US Election 2020

[Tero]

Look for best selling books coming out in 2021 written by Rush Limbaugh, Ben Shapiro et al. "How They stole The Election." I think Ann Coulter will skip that, concentrating on keeping Trummpism alive a bit, though she never liked him.

[Tero]

They only "cured" Biden ballots, no Trump ballots!

[Seabass]

Here's lifelong conservative and former Republican Tom Nichols calling it sedition.

Worse Than Treason

No amount of rationalizing can change the fact that the majority of the Republican Party is advocating for the overthrow of an American election.



“We are what we pretend to be,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote in the opening of his 1962 novel, Mother Night, “and so we must be careful what we pretend to be.” Republicans in Congress are pretending to be seditionists—and so they have become, in fact, seditionists.

Forget all the whispered denials and the off-the-record expressions of concern in private; ignore the knowing smirks on camera from GOP officials who are desperately trying to indicate that they’re in on the joke. Brush aside the caviling of the anti-anti-Trump writers who would rather talk about that time in 2017 when some Democrats objected to the Electoral College vote (and were gaveled down by Joe Biden himself).

This is sedition, plain and simple. No amount of playacting and rationalizing can change the fact that the majority of the Republican Party and its apologists are advocating for the overthrow of an American election and the continued rule of a sociopathic autocrat.

This is not some handful of firebrands making a stand for the television cameras. In 2005, one Democrat in the House and one in the Senate filed an objection to counting Ohio’s electoral votes, while insisting that they were not contesting the outcome of the presidential election itself. In 2017, a handful of Democratic members of the House objected to the electoral count. Because they lacked support in the Senate, then–Vice President Biden ruled the representatives out of order and declared, “It is over.” In both cases, the Democratic candidate had already conceded.

Today, the “sedition caucus” includes at least 140 members of the House—that is, some two-thirds of the House GOP membership—and at least 10 members of the Senate. Their challenge comes after weeks of insistence that the 2020 election was rigged, plagued by fraud, and even subverted by foreign powers. The president and his minions have filed, and lost, scores of lawsuits that ranged from minor disputes over process to childlike, error-filled briefs full of bizarre assertions.

Instead of threatening to gavel these objections into irrelevance, as Biden did four years ago, Vice President Mike Pence “welcomes” these challenges. Pence’s career is finished, but he could have stood for the Constitution he claims to love and which he swore to defend. However, cowardice is contagious, and no mask was thick enough to protect Pence from the pathogen of fear.

Perhaps the sedition caucus didn’t mean to go this far. Its members began by arguing that we all just needed to humor President Trump, to give him time to process the loss, and to treat the president of the United States as a toddler who was going home empty-handed. He wouldn’t be a dead-ender, they assured us, because that would be too humiliating. The Republican Party would never immolate itself for a proven loser.

But for Trump, there is no such thing as too much humiliation. The only shame in Trump world lies in admitting defeat. And so Trump doubled down, as anyone who had watched him for more than 10 minutes knew he would. And then he tripled, quadrupled, quintupled down. And just as they have done for the past four years, elected Republicans tried to convince themselves that if they supported this outrage, it would be the last time they would be required to surrender their dignity; that this betrayal of the Constitution would be the last treachery demanded of them. That if they complied one more time, they would be allowed to go back to their privileged lives far from the districts they claim to represent—places few of them really want to live after tasting life in the Emerald City.

It is possible that the sedition caucus knew that all these challenges would fail. It is possible that they know their last insult to American democracy, on Wednesday, will go nowhere, as well. This is irrelevant: Engaging in sedition for insincere reasons does not make it less hideous. Arguing that you betrayed the Constitution only as theater is no defense.

Indeed, shredding the Constitution purely for personal gain is perhaps the worst of the sins of the sedition caucus. It would almost be a relief to know that these Republicans really believe what they’re trying to sell, that they are genuine fanatics and ideologues who have at least paid us the respect of pitting their sincere beliefs against our own.

But we are, in the main, dealing with people who are far worse than true believers. The Republican Party is infested with craven opportunists, the kind of people who will try to tell us later that they were “just asking questions,” that they were “defending the process,” and of course, that they were merely representing “the will of the people.” Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz are not idiots. These are men who understand perfectly well what they are doing. Senator Mitt Romney sees it clearly, noting that his GOP colleagues are engaged in “an egregious ploy” to “enhance political ambition.”

People of goodwill across the United States want some sort of road map to oppose this cold-blooded attack on the Constitution, but none exists. As James Madison warned us, without a virtuous people, no system of checks and balances will work. The Republicans have gone from being a party that touted virtue to being the most squalid and grubby expression of institutionalized self-interest in the modern history of the American republic.

The real solution will come after all of these schemes fail. Voters must not take the bait and try to tinker with hasty legal and constitutional fixes. These, too, will fail to contain a party that is determined to destroy legal and moral norms in the pursuit of raw power. The better course is to turn our attention to the business of governing, while vowing to drive every member of the sedition caucus out of our public life, both through the ballot box and by shunning their enablers.

The members of the public and the institutions of American life should shroud these seditionists in silence and opprobrium in perpetuity: no television interviews, no sinecures at universities or think tanks, no rehabilitating book tours, no jokey late-night appearances, no self-serving op-eds.

The sedition caucus is worse than a treasonous conspiracy. At least real traitors believe in something. These people instead believe only in their own fortunes and thus will change flags and loyalties as circumstances require. They will always become what they pretend to be, and so they cannot—and must not—be trusted ever again with political power.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... on/617538/

[Animavore]

Nailed. It.

[Tero]

aunt crabby 11780.jpg (23.13 KiB) Viewed 948 times

[L'Emmerdeur]

Meanwhile another bullshit federal lawsuit is demolished by a judge who was first put on the bench by Bush II. He's considering sanctioning the lawyers who brought it.

Wisconsin Voters Alliance v. Vice President Michael R. Pence Memorandum Opinion

Plaintiffs' aims in this election challenge are bold indeed: they ask this Court to declare unconstitutional several decades-old federal statutes governing the appointment of electors and the counting of electoral votes for President of the United States; to invalidate multiple state statutes regulating the certification of Presidential votes; to ignore certain Supreme Court decisions; and, the coup de grace, to enjoin the U.S. Congress from counting the electoral votes on January 6, 2021, and declaring Joseph R. Biden the next President.

Voter groups and individual voters from the states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Arizona have brought this action against Vice President Michael R. Pence, in his official capacity as President of the Senate; both houses of Congress and the Electoral College itself; and various leaders of the five aforementioned states. Simultaneous with the filing of their Complaint, Plaintiffs moved this Court to preliminarily enjoin the certifying of the electors from the five states and the counting of their votes. In addition to being filed on behalf of Plaintiffs without standing and (at least as to the state Defendants) in the wrong court and with no effort to even serve their adversaries, the suit rests on a fundamental and obvious misreading of the Constitution. It would be risible were its target not so grave: the undermining of a democratic election for President of the United States. The Court will deny the Motion.

...

Even if the Court had subject-matter and personal jurisdiction, it still could not rule in Plaintiffs' favor because their central contention is flat-out wrong. [Proceeds to show this in detail.]

Plaintiffs' theory that all of these laws are unconstitutional and that the Court should instead require state legislatures themselves to certify every Presidential election lies somewhere between a willful misreading of the Constitution and fantasy. Plaintiffs readily acknowledge that their position also means that the Supreme Court's decisions in Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000), and Texas v. Pennsylvania, No. 155 (Orig.), 2020 WL 7296814 (U.S. Dec. 11, 2020), "are in constitutional error." Compl., ¶ 76. They do not, however, explain how this District Court has authority to disregard Supreme Court precedent. Nor do they ever mention why they have waited until seven weeks after the election to bring this action and seek a preliminary injunction based on purportedly unconstitutional statutes that have existed for decades -- since 1948 in the case of the federal ones. It is not a stretch to find a serious lack of good faith here...

Yet even that may be letting Plaintiffs off the hook too lightly. Their failure to make any effort to serve or formally notify any Defendant -- even after reminder by the Court in its Minute Order -- renders it difficult to believe that the suit is meant seriously. Courts are not instruments through which parties engage in such gamesmanship or symbolic political gestures. As a result, at the conclusion of this litigation, the Court will determine whether to issue an order to show cause why this matter should not be referred to its Committee on Grievances for potential discipline of Plaintiffs' counsel.

[Cunt]

The Washington Post isn't a party to the legal challenges. There's a clear public interest argument for publishing the conversation - the president threatened two elected officials to pressure them into making extra votes magically appear.

I didn't hear a threat, but I've heard commentators refer to a threat, and others say there was no threat.

To be an illegal threat, I think it has to rise to the level of waking up a prosecutor.

Hey, didn't the media full-on ignore the material from Hunter Biden's laptop because it was 'hacked material' or something?

The media did not ignore the material from Hunter Biden's laptop because it was 'hacked material'. They reported as much of it as they had access to, which wasn't much because the leaker only released it to the Wall Street Journal and Fox News, both of whom doubted its provenance and concluded that it did not make a case for Bidengate at any rate.

Did you look over any of it? Enough to corroborate the emails with the Boobilinsky testimony, I mean. The photos are incriminating, but only of Hunter, and depending on which jurisdiction he was in, and which substance was in the pipe (among other concerns)

I won't trouble you with links to the bothersome facts as you'll just reject them because of my bias.

No thanks, I don't at all disagree with your understanding of WSJ and Fox.

I don't trust you because of that bias, but I do try to listen. It would be easy to think I disagree with your 'bothersome facts' because I don't care about them (because we don't disagree on anything there)

I won't trouble you with the bothersome facts about the Biden business connections exposed in the laptop data, as you'll reject it because of my lack of interest in the 'right things'

(you like investigating the story, I like watching reporting on the story which exposes reporters hilariously, no offense meant)

[pErvinalia]

I don't trust you because of that bias,

Yet you trust any number of right wing lunatics that you freely admit are biased. It's almost as if you only trust stuff that fits your preconceived views on a subject.

[Cunt]

I don't trust you because of that bias,

Yet you trust any number of right wing lunatics that you freely admit are biased. It's almost as if you only trust stuff that fits your preconceived views on a subject.

I trust Ben Shapiro to be 'right-wing'. I trust Hermit to act as if he honestly believes that all Trump supporters are racist.

To me, that suggests that he'll have a strong challenge accepting examples like Candace Owens as honest representatives of their own opinion. Likely he would not be able to treat racist all that great, or at least would not want to be seen being kindly to those he has said himself - are racist.

But it isn't like I don't listen to him, I just keep in mind that he thinks fully half the US voter base is fundamentally racist, no matter how diverse they might be by any other measure. One-dimensional thinking, but it's just a one-dimensional reminder to me - he's smarter than me, but if he gets convincing, I have to remember that 'smart' can be put into service for fundamentally stupid ideas.

[pErvinalia]

I say again:

Yet you trust any number of right wing lunatics that you freely admit are biased. It's almost as if you only trust stuff that fits your preconceived views on a subject.

[Cunt]

I say again:

Yet you trust any number of right wing lunatics that you freely admit are biased. It's almost as if you only trust stuff that fits your preconceived views on a subject.

What do you think I 'believe' that is factually wrong? (and falsifiable)

[Hermit]

I trust Hermit to act as if he honestly believes that all Trump supporters are racist.

Where does the "all" come from?

[JimC]

Ex recto...

[NineBerry]

[Hermit]

I don't watch half-hour long videos plonked down without a brief summary or even just a comment.

Any particular section(s) you would like us to listen to, NineBerry? If so, time stamp(s) please.