that there were roughly 20 missing per box, and the third box she never opened (it likewise might have been missing 20). And here’s how a seemingly small number like 41 or 60 at one precinct could add up big-time in just one county in western Pennsylvania: There are 180 precincts in Washington County, and her precinct is a typical/average-size precinct. If 41 ballots on average were pulled from sleepy, unsuspecting precincts like hers, that could be as many as 7,380 ballots that could have ended up in Pittsburgh (just over the county border) or in Philadelphia or in Erie or another large city in Pennsylvania — that is, transported from Washington County, a major Trump county (a big fracking area), where Donald Trump won over 60 percent of the vote. If the number is 60, then it could have been as many as 10,800 ballots for just one of 67 counties.
Julianna is at the least suspicious. She is speaking up because she’s very troubled at what voter fraud would suggest about the voting process and democracy in our country. “I became a poll worker because I believe in the electoral process and our country and I want the elections to be run correctly,” she says. “I would report this discrepancy regardless of the results.”
How many discrepancies exist throughout the state? Truly no one knows, and there will be so many, with most seemingly minor, that likely no single smoking gun will emerge to convince the electorate (and partisan Democrats) that something fraudulent happened in Pennsylvania.
This much we do know: As the Trump campaign had warned months ago, mail-in balloting paved the way for this chaos; it opened the door to potential massive fraud. People who do this kind of work expected this mess. Not only do counties know the prospects for theft but so do countries. As Paul Bedard noted back in August in the Washington Examiner, this is why even the European Union bans mail-in balloting. “Most developed countries, especially in Europe, ban mail-in voting to fight vast fraud and vote buying that had threatened the integrity of their elections, according to an exhaustive review of voting rules and histories in over 30 major nations,” wrote Bedard. “In the European Union, 63% have put a ban on mailing in ballots except for citizens living overseas.”
To permit this process in the United States was idiotic, though perhaps not for those who had hoped and planned to exploit it. And as for Pennsylvania, mail-in ballots were catastrophic to the Trump campaign. As George Parry noted in his American Spectator piece before the vote last week, “Stealing Pennsylvania,” “Given Pennsylvania’s recently decreed rules for receiving and counting mail-in ballots, there may be no percentage of honest votes large enough to overcome the voter fraud already underway in the Keystone State.”
Indeed.
When I voted in person on Tuesday, November 3, I needed my ID and was required to write down my signature, as did everyone who walked in. Such procedures act as safeguards to protect elections and prevent fraud. For a striking indication of how ripe the process is for abuse, look at this data on mail-in ballots in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania:
There have been 6.7 million Pennsylvania ballots cast for Biden and Trump. The proportion that came from mail-in ballots is eye-opening. There were 3,130,919 mail-in ballots issued to Pennsylvania voters. Of these, a staggering 2,643,485 were cast — in other words, nearly 90 percent were sent in. Yes, nearly 90 percent. This means that the opportunities to swing the election to Biden by a mere half-percent or so via mail-in balloting were legion. To leverage a final vote margin of 50,000 out of some three million would be a cinch.
“Prove it!” Democrats will bark. “Show us how Pennsylvania was stolen!”
They know that will be virtually impossible. Those with suspicions will be framed as crazy conspiracy theorists (and surely as racists as well). Nonetheless, people here in Pennsylvania are highly suspicious, and have every right to be. You’d be naïve not to be incredulous at these numbers that don’t seem to add up.
“DRAIN THE SWAMP,” but let's work like crazy to keep two insider traders, AKA traitors, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, back in the US Senate from Georgia!!
Michigan judge says cheating claims based on ignorance of how elections work
WASHINGTON — A Michigan judge on Friday dismissed a lawsuit alleging cheating during the Nov. 3 election, agreeing with the city of Detroit that most claims were made by individuals who did not understand the vote-counting processes they were observing.
The handful of people who made accusations “did not have a full understanding” of the process for counting mail ballots at the TCF Center in Detroit, wrote Timothy M. Kenny, chief judge for the Third Judicial Circuit Court of Michigan.
“Sinister, fraudulent motives were ascribed to the process and the city of Detroit,” the judge wrote, but he found that this “interpretation of events is incorrect and not credible.”
The ruling is one of the most decisive rebukes to complaints about the 2020 election made by Trump supporters. The Trump campaign and others supporting his reelection have filed over a dozen lawsuits in several states, with only one minor victory in Pennsylvania, affecting a few thousand ballots. Democrat Joe Biden received about 60,000 more votes than Trump in Pennsylvania.
In contrast to Trump’s declarations that the election was stolen from him, the process playing out in the courts has demonstrated just how little evidence there is for this claim.
Judge Kenny focused on a walk-through held at the TCF Center on Oct. 29, overseen by Christopher Thomas, who served in senior positions in the state’s bureau of elections for 40 years until 2017 and then came back to help Detroit run its election.
“None of the plaintiff challenge affiants attended the session,” Kenny wrote, referring to the individuals who registered complaints. Thomas worked with numerous other challengers to resolve questions, the judge noted.
This judgment aligned with the city’s own response to the suit, which said that “most of the objections raised in the submitted affidavits are grounded in an extraordinary failure to understand how elections function.”
As for the one city employee who made allegations of other city workers “coaching” voters in how to vote, Kenny noted that her complaints were “serious” but lacking in specifics. “It asserts behavior with no date, location, frequency, or names of employees,” he wrote.
And the judge said the social media postings of at least one person who made allegations, Patrick Colbeck, undermine “his credibility as a witness.” The city’s legal response included screenshots of some of Colbeck’s postings, which talked about a rigged election weeks before Election Day.
Other people in the suit made references to the QAnon conspiracy theory in their social media posts.
The lawsuit, filed by the Great Lakes Justice Center, claimed that election workers were told not to check signatures on mail ballots, that extra mail ballots were brought in and all counted for Biden, that election workers backdated mail ballots so they could be counted, and that they “used false information to process ballots” — such as adding birthdays in the year 1900 to some voter entries.
The lawsuit also claimed election observers were blocked from watching vote counting at key moments, that votes from ineligible voters were counted and that a handful of city workers “coached” voters to cast ballots for Biden.
The city of Detroit’s filing refuted all these claims.
Election workers at the TCF Center, a Detroit convention center where much of the county’s vote tabulation took place, were instructed not to check mail-ballot signatures during the count, the city said. This was because signature matching had already been done before the ballots arrived at the TCF Center.
“Signature verification was not done at the TCF by counting board inspectors, because it had been completed by the city clerk’s staff,” the city said.
Complaints made in the Great Lakes lawsuit about mail ballots — known in Michigan as absent voter ballots — being backdated, with the implication that they had arrived after Election Day, were also plainly false, the city said. “No ballots received by the Detroit City Clerk after 8 p.m. on Nov. 3, 2020 were even brought to the TCF Center,” the city’s attorneys wrote. “No ballot could have been ‘backdated,’ because no ballot received after 8 p.m. on Nov. 3, 2020 was ever at the TCF Center.”
As for the notion that ineligible votes were counted, or that votes were concocted out of thin air and assigned to names of people who didn’t vote, the city said that what Republican observers inside the TCF Center really saw were election workers correcting an error by some election workers at satellite locations, who failed to complete a process that allowed some mail ballots to be counted. It was necessary to enter the date for these ballots to allow them to count, the city said.
“Every single ballot delivered to the TCF Center had already been verified as having been completed by an eligible voter,” the city said.
The charge of extra ballots being brought in was related to the arrival of blank ballots that were sent to TCF for use by election workers. These ballots were given to election workers so they could function as duplicate ballots in case legitimate ballots were damaged and could not be read by voting machines, the filing said.
“Michigan election law does not call for partisan challengers to be present when a ballot is duplicated; instead, when a ballot is duplicated as a result of a ‘false read,’ the duplication is overseen by one Republican and one Democratic inspector coordinating together,” Detroit’s lawyers wrote. “That process was followed, and Plaintiffs do not — and cannot — present any evidence to the contrary.”
The Trump campaign, in a lawsuit of its own filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan, claimed there were cases in which “ballot duplication was performed only by Democratic election workers, not bipartisan teams.” This claim has already been dismissed in one lawsuit filed last week by the Trump campaign in Michigan’s Court of Claims.
Observers were allowed at all times, and the city had large computer screens so they could observe each counting station from a safe distance, given concerns about COVID-19, the city said. At one point the room was so full of observers — there were “more than 200” Republican observers there, the city said — that it was “overcrowded,” and for a limited time the city would not allow any additional observers inside until someone from their party left.
And as for the accusation of “false information,” the city said some mail ballots that arrived between Sunday night and Tuesday — all before the close of polls on Tuesday night — needed to have the birth date manually entered due to a software “quirk.”
Election workers entering the birth date for those ballots used Jan. 1, 1900, as a “placeholder date” until the ballot entry could be matched to the voter’s entry in the state voter file. “That birthday will appear in several places in the electronic poll book record for a limited period,” the city said.
Detroit’s lawyers pointed out that Trump received almost three times as many votes in Detroit in the 2020 election than he did four years ago: 12,654, up from 4,972 in 2016.
"let's work like crazy to keep two insider traders, AKA traitors, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, back in the US Senate from Georgia!!"
you seem very disturbed that these two engaged in insider trading
please elaborate on what actions these two took that you interpret as insider trading
"https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/12/arizonas-top-election-official-once-called-trumps-supporters-neo-nazis/"
Trump barely lost Arizona and the top election official was a never-Trumper who thought his supporters were neo-Nazis
what would you do to stop neo-Nazis?
what did she do to stop the half of Arizona she calls neo-Nazis?
More than 100 Secret Service officers infected with COVID-19 or quarantining as virus surges across country
WASHINGTON – More than 100 U.S. Secret Service officers are either infected with the COVID-19 virus or been told to quarantine because of close contact with someone who has, a person familiar with the matter said Friday.
While the total was not broken down by infection and quarantine, the person who is not authorized to comment publicly said the number skewed largely to quarantine as a precaution because of the officers' past contacts.
The number included only those who are part of the service's 1,600-member Uniformed Division, which generally has the most contact with the public as they perform screening at events and patrol the White House grounds. The source declined to comment on the number of infections and quarantines within the corps of agents, including those in the Protective Division who maintain the closest contact with the president and other top White House officials.
The Washington Post first reported the infections and quarantines among service officers, indicating that the number was more than 130.
The reports come at the end of the campaign season, in which the Secret Service has provided security at a series of campaign rallies hosted by President Donald Trump and lower-profile events for President-elect Joe Biden.
All service employees who were assigned to the campaigns are being tested, the source said, adding that staffing levels are high enough to account for illness and isolation requirements.
Trump had 10 rallies during the two days before the election, speaking to large crowds – many of them maskless and packed close together – in Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows tested positive last week. Meadows was present with Trump when he visited his campaign headquarters in Arlington, Va., on Election Day and was seen not wearing a face mask. He was also in attendance at a White House gathering that evening and came into contact with Trump family members, according to reports.
South Dakota welcomed hundreds of thousands of visitors to a massive motorcycle rally this summer, declined to cancel the state fair and still doesn't require masks. Now its hospitals are filling up and the state's current COVID-19 death rate is among the worst in the world.
Meanwhile, as cases continue to grow at a similarly alarming rate in North Dakota, the state's governor has supported allowing health care workers who have tested positive for COVID-19 to continue working if they don't show symptoms. It's a controversial move recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a crisis situation where hospitals are short-staffed.
The states face a predictably tragic reality that health experts tell USA TODAY could have been largely prevented with public health actions — the same rules that could still save lives in the region now.
Pandemics require people to give up some of their freedoms for the greater good, University of British Columbia psychiatry professor Steven Taylor told USA TODAY. In conservative regions like the Dakotas and elsewhere in the world, it's common to see push back like an “allergic reaction to being told what to do,” said Taylor, author of "The Psychology of Pandemics".
But months of lax regulations have contributed to a growing public health crisis in the Dakotas:
How widespread is COVID-19 across North and South Dakota?
The current rates of infection and death in South Dakota and similarly restriction-free North Dakota are what Dr. Ali Mokdad would expect to see in a war-torn nation — not here.
“How could we allow this in the United States to happen?" asked Mokdad, a professor at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle. “This is unacceptable by any standards.”
Death rates in the past week in North and South Dakota are about the same or higher than the hardest-hit countries in the world right now — the Czech Republic, Belgium and Bosnia and Herzegovina — according to Friday New York Times data. And there's currently nowhere in the U.S. where COVID-19 deaths are more common than in the Dakotas, according to data published by The COVID Tracking Project.
It's a situation “as bad as it gets anywhere in the world," Dr. William Haseltine told USA TODAY.
How did it get so bad?
Mokdad pointed to a number of factors that have made both North and South Dakota vulnerable to the virus' spread. He cited higher rates of preexisting conditions and economic inequality in the region, in addition to health care that lags behind the U.S. standard.
Haseltine, president of ACCESS Health International and author of My Lifelong Fight Against Disease, blamed politicians — especially South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem — for ignoring public health measures that have been successfully used to curb the spread of the virus elsewhere in the world.
Noem has cast doubt on whether wearing masks in public is effective, saying that she’ll leave it up to the people to decide. She has said the virus can’t be stopped.
North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, also a Republican, has pleaded with people to wear masks and praised local towns and cities that have mandated masks. But he has avoided requiring masks himself and refused to enforce limits on social gatherings and business occupancies.
Noem and Burgum have leaned on ideals of limited government instead of decisive state action.
Haseltine said that approach is like standing in the way of an ambulance — the ambulance being proven health measures like mask mandates and social gathering restrictions. Even worse, encouraging large scale-events in a pandemic as South Dakota has done is equivalent to manslaughter, Haseltine said...
Co-Pilot - I have an important announcement, and I need you to read this entire email.
This is incredibly personal to me. I put my life on the line in Iraq to defend a fledgling democracy, and I flew missions to protect free and fair elections. I care deeply about the elections that take place in Michigan — my home, and where I am raising my children.
This campaign is not about me, it never has been. It’s about making sure the People of Michigan have been heard loud and clear.
Elections must be free, fair, and honest.
That is the principle at the foundation of our democracy, and the People of Michigan deserve to know for a fact that their vote has been counted. We must protect the integrity of our electoral process above all else — if we do not, our democracy will be in grave danger.
Voters must have confidence that our elections have been conducted with integrity and that they were not disenfranchised.
Although Senator Peters [49.8%] is ahead [by 86,700 votes], I have deep concerns that a sizable number of Michiganders may have been disenfranchised.
That’s why I have asked my team to investigate and determine. I am 100% committed to making sure that every single legal vote is counted.
I’m emailing you right now to help me fund this fight for free and fair elections in Michigan — I need your help to make sure my team has the resources they need to make sure every valid ballot has been counted (you can donate here).
When the process is complete, I will, of course, accept the results and the will of the people.
But right now, there are enough widely reported inconsistencies to warrant an investigation to ensure that elections were conducted in a transparent, legal, and fair manner. Those who object to this fair and legal process likely have something to hide.
If you want to help me ensure that the People of Michigan can trust democracy now and in the future, please help me get the resources to continue the fight.
Let’s Fly,
John James
Barack Obama and Eric Holder’s National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC) aimed to raise $400 million to help flip state legislatures from red to blue in the 2020 elections.
The thinking went like this: Democrats were frustrated after the 2010 midterm elections because Republicans held legislative majorities in states where lawmakers draw legislative and congressional district maps. So Democrats sought to turn the tables in time for the next decennial drawing, after the 2020 census.
The 2018 elections gave them reason to hope. In that election cycle, Democrats captured six state legislative chambers from Republicans, all of which NDRC had targeted. While the 2018 national Democratic Party “blue wave” failed to win control of the legislature in my state of Pennsylvania, Democrats did gain 11 seats in the state house and six seats in the senate – getting half way toward flipping the General Assembly and making Pennsylvania not only a prime swing state for 2020 but also a prime target at the legislative level this year.
Then, in 2019, Democrats – again with NDRC’s help – turned the Virginia legislature blue, raising expectations even further. These results, combined with enthusiastic anti-Trump sentiment and a purported $400 million war chest, seemed to portend another Democratic wave this year. It didn’t happen. Not even close.
The NDRC targeted 13 legislative chambers in nine states – and flipped none. Republicans expanded their majorities in several of these states, including Florida, Kansas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. The GOP captured both chambers of the New Hampshire legislature, gaining a trifecta in that state, where Republicans also hold the governorship.
And that $400 million? According to an NDRC email, it turned out to be closer to $7 million. Still, the Democrats did raise nearly $90 million for their red-to-blue effort, compared with more than $60 million raised by Republicans.
Why, then, did their efforts fail so spectacularly? Simply put: While voters showed that they didn’t care much for President Trump’s style, they also clearly rejected Democrats’ substance.
In Pennsylvania, voters resoundingly rejected Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s far-reaching COVID business lockdown – aided and abetted by Democratic legislators – and other aspects of the progressive policy agenda, including calls to defund police. The winning candidates ran against Wolf and his party. As one Democrat operative put it, the left’s efforts in Pennsylvania “hit a big, giant red wall.” But it’s not only in Pennsylvania or in state legislatures where the Democrats’ policies failed to woo voters.
While control of the U.S. Senate will be determined by runoff elections in Georgia in January, Republicans gained seats in the House of Representatives (though they remain in the minority).
Voters also “mostly” said no to tax increases on the ballot, as the Wall Street Journal characterized it. Such measures failed in Alaska, California, and Illinois; Colorado voters passed a tax cut. Joe Biden has claimed a mandate, but his one victory amid a wave of Democrat defeat suggests otherwise. The progressive policies he campaigned on – free college, more government health care, higher taxes – fell flat with voters. Down-ballot Democratic candidates paid the price.
While Biden supporters celebrate victory, Democrats should be concerned about the future of a progressive policy agenda that proved an utter failure at the ballot box.
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - The Alaska congressman who once ridiculed the seriousness of the novel coronavirus, calling it the “beer virus,” said on Thursday he is now infected with it.
The announcement by Representative Don Young comes as the state’s governor on Thursday warned that health-care and public-safety systems were at risk of being overwhelmed by the rapid spread of the virus across Alaska.
Young, the 87-year-old Republican who is Alaska’s sole U.S. House of Representatives member, made the announcement on Twitter.
“I have tested positive for COVID-19. I am feeling strong, following proper protocols, working from home in Alaska, and ask for privacy at this time,” he said on the Twitter post.
Young, who was just re-elected to his 25th term and is the longest-serving member of Congress, said in March that COVID-19 concerns were “created primarily by hysteria.”
“I call it the beer virus. How do you like that?” he said in a March speech at a senior center in Palmer, Alaska, in a mocking reference to Corona beer. “Anyway, it attacks us senior citizens. I’m one of you. I still say we have to as a nation, as a state, to go forth with the everyday activities.”
Governor Mike Dunleavy on Thursday sent an emergency text to state mobile phones with a link to a video warning about “escalating” COVID-19 cases.
“No matter what you believe about the virus, the facts are the facts. Hospitalizations and sick health-care workers are reaching untenable levels,” the Republican governor said in a the video.
On October 27th, Trump tweeted: "ALL THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA WANTS TO TALK ABOUT IS COVID, COVID, COVID. ON NOVEMBER 4th, YOU WON'T BE HEARING SO MUCH ABOUT IT ANYMORE. WE ARE ROUNDING THE TURN!!!"
Sit down and have a beer, Donald.
"I have become Jim !
Hello Jim...
Theresa
www.westopthesteal.com"
Congratulations Theresa / Jim!
I always thought you were secretly trans!
Went to your website... it was pretty empty... empty accusations an no proof.
What makes you think you'll have more luck than the Rump lawyers that keep having their cases thrown out of courts because they have no evidence?
What makes you think you can overturn the will of the electorate? Just because you firmly BELIEVE something doesn't make it true. Alternative facts aren't actually facts - they're just conspiracy theories.
At some point, people will start to realize that none of these conspiracy theories ever really materialize in any significant way in the real world... they just keep making up new conspiracy theories.
If you can't understand why Rump lost the vote, you really haven't understood why so many people loathed him. Many on the right blame "main stream media" for bad press. It doesn't take main stream media to make him look bad though - he does that all by himself. And he REALLY motivated LOTS of people - including Republicans - to vote against him.
If you don't understand why Republicans would vote against him, or you write them off as "RINOs," then you're really not thinking deeply enough about this.
Theresa, Trump has spent four years making sure the courts favor him -- he has appointed hundreds of judges. The Trump Justice Department sent lawyers to monitor the elections and those lawyers reported that they were extremely well run and asked DOJ to drop its stupid investigations of the election. Trump himself has filed at least 12 lawsuits, and at last count had lost 11 of them. This election was conducted very professionally and it was not close. Biden wins the electoral college by several different combinations of states, so overturning one is not going to change the outcome, and he is currently nearly 6 million votes ahead in the popular vote.
I find it surprising that people who call themselves "patriots" and say they believe in freedom also oppose the process of democracy in America, the vote, which is the basis of our freedom. I don't know what you call the system of government where power is determined by kidnapping governors, roaming the streets with AR-15s, lying to the media, and obstructing elections, but that is not the way we do it in the USA.
One candidate wins in each race. Sometimes it's the one you back, sometimes it's not. You either believe in freedom and democracy or you don't, you either accept the results of a fair election or you don't. Nobody "stole" this, the people voted and this is the outcome, a huge win in the popular vote and 306 electors, so far.
You keep believing what you want to believe. You saw the Sidney Powell interview this morning I assume ? I saw hundreds of thousands of people downtown yesterday.... I don't know how to judge, someone said probably 300,000- 500,000. We will see what happens this week, one thing that has not been refuted though, is that the Dominion Voting machines had software uploaded the night before the election... Jim is also in software I thought, we both know how crazy that is... that should never happen, that's like changing the flight control software while the plane is on the runway. You don't do that... ! I am not going to argue this with you, Trump won and he won by a landslide. I do know people that hate Trump ... typically they are the ones that watch CNN and MSNBC and NPR, and believe all the lies spewed about him. I look at results... my husband had a good post on Facebook ..."I am making this post so it will show back up as a future memory on my timeline: Today is 3 days after the 2020 election. Gasoline is currently $1.80-2.10 per gallon. Interest rates are 2.65% for a 30 year mortgage. The stock market closed at 28,390, even though we have been fighting COVID for 9 months. Our GDP growth for the 3rd Qtr was 33%. We had the best economy ever until COVID and it is recovering well. We have not had any new wars or conflicts in the last 4 years. North Korea has been under control and has not been testing any missiles. Isis has not been heard from for over 3 years. The housing market is the strongest in over 20 years. Homes have appreciated at an unbelievable rate and sell within hours of going on the market, with multiple offers. I hope our new leadership can build on these things and can keep them going, but if I were a betting person I would bet that the only place we will see these results will be in this post.Keep a copy to compare later. 11-6-2020
" And when I said I had become Jim, it was in reference to putting up a blog... you all are just nasty, all the time.
Sidney Powell is a force to be reckoned with "I never say anything I can't prove"... Lin Woods is also on Trumps team. You know, Lin Woods of Nick Sanders and the CNN lawsuit for defamation...
It should be an interesting week.
Theresa
"Trump won and he won by a landslide.
Rump lost by over five and and a half million votes.
Biden 78,758,034
Rump 73,122,988
I would tend to agree that Trump lost.
But letting the cases run through the courts and the recounts in close states proceed is what's in the best interest of the country. Why do Democrats have to have a spasmodic fit over every trivial matter?
Statistically, there are some circumstantially strange numbers. Just one example: Trump outperformed the polls in most parts of the country and yet underperformed the polls in western Pennsylvania. How could that be? The populace there is incensed by Biden's position on fossil fuels. Driving around, looking at lawn signs and judging by rallies and other manner of discourse, it's hard to find the faintest blip of support for Biden.
It needs to be looked at....
circumstantially, nothing makes sense:
https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/13/5-historical-trends-that-show-its-utterly-shocking-if-trump-lost-in-2020/
The claim: Dominion Voting Systems deleted votes for Donald Trump, switched votes to Joe Biden
Multiple conservative news sources have claimed this week that vote counting software from Dominion Voting Systems deleted votes for President Donald Trump or switched votes to President-elect Joe Biden.
OAN’s Lilia Fifield made the claim on air earlier this week, per a clip on Mediaite.
"Election systems across the country are found to have deleted millions of votes cast for President Trump," she said. "According to an unaudited analysis of data obtained from Edison Research, states using Dominion Voting Systems may have switched as many as 435,000 votes from President Trump to Joe Biden, and the author also finds another 2.7 million Trump votes appear to have been deleted by Dominion including almost one million truckloads in Pennsylvania alone."
Similar claims appeared on Gateway Pundit, though it credits the findings to the website thedonald.win, whose author also cites Edison Research.
Trump himself then magnified the claim.
“Report: Dominion deleted 2.7 million Trump votes nationwide. Data analysis finds 221,000 Pennsylvania votes switched from President Trump to Biden. 941,000 Trump votes deleted. States using Dominion Voting Systems switched 435,000 votes from Trump to Biden," he wrote on Twitter.
His son Donald Trump Jr. also implied that Dominion Voting Systems had improperly tallied votes for Biden in a post on Instagram.
"What's the difference between a Dominion voting machine and Hunter Biden? Nothing. They both give 10% to the 'big guy,'" the post read.
A national coalition announced Thursday that there is no evidence that any voting software deleted or changed votes in last week's election.
In fact, the security group — which includes the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the National Association of State Election Directors — described the election as "the most secure in American history."
"There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised," the coalition concluded.
It added that all states with close results have paper records of each vote that allow for a recount, if necessary.
"This is an added benefit for security and resilience," the coalition wrote. "This process allows for the identification and correction of any mistakes or errors."
CISA Director Chris Krebs also retweeted a message from election law expert David Becker that condemned "wild and baseless claims about voting machines," according to CBS News.
Edward Perez, an election-technology expert at the OSET Institute, a nonprofit that studies voting infrastructure, told the New York Times that claims about Dominion voting machines are "misinformation at best and, in many cases, they’re outright disinformation."
“I’m not aware of any evidence of specific things or defects in Dominion software that would lead one to believe that votes had been recorded or counted incorrectly," Perez said.
Dominion Voting Systems released a statement this week to deny the claims that its machines had deleted or changed votes.
"Dominion Voting Systems categorically denies false assertions about vote switching issues with our voting systems," the statement reads. "Vote deletion/switching assertions are completely false."
The statement also addresses some specific details of allegations from Trump and Gateway Pundit.
Dominion calls the claim from Trump that its machines deleted 941,000 votes for him in Pennsylvania alone "impossible."
That's because Dominion only serves 14 counties in the state, which produced a total of 1.3 million votes — 52%, or 676,000, of which went to Trump. That only leaves 624,000 other votes, fewer than what Trump claims were switched.
Edison Research created 'no such report' about switched votes
The statement from Dominion Voting Systems also noted that Edison Research — a firm that OANN and Gateway Pundit cited in their stories — has refuted claims that it produced any data to support allegations of vote switching.
Larry Rosin, the president of Edison Research, told The Dispatch Fact Check, that it never produced any data to that effect.
"Edison Research created no such report and we are not aware of any voter fraud," he said.
A few — though not all — of the counties in Michigan and Georgia that experienced minor issues on Election Day used voting systems made by Dominion.
But the errors were not glitches with the machine, and there's no indication that the software affected the vote counts.
In Michigan, inaccuracies in two counties were due to human errors, not software issues, per a statement from the Michigan Department of State. Just one county used software from Dominion.
"As with other isolated user errors that have occurred in the reporting of unofficial results both in this and previous elections, this is not the result of any intentional misconduct by an election official or because of software or equipment malfunctioning or failing to work properly," the statement read.
And in one Georgia county, an apparent problem with Dominion software delayed officials’ reporting of the vote tallies but did not affect the actual vote count, per the New York Times.
"you all are just nasty, all the time"
No, we're pretty fun people to be around most of the time.
We only have to get nasty when dealing with deplorables - otherwise they'll try and take advantage of you.
"But letting the cases run through the courts and the recounts in close states proceed is what's in the best interest of the country. Why do Democrats have to have a spasmodic fit over every trivial matter?"
The Rumpster trying to stay in office after he lost the vote is NOT a trivial matter. As for the court cases, we're having fun watching them get dismissed for lack of evidence. Recounts happen all the time, and Joe's margins are plenty wide enough to survive a recount. Not a problem.
Why you think democrats "have a spasmodic fit over trivial every trivial matter" is just more of your omnipresent projection.
I think it's karma that the 306 EC votes Rump got in 2016 and referred to as a "landslide" are the exact same numbers he gets to landslide out on.
Biden has brought balance back to the universe.
Fox News anchor Eric Shawn on Sunday debunked claims of widespread electoral fraud pushed by President Donald Trump and some of his allies at the network, calling them an insult to the thousands of election officials across the country who worked to ensure the process was free and fair.
The weekend anchor said on “America’s News Headquarters” that the baseless and inflammatory claims about a rigged election were disputed by the government, election officials and voting experts and were “designed to undermine your faith in American democracy.”
He aired video of Ben Hovland, the Trump-appointed chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, who said that the 2020 election was the most secure in history and among the best-run.
“The American people made their voice heard, and when we spread conspiracy theories and we don’t back that up with facts, it has an impact,” Hovland said.
Shawn also singled out Trump’s claim that Republican election observers were blocked from watching vote counts in Pennsylvania and other states. He aired an excerpt of his Thursday interview with Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt, who called the claims “totally untrue” and added that he saw no evidence whatsoever of voter fraud.
Shawn also addressed the conspiracy theory amplified by Trump that Dominion Voting Systems software used by several states deleted millions of Trump votes or switched them to Joe Biden.
The Denver-based company, election-technology experts, fact-checking sites and news organizations have all condemned the theory as false.
“Election officials across the country insist as of today there is no evidence of any widespread fraud affecting the outcome of the presidential election, that our precious democracy was not tampered with and that such baseless and false claims are an insult to the thousands of election officials and workers across the country who we have seen dedicating themselves 24/7 to ensure a fair and free election for all of us,” Shawn said.
Shawn’s report stood in sharp contrast to that of Fox News personality and staunch Trump defender Maria Bartiromo, who hosted Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, and Sidney Powell, another member of his legal team, and allowed them to amplify the baseless claims about Dominion voter fraud.
Sean Hannity and Fox Business’ Lou Dobbs have also given oxygen to the claims.
Shawn joined his colleague, “Fox & Friends” co-host Steve Doocy, in shooting the theories down.
Without evidence, Trump has promoted conspiracy theories about voter fraud and launched legal challenges to undermine the reality that Biden won the presidential election.
"I do know people that hate Trump ... typically they are the ones that watch CNN and MSNBC and NPR, and believe all the lies spewed about him."
What makes you think you have to watch CNN, MSNBC, or NPR to hate Rump?
At the very least, Rump is a pathological liar. That's reason enough to hate him. It doesn't require watching any of those stations to develop animosity for what he is, what he does, what he hasn't done, his incompetence, his ignorance, and his belligerence.
He has developed his persona over many years, and it has served him well. He knows exactly how to play his reality-TV audience. You don't give him enough credit for pissing off much of the country all by himself.
That's not the media's fault - that's HIS PLAN - divide and conquer. An effective method used by despots throughout history. He pisses off people because he KNOWS it fires up his base. He thrives on chaos - which most people abhor - so he creates more of it so he can make himself the "savior" for "fixing" the problem he created in the first place.
Rump is playing the media exactly the way he wanted to - and CNN, NPR, and MSNBC aren't lying nearly as much as you like to believe they are.
"In fact, the security group — which includes the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the National Association of State Election Directors — described the election as "the most secure in American history.""
this is a statement without any basis
by definition, mail voting is less than in-person voting where ID is checked and bipartisan participation is required
a commission headed by Jimmy Carter, a few years back, concluded:
“Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.”
now, the only time we hear from Jimmy is when he sends me emails, part of a rotating troupe of characters, begging for money to help Joe Biden
now that his Dad is President, Hunter should be able to sharply increase his influence-peddling fees
""There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised," the coalition concluded."
gee, I guess we should do away with courts and just ask this group of deep-staters to rule on any election dispute
or, alternatively, just award election victories to whichever candidate's family makes the most money selling access to him
"It added that all states with close results have paper records of each vote that allow for a recount, if necessary."
recounts lead to spasmodic episodes among TTFers
""This is an added benefit for security and resilience," the coalition wrote. "This process allows for the identification and correction of any mistakes or errors.""
how would that detect is Dems are collecting mail-in ballots from people who never bothered to vote before and filling them out?
"As with other isolated user errors that have occurred in the reporting of unofficial results both in this and previous elections, this is not the result of any intentional misconduct by an election official"
there is no way to prove what not intentional
"No, we're pretty fun people to be around most of the time.
We only have to get nasty when dealing with deplorables - otherwise they'll try and take advantage of you."
that half of the country you refuse to talk to did a pretty good job taking advantage of you in 2020
they won so many house seats that they are within striking range of GOP control in 2022
it's a Gingrich nightmare for you!
worse for you, Republicans control over 3/5 of state legislatures which will redistrict for the 2020 census this year
ca-ching!
face it
voters rejected liberal progressivism more than Trump
AOC has declared that the truce with moderates, purposed to oust Trump, is over
so, in reality, neither Biden nor the super-liberals have a majority
the GOP actually has more House votes than either
for we libertarians, the 2020 result is a dream come true!
"The Rumpster trying to stay in office after he lost the vote is NOT a trivial matter."
it's only non-trivial is you think he might succeed
which, clearly, you do
Dems have a very rational fear of democratic processes
because don't support what they stand for
the Green New Deal and defunding the police and single-payer health insurance and massive minority unemployment and open borders and appeasement of the Orwellian regime is Beijing will never be a winning hand in a democracy
"As for the court cases, we're having fun watching them get dismissed for lack of evidence. Recounts happen all the time, and Joe's margins are plenty wide enough to survive a recount. Not a problem."
so, stop whining
"Biden has brought balance back to the universe."
oh, I agree
divided government where nothing gets done is the optimal outcome
especially since we have a Supreme Court that will overrule any attempt by Biden to impose socialism
and Biden secretly is relieved that he has an excuse why none of the radical leftist agenda he ran on can be eneacted
Trump's tax cuts are here to stay!
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — President Donald Trump’s campaign is withdrawing a central part of its lawsuit seeking to stop the certification of the election results in Pennsylvania, where Democrat Joe Biden beat Trump to capture the state and help win the White House.
Ahead of a Tuesday hearing in the case, Trump’s campaign dropped the allegation that hundreds of thousands of mail-in and absentee ballots — 682,479, to be precise — were illegally processed without its representatives watching.
The campaign’s slimmed-down lawsuit, filed in federal court on Sunday, maintains the aim of blocking Pennsylvania from certifying a victory for Biden in the state, and it maintains its claim that Democratic voters were treated more favorably than Republican voters.
The Associated Press on Nov. 7 called the presidential contest for Biden after determining that the remaining ballots left to be counted in Pennsylvania would not allow Trump to catch up. Trump has refused to concede.
The remaining claim in the lawsuit centers on disqualifying ballots cast by voters who were given an opportunity to fix mail-in ballots that were going to be disqualified for a technicality.
The lawsuit charges that “Democratic-heavy counties” violated the law by identifying mail-in ballots before Election Day that had defects — such as lacking an inner “secrecy envelope” or lacking a voter’s signature on the outside envelope — so that the voter could fix it and ensure that the vote would count, called “curing.”
Republican-heavy counties “followed the law and did not provide a notice and cure process, disenfranchising many,” the lawsuit said.
Cliff Levine, a lawyer representing the Democratic National Committee, which is seeking to intervene, said it’s unclear how many voters were given the chance to fix their ballot.
But, he said, it is minimal and certainly fewer than the margin — almost 70,000 — that separates Biden and Trump.
“The numbers aren’t even close to the margin between the two candidates, not even close,” Levine said.
In any case, there is no provision in state law preventing counties from helping voters to fix a ballot that contains a technical deficiency. Levine said the lawsuit does not contain any allegation that somebody voted illegally.
“They really should be suing the counties that didn’t allow (voters) to make corrections,” Levine said. “The goal should be making sure every vote counts.”
Pennsylvania’s top election official, Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, a Democrat, responded in court on Sunday, asking the judge to dismiss the case. State courts are the proper jurisdiction for the subject, and the lawsuit contains no “plausible claim for relief on any legal theory,” the state’s lawyers wrote.
More than 2.6 million mail-in ballots were reported received by counties, and there has been no report by state or county election officials or a prosecutor of fraud or any other problem with the accuracy of the count.
A key theme of Trump and his supporters has been their claim that Philadelphia — a Democratic bastion where Trump lost badly — had not allowed Trump’s campaign representatives to watch mail-in and absentee ballots processed and tabulated.
However, Republican lawyers have acknowledged in a separate federal court proceeding that they had certified observers watching mail-in ballots being processed in Philadelphia. Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration has said that ballot watchers from all parties had observers throughout the process and that “any insinuation otherwise is a lie.”
Update. Trump campaign has filed twenty lawsuits alleging election fraud and irregularities. Out of those twenty, as of this morning, twenty have failed.
"Trump outperformed the polls in most parts of the country and yet underperformed the polls in western Pennsylvania. How could that be?"
Easy.
Western PA is coal country.
"“We’re going to get those miners back to work,” Trump said at a West Virginia campaign rally in May 2016. “The miners of West Virginia and Pennsylvania, which was so great to me last week, Ohio and all over are going to start to work again, believe me. They are going to be proud again to be miners.”
Trump later promised that “we're going to have clean coal and we're going to have plenty of it,” and that the U.S. would have “an amazing mining business.”
The industry experienced a brief resurgence during the first two years of Trump's presidency in part because of international demand from countries such as India, as well as the markets responding favorably to some of Trump's environmental rollbacks and economic policies. In 2017, for instance, Appalachian coal mines produced nearly 200 million tons, slightly over a 10% increase from 2016.
But the renaissance was short-lived.
U.S. coal production decreased 6.6% in 2019 to 706.3 million tons from the previous year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The number of producing mines also decreased to 669 mines in 2018, a total loss of 41 mines since 2016.
And despite its historic ties to the industry, there is only one active coal mine left in Perry County.
That mine, run by the Buckingham Coal Company, technically closed a majority of its contracts in late 2017 to early 2018, but still operates a contract with the Fairborn Cement Company and has roughly 35 employees, General Manager Kevin Boyle said."
"Update. Trump campaign has filed twenty lawsuits alleging election fraud and irregularities. Out of those twenty, as of this morning, twenty have failed."
actually, Trump won a suit in Pennsylvania last week
again, it's obvious to every rational person that there is not enough problems to flip th election to Trump
why are you so worried and even lying?
relax, Biden will be a powerless figurehead, much like the Queen of England
then, in 2022, the Congress will do a Gingrich and Biden will do a Clinton
and it'll be 1994 deja vu all over again
"Easy.
Western PA is coal country."
there is no indication that coal country has stopped supporting Trump
something funny is going on
You just had to see the enthusiastic cheer of tens of thousands of pro-Trump protesters who flocked to Washington, DC, over the weekend to understand it doesn’t really matter what the final electoral vote tally is: Trumpism has won.
For four years, Donald Trump was written off, attacked, spied upon, lied about and impeached, and yet, after all that, just by standing firm for traditional American values, he increased his vote by 10 million.
More than 73 million free-thinking Americans refused to be intimidated, tricked or shamed out of voting for Trump. They saw through four years of lies about Russia collusion, golden showers in Moscow hotels, corruption in Ukraine, “suckers and losers,” and “white supremacists.”
Even if, as seems probable, Joe Biden ends up living in the White House, and inviting his son Hunter to dinner with new business prospects from China, the corrupt bipartisan globalist establishment is not back in the ascendancy.
Despite the predictions of experts, there was no “blue wave.” The election was a firm repudiation of socialism, “defund the police” madness and the rest of the woke smorgasbord Dems offered.
Rather than losing 15 to 20 seats in the House, Republicans have taken at least seven seats from Democrats, with several still to be called.
It will be the smallest majority the Dems have had since World War II.
No incumbent Republican lost a seat in the House.
Republicans will keep control of the Senate, if the two Georgia runoffs go their way. They did not lose a single state legislature, and appear to have gained three.
“Every Democrat has been beaten by a Republican woman, Republican minority or Republican veteran,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said. “We are more diverse and stronger because of what President Trump has done.”
At last count, there will be nine new Republican women entering the house, led by New York’s own Nicole Malliotakis, the daughter of a Cuban refugee. There are so many, she is talking about forming her own “Squad,” to counter the one created by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: a group of new Republicans who love America. “We value freedom, liberty and opportunity,” Malliotakis, 40, told The Post.
She flipped her district running on family values and law and order.
The other conservative women who flipped Dem seats are Young Kim and Michelle Park Steel, Christian Korean immigrants from California; Maria Salazar, the daughter of a Cuban refugee from Florida; Ashley Hinson of Iowa, Michelle Fischbach of Minnesota, Yvette Herrell of New Mexico, Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma and Nancy Mace of South Carolina.
Three conservative men flipped seats: former NFL star Burgess Owens in Utah, Cuban-born former Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Giménez in Florida and Iraq veteran Peter Meijer of Michigan.
Meanwhile, shell-shocked Democrats are screaming at each other in Zoom postmortems, and branding the result a “dumpster fire,” with socialists and moderates blaming each other.
Another bright spot is that divisive House Speaker Nancy Pelosi looks to be on her last legs.
According to McCarthy, 15 Democrats voted against her in the last Congress, and 10 of those are returning. If they vote as they did before, she will not win the 218 votes she needs on the floor for the speakership. Good riddance.
The election was a repudiation of Pelosi’s unhinged hatred and of the hypocrisy of Democratic leaders who spent four years trying to railroad Trump out of office and now complain he is “delegitimizing” Joe Biden by pursuing legal avenues to contest the results of a close election, just as did Democrats Al Gore and Stacey Abrams, who, last time I looked, still hadn’t conceded the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race.
Among the worst hypocrites last week was former President Barack Obama, who complained Trump was “delegitimizing not just the incoming Biden administration, but democracy generally.” Says the president whose administration spied on the Trump campaign, framed Gen. Michael Flynn as a Russian agent and set in train the Russia-collusion hoax.
And how about House Intelligence Committee Chairman and impeachment fantasist Adam Schiff? He complained Trump is “tearing down our democracy” and lamented the new Congress will “try to . . . delegitimize Joe Biden.” Hah!
Democrats spent four years trying to delegitimize Trump. Surely he is allowed four weeks to challenge election irregularities in certain swing states, which worry half the country.
It’s not Trump’s fault that millions of voters don’t trust the integrity of this election.
The real culprits are Democrats who opportunistically changed the rules at the last minute, under cover of the pandemic, with their armies of lawyers filing multiple suits to weaken voter ID laws and weight the scales in their favor.
The result in a close election is widespread doubt.
Even if there was no skulduggery, the Trump campaign lawsuits come to nothing and the Dominion voting machines and their suspicious-sounding software get a clean bill of health, it’s a service to public trust for the Trump campaign to go through a process that is legal and accounted for within the Constitution.
If there has been no fraud or miscounting, then public faith will be restored in the integrity of our elections going forward. That is a good thing which Biden should embrace if he really believes in unity and healing.
Yet again, the pragmatic outsider businessman Trump will have cleaned up a mess in the American bureaucracy. For that, and much more, we owe him a debt of gratitude.
Pro-Trump “Prophets” Keep Insisting Trump Won the Election (Even Though He Lost)
Ever resistant to the reality that the rest of us inhabit, the so-called “prophets” who support Donald Trump continue to insist that he will get a second term as president, no matter how much evidence points the other way.
Right Wing Watch rounded up some of the voices doing more to elevate Trump than promote their faith.
Here’s just a glimpse at the misinformation coming from that crowd:
On Friday morning, the Elijah List, which sends subscribers “daily prophetic words,” described the current moment as “one of massive consequence for the nation as a whole and for conservative charismatic Christians in particular.”
On the natural, non-spiritual side, either Donald Trump has pulled off the political feat of a lifetime, convincing tens of millions of Americans to reject the results of a fairly contested election.
Or Trump is the victim of the most massive electoral fraud in our history, the exposing of which will shake our nation to its foundations.
These people truly believe that the election was rigged by Democrats, even though the only evidence we have of any voter fraud was committed by Republicans. But even if the votes get recounted, the outcome is obvious: No win for Joe Biden will be accepted. They’re sore losers, just like their leader.
Indeed, several prophets have publicly told God that he must keep Trump in the White House to avoid exposing his “prophets” to mockery because their predictions did not come to pass.
On Monday, Elijah Streams posted an interview with “prophet” Kat Kerr, who insisted that God was saying Trump will win. She even claimed that if there is a “mock” swearing-in of Joe Biden, “it will not stick.” The prophets who prophesied Trump’s victory were not wrong, she said, and should stop apologizing.
The funny thing is that some of these people could possibly earn back a small modicum of respect from the public — or at least some of their critics — if they simply admitted they were mistaken or that they confused their personal desires with God’s Plan.
This doubling down and refusing to admit defeat makes them look even more ridiculous the longer it all drags on. There wasn’t much of a reason to take them seriously before, but there’s absolutely no reason to take them seriously now.
If I were a prophet, I’d say that they’re being punished for making politics their God.
Wyatt and Regina Hardiman told us day after day over the past few years that Trump was sure to win in 2020, Democratic prospects were dim, Democrats are in for a big surprise on election day, and so on.
Beth Soneburner's article applies to them too - "There wasn’t much of a reason to take them seriously before, but there’s absolutely no reason to take them seriously now."
Conservative Christians are trying to destroy America, in order to make liberals cry.
Conservative Christians may hate America for its liberal Godless Constitution, but if they destroy that Constitution, they will not like the result. We can expect America to split up and become a version of the Balkans, with the economy being diverted from growth to warfare, which will not work well for the former states of America, but this is what they want.
But they won't have to sell cakes to gays, so they will consider it a victory, while they wonder how they can avoid being drafted, because they have a sudden onset of bone spurs.
"Pro-Trump “Prophets” Keep Insisting Trump Won the Election (Even Though He Lost)"
It's the old trope / trip: "If we believe it REAL HARD, it'll come to pass!"
No, sorry, guys, reality doesn't work that way. Never did, never will.
Though whether they ever actually GET THAT is questionable at best.
"It's the old trope / trip: "If we believe it REAL HARD, it'll come to pass!"
This actually has a name. The Tinkerbell effect
A South Dakota nurse has gone viral after explaining her ongoing frustrations with trying to convince COVID-19 patients they actually have the virus.
“Their last dying words are, ‘This can’t be happening. It’s not real,’” Jodi Doering told CNN. “Even after positive results come back, some people just don’t believe it.”
Doering was sitting on her couch Saturday night and was attempting to soothe herself on a night off by cuddling her dog and eating Oreo ice cream, when she felt the urge to publicly express the obstacles she’s facing at work.
“I can’t help but think of the Covid patients the last few days,” she tweeted. “The ones that stick out are those who still don’t believe the virus is real. The ones who scream at you for a magic medicine and that Joe Biden is … Going to ruin the USA.”
She added: “All while gasping for breath on 100% Vapotherm. They tell you there must be another reason they are sick. They call you names and ask why you have to wear all that ‘stuff’ because they don’t have COViD because it’s not real.”
“People want it to be influenza, they want it to be pneumonia, we’ve even had people say, ‘I think it could be lung cancer,’” Doering told the outlet. The nurse said that when she suggests that some patients should FaceTime with their friends and family for a final conversation, they say, “‘No, because I’m doing fine.’”
She said this attitude is taking a serious toll on health care workers.
“It’s like a f***g horror movie that never ends,” she tweeted Saturday. “There’s no credits that roll. You just go back and do it all over again.”
How about now? Is now the time to talk about gun control? There haven't been any mass shootings in a few days. Surely now is a good time to talk about gun control.
RUMOR: Democrats and Dominion Voting Systems tampered with computers to change the results
REALITY: Officials quickly fixed isolated glitches and accidents, only two of which involved Dominion and none of which affected the final vote count
No election goes off without a hitch, and in the internet era, technology can compound some of the usual mistakes. But there’s a big difference between Democrats conspiring with Dominion Voting Systems to “hack” election and delete Republican votes and the kind of minor, easily detectable and correctible data-entry accidents and software glitches that complicate any computer-based enterprise.
The first is what Trump & Co. darkly speculate, without evidence, to have taken place in close-run states.
The second is what actually happened.
Consider the example of Antrim County, Mich., a Republican stronghold where unofficial results initially showed Biden beating Trump by roughly 3,000 votes — a sharp reversal from Trump's performance there in 2016. Trump supporters flagged the discrepancy. Tweets about it went viral. Soon conservatives such as Ted Cruz were calling for investigations and alleging that maybe the same election-management software used in Antrim County (Dominion Voting Systems) had screwed up the statewide count.
Experts eventually figured out what went wrong: An election worker had “configured ballot scanners and reporting systems with slightly different versions of the ballot, which meant some results did not line up with the right candidate when officials loaded them into the system,” according to the New York Times. By then local officials had already caught and corrected the error — even before another round of review conducted by Republican and Democratic “canvassers” that is designed to catch such mistakes. In the revised count, Trump beat Biden by roughly 2,500 votes.
But these facts haven’t deterred Trump allies from seizing on other, unrelated examples of routine tech-related errors to falsely insinuate some sort of nefarious conspiracy involving Dominion. In Oakland County, Mich., election workers mistakenly counted votes from the city of Rochester Hills twice, according to the Michigan Department of State — then spotted and fixed their error. An incumbent Republican county commissioner kept his seat as a result.
“As a Republican, I am disturbed that this is intentionally being mischaracterized to undermine the election process,” Tina Barton, the clerk in Rochester Hills, said in a video she posted online. “This was an isolated mistake that was quickly rectified.”
Oakland County used software from a company called Hart InterCivic, not Dominion.
Meanwhile in Georgia, glitchy software updates affected how poll workers checked in voters in Spalding and Morgan counties, which both halted voting for a few hours. In another Georgia county, Gwinnett, a different glitch delayed the reporting of results.
Gwinnett County used Dominion; the other counties did not. In any case, the issues did not affect the counts. Trump won Spalding County by 21 points and Morgan County by 42; Biden won Gwinnett by 18...
...Elsewhere, fringier far-right activists have vaguely theorized that secret CIA computer systems called “Hammer” and “Scorecard” hacked the election on Biden’s behalf, pointing to momentary inconsistencies in CNN’s unofficial, on-air vote tallies for the 2019 Kentucky gubernatorial race as evidence. There is no proof that Hammer and Scorecard exist, and even if they did, experts say they would not be able to intercept the digital transmission of vote results and change them without being detected; officials always compare the transmitted results to paper receipts from the original machines before certifying the outcome.
“The Hammer and Scorecard nonsense [is] just that — nonsense,” tweeted Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency director Chris Krebs. “This is not a real thing, don’t fall for it and think 2x before you share.”
Yet Twitter and Facebook posts from Trump and White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany falsely implied that the isolated issues in Michigan and Georgia were signs of widespread problems with the election. On Thursday, the president even went so far as to tweet that Dominion itself had deleted millions of his votes — a claim with no basis in reality. He followed up Sunday and Monday by echoing baseless conspiracy theories alleging Democratic control of Dominion, which have been debunked as well. The president has not provided a shred of proof that software switched or deleted a single one of his votes — let alone the tens or even hundreds of thousands he would need to overturn his losses in Michigan, Georgia and elsewhere.
Not to be deterred, however, Georgia’s two Republican senators, who are jockeying for advantage in their Jan. 5 runoff elections, called on Brad Raffensperger, the state’s Republican secretary of state, to resign because he had “failed the people of Georgia.”
“That is not going to happen,” Raffensperger said in a statement. “My job is to follow Georgia law and see to it that all legal votes, and no illegal votes, are counted properly and accurately. … As a Republican, I am concerned about Republicans keeping the U.S. Senate. I recommend that Senators Loeffler and Perdue start focusing on that.”
I didn't vote for Biden and I expect to have a lot of disagreements with him, but, I must admit, every time I hear him speak since the election, it seems like a relief and, give him credit, he's not a TTFer.
President-elect Joe Biden has privately told advisers that he doesn't want his presidency to be consumed by investigations of his predecessor, according to five people familiar with the discussions, despite pressure from some Democrats who want inquiries into President Donald Trump, his policies and members of his administration.
Biden has raised concerns that investigations would further divide a country he is trying to unite and risk making every day of his presidency about Trump, said the sources, who spoke on background to offer details of private conversations. They said he has specifically told advisers that he is wary of federal tax investigations of Trump or of challenging any orders Trump may issue granting immunity to members of his staff before he leaves office. One adviser said Biden has made it clear that he "just wants to move on."
Another Biden adviser said, "He's going to be more oriented toward fixing the problems and moving forward than prosecuting them."
Current Trump election-fraud lawsuit score: twenty-six suits filed, twenty-five losses.
Biden is not saying there will be no prosecutions of Trump or the Republicans that colluded with him, what he's saying is that, unlike with Trump promising a special prosecutor to look into Hillary's emails, he will not be personally leading any investigations or calling for them into Trump, he'll leave it up to the Justice Department to do its job and investigate Trump administration crimes independently and, again unlike with Trump's violating the rule of law, he won't get personally involved in it.
Here's what Carl Sagan had to say about intelligent design:
If God is omnipotent and omniscient, why didn't he start the universe out in the first place so it would come out the way he wants? Why's he constantly repairing and complaining? No, there's one thing the Bible makes clear: The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer. He's not good at design, he's not good at execution. He'd be out of business, if there were any competition
-- from Sagan's novel Contact
"They said he has specifically told advisers that he is wary of federal tax investigations of Trump"
No worries. New York State is investigating Rump's state tax law violations.
"Current Trump election-fraud lawsuit score: twenty-six suits filed, twenty-five losses."
actually, your count is wrong
and you're pathetic
no one thinks Trump will win
maybe you should find something constructive to whine over
"Blogger Priya Lynn said..."
no one cares what you to say, Randy
if you want to participate in the conversation, maybe you could change your name and no one would know it's you
"Here's what Carl Sagan had to say about intelligent design:"
the best you can do is find some TV celebrity that's been dead for years?
tells you how valid the point is
"-- from Sagan's novel Contact"
oh, I see
it's a quote from a fictional character
that explains how ignorant the comment was
"No worries. New York State is investigating Rump's state tax law violations."
such as?
remember, when he becomes a private citizen, he can sue you for slander
A new survey on religion and its role in American life offers a lesson for political candidates looking to improve their standing among voters who care about religious liberty. In turns out, a political candidate’s support for this freedom, a bedrock American ideal embedded in the First Amendment, is far more important to voters than their own faith when backing a candidate.
The Becket Fund, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit public interest law firm that defends this right for people of all faiths, surveyed 1,000 Americans across the country over the last year.
One of the poll’s most surprising findings is just how important religious freedom is to American voters and how it factors into their choice of candidates. Respondents who were registered to vote were consistently more supportive of religious freedom than those not registered. And when it comes to a candidate’s stance on the issue, 78% of those polled said it was an important factor in their voting decisions. In comparison, only 45% said their own faith influenced their vote to a moderate degree or more.
“The message for all elected officials is there’s a clear desire there for more attention to defending religious freedom,” said Caleb Lyman, the Becket Fund’s director of research. “It’s important to a big voting bloc.”
And the country’s lawmakers have far more work to do in convincing voters they are dedicated to protecting this constitutional right. When asked which branch of government does the best job of safeguarding religious freedom, respondents were more likely to choose the courts than elected officials, including the president, Congress and state governments -- with Congress given the least credit.
Becket created the Religious Freedom Index, now in its second year, as an in-depth survey of Americans’ opinions and perspectives on religion so it could detect subtle shifts over time. The data files for the survey are hosted online by the Association for Religion Data Archives, which is commonly cited in media reports for offering free public access to statistics including church membership numbers from around the world.
The core of the findings are tracked by asking the same 21 questions in the same order each year -- though the group added new ones in 2020 to evaluate how the year’s turbulent events are impacting views on religion and the ability to practice it.
Some 62% of respondents said faith or religion was helping them navigate the challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic while more than three-quarters — 78% — said religion is important to providing stability during times of social unrest. One of the poll’s most surprising findings is that Gen Z respondents, who were born in the late 1990s to the early 2010s, were much more likely to say faith had been important to their handling of COVID uncertainty and restrictions. This and other surveys have found the young adult age group to be less religious, and they are some of the least at risk during the pandemic. But these young adults are joining their grandparents -- those in the over-65 group -- in being more likely than the overall sampling of respondents to say faith and religion are important to dealing with the pandemic.
It generally comes as little surprise that Americans turn to religion in times of uncertainty, considering another more basic finding: Some 60% of those surveyed agreed with the statement that religion is a fundamental part of “who I am” and should be protected accordingly.
Those findings factor into the controversy, which has played out in the courts, over whether state and local governments are treating houses of worship fairly during the COVID lockdowns and restrictions. The survey found that a majority of respondents said that houses of worship should be treated with at least the same priority as reopening businesses.
When comparing state and local rules governing outdoor religious services and outdoor protests, respondents were twice as supportive of giving priority to the religious services, according to the index. That’s not a sign, however, that Americans value their personal religious pursuits more than efforts to improve racial equality. The index also found a leadership gap when it comes to the racial unrest that has swept the country this year as communities reacted to the killing of several black men and women by police. More than four out of five respondents who said faith was important also believe religious organizations and their leaders should play a role in advocating for greater racial equality, but less than half think their faith community is doing a good job of responding to the issue.
“It’s really important for religious communities to think about how they can fill that leadership gap,” Lyman said. “There’s a clear desire for people of faith to have their religious communities involved in advocating for racial justice, but they don’t see that role being filled yet.”
"...kill every woman who has known a man by sleeping with him. But all the young girls who have not known a man...keep them alive for yourselves."
-Moses (Numbers 31:17)
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous, the Sagan quote stands by itself regardless of whether or not he had a fictional character say it - for a supposedly omniscient and omnipotent being, god is a hilariously incompetent manufacturer.
Trump's spending the next two months trying to make things as bad as possible for Biden and Americans.
This is a man who not only did nothing to deal with coronavirus, he actively worked to make it worse!
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "no one thinks Trump will win"
That's obviously false. He's got tens of millions of his followers who believe everything he says and he's recklessly telling them he will win because there was massive fraud.
Trump is an ever increasing danger to the United States. He's been trying to start a war with Iran every since it was revealed that their stock pile of weapons grade uranium has exploded since he reneged on the Iran Nuclear deal.
The United States is a great deal less safe because of Trump's actions and spilling of national security secrets.
If Trump had issued a national mask mandate months ago the Covid situation would not be so dire with deaths expected to rise to 2000 a day by christmas.
Instead he mocked the wearing of masks and made it a mark of loyalty to him for his supporters to not only refuse to wear a mask but to attack those who do.
Trump could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives if he would have just used the blind loyalty of his followers to get them to wear masks, social distance, and avoid gatherings.
Trump is the greatest mass murderer in American history.
NEW: Very timely data from the @vdeminstitute on the Republican party's disturbing authoritarian turn. As the GOP's refusal to recognize the results of the election demonstrates, the problems run much deeper than just Trump.
"Blogger Priya Lynn said..."
no one cares what you to say, Randy
if you want to participate in the conversation, maybe you could change your name and no one would know it's you
"NEW: Very timely data from the @vdeminstitute on the Republican party's disturbing authoritarian turn. As the GOP's refusal to recognize the results of the election demonstrates, the problems run much deeper than just Trump."
Christopher, the GOP is the opposite of authoritarian. They keep placing originalists on the courts who will protect the constitutional rights of citizens from capricious governmental abuse. The Democratic Party, on the other hand, is committed to the need for government to intervene in the lives of citizens and oversee all interpersonal activity.
Worse is a growing branch of the Democratic party allied with the billionaire tech giants who seek to grow a totalitarian progressive-tech-entertainment complex that forbids dissent in public forums. Their goal is similar to that of the Orwellian Chinese state, which is why China has sought to support Democratic candidates in the US. Now, any speech they don't like is blocked from social media.
These types believe speech against them is the equivalent of violence and violence is justified to counter it. Thus, riots in support of progressive is justified.
"no one cares what you to [sic] say" either.
GOPers are liars and they adore rump, the biggest liar and grifter of them all who has hijacked their party.
"GOPers are liars and they adore rump, the biggest liar and grifter of them all who has hijacked their party."
Mr Mirror
With all his faults, Trump is in the last weeks of his term. You're going to have to find new ways to attack those who don't support progressive socialism. You might want to get started. Right now, you're losing.
They said "the most secure election in American history." There are 73 million Americans who disagree with that statement. Why do we just do this, why don't we let the process work, why do we let the law work and follow the constitution? We have 27 days until the electoral college meets. So let's let this play out.
Today in Georgia you had two counties, there are 159 counties in Georgia, two of them today, just, Shazam, found missing votes, missing memory cards, and both of them to the benefit of President Trump.
What is the rush? We had four years of the phony Russia hoax investigation, what is wrong with four weeks of investigating this election, with all the irregularities in all the key swing states. Let's let the process play out, that is just common sense, and the vast majority I think of Americans get it, the only one the don't are the mainstream media, big tech, and Democrats in Washington, D.C.
The rest of the country gets it, let the process work.
16 new GOP women elected were pro-life:
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/11/18/election_of_pro-life_women_shows_tide_is_turning_144687.html
Democrats are very worried
Anti-science Democrats are at it agan!
In the wake of rising numbers of coronavirus cases and hospitalizations, as many states, notably those run by Democrats, are going back toward economic lockdowns. They include New York, Illinois, Virginia, Michigan, Maryland, Minnesota, California, and Washington. Those like California and Washington have considered full shutdowns.
This means lockdowns of schools, churches, businesses, restaurants, and office buildings. California Governor Gavin Newsom even issued orders on how to celebrate Thanksgiving with no singing, no laughing, and no more than ten people at the table. Who thinks of these unrealistic edicts? Much more worrisome is the discussion from the transition team of Joe Biden over a national lockdown that could last several weeks.
Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota said he wanted such a suspension of economic activities before the backlash and broad alarm about the effects that his recommendation would have, particularly on a nascent administration. He and other Biden advisers said the reason the last national lockdown in the spring did not work was because it was not “stringent” enough. What more do they want from us?
But enforcing all these regulations could be difficult. A recent survey by Gallup finds that less than half of Americans say they are “very likely” to comply with shutdown orders. The country could turn into a police state to enforce the mandates to cancel economic activities and demands that citizens stay home. What makes all of this talk about massive shutdowns so disturbing is that there is very little evidence that lockdowns slow the spread of the coronavirus. Even the World Health Organization concedes that such orders cannot curb the spread of the coronavirus.
The Committee to Unleash Prosperity has been tracking developments across the country since early spring. The states were divided into five categories, from the strictest lockdowns to states with no lockdowns at all. The evidence shows us that lockdowns are not associated with lower death rates or lower hospitalizations. In fact, the evidence is in the other direction as states with the most stringent lockdowns, like New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, have had the highest death rates.
The effect of lockdowns is bankruptcy for thousands of small businesses and millions of destroyed jobs. Every week with shutdowns could lead to about $250 billion in lost output. So that means we would lose $2 trillion over two months. It would also crush the spirit of Americans, leading to more isolation, suicides, drug overdoses, and domestic abuse.
There is a far better strategy employed by many states to protect seniors, people who are severely overweight, and vulnerable medical populations. These groups account for well above 90 percent of the deaths and severe coronavirus medical problems. It is certainly one thing to have backed the shutdowns nine months ago when we had no idea if they would work. But to continue to promote ideology over data flies in the face of public policy based on evidence that the left accuses the right of ignoring.
If I could stop a person from raping a child, I would. That's the difference between me and your god.
Christianity: Because you're so awful you made God kill himself.
how about if someone were going to kill a child?
would you stop 'em if you could?
most TTFers think killing inconvenient children is a constitutional right
are you sure there are no other differences between you and God?
btw, when you say "your god", who is "you"?
Randy, give up
no one is interested in your constant attacks on God
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "how about if someone were going to kill a child? would you stop 'em if you could?"
Yes.
"most TTFers think killing inconvenient children is a constitutional right"
No one on this blog takes that position.
A zygote is not a child, a zygote is not a person. A zygote can't think, feel, love or hate, it does nothing we associate with being a person.
No one has a right to use another person's body without their permission.
A zygote does not have the right to use a woman's body without her permission. That is one of the pillars of morality.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "no one is interested in your constant attacks on God"
Au contraire all fair minded people want to see me expose the evil god character of the christian/islamic religion.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous falsely claimed "most TTFers think killing inconvenient children is a constitutional right"
Wyatt and Regina Hardiman think killing harmless lgbt people is a constitutional right because their bible commands them to.
During his appearance on “The NutriMedical Report” last Thursday, radical right-wing commentator Josh Bernstein baselessly claimed that Democrats are supposedly trying to “steal” the White House from President Donald Trump. In order to prevent this from happening, Bernstein urged Trump to declare martial law, use the military to arrest poll workers in swing states, toss out any ballot counted after the polls closed on election day, and force a new election.
Bernstein, who during his last appearance on the program vowed to wage a violent civil war and kill left-wing activists if they managed to “steal” the election, urged Trump to take “drastic measures” to counter alleged Democratic efforts.
“I think we need drastic—and I mean drastic—measures in order to change what’s going on,” Bernstein said. “The first thing I would do if I was President Trump is I would call the Insurrection Act in right now. The first thing you do is you quell all violence, and you stop all violence with the military or the National Guard. The second thing you do is declare martial law in the country right now, and you send in armed military and National Guard folks into every single one of these swing states where they are counting ballots, and you force them to stop counting ballots right then and there, and if not, they are taken away by the military and arrested.”
“The next thing we do is we end up having a situation where we do an immediate injunction to the Supreme Court,” he continued. “We make a ruling that says any vote that has been counted after the close of the polls on election night in that respective state, every vote that was counted after the polls closed, is null and void. One hundred percent. And then what you do—it’s very simple at this point—you either do one of two things: you either count the votes that you already have in to that point and determine your winner, or you get rid of the entire election—100 percent, every state—you do a complete redo, and you have the election on January 3.”
Republicans aren't the solution, Republicans are the problem.
They are out to destroy America because the vote didn't go their way. So much for "constitutional originalism."
"Blogger Priya Lynn said..."
no one cares what you to say, Randy
if you want to participate in constructive on-topic conversation, maybe you could change your name and no one would know it's you
"Bernstein urged Trump"
so what?
people "urge" him to do all sorts of things
AOC has urged Trump to ban red meat and cars
there are nasty authoritarian thugs on both sides
but those suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome are more likely to have totalitarian tendencies, as has been discussed here repeatedly
"to declare martial law, use the military to arrest poll workers in swing states, toss out any ballot counted after the polls closed on election day, and force a new election."
so what?
Trump hasn't suggested doing that and the military would likely arrest him if he tried to do so
Lawsuit update: Trump's team has one 1 and lost 28 so far.
"so what?
Trump hasn't suggested doing that and the military would likely arrest him if he tried to do so"
You forgot - the Rumpster just replaced a bunch of the top military brass with his own hand-picked loyalists. They won't move against him. He's prepared for this.
"so what?
Trump hasn't suggested doing that and the military would likely arrest him if he tried to do so"
“There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.” - Mike Pompeo
This comment has been removed by the author.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "there are nasty authoritarian thugs on both sides"
That's objectively not true. Trump's made over 20,000 false or misleading statements and claimed that article II of the Constitution says "I can do anything I want". There is no Democratic president that comes remotely even close to that kind of authoritarianism. Trump's gone through the entire government and replaced top leaders with his own lackies to do his bidding. Obama and Clinton didn't do that. He's used the military to assault peaceful protestors so he could get a photo op and now he's replaced all the top military leaders with people loyal to him and not the constitution. He's mounted over 2 dozen attacks on the democratic election he had already tilted in his favour and Republicans recklessly stand by giving him chance after chance to subvert the election. Its time for Republicans to put an end to this and acknowledge president elect Joe Biden.
Good anonymous said "Bernstein urged Trump to declare martial law, use the military to arrest poll workers in swing states, toss out any ballot counted after the polls closed on election day, and force a new election."
In Wyatt/Regina's later quote of Good anonymous they left out the part in italics to diminish the real threat of the statement:
"to declare martial law, use the military to arrest poll workers in swing states, toss out any ballot counted after the polls closed on election day, and force a new election."
This is a standard bad faith argumentation tactic of theirs, they do this all the time when quoting others.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "so what? Trump hasn't suggested doing that and the military would likely arrest him if he tried to do so"
The military where he recently replaced all the top leaders with people loyal to him rather than the Constitution? He's obviously got those authoritarian moves in mind as a last resort. He just told a judge that he should ignore the votes and declare him winner of Pennsylvania.
You've argued at least a couple times now that it doesn't matter how many attacks on democracy Trump makes, the military, or congress or someone will rein him in. You paint this as nothing to worry about when it is a deeply troubling ongoing threat to American democracy especially while Republicans stand by and watch him make attempt after attempt to subvert democracy. No matter what authoritarian move Trump makes you try to justify it or say it doesn't matter. You'll let Trump go as far as he wants which is full on dictator. You are as much a part of the attack on democracy as Trump is.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "The unemployment rate is 6.9% which is better than in the first year of Obama's presidency".
Another common tactic of Wyatt and Regina to gas light readers, cherry picking the data.
The first year of Obama's term was spent recovering from the great recession started under the previous Republican government. Obama put the U.S. on a record continuous streak of job creation and the current 6.9% unemployment rate is far higher than the 5% or so under Obama's last few years as president. Trump has done far worse on the economy than Obama, he's leaving a disaster for the Democratic president to clean up, as happens with every Republican president in the last several decades.
With almost 2,000 Americans a day dying needlessly while Trump does nothing, jobless claims have inevitably increased. The unemployment rate is rising again and is going to get much worse. It will probably take a year or so for Biden to turn it around like Obama did but he will eventually. And then lying Wyatt and Regina will scream about what a "bad job" Biden did in the first year of his presidency while never mentioning that it was a Republican president who was responsible for the economic disaster.
Trump could have stopped all this if he'd acknowledged the seriousness of this at the beginning of the pandemic and encouraged mask wearing and social distancing instead of mocking it and making it a mark of loyalty to him to refuse to do so. Liberals can't make this work by themselves and conservatives are doing everything they can to make the pandemic worse because loyalty to their leader means pretending there's nothing wrong and nothing need be done about it.
Trump Is Getting Ever More Brazen In His Attempts To Steal The Election He Lost
From trying to deny votes from being counted in majority Black cities to pushing to disenfranchise entire states to lying about having won, it’s all out in the open.
WASHINGTON ― Having lost his election for a second term, President Donald Trump, his campaign and his allies are ever more openly just trying to steal it.
In recent days, his campaign has welcomed the idea of disenfranchising all of the voters of Nevada, pushed to have Michigan’s 16 electoral votes awarded by its Republican legislature and alleged, without evidence, “massive fraud” all over the country in a court case in Pennsylvania ― all as Trump posts one lie after another on social media.
“In Detroit, there are FAR MORE VOTES THAN PEOPLE. Nothing can be done to cure that giant scam. I win Michigan!” he wrote Wednesday morning.
“I WON THE ELECTION. VOTER FRAUD ALL OVER THE COUNTRY!” he wrote a couple of hours earlier.
And campaign in-house lawyer Jenna Ellis wrote enthusiastically Tuesday evening of sending the election results in Michigan ― which President-elect Joe Biden won by 154,000 votes ― to the state’s GOP-run legislature: “Huge win for @realDonaldTrump.”
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on authoritarianism at New York University, said Trump’s claim to have won an election he lost by 74 Electoral College votes and 6 million votes overall is a clear danger sign.
“The red line is the election,” said Ben-Ghiat, whose new book, “Strongmen,” puts Trump in the context of a century of fascist leaders. “If you don’t recognize an election, you have gone into the territory of a non-democracy. It’s pretty easy.”
Trump said "I've got the military, I've got the police, I've got the bikers, I've got the Supreme Court..."
The only thing standing between a Trump dictatorship and democracy are the courts. And these are courts Trump packed with terribly unqualified people who he picked to be loyal to him over the constitution.
Meanwhile Republicans stand by passively and watch Trump do everything he can to steal the election. American democracy hangs by a thread.
"Blogger Priya Lynn said...
This comment has been removed by the author."
no one cares what you to say, Randy
if you want to participate in constructive on-topic conversation, maybe you could change your name and no one would know it's you
So, Wyatt and Regina are back to claiming they aren't responding to any of my comments any more. That won't last long, just like all the other times they insisted they'd never respond to me again. They've got all the self restraint of a five year old.
His fav verse is Luke 19:27 -- where Jesus instructs his followers to bring: "...those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me.” (Luke 19:27 KJV)
Population of South Dakota: 800,000
Population of South Korea: 52 million
35% more people have died from COVID in South Dakota than South Korea.
US border wall is ripping through nature
As the US election drags on, so does the construction of the 9-metre-high wall made of steel and concrete that the country is constructing along its southern border. Among the nature reserves that have been bisected by the heavily reinforced wall is Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, in Arizona. Conservationists’ concerns include that the wall blocks hunting and migration routes, has disruptive 24-hour lighting and has tapped uncounted litres of precious desert water to make cement. If completed as planned, a complete border wall could “alter the evolutionary history of North America forever”, says conservation scientist Myles Traphagen.
How Trump interfered with COVID science
Last month, a coronavirus-crisis sub-committee within the US House of Representatives released a report documenting 47 instances in which government scientists had been sidelined or had their recommendations altered by the administration of US President Donald Trump. From ignoring expert advice to prematurely approving COVID treatments, Nature chronicles some of the most significant cases of interference so far, and assesses their impact.
"Population of South Dakota: 800,000
Population of South Korea: 52 million
35% more people have died from COVID in South Dakota than South Korea."
Andy, if you like Korea so much, go live there
you'll be very safe eating your cabbage every day
the people of South Dakota knew what risk they were taking and they aren't complaining
and those are their residents who wanted to play it safe were free to wear masks when they go out and stay home most of the time
even the WHO says lockdowns are unnecessary
"Blogger Priya Lynn said..."
Randy, no one cares what you're imaginary character has to say
if you want to participate, try changing your name and choosing a topic other your bias against Christianity
This just in. Trump team has now won two court cases, the latest involving 2,349 votes in Pennsylvania, which won't change anything. So the current score is 2 wins, 31 losses.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "the people of South Dakota knew what risk they were taking and they aren't complaining".
The health care workers are certainly complaining as are the people dying. The health care system is being overwhelmed and its workers run ragged. But of course to Wyatt and Regina and Republicans couldn't care less.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "and those are their residents who wanted to play it safe were free to wear masks when they go out and stay home most of the time"
That doesn't work unless the whole population does it. The carelessness of conservatives doesn't affect them in isolation, it threatens everyone's lives. So it is not good enough to say "If you want to you go ahead but we're not going to do it."
To minimize the number of people who die everyone has to wear masks, socially distance, and avoid gatherings. You don't have a right to behave recklessly when your behaviour threatens others. For Wyatt and Regina saving lives is irrelevant compared to showing loyalty to Trump by ignoring mitigation measures.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "even the WHO says lockdowns are unnecessary"
Unnecessary if other measures are taken but American conservatives oppose all Covid mitigation measures and are actively working to make the pandemic worse!
Conservatives have made lockdowns in the U.S. necessary.
"We can disagree and still love each other...unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist."
- James Baldwin
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