2020 US Election (Part 3)

[Sommerswerd]

Finally, at long last... All states have been called by CNN:

Biden: 306
Trump: 232

Bwaaaaaahahahaha!!!

 

[Cloud_Strife]

Properly so. Biden is not yet President elect.

Trump lost, time to remove that maga sticker from your bumper, take down trump flag and step back into reality

Russia collusion is a conspiracy theory, so you don't have standing to object.

You're flailing, I get it. It hurts... it hurts very bigly for you i see

 

[innonimatu]

Keep drinking that Kool aid. The Russian intelligence connection was identified and made public by the Trump DOJ.

If you believe so then you should be able to link to the DOJ document identifying that connection.

 

[El_Machinae]

Finally, at long last... All states have been called by CNN:

Biden: 306
Trump: 232

Those numbers look familiar. It might be the biggest EC victory since Reagan

 

[Takhisis]

Of course Donald Trump claims that Pfizer et al. have only announced that they've managed COMPLETE SUCCESS or whatever it's supposed to be after his election in order to hurt his chances. *sigh*

 

[Sommerswerd]

Those numbers look familiar. It might be the biggest EC victory since Reagan

Lols... Yup... check out my edited post above... Kellyanne gets trolled by The Lincoln Project.

 

[Sommerswerd]

Of course Donald Trump claims that Pfizer et al. have only announced that they've managed COMPLETE SUCCESS or whatever it's supposed to be after his election in order to hurt his chances. *sigh*

Even assuming they knew in advance (they didn't) Pfizer was in a Comey situation... damned if you tell, damned if you don't tell. They would have been doing the right thing by waiting anyway... better to just stay out of it. Plus you can't look at it in a vacuum... it would have been irresponsible of them to release that info knowing fully that Trump would handle it completely dishonestly and recklessly.

 

[Farm Boy]

~3.5%-4.5% in the popular vote with historic turnout, which I've been hearing is curtains on ushering in Democratic victory. In 2020, with a pandemic, and a horrid economy. Seriously, hold onto your butts!

 

[Sommerswerd]

3.5% in the popular vote with historic turnout, which I've been hears is curtains on Democratic victory. In 2020, with a pandemic, and a horrid economy. Seriously, hold onto your butts!

I was saying the whole time that the magic number for the Democrats was somewhere between 2.1% (what Hillary got) and 3.9% (what Obama got in 2012). So 3.5% sounds like I'm freaking Nostradamus *pats self on the back*

 

[Farm Boy]

Well, let's hold out some hope then for the senate. Single party government, particularly if it's down to tie-breakers, blows ass.

 

[Birdjaguar]

If you believe so then you should be able to link to the DOJ document identifying that connection.

This new information came from recently declassified footnotes of the Horowitz report.

Here is the full, but redacted, report.

At the very end of this link you will find the newly unredacted (mostly) footnotes.
Article about the footnotes

Republicans wanted the information declassified because they felt it helps their case against the investigation. The implications are that Steele was duped by the Russians and that the FBI ignored that possibility.

 

[Patine]

Keep drinking that Kool aid. The Russian intelligence connection was identified and made public by the Trump DOJ.

Kool-Aid comes in both red and blue flavour in the modern U.S. I can't stand the stuff in any colour.

 

[Patine]

Trump lost, time to remove that maga sticker from your bumper, take down trump flag and step back into reality



You're flailing, I get it. It hurts... it hurts very bigly for you i see

Did Trump have his own flag? I don't recall ever seeing it, or an image of it. I knew about his bumper stickers, caps, and stupid meme images, but I was unaware of an actual Trump flag.

Also, given it's a very large percentage of Americans of both Duopoly Parties contributing to the toxic zeitgeist and break-down of reason and sense in the American society, behaviour, and discourse, it's still a LONG road to "stepping back into reality." Trump was neither the cause nor architect of the past four years' trouble, nor was a "final boss fight," - his election was merely a symptom of a festering cancer in American culture and politics across much of the board - a cancer that is still, largely, untreated, or, for the most part, undiagnosed.

 

[amadeus]

Did Trump have his own flag? I don't recall ever seeing it, or an image of it. I knew about his bumper stickers, caps, and stupid meme images, but I was unaware of an actual Trump flag.

Basically a yard sign on cloth, same as the Biden one I’ve seen. I don’t know if either of them were officially produced by the campaigns.

 

[Takhisis]

Suggested reading:

This is no conventional coup. Trump is paving the way for a 'virtual Confederacy'
Race is the message behind his supporters’ legal shenanigans, and a keystone for a Trumpian government in exile
By Jonathan Freedland

Not for the first time, Donald Trump’s unhinged behaviour prompts an uncomfortable question: should we be laughing in derision or trembling with fear? Is he playing out his last days as nothing more than a sore loser pathetically kidding himself that he might yet score the winning run, even after the crowd’s gone home and the stadium is empty – or is his insistence that last week’s election was stolen an attempt to cling on to power, to stage a coup against his democratically elected successor?

Spoiler :

The case for laughter is strong, as Trump’s allegations crumble to dust. On Thursday, a wing of the department of homeland security – part of the government that Trump still heads – declared that last week’s election “was the most secure in American history”, and that there was “no evidence” of any malpractice, still less of the mass-scale fraud that Trump has groundlessly alleged.

The result is that Trump’s lawyers have been all but laughed out of court, forced by impatient judges to admit that they don’t have any evidence, let alone proof. His courtiers continue to pretend that the emperor is fully clothed, of course, but even they are winking at the crowd. Surely Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was joking when he promised with a smile: “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.”

The inner circle are happy to let Trump, who has appeared only once in public since election day, remain hunkered down in his White House bunker, “feverishly tweeting, watching television and telephoning allies”, as the Los Angeles Times reports. They carry on telling him what he wants to hear, but they know his cause is doomed. Tellingly, even Trump’s own son-in-law, Jared Kushner, made his excuses for Saturday’s supposed council of war, sending “aides” in his place.

All that should prompt derision rather than fear. We can take the lead set by the president-elect himself, relax and let the process play out until Joe Biden is sworn in on 20 January. That’s certainly appealing, and most of the time I manage it. But every now and then, fear intrudes.

Why, for example, has Trump fired the civilian leadership of the defence department, including the defence secretary, Mark Esper, filling their posts and others in intelligence with ultra-loyalists? Esper stood up to Trump over the summer, when the president wanted to deploy the military to crush peaceful protests. Does Trump have something similar in mind, a move that would require a yes man to nod it through? Is it possible that Pompeo was not, after all, joking?

For now, I can accept that a full, tanks-in-the-streets coup is not on the cards. One Capitol Hill Republican tells me he suspects Trump sacked Esper mainly to “make him feel better”, and “to get even with the people who thwarted him”, rather than because he wants a Pentagon boss who will agree to send in the troops. Equally possible, says my source, is that Trump plans to go out with a bang, and wants pliant people in post. What kind of bang? Some talk of a total withdrawal from Afghanistan. Conversely, there’s chatter about a possible attack on Iran.

That would be huge – and Trump likes huge – but it’s not a coup. On this reading, Trump is rejecting the election result less in order to keep power than to instil in his base the sense of grievance that will bind them to him for his next act – whether that be a new media company, Trump TV, to challenge Fox News or another run for the White House in 2024.

But if that’s true, it’s hardly grounds for relief. That Trump’s attempt to defy a democratic election is comically inept or cynically motivated doesn’t alter the fact that he’s making it. No less alarming, all but a handful of Republicans have backed him. Fearing both his wrath and the hold he continues to exercise over the Republican electorate – highly relevant, given that two Senate seats are up for grabs in Georgia in January – the party’s most senior figures have acquiesced in Trump’s evidence-free claim that the Democrats rigged the election.

That matters. Most directly, it will impair the incoming president as he tries to get to grips with a pandemic that on Thursday saw a record number of new cases in the US – 159,000 in a single day – about which Trump is doing and saying precisely nothing. How can Biden lead if half the country has been primed to believe he is not the rightful president? The Republican rebuttal – that Democrats hardly welcomed Trump in 2016 – trips on one simple fact: Hillary Clinton conceded defeat right away. That is the only way a democratic system can work, with the consent of the loser.

The fear is that Trump and his followers will never give way, that he will remain the head of a “Trumpian government in exile”, as the historian Sean Wilentz puts it, antagonistic to the legitimate, elected government, armed with allies in Congress, sustained via social media and nourished by grievance and the romance of a lost cause: a new, virtual Confederacy.

The word is not wholly hyperbolic because, inevitably in America, so much of this turns on race. When Trump’s cheerleaders locate the supposed voter fraud in Philadelphia or Detroit, their listeners get the message: it’s that black cities are corrupt and, at root, that black people shouldn’t be allowed to decide who gets to be president of the United States. As Barack Obama writes in his upcoming memoir, these are “dark spirits” that have “long been lurking on the edge of the Republican party – xenophobia … paranoid conspiracy theories, an antipathy toward black and brown folks”.

So no, this won’t be a coup like we’ve seen in the movies. But nor can we just laugh it off. Trump is often ridiculous, but he’s no joke.

 

[FriendlyFire]

Gaslight
Obstruct
Project <---- we are here now

Arizona Election Witness Confesses to Being Trump Campaign Lawyer's Business Partner in Court

Zack Alcyone admitted to being the associate of the Trump campaign's legal representative, Kory Langhofer, during a hearing in Maricopa County on Thursday, specialist legal news website Law and Crime reported.
The pair are listed as co-founders of Phoenix-based software company Signafide on the firm's website.

Trump's legal team initially said there could potentially be thousands of votes for the president within the ballots in question, but later backtracked and suggested that number would be lower.
Instead, Langhofer insisted the plaintiffs were simply raising concerns about a "limited number of cases" in Maricopa County involving what he said were "good faith errors."

https://www.newsweek.com/arizona-el...mpaign-lawyers-business-partner-court-1547233

 

[Kyriakos]

Even assuming they knew in advance (they didn't) Pfizer was in a Comey situation... damned if you tell, damned if you don't tell. They would have been doing the right thing by waiting anyway... better to just stay out of it. Plus you can't look at it in a vacuum... it would have been irresponsible of them to release that info knowing fully that Trump would handle it completely dishonestly and recklessly.

Pfizer's CEO is jewish-greek, and from this city. Which means that he wouldn't have much of a reason to get involved in US politics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Bourla
Then again, he was awarded stuff by Pyatt, the local US ambassador, so who knows

 

[amadeus]

“Virtual Confederacy” sounds like a hamfisted media thing. There’s only been token opposition meant to save face; at worst, we’ll end up with a Trump cable TV channel that takes a bite out of Rupert Murdoch’s lunch. Ho-hum.

 

[FriendlyFire]

Gaslight <---- we are here now
Obstruct
Project

Delusional Kayleigh McEnany says “Trump will attend his own inauguration in January”

“It would look pretty bad if he did not attend the inauguration,” said Varney, normally an adamant supporter of Trump. “It would look like sour grapes, wouldn’t it?”
“I think the president will attend his own inauguration,” McEnany responded. “He would have to be there, in fact.”
“You really think you can turn this around?” a skeptical Varney asked.
“Absolutely,” McEnany said before adding that Trump’s administration only wants to “lift the hood of the car” and examine the election results — though there is no evidence to support the president’s claims of election fraud.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kayl...s-own-inauguration_n_5faee847c5b6d05e86e6c888

 

[Patine]

If Biden accidentally dies to AR15 who gets sworn in?

That's a VERY SPECIFIC phrasing of a concern for a leader's possible demise. Pretty much, "beware the Ides of March," level of specific...