I Cannot Fathom This Election

[Empty_of_Clouds]

That is a deeply saddening account, Chuck. That people died in fear and denial due to the deliberate actions of a person they would expect to be looking out for them is beyond disturbing. That person (POTUS, if I wasn't clear) probably needs to be charged under a law similar to that for war crimes for his part in the deaths.

[kazoolaw]

[QUOTE=dneal;310965]I read many of the documents, and have not said that I do not. YOU (and kazoolaw) have accused me of this, but I haven't felt like disabusing you of your bias against me. Whatever.

TS, TS,

Post 108: You said you only read the first 10 pages. Not me, not dneal.

Facts remain pesky things.

[kazoolaw]

Stop being silly and illogical. Read the entire opinion. I posted the link. You read the first paragraph and ignored the rest? It says, simply, that Kraken Powell cannot appeal a decision that has not been made. The appeals court reviews decisions. In the United States, US District Courts hear cases. They consider evidence. After a District Court rules, a party may appeal.

Sorry Welch, you shot at me and hit TS. I'm not the one who doesn't understand the difference between a dismissal on jurisdictional grounds versus a decision on the merits. Your explanation was clear and succinct. Hope he reads it all.

[dneal]

I can't wait to watch what SNL does with Rudy's leaking brains and personages like Melissa Carone. Please, please!

NBC must like fountain pens.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34-JCkVuKJ8


It is strange that liberals now hate Rudy Giuliani and love John Bolton. Interesting times...

[Freddie]

I can't wait to watch what SNL does with Rudy's leaking brains and personages like Melissa Carone. Please, please!

NBC must like fountain pens.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34-JCkVuKJ8
The BS just keeps on piling up.....'Tis over the world has moved on..........

Weird.

Fred
chow time /B]
Weird.
Well, you're the expert on the topic.



It is strange that liberals now hate Rudy Giuliani and love John Bolton. Interesting times...

[B]Indeed 'tis strange and weird now that you hate Mr. Giuliani and Love Mr. Bolton. Re interesting times....Yes.

So it is this way cause maybe it is true or perhaps not true..because there is no evidence...
Or 'Cause there hasn't been any non-evidence..........

As noted above..Keeps piling up.

Fred
https://youtu.be/HLMr2Ck9KVo
Entertainin' Ain't it

[dneal]

What’s really strange is that you make even less sense the closer you get to forming full sentences.

[Chuck Naill]

I can't wait to watch what SNL does with Rudy's leaking brains and personages like Melissa Carone. Please, please!

NBC must like fountain pens.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34-JCkVuKJ8
The BS just keeps on piling up.....'Tis over the world has moved on..........

Weird.

Fred
chow time /B]
Weird.
Well, you're the expert on the topic.



It is strange that liberals now hate Rudy Giuliani and love John Bolton. Interesting times...

[B]Indeed 'tis strange and weird now that you hate Mr. Giuliani and Love Mr. Bolton. Re interesting times....Yes.

So it is this way cause maybe it is true or perhaps not true..because there is no evidence...
Or 'Cause there hasn't been any non-evidence..........

As noted above..Keeps piling up.

Fred
https://youtu.be/HLMr2Ck9KVo
Entertainin' Ain't it

Wow, this is new information. Nothing is surprising, just didn't know it exists...."too many years"....LOL!!

[welch]

It has come to this:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/12/07/michigan-sos-benson-armed-protest/


Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson had just finished wrapping string lights around her home’s portico on Saturday evening and was about to watch “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” with her 4-year-old son when a crowd of protesters marched up carrying American flags and guns.

About two dozen protesters chanted “Stop the Steal” and accused Benson, a Democrat and Michigan’s chief election officer, of ignoring widespread voter fraud — an echo of President Trump’s continued unfounded claims as he seeks to overturn the results of the election that President-elect Joe Biden won.

“She’s decided to completely ignore all of the credible, credible, fraudulent evidence that has been continually pointed out,” demonstrator Genevieve Peters said of Benson, as she live-streamed the protest in Detroit on Facebook. “We’re out here in front of the secretary of state’s house and we want her to know we will continue to be here.”

Although the group dispersed with no arrests when police responded just before 10 p.m. Saturday, Michigan state officials accused the group of “terrorizing” Benson’s family.
“They shouted baseless conspiracy theories about the election, and in videos uploaded to social media, at least one individual could be heard shouting ‘you’re murderers’ within earshot of her child’s bedroom,” Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel (D) and Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy (D) said in a joint statement on Sunday. “This mob-like behavior is an affront to basic morality and decency.”
They added that “terrorizing children and families at their own homes is not activism.”

Vitriolic rhetoric has led bipartisan leaders to warn that Trump’s baseless attacks on the election are endangering election officials’ lives. Multiple Michigan officials have reported being threatened and harassed over the election results, as have officials in Georgia, Arizona, Vermont, Kentucky, Minnesota and Colorado.
Benson also tied the Saturday protest to ongoing efforts by Trump’s supporters to undermine the election since polls closed on Election Day. On Nov. 4, election challengers shouted “Stop the count” inside a Detroit vote-counting center. About two weeks later, GOP appointees on the Wayne County Board of Canvassers initially refused to certify election results in the Detroit area, but later reversed course and formalized Biden’s victory.

Trump and his campaign have also challenged the election results in Michigan, calling on a discredited witness who went viral for her strange testimony on alleged election fraud, which she presented without evidence, in front of a state House panel.

Trump campaign’s star witness in Michigan was deemed ‘not credible.’ Then, her loud testimony went viral.

“Through blatantly false press releases, purely political legislative hearings, bogus legal claims and so called ‘affidavits’ that fail to allege any clear or cogent evidence of wrongdoing, those unhappy with the results of this election have perpetuated an unprecedented, dangerous, egregious campaign to erode the public’s confidence in the results of one of the most secure, accessible and transparent elections in our state’s history,” Benson said in a statement Sunday.

Benson is far from the only elected official who has been targeted this year by protesters at their residences.
People displeased with the coronavirus restrictions put in place by Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) gathered in front of her Lansing home in April. Protesters opposing police violence against Black men this summer targeted mayors at their homes in Los Angeles; Portland, Ore.; Chicago; Seattle and St. Louis.
Armed protesters also flooded the Michigan Capitol in April to demand that legislators put an end to a stay-at-home order in the state. The state’s Republican lawmakers complied, but Whitmer extended restrictions with executive orders anyway.

Public officials, including Benson on Sunday, have largely defended the right to protest while opposing demonstrations that target elected leaders at their homes.
“A line is crossed when gatherings are done with the primary purpose of intimidation of public officials who are carrying out the oath of office they solemnly took,” Benson said.
But Benson also said Saturday’s protest wouldn’t lead her to abandon her responsibility to defend the election results.
“Through threats of violence, intimidation, and bullying, the armed people outside my home and their political allies seek to undermine and silence the will and voices of every voter in this state, no matter who they voted for,” Benson said. “But their efforts won’t carry the day.”

She called Michigan’s election results “unequivocal” and said she would defend the votes of 5.5 million Michigan citizens. With 2,804,040 votes, Biden won 50.62 percent of the vote in Michigan, surpassing Trump by more than 154,000 votes. The state’s results were certified on Nov. 23.

“The will of the people is clear,” she said. “And I will stand up every day in my job for all voters, even the votes of the protesters who banded together outside my home.”

Ah, Trumpist logic on display: "She’s decided to completely ignore all of the credible, credible, fraudulent evidence that has been continually pointed out,” demonstrator Genevieve Peters said of Benson, as she live-streamed the protest in Detroit on Facebook.

Yes, Trumpists believe in "credible, fraudulent evidence" .

[dneal]

Through blatantly false press releases, purely political legislative hearings, bogus legal claims and so called ‘affidavits’ that fail to allege any clear or cogent evidence of wrongdoing, those unhappy with the results of this election have perpetuated an unprecedented, dangerous, egregious campaign to erode the public’s confidence in the results of one of the most secure, accessible and transparent elections in our state’s history,” Benson said in a statement Sunday.

Yes, it has eroded the public confidence. This kind of attitude certainly does nothing to assuage it.

[kazoolaw]

Yes, Trumpists believe in "credible, fraudulent evidence" .

welch,

I'm sure you've never heard anyone on the left claiming a presidential election was stolen since 2016. It's not a good look for either right or left.

Nor is a good look to ignore it when it happens, whether from left or right.

[Sphere]

"Nor is a good look to ignore it when it happens, whether from left or right. "

You are right and accusations need real proof. There is no proof. There have been plenty of opportunities to produce evidence of fraud, tampering, or any other type of misconduct, and nothing that has come to light has been remotely acceptable as evidence. The arguments have even been rejected by judges appointed by President Trump. (because justice is not blind) The American system of justice requires proof of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt. That burden falls squarely on the party who is claiming that something unlawful has occurred. There is no proof. Joe Biden won the election.

[dneal]

"Nor is a good look to ignore it when it happens, whether from left or right. "

You are right and accusations need real proof. There is no proof. There have been plenty of opportunities to produce evidence of fraud, tampering, or any other type of misconduct, and nothing that has come to light has been remotely acceptable as evidence. The arguments have even been rejected by judges appointed by President Trump. (because justice is not blind) The American system of justice requires proof of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt. That burden falls squarely on the party who is claiming that something unlawful has occurred. There is no proof. Joe Biden won the election.

There is evidence. For it to become proof (either for or against the argument) there needs to be some semblance of investigation rather than outright dismissal of concerns.

This is not about who ends up President. There is little chance that Joe Biden is not inaugurated.

This is about 40% of the electorate that thinks something is wrong. Dismissing them, particularly using derogatory and partisan language, only strengthens their suspicions. That's how you confirm and increase belief in conspiracy theories.

[kazoolaw]

There is no proof. There have been plenty of opportunities to produce evidence of fraud, tampering, or any other type of misconduct, and nothing that has come to light has been remotely acceptable as evidence.

In the words of that famous legal scholar: "You keep using that word, I don't think you know what it means." -Inigo Montoya

[welch]

Yes, Trumpists believe in "credible, fraudulent evidence" .

welch,

I'm sure you've never heard anyone on the left claiming a presidential election was stolen since 2016. It's not a good look for either right or left.

Nor is a good look to ignore it when it happens, whether from left or right.


What strikes me:

(1) The US Constitution held up, through it all

(2) The US Electoral College is creaky, but it does work. Not as well as I would like, but it works well enough that I doubt it will be changed to a popular vote system.

(3) The US judicial system, from state to Federal, from the first levels that hear trials up through the state and US appeals courts, performed perfectly. Judges did their job of considering evidence, following precedents. As a returning history student, I have often considered the cluster of precedents an irritating cloud. Interesting to find that they are so useful as guides to logic, and used in all these decisions.

Interesting to see, to have it proven, that we are not Hungary and not Poland. In both countries, a party won control of parliament and proceeded to pack courts with disciplined party followers who made the courts a part of the government bureaucracy, and the governing bureaucracy, and the government a simple piece of the party. (see articles by Gabor Halmai and Woyciech Sadurski in Constitutional Democracy in Crisis?). In the US and in the most important courts, judges do not seem to have 'D' or 'R' branded on their souls.

As a demonstration, read the judicial rulings about this election. They are all gathered here: https://www.democracydocket.com/

[TSherbs]

The delusion marches on, and the courts keep slapping it down.

All disputes over electors must be resolved by tomorrow. Looks like we're gonna make that deadline.

I won't bother quoting from these rulings today. Just a waste of time at this point.

I actually don't want Rudy to die. Covid is beginning to look like a Biblical plague, or Thebian fate.

[welch]

The delusion marches on, and the courts keep slapping it down.

All disputes over electors must be resolved by tomorrow. Looks like we're gonna make that deadline.

I won't bother quoting from these rulings today. Just a waste of time at this point.

I actually don't want Rudy to die. Covid is beginning to look like a Biblical plague, or Thebian fate.

As the Secretary of State of Georgia said this morning, "We have counted the votes three times and each time, Biden has won by 12,000 votes".

In each suit that I've read, and I've checked nearly all of the swing states, judges weighed Trump Campaign, Inc, offerings, dismissed what they considered "inadmissable hearsay" (Nevada) or as opinion with no connection to data that could be verified (self-identified experts in fraud in Nevada), or as opinion based on nothing (Nevada, again), or as vague, or as based on a misunderstanding of election process, or as claiming that it was fraudulent for a Michigan county to hire a rent-a-truck with out-of-state license plates (a sample from an opinion in Michigan), or withdrawn by Trump Campaign, Inc. Best I remember, that happened in Pennsylvania or Michigan, when a judge cleared his throat loudly and reminded a lawyer to answer the judge's questions honestly. "We have no evidence of fraud at this time, your honor": one of the classic lines of the entire election.

[Chuck Naill]

The delusion marches on, and the courts keep slapping it down.

All disputes over electors must be resolved by tomorrow. Looks like we're gonna make that deadline.

I won't bother quoting from these rulings today. Just a waste of time at this point.

I actually don't want Rudy to die. Covid is beginning to look like a Biblical plague, or Thebian fate.

As the Secretary of State of Georgia said this morning, "We have counted the votes three times and each time, Biden has won by 12,000 votes".

In each suit that I've read, and I've checked nearly all of the swing states, judges weighed Trump Campaign, Inc, offerings, dismissed what they considered "inadmissable hearsay" (Nevada) or as opinion with no connection to data that could be verified (self-identified experts in fraud in Nevada), or as opinion based on nothing (Nevada, again), or as vague, or as based on a misunderstanding of election process, or as claiming that it was fraudulent for a Michigan county to hire a rent-a-truck with out-of-state license plates (a sample from an opinion in Michigan), or withdrawn by Trump Campaign, Inc. Best I remember, that happened in Pennsylvania or Michigan, when a judge cleared his throat loudly and reminded a lawyer to answer the judge's questions honestly. "We have no evidence of fraud at this time, your honor": one of the classic lines of the entire election.

I do remember the judge reminding the attorney not to lie to a judge, which is a condition for suspension or disbarment.

[welch]

Kraken is sunk again.

Judge Timothy Batten, a Federal judge in Atlanta, dismissed Sidney Powell's Kraken. For baseball fans keeping score, or for fountain pen users overseas who are curious about the US system, on Friday a Federal Appeals judge sent Sidney Powell's "Kraken" back to the district court, the first-line court, ruling that. She could not appeal a decision that had not been made. He reminded her that she was wasting her own time. Judge Batten, that judge, dismissed her case on grounds that it should have gone to a state court, first.

Details:


Batten did not rule on the merits of Powell’s claim, which were made on behalf of a slate of would-be Trump electors in the Electoral College.

Instead, the judge granted motions to dismiss the lawsuit on the grounds that the suit did not belong in federal court.

Batten repeatedly suggested that Powell could have filed her lawsuit in state court, and he cited an federal appeals court ruling that “federal courts don’t entertain post-election conduct, excuse me, contests about vote-counting misconduct.”

Batten also said he found that the plaintiffs in the case did not have legal standing to bring the lawsuit.

“In their complaint, the plaintiffs essentially ask the court for perhaps the most extraordinary relief ever sought in any federal court in connection with an election,” the judge said.

“They want this court to substitute its judgment for that of 2.5 million Georgia voters who voted for Joe Biden, and this I am unwilling to do.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/07/judge-dismisses-sidney-powell-lawsuit-challenging-trump-georgia-loss.html

Let's consider Judge Batten's statement: “In their complaint, the plaintiffs essentially ask the court for perhaps the most extraordinary relief ever sought in any federal court in connection with an election,” the judge said.

“They want this court to substitute its judgment for that of 2.5 million Georgia voters who voted for Joe Biden, and this I am unwilling to do.”

Again, a statement to be remembered.

[Chuck Naill]

If it were baseball, the umpire would have already ejected somebody for arguing balls and strikes.

[Chuck Naill]

Kraken is sunk again.

Judge Timothy Batten, a Federal judge in Atlanta, dismissed Sidney Powell's Kraken. For baseball fans keeping score, or for fountain pen users overseas who are curious about the US system, on Friday a Federal Appeals judge sent Sidney Powell's "Kraken" back to the district court, the first-line court, ruling that. She could not appeal a decision that had not been made. He reminded her that she was wasting her own time. Judge Batten, that judge, dismissed her case on grounds that it should have gone to a state court, first.

Details:


Batten did not rule on the merits of Powell’s claim, which were made on behalf of a slate of would-be Trump electors in the Electoral College.

Instead, the judge granted motions to dismiss the lawsuit on the grounds that the suit did not belong in federal court.

Batten repeatedly suggested that Powell could have filed her lawsuit in state court, and he cited an federal appeals court ruling that “federal courts don’t entertain post-election conduct, excuse me, contests about vote-counting misconduct.”

Batten also said he found that the plaintiffs in the case did not have legal standing to bring the lawsuit.

“In their complaint, the plaintiffs essentially ask the court for perhaps the most extraordinary relief ever sought in any federal court in connection with an election,” the judge said.

“They want this court to substitute its judgment for that of 2.5 million Georgia voters who voted for Joe Biden, and this I am unwilling to do.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/07/judge-dismisses-sidney-powell-lawsuit-challenging-trump-georgia-loss.html

Let's consider Judge Batten's statement: “In their complaint, the plaintiffs essentially ask the court for perhaps the most extraordinary relief ever sought in any federal court in connection with an election,” the judge said.

“They want this court to substitute its judgment for that of 2.5 million Georgia voters who voted for Joe Biden, and this I am unwilling to do.”

Again, a statement to be remembered.

I appreciate your willingness to provide information knowing that it will have no effect on brainwashed Trump supporters. I mean, if Trump won I would want to know, but nothing at this point supports that view.

[dneal]

The chronic TDS is getting inflamed, which is strange since "your guy" won.

57730

[Freddie]

The chronic TDS is getting inflamed, which is strange since "your guy" won.

57730

The BullShit Keeps Piling Up Trump's False Fraud Claims Has Offered No Evidence Whatsoever

Trump's false hoods are creating dangerous precedent for future elections.

By The Way How Did You like His Deposition Re Trump University....
In the next several years he is going to be spending a lot of time in court.....

dneal: Had no idea you were a member of the Algonquin Round Table. 'Tis phantasmagoric since Your Guy Won: Congratulations Pal.

Fred

[dneal]

Fred - I'm just stacking the BS on top of yours. You've been at it since the 2nd post of this thread. It doesn't make any sense (other than you keep indicating that everything is BS), but you do you.

[TSherbs]

I will say this, those yahoos with guns outside of elected officials' and judges' houses should have their guns taken from them and be given a good ass-kicking by some boys from Southie.

Gun toting fools tend to suffer from small-man issues. The guns make them feel bigger.

Their group is WSLM: White Sore Losers Matter

[dneal]

I will say this, those yahoos with guns outside of elected officials' and judges' houses should have their guns taken from them and be given a good ass-kicking by some boys from Southie.

Gun toting fools tend to suffer from small-man issues. The guns make them feel bigger.

Their group is WSLM: White Sore Losers Matter

Ooooh, I think this is the first time I've seen you in "tough guy" mode.

You go girl!

57731

[Chuck Naill]

One aspect of the Repubian complaint I do not understand it how they accept the wins while questioning the losses. I do not doubt that mistakes are made, but not enough to change the overall result. And, how do four or five states work together to throw the election?

It should be obvious, for those who have studied Trump for the past five years is that he says things that are not grounded in reality. He reminds me of sales people who tell you the product is great, but has no real knowledge if it is or is not.

I can only assume two things, those that believe Trump are not aware of his past or that they don't care if a liar is in charge.

[dneal]

One aspect of the Repubian complaint I do not understand it how they accept the wins while questioning the losses. I do not doubt that mistakes are made, but not enough to change the overall result. And, how do four or five states work together to throw the election?

It should be obvious, for those who have studied Trump for the past five years is that he says things that are not grounded in reality. He reminds me of sales people who tell you the product is great, but has no real knowledge if it is or is not.

I can only assume two things, those that believe Trump are not aware of his past or that they don't care if a liar is in charge.

Things might be clearer if you made an attempt to understand their argument before passing judgement on it, or making an assumption that presents a false dichotomy. There might be a third, fourth, fifth, etc... option that you haven't considered.

The major mistake is a lack of "Strategic Empathy". It originates from Sun Tzu. Paraphrasing: “If you know the opponent and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the opponent, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the opponent nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” The second proposition probably explains best why people were shocked at the first Trump victory, and why they don't understand the totality of the current situation.

The caricatures we see in this thread of "Trump supporters" simply demonstrates Sun Tzu's point, and that many have not bothered to objectively consider the other's perspective. I realize that by even considering the heretical question, one runs the risk of being considered a *gasp* "Trumpkin" by the liberal orthodoxy; but that's how intellectual honesty works. You examine the opposing argument fairly - or as EoC quotes Jon Szanto: "Be a little more open into accepting other viewpoints, if you can..."

If you're truly interested in rationale in how "four or five states work together to throw the election", I'll happily lay out the Republican argument. If it were the Democrat strategy (whether fraudulent or fair), it's actually quite brilliant. But based on your previous posts, I suspect you're not.

When I see you post: "I have taken the position that I will only discuss with someone who is wanting a discussion and not an arguement", it appears to me that you consider "a discussion" one that does not offer a view that opposes your own. Maybe I'm wrong.

[welch]

Ross Douthat on "Why Do So Many Americans Think the Election Was Stolen?
Looking for the reasons behind a seemingly unreasonable belief."

For those who have run through their NY Times free monthly articles:


There have been few surprises this past month in how Donald Trump has dealt with the reality of his electoral defeat.

Anyone familiar with his career could have predicted that he would claim to have been cheated out of victory. Anyone watching how he wielded power (or, more often, didn’t) as president could have predicted that his efforts to challenge the election results would be embarrassing, ridiculous and dismissed with prejudice in court. And anyone watching how the Republican Party dealt with his ascent could have predicted that its leaders would mostly avoid directly rebuking him, relying instead on the inertial forces of American democracy, the conscientiousness of judges and local officialdom, and Trump’s own incompetence to turn back his final power grab.

So far, so predictable. But speaking as a cynical observer of the Trump era, one feature of November did crack my jaded shell a bit: not his behavior or the system’s response, but the sheer scale of the belief among conservatives that the election was really stolen, measured not just in polling data but in conversations and arguments, online and in person, with people I would not have expected to embrace it.

The potency of this belief has already scrambled some of the conventional explanations for conspiratorial beliefs, particularly the conceit that the key problem is misinformation spreading downward from partisan news outlets and social-media fraudsters to the easily deceived. As I watch the way certain fraud theories spread online, or watch conservatives abandon Fox News for Newsmax in search of validating narratives, it’s clear that this is about demand as much as supply. A strong belief spurs people to go out in search of evidence, a lot of so-called disinformation is collected and circulated sincerely rather than cynically, and the power of various authorities — Tucker Carlson’s show or Facebook’s algorithm — to change beliefs is relatively limited.

But what has struck me, especially, is how the belief in a stolen election has spread among people I wouldn’t have thought of as particularly Trumpy or super-partisan, who aren’t cable news junkies or intensely online, who didn’t even seem that invested in the election before it happened.

Others have taken note of the same phenomenon: At National Review, Michael Brendan Dougherty writes that “friends who I did not know were political are sending me little snippets of allegations of voter fraud and manipulation.” At The American Mind, the pseudonymous Californian Peachy Keenan describes watching a passel of lukewarm Trump-supporter moms in her Catholic parish suddenly “get MAGAfied” by election conspiracy theories. (As a fraud believer herself, she thinks that’s a good thing.)

Drawn from my conversations in the past few weeks, here’s an attempt at a taxonomy of these unlikely seeming fraud believers.

The conspiracy-curious normie

I say “normie” to reflect the reality that being open to the possibility of conspiracies is itself extremely normal and commonplace. There is nothing unusual, statistically speaking, about believing that a Cold War-era deep state assassinated John F. Kennedy or that the government is concealing evidence of U.F.O.s. Conspiracy theories are common among Democrats as well as Republicans: Witness the polling on Russia’s supposed tampering with vote totals in 2016 or George W. Bush’s supposed foreknowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks; recall the voting-machine theory spun to explain John Kerry’s narrow defeat in 2004.

This means you don’t need a complex story about Facebook or Fox News to understand why a person who isn’t intensely political might nonetheless be open to the idea that an election settled by tens of thousands of votes in a few key states was actually fixed for the winner. That kind of openness is just human nature — and not the worst part of human nature, either, given that conspiracies and cover-ups exist (the military really has been hiding weird evidence of U.F.O.s!) and even wrongheaded theories often partake of a reasonable skepticism about elite malfeasance, from the Gulf of Tonkin era to the Jeffrey Epstein case.

What’s happened in the past month with our open-minded normie, though, is that this openness has been validated by the president of the United States and his retainers in a way that other forms of conspiracy curiosity are not. There is a longstanding pattern in both political parties of gently encouraging conspiracizing. (The Diebold-stole-Ohio theories in 2004 were given oxygen by prominent congressional Democrats; MSNBC’s Russiagate coverage was not exactly cautious in the theories that it entertained.) But Trump is obviously different — higher-profile and more radical. He’s a president, not a cable-TV host or a congressman, and he’s shouting allegations, any allegations, with no pussyfooting, hedging or deniability involved.

If you are biased against conspiracy theories, this shouting is ridiculous. If you’re somewhat open toward them, though, and somewhat right-of-center, it provides encouragement. It’s not that the curious normie listens to Trump and thinks that everything he says is true. It’s that Trump is providing validation for the belief that something might be true, that where there are so many claims of fraud a few might be accurate, that where there’s so much smoke there might be a blaze or two as well.

Of course there are also lots of pure Trump loyalists who trust his claims absolutely, and a certain number of QAnon-type fantasists who embrace any theory no matter how baroque. But the voter-fraud narrative is pervasive on the right because you don’t have to be a loyalist or a fantasist to take something from Trump’s rants — not belief itself, but the permission to believe.

The outsider-intellectual

The next category of believer consists of extremely smart people whose self-identification is bound up in constantly questioning and doubting official forms of knowledge. Conservatism has always had plenty of this sort in its ranks, but the consolidated progressive orthodoxy in elite institutions means that more and more people come to conservative ideas because they seem like a secret knowledge, an account of the world that’s compelling and yet excluded from official discourse.

This, in turn, instills a perpetual suspicion about anything that seems to have too much of a liberal consensus defending it, especially any idea that gets mocked and laughed at more than it gets rebutted. And it creates a strong epistemological bias toward what you can only find out for yourself, as opposed to what Yale’s experts or Twitter’s warning labels or The New York Times might tell you.

In many cases the outsider-intellectual’s approach generates real insight. (Anonymous right-wing Twitter was way out ahead of the coronavirus threat, for instance, at a time when official liberalism was still fretting more about xenophobia than the virus itself.) But it also tends to recapitulate the closed-circle problems of the official knowledge it rejects.

Thus the outsider-intellectual type looks at the no-voter-fraud consensus and immediately goes out in search of cracks in the pillar of official truth, anomalies that official certainty elides. A lot of the supposed evidence of fraud that circulates online comes from these efforts — not from grifts or lies (though grifters and liars do pick them up) but from sincere analyses of election data, which inevitably turn up anomalies here and there, which confirm the searchers’ assumptions, which closes the circle and convinces them that the official narrative is false and voter fraud is real.

The recently radicalized

This final camp includes many of the people reading and circulating the outsider-intellectual analyses — people on the right whose perceptions of what liberal institutions and actors are capable of doing have been altered by the coronavirus era.

Many liberals have spent the Trump years worried about a kind of Reichstag Fire moment, a crisis that Trump might use as an excuse to consolidate authoritarianism. But a lot of conservatives experienced May and June of the Covid era as a mirror image of those anti-Trump fears — as a crisis that seemed to be deliberately exploited for revolutionary purposes by politicians and activists of the left.

Their story of the spring and early summer starts with our country’s leaders and experts calling for unprecedented sacrifice, with lockdowns and closures that disproportionately affected small businesses, churches and families with children — all conservative-coded groups and institutions — while liberal professionals on Zoom were in better shape and the great powers of Silicon Valley expanded their influence and wealth. Then, based on a single activist-amplified case of police brutality, the same experts and politicians suddenly abandoned restrictions for the sake of left-wing protests … which the official media pretended were peaceful even when they cut a violent swathe through American cities … which included a wave of iconoclasm against key symbols of American history … even as a new ideological vocabulary seemed to suddenly take over elite institutions … and dissenting figures were purged … and in the background the world’s elites loudly announced that they were seeking a “Great Reset,” a post-coronavirus new world order.

For the radicalized, all this felt stage-managed, prearranged — both as a further escalation in the establishment’s battle against Trump, a successor to the Mueller investigation and the impeachment push, and as an attempt to use the weirdness of the Covid situation to consolidate radical power within elite institutions. Experiencing and interpreting the summer of 2020 this way primed people to expect further escalation in the fall: After all, if liberals exploited a pandemic to stage-manage an ideological revolution, why wouldn’t they exploit all the weird features of pandemic voting to stage-manage the election outcome?

No doubt some of my liberal readers will find this question too ridiculous to even merit an answer. You can’t argue someone out of a conspiracy theory, a common axiom goes, which means the only appropriate response to these ideas is condemnation and a kind of quarantine — to be achieved, presumably, through better Facebook algorithms, the comprehensive political defeat of the Republican Party and some sort of “have you no sense of decency, sir” courage from news anchors and political leaders whenever right-wing paranoia re-emerges.

I don’t see any way that these efforts will work. (Certainly on the evidence of 2020, the Republican Party isn’t going anywhere, let alone about to be “burned to the ground” as some anti-Trumpers hoped.)

Of course the alternative — actually trying to argue with people in the camps I’ve just described — may not work either, especially given the curated virtual realities that the internet increasingly enables us all to inhabit. But I’ve been argued in and out of a few outré theories in my life. (Only the best outré theories, I assure you.) And if you accept that there’s more reasoning involved in conspiracy theorizing than official wisdom suggests, then once such theories achieve a certain prominence, there’s an obligation to actually make the case against them rather than just laugh them away.

My own attempts at argument have run as follows: To the conspiracy-curious Republican whose curiosity is validated by Trump’s allegations of fraud, I’ve suggested that the place to look for fire amid the smoke is in claims that the president’s lawyers are actually willing to advance in court, as opposed to in news conferences, semiofficial hearings and on Twitter. Those lawyers — especially now that it’s mostly just the Rudy Giuliani show — have every incentive to blow a fraud case wide open. If their legal claims don’t actually allege fraud or they fall apart under scrutiny, then so should your assumption that the president’s blustering must have some real-world correlative.

To the outsider-intellectuals fascinated by anomalies in ballot counts or ballot return patterns, I’ve argued that anomalies indicating fraud would have to show up in the final vote totals — meaning some pattern of results in key swing-state cities that differ starkly from the results in cities in less-contested states, or some turnout pattern in a swing state’s suburbs that looks weird relative to the suburbs in a deep- blue or deep-red state. But where claims for those kinds of anomalies have been offered, they’ve turned out to be false. So until a compelling example can be cited, anomalies in the counting process should be presumed to be error or randomness, not fraud.

Finally to the radicalized, I’ve tried to convey, based on my own knowledge of how liberal institutions work, that what looked stage-managed to outsiders in the May and June disturbances actually reflected organic upheaval and division, sincere antiracism and disorganized Trump-phobia, a crisis in the mind of liberalism, a dose of religious revival, plus a chaotic revolt by city-dwellers against a lockdown experience that fell heavily on them. Hypocrisy and radicalism alike there was in plenty, but literally nobody was in charge, except sometimes for activists in the younger generation who sensed a professional opportunity, and any supposed “plan” or “reset” was just a hapless attempt by elder statesmen to get woke. Put more succinctly: The liberal establishment that I watched stagger through May and June could not plan a sweeping voter-fraud conspiracy to save its life.

Have I persuaded anyone with these arguments? Maybe not, and as a columnist for a noted establishment organ, I’m probably not the best person to make them anyway. That distinction belongs to people more enmeshed in the conservative universe, scribes for National Review and talk-radio hosts and conservative media critics, all of whom are the more important arguers for an intra-Republican debate.

But I am certain that these issues are connected to a larger and more important question for the future of the right. At the moment, the voter-fraud narrative is being deployed, often by people more cynical than the groups I’ve just described, to help an outgoing president — one who twice lost the popular vote and displayed gross incompetence in the face of his administration’s greatest challenge — stake a permanent claim to the leadership of his party and establish himself as the presumptive Republican nominee in 2024. And it’s being used to push aside the more compelling narrative that the Republican Party could take away from 2020, which is that Trump’s presidency demonstrated that populism can provide a foundation for conservatism, but to build on it the right needs a very different leader than the man Joe Biden just defeated.

That’s the most important argument for the next four years — and one I’ll be making firmly, passionately, right up until the Republican Party nominates Trump again in 2024.


https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/05/opinion/sunday/trump-election-fraud.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

[kazoolaw]

To write so much and understand so little.

It will take someone with a little longer memory of hanging chads and 2016's claims of a stolen election with Russian interference and a willingness to write clearly of the history of presidential politics/elections in the 21st century.

[Hawker800]

I always thought pen people were a little more respectful and kindhearted than the average forum member. It seems many here are just petulant cry babies. Even some of the women are mean spirited. Maybe Live Leak would be more to your personalities.

[dneal]

I always thought pen people were a little more respectful and kindhearted than the average forum member. It seems many here are just petulant cry babies. Even some of the women are mean spirited. Maybe Live Leak would be more to your personalities.

I'm sure informing people that they seem like petulant cry babies (even some of the women) will be understood as the respectful and kindhearted post you assuredly intended.

[dneal]

For those that only get their news from mainstream sources, Texas filed a complaint against Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin to the Supreme Court.

Texas claims that since those four States violated the Electors Clause (Art. 2), by violating their own State election laws in their conduct of the Presidential election.
Texas claims that violates the 14th (Equal Protection) Amendment to the Constitution, diluting the legitimate vote of the other 46 States who did conduct their elections in accordance with State laws and Art. 2.

The relief is essentially that those four States should not be allowed to include their electoral votes (or appoint electors in accordance with the law).

LINK to complaint. (https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/images/admin/2020/Press/SCOTUSFiling.pdf)

[TSherbs]

It was a satisfying relief to read such a short document coming out of a courtroom: https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/120820zr_bq7d.pdf

Budda dum dum dum, another one bites the dust.

[digitalsedition]

For those that only get their news from mainstream sources, Texas filed a complaint against Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin to the Supreme Court.

Texas claims that since those four States violated the Electors Clause (Art. 2), by violating their own State election laws in their conduct of the Presidential election.
Texas claims that violates the 14th (Equal Protection) Amendment to the Constitution, diluting the legitimate vote of the other 46 States who did conduct their elections in accordance with State laws and Art. 2.

The relief is essentially that those four States should not be allowed to include their electoral votes (or appoint electors in accordance with the law).

LINK to complaint (https://www.scribd.com/document/487348469/TX-v-State-Motion-2020-12-07-FINAL#from_embed)

I see that Alabama and Louisiana have joined that Texas lawsuit a little while ago.
https://twitter.com/AGSteveMarshall/status/1336435391403057156
http://ladoj.ag.state.la.us/Article/10825

[dneal]

It was a satisfying relief to read such a short document coming out of a courtroom: https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/120820zr_bq7d.pdf

Budda dum dum dum, another one bites the dust.

Well, you've already noted how you don't like to read more than 10 pages or so. Are we supposed to be surprised you were happy with just one page?

[Chuck Naill]

Many only want to hear news that supports their views. Voice of America is being moved towards a Trumpian conversation.

If we only want to take sides instead of wanting a global perspective, it’s easy to find what you want.

If you think your being disenfranchised, you’ll have to question if it’s your responsibility or blame it on someone else.

[welch]

For those that only get their news from mainstream sources, Texas filed a complaint against Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin to the Supreme Court.

Texas claims that since those four States violated the Electors Clause (Art. 2), by violating their own State election laws in their conduct of the Presidential election.
Texas claims that violates the 14th (Equal Protection) Amendment to the Constitution, diluting the legitimate vote of the other 46 States who did conduct their elections in accordance with State laws and Art. 2.

The relief is essentially that those four States should not be allowed to include their electoral votes (or appoint electors in accordance with the law).

LINK to complaint (https://www.scribd.com/document/487348469/TX-v-State-Motion-2020-12-07-FINAL#from_embed)

I see that Alabama and Louisiana have joined that Texas lawsuit a little while ago.
https://twitter.com/AGSteveMarshall/status/1336435391403057156
http://ladoj.ag.state.la.us/Article/10825

dneal, this lawsuit by Ken Paxton, AG of Texas, has been reported here:

- https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/supreme-court-trump-pennsylvania-election-results/2020/12/08/4d39e16c-397d-11eb-98c4-25dc9f4987e8_story.html

Read down. The Post covers it after the main news, that the Supreme Court had refused to hear the Trump lawsuit asking to overturn the election in Pennsylvania, meaning that Paxton's lawsuit asks the Court to declare, on Thursday, that "We reverse the unanimous decision that we stupidly made on Tuesday".


The Texas filing is another that seeks to overturn election results.

All four states targeted have certified their election results, and all but Wisconsin appeared on track to meet Tuesday’s “safe harbor” deadline, which privileges those certifications under federal law when it is time for Congress to tally electoral votes. One legal challenge to the Wisconsin recount remained pending in state court, potentially blocking the state from taking advantage of the cutoff.

Legal experts called the suit highly unusual and said it raises several questions, including whether Texas has standing to bring a retroactive complaint over how other states enforce their election statutes. The Constitution says it is up to individual states to set the terms for elections.

The complaint filed by Paxton was a grab-bag of allegations about voting in the four states that have been largely rejected by individual courts. He sketched out a dark conspiracy to throw the election to Biden.

“Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a justification, government officials in the defendant states of Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania usurped their legislatures’ authority and unconstitutionally revised their state’s election statutes,” the complaint states, referring to the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. “They accomplished these statutory revisions through executive fiat or friendly lawsuits, thereby weakening ballot integrity. Finally, these same government officials flooded the . . . states with millions of ballots.”

At one point, the complaint repeats discredited theories that Biden was rescued by a late dump of ballots, saying that as of 3 a.m. on the morning after the election, Biden’s chances at winning all four states was “less than one in a quadrillion.”

The complaint asks the court to extend the deadline for the electoral college’s meeting, set for Dec. 14, and to disallow electors from the four states. In a separate request for an injunction, it suggests an alternative: that the court vacate the states’ elector certifications “from the unconstitutional 2020 election results” and allow the state legislatures to appoint electors.

A constitutional provision allows states to sue one another at the Supreme Court without going through lower courts. Usually, the subject matter is something such as water rights. In 2016, the court turned down an attempt by Nebraska and Oklahoma to object to Colorado’s liberalized laws on recreational marijuana use on the grounds that it was causing law enforcement or other problems in their own states.

Attorneys general in the four battleground states criticized the Texas filing as factually wrong, lacking substance and eroding confidence in American democracy.

“With all due respect, the Texas Attorney General is constitutionally, legally and factually wrong about Georgia,” Katie Byrd, spokeswoman for the Georgia attorney general’s office, said in a statement. Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr is a Republican.

Attorneys general Nessel, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Josh Kaul of Wisconsin — all Democrats — issued a joint statement calling the effort an attempt to “mislead the public and tear at the fabric of our Constitution.”

“It’s well past time for the president and our fellow states and elected officials to stop misleading the public about this year’s election and to acknowledge that the results certified in our states reflect the decisions made by the voters in a free, fair, and secure election,” they stated.


Then
Stephen Vladeck, a constitutional law professor at the University of Texas, tweeted: “It looks like we have a new leader in the ‘craziest lawsuit filed to purportedly challenge the election’ category.”

Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California at Irvine, called the filing a “news release masquerading as a lawsuit” in a blog post that outlined his view of why the action would not succeed.

- Discussed in this opinion:
A GOP senator reveals just how deranged many in his party have become

Sen. Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, has done something truly extraordinary. He has now stated in unequivocal terms that it’s unacceptable for his fellow Republicans to try to subvert the will of American voters to keep President Trump in power illegitimately.

Why have so few other Republicans proved willing to take this simple step?

Toomey’s declaration contrasts sharply with a new development in the Georgia runoffs. GOP Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue just announced their support for a deranged lawsuit filed by Texas that seeks to overturn popular vote outcomes in four battleground states that Trump lost.

Those Georgia moves capture a broader state of affairs: It appears that untold numbers of elected Republicans are trying to inspire in GOP voters a state of what you might call permanent warfare against our democratic institutions and the opposition’s voters alike.

This war footing doesn’t permit acknowledgment of the opposition’s claims to legitimate political representation. It treats efforts at the wholesale subversion of unwanted electoral outcomes as an acceptable tool of political competition.

This is what Toomey’s new declaration throws into sharp relief.

“It’s completely unacceptable,” Toomey told the Philadelphia Inquirer, referring to Trump’s efforts to get numerous GOP-controlled state legislatures to appoint pro-Trump electors to the electoral college, in defiance of the state’s popular vote outcome.

“The president should give up trying to get legislatures to overturn the results of the elections in their respective states,” Toomey continued.

Compounding the heresy on display here, Toomey even dared to reveal that he had personally congratulated President-elect Joe Biden on his victory, in a conversation Toomey described as “pleasant.”

Some Republicans support Trump’s efforts
Our discourse on all this is deeply confused. News organizations sometimes emphasize that few elected Republicans have affirmatively endorsed Trump’s efforts to get state legislatures to overturn popular vote outcomes. This creates the impression that they are quietly tolerating a Trumpian tantrum that they hope will pass, as if the problem here is their mere spinelessness.

But the more important point — and this is almost never conveyed with clarity — is this. While it’s good that some state-level Republicans have rebuffed these efforts, a great many other elected Republicans have refrained from declaring them wholly intolerable, which would demonstrate that they must be unequivocally condemned as existentially destructive to democracy.

By doing exactly this, Toomey has exposed this deficit.

It’s also rarely conveyed with clarity that some Republican senators actually do tacitly support efforts to overturn the election results. This includes Loeffler and Perdue. Loeffler has suggested that by trying to get rogue electors appointed, Trump is merely exercising his “right” to take “legal recourse,” which is nonsense, because that tactic lies outside what the law allows.

A demented lawsuit

What’s more, Loeffler and Perdue have now endorsed this new Texas lawsuit. It literally asks the Supreme Court to step in and invalidate Biden’s electors in Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, on the fictitious grounds that the voting was administered fraudulently in them — echoing claims that numerous courts have shot down already.

This could clear the way for GOP state legislatures in all four states to appoint Trump electors, overturning the results, as Trump himself has repeatedly demanded.

This is insane. As University of Texas law professor Steve Vladeck points out, the suit seeks to exploit the fact that the Supreme Court does have jurisdiction to hear disputes between states, but it does not automatically hear such complaints, and in this case, it won’t. The high court already declined to hear a somewhat less crazy lawsuit seeking to overturn results in Pennsylvania.

But the fact that this is a stunt doesn’t make it less disgusting that Loeffler and Perdue have endorsed it. Their statement declares that they “fully support” this lawsuit on the grounds that Trump has “every right” to exercise his “legal recourse.”

Again, here they are declaring this effort to subvert the will of the voters to be a legitimate tactic. Since one of the states is Georgia, this is in effect a declaration of war on their own state’s electorate.

“The central argument here is that we should let the election be decided by unelected judges and partisan state legislators, rather than the 150 million Americans who cast legitimate ballots,” Vladeck told me. “That would be the end of democracy as we know it.”

[dneal]

Many only want to hear news that supports their views. Voice of America is being moved towards a Trumpian conversation.

If we only want to take sides instead of wanting a global perspective, it’s easy to find what you want.

If you think your being disenfranchised, you’ll have to question if it’s your responsibility or blame it on someone else.

Careful Chuck, your bias is beginning to peek through your sanctimony.

[dneal]

@ welch- at the time, no mainstream source was reporting it. Not Fox, not CNN, and you can add as many of the major left or right outlets as you like. Yes, it’s in the cycle now.

Each side will trot out their experts to support their mostly partisan opinions. Most ignore the actual content of the brief, instead characterizing it in accordance with their political leanings.

[Chuck Naill]

We are watching the destruction of what is left of the Republican Party. Since Evangelicals tend to put more trust in what they cannot see that what they can, none of this is a surprise, but sad non the less.

[dneal]

We are watching the destruction of what is left of the Republican Party. Since Evangelicals tend to put more trust in what they cannot see that what they can, none of this is a surprise, but sad non the less.

And the cracks widen...

[dneal]

So in another likely futile attempt to have an objective discussion, I'll offer my thoughts on the Texas case.

Although there's probably some historical precedent already, I think it's interesting that a State is bringing suit against several other States; and using Art 3 to go directly to the SC. It's not something you'll see every day, and probably not something the average person will see in their lifetime.

Although it's addressed in the complaint, the case doesn't center on proof of fraud, likely outcomes, etc... that the other "Kraken" type cases address. It focuses on a Constitutional question that is pretty clearly established. Those four States clearly altered their rules through means other than their legislatures. Texas argues that this is a violation of Constitutional law (Art 2). They have a pretty good argument for that.

The effect (or harm) they argue results from that is that it causes a violation of the 14th Amendment (Equal Protection). Although it's a pretty good argument, it's not as solid as the Art 2 claim. It starts to dip it's toes into the "outcome" question.

Four justices have to agree to hear a case. I think ACB and Gorsuch easily agree, because they're Textual Constitutionalists (and it's no hard feat to imagine the left claims it's because Trump appointed them, which I think is disingenuous, but it'll still happen). Thomas will likely be in as well. Assuming the "liberal" justices don't sign on, that leaves Kavanaugh, Alito and Roberts.

I don't really have a read on Kavanaugh, and can see him going either way (with a slight probability to accept). Alito is usually also unpredictable to some extent, but Pennsylvania ignoring his order (pointed out in the Texas brief) alone could get his vote to hear. Roberts is more a politician than a jurist, IMHO; so I see him torn between not wanting to get involved and the idea of a SC getting "packed" under his watch. That might turn out to be a strategic mistake by the Democrats.

Supposing there are four votes to hear, the question becomes which way at least five votes go to rule. I think the same three (ACB, Gorsuch and Thomas) agree with Texas' Constitutional argument. I'm less sure of Alito and Kavanaugh, and I think the Roberts calculus stays the same. There is a lot of room for them to rule against under the 14th Amendment argument, influenced by the "we don't want to determine outcomes" problem.

If they deny hearing, or rule against Texas; the answer is easy. Biden is inaugurated in January and this thing is essentially behind us. The "stole the election" claims will continue from the right, just like they did from the left in the Gore and Clinton losses; but that's pretty much just today's political landscape.

If they hear the case, and rule in favor of Texas; it gets a whole lot more complex. Are those four States' electors excluded? The election goes to the House and then the question is: Does the Republican party get 26 votes for Trump in that case? (For our international friends, each State gets one vote in this case and a simple majority decides).

Suppose Texas is successful, the SC throws out the elections in those four States, and orders the legislatures to appoint electors directly. All four are held by the GOP, and it forces them to do the thing they don't have the political courage to do otherwise. Yes, some of them are drafting resolutions to appoint electors directly; but no politician takes that kind of real risk. They're still in a similar boat of having the decision land in their laps. They're going to get an enormous amount of backlash whichever choice they make (Biden or Trump). I smile a little at the thought of politicians squirming.

The suit is linked in an earlier post, and it's an easy read. There are two sections: a 20 page claim and a 35 page brief supporting the claim. They're similar, with the brief going into a little greater detail. Ironically, precedent established in Bush v Gore is argued to strengthen Texas' complaint.

[welch]

Here is the suit that the AG of Texas has filed:

https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/images/admin/2020/Press/SCOTUSFiling.pdf?utm_content=&utm_medium=email&utm_name=&utm_source=govdelivery&utm_term=

It repeats claims that were already considered and dismissed in the four states it targets, and in Arizona and Nevada. I have read through many of the decisions in those four, plus in Arizona and Nevada; it is astonishing to see the claims yet again. Among the silliest is the statistical argument:


Expert analysis using a commonly accepted statistical test further raises serious
questions as to the integrity of this election.

10. The probability of former Vice President Biden winning the popular vote in the four Defendant
States—Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—independently given President Trump’s
early lead in those States as of 3 a.m. on November 4, 2020, is less than one in a quadrillion, or 1 in
1,000,000,000,000,000. For former Vice President Biden to win these four States collectively, the odds of
that event happening decrease to less than one in aquadrillion to the fourth power (i.e., 1 in
1,000,000,000,000,0004). See Decl. of Charles J. Cicchetti, Ph.D. (“Cicchetti Decl.”) at ¶¶ 14-21, 30-31.
See App. 4a-7a, 9a.

11. The same less than one in a quadrillion statistical improbability of Mr. Biden winning the
popular vote in the four Defendant States—Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—
independently exists when Mr. Biden’s performance in each of those Defendant States is compared to
former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s performance in the 2016 general election and
President Trump’s performance in the 2016 and 2020 general elections. Again, the statistical improbability
of Mr. Biden winning the popular vote in these four States collectively is 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,0005. Id.
10-13, 17-21, 30-31.

12. Put simply, there is substantial reason to doubt the voting results in the Defendant States

This argues that Biden could not have won because he trailed in those states before they counted mail-in votes. It refers to a Footnote 5, which I cannot find. If someone else reads all this, please tell me what Fn 5 says, because it is supposed to justify the thinking leading to this plainly bizarre conclusion.

It seems unlikely that the Supreme Court will decide to ignore the court decisions that dismissed all the Trump campaign's lawsuits. That would require the Supreme Court to rehear all the evidence, to reconsider every decision that refused to allow some of the Trump claims to be evidence ("an affidavit is inadmissable hearsay"). Paxton repeats everything that trial courts examined and found to be incredible, including all of the Trump arguments in Pennsylvania that the Supreme Court toss a couple days ago.

[dneal]

Yes, all that is in there too; but that's not the primary argument the claim makes. There are nine points made before your cite begins. The points you cite are problems that resulted from those four States' violation of Art 2, and that we wouldn't be in this mess if they obeyed the law as written.

NATURE OF THE ACTION
1. Plaintiff State challenges Defendant
States’ administration of the 2020 election under the
Electors Clause of Article II, Section 1, Clause 2, and
the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

2. This case presents a question of law: Did
Defendant States violate the Electors Clause (or, in
the alternative, the Fourteenth Amendment) by
taking—or allowing—non-legislative actions to
change the election rules that would govern the
appointment of presidential electors?

3. Those unconstitutional changes opened
the door to election irregularities in various forms.
Plaintiff State alleges that each of the Defendant
States flagrantly violated constitutional rules
governing the appointment of presidential electors. In
doing so, seeds of deep distrust have been sown across
the country. In the spirit of Marbury v. Madison, this
Court’s attention is profoundly needed to declare what
the law is and to restore public trust in this election.

[kazoolaw]

Footnote 5 is at page 27: "5 Id., Affidavit of Jessy Jacob, Appendix 14 at ¶15, attached at
App. 34a-36a."

[welch]

Yes, all that is in there too; but that's not the primary argument the claim makes. There are nine points made before your cite begins. The points you cite are problems that resulted from those four States' violation of Art 2, and that we wouldn't be in this mess if they obeyed the law as written.

NATURE OF THE ACTION
1. Plaintiff State challenges Defendant
States’ administration of the 2020 election under the
Electors Clause of Article II, Section 1, Clause 2, and
the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

2. This case presents a question of law: Did
Defendant States violate the Electors Clause (or, in
the alternative, the Fourteenth Amendment) by
taking—or allowing—non-legislative actions to
change the election rules that would govern the
appointment of presidential electors?

3. Those unconstitutional changes opened
the door to election irregularities in various forms.
Plaintiff State alleges that each of the Defendant
States flagrantly violated constitutional rules
governing the appointment of presidential electors. In
doing so, seeds of deep distrust have been sown across
the country. In the spirit of Marbury v. Madison, this
Court’s attention is profoundly needed to declare what
the law is and to restore public trust in this election.

I skipped mentioning the first parts because they are the same as what the Trump campaign has argued before, and before being dismissed everyplace else. Trump tried arguing in Pennsylvania that the legislature had no right to expand mail-in voting to people who had not asserted that they were bed-ridden or out-of-state. The Supreme Court dismissed that suit on Tuesday.

The statistical argument seemed more interesting because this is the first time anyone presented it. Judge Stewart mentioned such an argument in his decision in Nevada last Friday; he wrote that the "expert" had not shown any data on which his argument depended, so it was not admissible. Paxton, curiously, did not provide the link he referenced in Footnote 5, promising, apparently, that he would have show it "real soon now". (Learned that here: https://reason.com/volokh/2020/12/08/statistical-nonsense-at-scotus/)

Justin Grimmer, a professor at Stanford and the Hoover Institute tweets this about the "statistical impossibility" argument:


The Texas AG is seeking to block electors from swing states, claiming that “given President Trump’s early lead...on November 4, 2020” the chance of Biden winning “is less than one in a quadrillion”. This claim is based on an embarrassing and basic error in statistical reasoning.


Cicchetti (and the AG’s) claim sounds like if you could rewind time and rerun the world 1 quadrillion times, we’d see this result only once. But Cicchetti never computes this probability and I’m not clear how he even could. Instead, he answers a different question.


Cicchetti’s probabilities rest on the assumptions that, in a fraud free world, Biden would have the same support as Clinton and early and late-tabulated votes are identical.If these assumptions are wrong, his probabilities are meaningless. And we know these assumptions are wrong.


Cicchetti effectively says, assuming Biden has the same support as Hillary, the chance of this result is very small.


But, of course, Biden is not the same as Hillary, these are different elections, and the electorate changes. So this probability teaches us very little about Biden’s true chance of victory.


He does the same basic analysis for early and late-tabulated votes: he shows that if we assume they are random samples from the population, then the chance of this result is small.


Of course early- and late-tabulated votes are not randomly sampled from the population of votes. The ``blue shift” in late-counted votes is well documented (https://preprints.apsanet.org/engage/apsa/article-details/5e7bce380e55c30019685cca and https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3547734 ).


The conclusions in his analysis and the AG’s brief rely on an embarrassing confusion between the probability of something actually happening and the probability of it happening under an (implausible) assumption about the true state of the world.


Cicchetti never tries to compute the probability of Biden winning. Instead, he implausibly assumes Biden and Clinton have identical support or that early- and late-tabulated votes are randomly sampled.His probabilities teach us very little about the true chance of Biden winning.


So, no. Cicchetti doesn’t even provide the relevant probability. He doesn’t consider obvious alternative explanations. And he makes a basic error in interpretation.


I’m sure this claim will now become canon in election-conspiracy media, particularly given that Trump retweeted it. I’m frankly embarrassed that such statistical incompetence would appear in such a high profile venue.

The series of tweets is here:

https://twitter.com/justingrimmer/status/1336448650092822528

[dneal]

I skipped mentioning the first parts because they are the same as what the Trump campaign has argued before, and before being dismissed everyplace else. Trump tried arguing in Pennsylvania that the legislature had no right to expand mail-in voting to people who had not asserted that they were bed-ridden or out-of-state. The Supreme Court dismissed that suit on Tuesday.

The statistical argument seemed more interesting because this is the first time anyone presented it. Judge Stewart mentioned such an argument in his decision in Nevada last Friday; he wrote that the "expert" had not shown any data on which his argument depended, so it was not admissible. Paxton, curiously, did not provide the link he referenced in Footnote 5, promising, apparently, that he would have show it "real soon now". (Learned that here: https://reason.com/volokh/2020/12/08/statistical-nonsense-at-scotus/)

Justin Grimmer, a professor at Stanford and the Hoover Institute tweets this about the "statistical impossibility" argument:



I'm not positive which Pennsylvania suit you're talking about, but I assume it's Kelly. My understanding is that argument was that the voting date (and other) changes violated the Pennsylvania Constitution. A State court found that the suit came too late (and there's a laches problem). The State Supreme Court upheld that decision, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal (as opposed to "dismissing").

This Texas suit isn't quite the same thing, and they address laches. In essence, they couldn't have waited to late because they (Texas) weren't harmed until after the election was held.

I think the only profession that is more argumentative than lawyers is statisticians. I've posted a few pages back that I've seen a lot of statistical "proof" postulated, discredited, the discredit discredited, etc... The Texas case adds more of the same (and the statisticians arguing cycle starts again). It's interesting, but I don't think the Texas argument depends on it. The Constitutional argument is the foundation.

I'm kind of interested in what Dershowitz has to say about it.

--edit--

RE: Grimmer's tweets. First, I'm surprised he begins with

"The Texas AG is seeking to block electors from swing states, claiming that “given President Trump’s early lead...on November 4, 2020” the chance of Biden winning “is less than one in a quadrillion”. This claim is based on an embarrassing and basic error in statistical reasoning."

While technically true, it's just a little misrepresentative of the suit. I normally wouldn't care, but I thought it was funny given that his position is Co-Director of an organization that "The Democracy and Polarization Lab studies modern-day challenges to democratic governance, diagnosing problems and testing potential solutions. How can we reduce polarization, improve the information environment, maintain the integrity of the electoral process, and foster democratic accountability?"

You would think his tweet would perhaps be a little less potentially "polarizing".

Anyway, his main argument is that Cicchetti's numbers are based on assumptions. Fair point, but he doesn't prove the assumptions (or math) wrong. It's inductive logic. If the assumption is true, and the logic sound, then the conclusion must be true. Grimmer's task would be to prove the assumption or logic (i.e.: math) false. He doesn't do that (that I see, anyway). He introduces the possibility that the assumption is false, but that's inherently the case with inductive logic.

[TSherbs]

yeah, this new suit is not going anywhere, either.

I'll just point out one corrosive and laughable hypocrisy in the document: Texas wants to claim "damage" in the undermining of democracy that the Pennsylvania process is had. That's ripe, I'll tell ya, from the side of the guy who has been saying all along that he'll only accept an election in which he wins. And that is just one of the ways that he has undermined the idea of free and fair elections. They are all so common now that I won't bother to list them.

Next deadline: December 14 (5 days).

[dneal]

Next deadline: December 14 (5 days).

Wrong, but you would have to read the suit to find out why.

[dneal]

Here's a deadline from the SC, regarding the TX suit:

“Response to the motion for leave to file a bill of complaint and to the motion for a preliminary injunction and temporary restraining order or, alternatively, for stay and administrative stay requested, due Thursday, December 10, by 3 pm.”

Basically that's for the four States, if they want to respond to Texas' complaint.

[TSherbs]

Here's another ripe complaint from the Texas document about Pennsylvania et al:

Intrastate differences in the treatment of voters, with more favorable allotted to voters – whether lawful or unlawful – in areas administered by local government under Democrat control and with populations with higher ratios of Democrat voters than other areas of Defendant States.

Ha! That's from the state where during a pandemic the governor reduced the mail-in drop boxes to one per county, regardless of the size of the population or square area of the county, with the greatest reductions in drop boxes in democratic counties (urban). The Gov had to appeal the court decisions twice before the highest court permitted the action (the lower ones did not).

The disciples of cynical manipulation are tipping their hats to this about-face. I guess this is why we have two sides to our faces.

[Chuck Naill]

Now Hunter Biden is being investigated regarding his taxes. Given Trump's attacks on him, this is not surprising, but abuse of power is something that should concern us all. Not that the younger Biden should be given a pass or that he is not guilty. That is not the I am making.

[dneal]

Now Hunter Biden is being investigated regarding his taxes. Given Trump's attacks on him, this is not surprising, but abuse of power is something that should concern us all. Not that the younger Biden should be given a pass or that he is not guilty. That is not the I am making.

Investigating Hunter Biden allegedly profiting from his father's role as Vice President is an abuse of power by Trump?

As Fred would say... Fascinatin'

[Freddie]

Now Hunter Biden is being investigated regarding his taxes. Given Trump's attacks on him, this is not surprising, but abuse of power is something that should concern us all. Not that the younger Biden should be given a pass or that he is not guilty. That is not the I am making.

Investigating Hunter Biden allegedly profiting from his father's role as Vice President is an abuse of power by Trump?

As Fred would say... Fascinatin'

Yo! Dude. I wouldn't say that....We have a fascist in the people's house undermining our democracy and creating precedent.
Re: Texas et al Absolute garbage Frivolous Lawsuit Dude { Ted Cruz } from TX who wants to represent in SC knows it ain't going anywhere.
He did graduate Princeton and Harvard Law....He knows and I knows that,

The BS keeps piling up........................

Fred

[welch]

Footnote 5 is at page 27: "5 Id., Affidavit of Jessy Jacob, Appendix 14 at ¶15, attached at
App. 34a-36a."

Not so much. Paxton's Footnote 5 was supposed to provide the Declaration by Charles Cicchetti, PhD, reference to a paper on which Cicchetti bases his claim that it was profoundly improbable for Biden to have won in several states after have trailed the same-day votes. Paxton says that the unlikelihood is 10 with sixty zeros to 1.

As best I can see, Paxton has made Jessy Jacob Fn 5, and moved Cicchetti's "Declaration" to an appendix "forthcoming". Has he provided it? I note his sloppiness, and grumble that he seems to be playing "hide the references".

No, there are no appendices.

[dneal]

Each of the four States responded to Texas' suit. I'll link the .pdf's

Pennsylvania (https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22O155/163367/20201210142206254_Pennsylvania%20Opp%20to%20Bill%2 0of%20Complaint%20v.FINAL.pdf).
Wisconsin (https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22O155/163393/20201210150111653_Brief.pdf)
Georgia (https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22O155/163383/20201210145849997_Georgia%20--%20Brief%20in%20Opposition.pdf)
Michigan (https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22O155/163387/20201210145404465_22O155%20Texas%20MI%20BIO%2012-10.pdf)


--edit--
There have been a lot of documents filed, mostly amicus motions/briefs, from a variety of sources.

HERE is the main docket page for the case. (https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docket/docketfiles/html/public/22o155.html)

--edit #2--

There's too much to detail, but each of the four responses are similar enough in the main points.

In general:

- Texas lacks standing
- Texas hasn't demonstrated Art 2 violations or 14th Amendment harm
- Something along the lines of "Our state laws are none of Texas' business".
- This type of suit has already been brought
- laches - or they waited too long.

It depends on the State, but there's a lot of tit-for-tat on what did or did not happen on election day (blocking observers, legality or use of collection boxes, etc...) Texas obviously anticipated a lot of the points in the responses, and it's clear they had much more time to prepare their motion and brief.

Like I said before, each side will trot out their "experts" and emphasize the points they find relevant or persuasive to their point of view.

We'll just have to wait and see what the SC does next.

[dneal]

Footnote 5 is at page 27: "5 Id., Affidavit of Jessy Jacob, Appendix 14 at ¶15, attached at
App. 34a-36a."

Not so much. Paxton's Footnote 5 was supposed to provide the Declaration by Charles Cicchetti, PhD, reference to a paper on which Cicchetti bases his claim that it was profoundly improbable for Biden to have won in several states after have trailed the same-day votes. Paxton says that the unlikelihood is 10 with sixty zeros to 1.

As best I can see, Paxton has made Jessy Jacob Fn 5, and moved Cicchetti's "Declaration" to an appendix "forthcoming". Has he provided it? I note his sloppiness, and grumble that he seems to be playing "hide the references".

No, there are no appendices.

It looks like the appendix / references are in THIS document (https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22O155/163048/20201208132827887_TX-v-State-ExpedMot%202020-12-07%20FINAL.pdf), starting on page 19 of the .pdf

Cross-referencing from the brief is not easy, to say the least.

[welch]

Footnote 5 is at page 27: "5 Id., Affidavit of Jessy Jacob, Appendix 14 at ¶15, attached at
App. 34a-36a."

Not so much. Paxton's Footnote 5 was supposed to provide the Declaration by Charles Cicchetti, PhD, reference to a paper on which Cicchetti bases his claim that it was profoundly improbable for Biden to have won in several states after have trailed the same-day votes. Paxton says that the unlikelihood is 10 with sixty zeros to 1.

As best I can see, Paxton has made Jessy Jacob Fn 5, and moved Cicchetti's "Declaration" to an appendix "forthcoming". Has he provided it? I note his sloppiness, and grumble that he seems to be playing "hide the references".

No, there are no appendices.

It looks like the appendix / references are in THIS document (https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22O155/163048/20201208132827887_TX-v-State-ExpedMot%202020-12-07%20FINAL.pdf), starting on page 19 of the .pdf

Cross-referencing from the brief is not easy, to say the least.

Ah, there it is. Roughly p. 20. Thanks!

[welch]

I have read Dr. Cicchetti's paper, starting about p.20 in the revised Texas Expedited motion. Indeed, as dneal found, there is a large appendix tacked on.

- Cicchetti spends most of his analysis on Georgia.

- Cicchetti assumes that Joe Biden should have received the same votes that Hillary Clinton did in 2016. That they did not, convinces him that there must have been hanky-panky.

- He argues that four years is a short time between elections, so the results should be the same, an argument that fails, of course, in all elections ever held in the US.

- He argues that four years is too short for a serious demographic change to affect votes. He neglects to account for Biden and Clinton being different human beings, for the possibility that voters might change their minds. Even though he seems to notice that more people voted, but assumes that voters must pick candidates in the same percentage that they did in 2016.

- He ignores the fact that we hold elections so that voters can choose.

- Cicchetti, also, ignores the very close results of the contest for governor in 2018. Perhaps Stacy Abrams and, now, Joe Biden, drew out more Democratic voters.

- Cicchetti might have examined the 2016 results in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. His method would suggest that Clinton won those three states because any statistician would assume that she would get the same votes as President Obama had in 2012. Etc...

- Cicchetti gets his argument that it the odds of Biden winning by .02% after all votes were counted, while trailing Trump by 49% to 51% at 3am, from his belief that Biden ought to have received the same proportion of votes as Clinton.

- Cicchetti attempts to clinch his argument by saying that all four states have been called "swing states"; therefore, either candidate should have a 50 / 50 chance of winning. Why does he think so? He doesn't explain. On that weak basis, he treats us to a thought-experiment in statistics. Flip a pile of coins and the heads / tails should come out 50 / 50. If we repeat the experiment four years later, they should still come out 50 / 50. (Therefore an election is like a coin-toss?)

- Cicchetti mentions that others have argued that Georgia counties might finish counting at different times, or that there might be some difference if some counties have more mail-in votes. He notices that more Democratic voters live in and around Atlanta and Savanah, but quickly discards the thought that those places, having more population than other areas, might count slower. Instead, he posits that the stream of votes being counted must be all the same no matter which county they come from. Otherwise, his assertions shatter.

[TSherbs]

Thanks for the work on this.

[dneal]

The thing that gets me about all these "statistical improbabilities / impossibilities" is what you already point out. Either case is a hypothesis, nothing more at this point.

Cicchetti talks about 95% of the votes being in, and the remaining 5% (mostly mail-in or absentee) having to swing for Biden by 75% or more. He says it's a statistical improbability, and potential evidence of fraud. He's right, but that doesn't constitute "proof" of anything. It could also be that Biden voters, who are more likely to follow COVID precautions, were more likely to mail in their ballots. Shuffle a brand new deck of cards and spread them out on a table. The statistical probability of them ending up in whatever particular order is nigh impossible, but there it is nonetheless. It happened.

Arizona is probably the best example of how to deal with suspected fraud. A judge ordered a sample of 100 ballots. 2 of the 100 that should have gone for Trump, went for Biden. Although only 2, it's still 2%; more than Biden's margin of victory. "SEE!!!", say some. "BIDEN STOLE THE ELECTION!!!" The judge rightly ordered another 1500 ballots inspected, and that sample demonstrated no wrongdoing. Trump voters still aren't happy with the outcome; but they now have some confidence in election integrity (and yes, some will never be convinced just as some liberals will still think Trump "colluded" with Russia).

Michigan is a great example of how not to deal with fraud allegations. Frankly, the MI Secretary of State comes off just as unhinged and divisive as Trump. "Baseless allegations" by a "group that wants to undermine confidence", blah blah blah... She ought to be measured in her response. "I understand that some have concerns...", for example; and look into those concerns like Arizona did.

Four specific Democrat metropolitan areas in four "swing" states leaning heavily enough for Biden to move the state to Biden's column is not 'normal' - in the sense of it's not what we usually experience. It could be that Democrats "stuffed" the ballot box, so to speak; and there is some circumstantial evidence to support that hypothesis. It could also be that Democrats realized those four metro areas were enough to swing those states, and concentrated legitimate effort there; which would be as brilliant a strategy as Kellyanne Conway focusing on "the blue wall" in 2016.

But if you're going to assure the American voter that they can trust the election process, you have to do like Arizona and look into claims. Refusal to, and just calling them a bunch of delusional conspiracy theorists comes off as The Great Oz saying "pay no attention to that man behind the curtain". It only reinforces the perceived validity of conspiracy, and makes otherwise rational people more likely to subscribe to conspiracy theories.

[Ray-VIgo]

Two questions raised by the election, at least in my mind, are:

1. What is base level of cohesiveness below which a republican form of government is impossible? And is there any way of knowing how close your particular society and government are to that floor at a given time?

2. Is there some absolute voting or population ceiling on the elected republican form of government before dysfunction and disunion result?

[TSherbs]

Two questions raised by the election, at least in my mind, are:

1. What is base level of cohesiveness below which a republican form of government is impossible? And is there any way of knowing how close your particular society and government are to that floor at a given time?

2. Is there some absolute voting or population ceiling on the elected republican form of government before dysfunction and disunion result?

1) This seems to ask for a metric that doesn't really exist.

2) No


There is no doubt that republican democracy functions well only to the degree that the general population accepts it and is willing to go along with its rules and laws and outcomes. Rebellion is always a threat to republican democracy, and the greater the rebellion, the greater the threat (see the US Civil War). But I don't know how to measure or set limits on these things.

As indications of serious "dysfunction," however, I would offer these:

a) Disruption or interference in voting procedures

b) Abrogation of law

c) Martial Law

d) Civil war

I don't think that any of these conditions are currently being met in the USA around this recent election. Hullabaloo in the streets and in the courts and in the media do not make the collapse of republican government; we have weathered worse than this. Even this recent lawsuit with all the "signers-on" is nothing more than a tongue-licking to coddle favor in future elections and to try to build uncertainty in order to later argue for the need for voter ID laws (that is the endgame here!)

I despise the scumbag current POTUS, but even he is not a real threat to republican government (not yet). He has just primarily been a lying sack of shit throwing his stink across the landscape. But republican governance can withstand a shitstorm.

I believe.

[dneal]

Why are voter ID laws a bad thing? I get the “voter suppression” argument, which seems specious; but surely that isn’t a hurdle that can’t be overcome.

[kazoolaw]

But republican governance can withstand a shitstorm.

I believe.You're talking the Biden crime family right?

[dneal]

But republican governance can withstand a shitstorm.

I believe.You're talking the Biden crime family right?



No, that would be Democratic governance.

;)

[dneal]

Texas’ reply (https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22O155/163498/20201211111125165_TX-v-State-MPI-Reply-2020-12-11.pdf) to the 4 States’ responses is worth a read.

It does a decent job summarizing their objections and asserting Texas’ view.

[dneal]

SC declined to hear.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/121120zr_p860.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1GArXZsDUW-oFpMEXiWe2S-tfq7h8GuyyvK37gsHrjdnq0c2shyjE14Rs

—edit—

I think it would have better for the country for them to have heard the case, and rule against Texas; than to have gone this route. The opinions would have beneficial for purposes of precedent, and to bring some closure to the “election was stolen” crowd.

I saw that the Wisconsin SC is hearing Trump’s case, but it’s time for him to concede. The State legislatures aren’t going to reappoint electors, even though some are mulling it over with hearings (Michigan) or motions.

[welch]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/supreme-court-texas-election-trump/2020/12/11/bf462f22-3bc6-11eb-bc68-96af0daae728_story.html

I'm not sure what Thomas and Alito are thinking, but the rest of the Court seems to think that Texas was spilling hogwash down the steps of the Court building. No, we are not Hungary; there is not yet a version of Fidesz able to eliminate a free judiciary.

I read the Texas complaint, leaving it full of underlinings in read, and red comments in the margins. Contemptible. The Pennsylvania reply was enough. Pennselvania argued:

- Supreme Court should be the court to hear disputes between states over the river that runs between them, such as the dispute between Maryland and Virginia that demonstrated the need for, and began the process that resulted in the US Constitution, itself. Court should not hear a claim that Texas feels itself hurt by the way four other states conducted the elections.

- If the Court accepts this case, then every presidential election will go to the Supreme Court, where the Court will decide who won the election. That would have been madness for the Court, and would end constitutional democracy in the US.

- Each of the separate Texas complaints has already been heard in state courts, and rejected. There would be nothing for the Supreme Court to decide.

- Texas claims that the Pennsylvania legislature violated the Pennsylvania constitution by making it easier to vote-by-mail. The legislature passed it as a bi-partisan and good-government measure. Passed it in 2019, contrary to the Texas claim -- a sneer -- that Pennsylvania and the rest used Covid-19 as a way to corrupt the vote. (I am simplifying the Texas language, but that's what they seem to suggest)

- As Pennsylvania argues, many states changed their process to protect voters from Covid. Even Texas.

We have examined the nuts&bolts of a national election since the morning of election day. Elections are carried through by counties all over the country, big counties, sparsely populated counties, elections runs by state secretaries of state of both parties. It held up, and, thanks to the various levels of court, we have read decisions that show how elections are run. I don't know what else can persuade doubters that American elections are free and honest.

[dneal]

Thomas pretty much always says that it's mandatory for the SC to hear a case presented by a State, and he references his view on the AZ v CA from February (which the court also declined to hear).

I thought Texas had a pretty good argument from a technical perspective, and thought ACB and Gorsuch would vote to hear for the Constitutional reason(s). The four States did change their rules outside the legislative process. I thought their responses had some petty components, like PA claiming Texas' suit was "seditious", and they definitely made much of the validity (or lack thereof) of the claims from the affiants.

Their argument against Texas' standing was fair, as was their argument against 14th Amendment harm; but that's why I think the Court should have heard the case and issued a ruling.

[TSherbs]

Looking forward to Monday.

Welch, what is the record now? 56-1? I've lost count.

With such a record, there is no need for the SC to hear this to set anything straight. The opinions of the judicial community are deafening (unless one's ears are already closed).

This has been a bullshit case and a bullshit argument based on bullshit evidence from the start.

[Chuck Naill]

As one pundit said, the Republicans don't love Trump, they "fear" him and it must be "demeaning" for them to have to go along with the spectacle the president has created. I am sure they want him gone as much as the majority of the voters.

Even if you are a Trumpian, you cannot love democracy and approve of the path Trump has taken his entire term which began by forcing Shawn Spicer to overstate the number of people who showed up at this inaguration when the fact is, people stayed away in droves.

If there were ever an example of paying no attention "to the man behind the curtain" it has been D. Trump and it's been that way for his entire existant from the mouth of politicans, attorneys, former cabinate members, relatives, journalists, and former Republican politians who loved truth more than votes aka Jeff Flake and Bob Coker.

[TSherbs]

...But if you're going to assure the American voter that they can trust the election process, you have to do like Arizona and look into claims. Refusal to, and just calling them a bunch of delusional conspiracy theorists comes off as The Great Oz saying "pay no attention to that man behind the curtain". It only reinforces the perceived validity of conspiracy, and makes otherwise rational people more likely to subscribe to conspiracy theories.

This is not true. On more than one level.

First, every state has/had already quality-checked their own elections. This is what happens prior to certification. This is what hired professionals do for each state, at multiple levels. Elections are not, and have never been, quality-checked in the courts. Not even in 2000. If that state feels that sufficient inaccuracies have been found for recounts, then they conduct them. Prior to certification. This is the "assurance" process, and it is already built in. There is no additional quality-check necessary for reasonable and logical "assurance."

When persons or groups of people begin to truck in conspiracy theory beyond this quality check process, there is no obligation--rational, ethical, or legal--to make additional efforts to relieve them of their anxieties and/or delusions. Rational people and rational processes are not responsible for the delusions of others.

Let's put responsibility where it belongs (which is what the courts have done some 56+ times now!): If one is to put forth a challenge to a legal and vetted election result, then the CHALLENGER must supply the persuasive material evidence that pervasive and substantial inaccuracies have resulted. There is no rational or legal responsibility to even entertain the idea of a "person behind a curtain" until one demonstrates that both the curtain and the person are real.

That's the thing about delusional people. They assume from the start that the conspiracy/delusion is likely enough to be real, and then they ask others to take on the responsibility to disprove it.

But that's the argument from delusion.

[dneal]

...But if you're going to assure the American voter that they can trust the election process, you have to do like Arizona and look into claims. Refusal to, and just calling them a bunch of delusional conspiracy theorists comes off as The Great Oz saying "pay no attention to that man behind the curtain". It only reinforces the perceived validity of conspiracy, and makes otherwise rational people more likely to subscribe to conspiracy theories.

This is not true. On more than one level.

First, every state has/had already quality-checked their own elections. This is what happens prior to certification. This is what hired professionals do for each state, at multiple levels. Elections are not, and have never been, quality-checked in the courts. Not even in 2000. If that state feels that sufficient inaccuracies have been found for recounts, then they conduct them. Prior to certification. This is the "assurance" process, and it is already built in. There is no additional quality-check necessary for reasonable and logical "assurance."

When persons or groups of people begin to truck in conspiracy theory beyond this quality check process, there is no obligation--rational, ethical, or legal--to make additional efforts to relieve them of their anxieties and/or delusions. Rational people and rational processes are not responsible for the delusions of others.

Let's put responsibility where it belongs (which is what the courts have done some 56+ times now!): If one is to put forth a challenge to a legal and vetted election result, then the CHALLENGER must supply the persuasive material evidence that pervasive and substantial inaccuracies have resulted. There is no rational or legal responsibility to even entertain the idea of a "person behind a curtain" until one demonstrates that both the curtain and the person are real.

That's the thing about delusional people. They assume from the start that the conspiracy/delusion is likely enough to be real, and then they ask others to take on the responsibility to disprove it.

But that's the argument from delusion.

You miss the point completely.

Before the election, and depending on the source, roughly 50% of the entire electorate had confidence in our system. Doesn't matter if you polled Democrats or Republicans. Only 50% had confidence. Think about that for just a moment, and let it sink in. What kind of country do we live in when only half the voters trust the electoral process?

Post election, surveys indicate an increase in confidence among Democrats and a decrease among Republicans. I suspect the inverse was true after Hillary's, or Al Gore's loss. I also think you could find these swings in confidence in Kennedy's win over Nixon, Truman's win over Dewey, or any other cycle.

Sure there will always be "sour grapes" when one's "team" loses, and that applies to a whole lot more than elections. Certainly there will be the kooks on either side that hold "delusional" views. There's not a lot anyone can do about that. But to reiterate, only half of the electorate believes an election will be fair when going into it.

Instead of haphazardly labeling people who believe they have legitimate concerns as delusional, as you and Jocelyn Benson seem wont to do (which ironically seems appallingly similar to Trump's behavior); perhaps it would be better for the nation to address their concerns in a reasonable way. Perhaps it would be better to work to increase voter confidence across the board.

--edit--

While I'm bitching about the predominately liberal attitude to this, I'll add the conservatives that also foment concerns with election fairness. They aren't doing the country any favors either. Still, looking into the issue and demonstrating that there was no significant wrongdoing (or maybe discover there was) is what I am advocating would be beneficial.

[TSherbs]

How am I "missing the point completely"? I am directly addressing the point: what our govt ought to do to dispell lack of confidence.

My answer, directly on the point, is "nothing more than the states already do."

This time around, it would have helped if the POTUS had had a sock in his mouth and no Twitter account (even Barr couldn't repeat Trump's lies).

Again: there is no rational, legal, or ethical reason to doubt the quality control results of state reviews before state certification.

Which is directly on your point. I don't "miss" your point, dneal. I just think that it is spurious.

[TSherbs]

And NOW, the best thing that any one person could do to calm the waters would be for Trump to concede and say this: "Joe Biden has won the presidency with a legitimate and fair and accurate election. I was driven by ambition to question and undermine my followers' confidence in the result. I concede to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and will work to assist in the transition for the good of our country."

He does not have to do this, nor is it likely he will. But it would help with some of the lingering doubts that he helped to stoke for weeks and weeks, even going back to the 2016 result when he said that Dems stole 3 million votes from him.

[TSherbs]

Trump also amplified, primarily through Twitter, all the Deep State conspiracy nonsense that has popped up out of the AltRight. Trump is stupid enough and narcissistic enough to believe that trash, and he is manipulative enough to use it to his advantage, to divert attention away from the consequences of his own poor decisions and behaviors. Trump has dumped shit into the waters of the conversations for years, and one of the results has been an erosion of confidence in govt by the very party that is actually in control of two of the three branches. Thanks a lot, Donnie, for that mind-fuck.

[dneal]

"What the states already do" appears to be insufficient.

When side A claims side B cheated and side B is the authority to validate whether or not side B cheated; you can't be surprised that side A is skeptical of the results. Side B then goes on to slander and libel side A as "delusional" conspiracy theorists, and none of their claims should be further examined (if they even were in the first place). It's no surprise there is little voter confidence.

You keep interjecting Trump for some reason (I'll just assume it's your TDS/bias), and talk about not doubting the results before certification; which is election outcome related. Neither of those are my point, which you still miss or ignore.

I've said many times I don't give a fuck who wins the election. I care about the electorate trusting the process. They didn't before the election and they don't now.

[dneal]

Trump also amplified, primarily through Twitter, all the Deep State conspiracy nonsense that has popped up out of the AltRight. Trump is stupid enough and narcissistic enough to believe that trash, and he is manipulative enough to use it to his advantage, to divert attention away from the consequences of his own poor decisions and behaviors. Trump has dumped shit into the waters of the conversations for years, and one of the results has been an erosion of confidence in govt by the very party that is actually in control of two of the three branches. Thanks a lot, Donnie, for that mind-fuck.

Exhibit A for your TDS.

Your guy won. Why do you still harbor so much anger and resentment?

[TSherbs]

"What the states already do" appears to be insufficient.

When side A claims side B cheated and side B is the authority to validate whether or not side B cheated; you can't be surprised that side A is skeptical of the results. ..

But that is not even the case. I don't have to explain for the other readers of this thread.

This stuff is deep in your head, dude.

[TSherbs]

Trump also amplified, primarily through Twitter, all the Deep State conspiracy nonsense that has popped up out of the AltRight. Trump is stupid enough and narcissistic enough to believe that trash, and he is manipulative enough to use it to his advantage, to divert attention away from the consequences of his own poor decisions and behaviors. Trump has dumped shit into the waters of the conversations for years, and one of the results has been an erosion of confidence in govt by the very party that is actually in control of two of the three branches. Thanks a lot, Donnie, for that mind-fuck.

Exhibit A for your TDS.

Your guy won. Why do you still harbor so much anger and resentment?

My post explains my anger very clearly.

[dneal]

"What the states already do" appears to be insufficient.

When side A claims side B cheated and side B is the authority to validate whether or not side B cheated; you can't be surprised that side A is skeptical of the results. ..

But that is not even the case. I don't have to explain for the other readers of this thread.

This stuff is deep in your head, dude.

I'm curious how you know what is or isn't the case, when you admit you paid no attention to the hearings, affiants' testimony, or the affidavits themselves. Instead, you rely on your characterization of what courts were deciding and why. Example? You gleefully post that the SC ruled against Kelly in PA. What in fact actually happened was that Kelley asked for an injunction while the case was proceeding in the lower court. The SC declined to grant that injunction.

You've been playing loose with facts, presenting your clearly biased opinion as representative of the facts. I'm sorry if I don't take seriously your understanding of what's rational when you can't demonstrate the behavior.

There are tiers of evidence, usually applicable at different points. Does "reasonable suspicion" sound like a legal term? If so, what does that normally lead to? Perhaps a warrant (in criminal cases)? What about "preponderance of the evidence"? You seem to be limited to "beyond reasonable doubt", because you've formed your conclusion.

I've read the affidavits. I've watched the testimony from those affiants in several hearings. I find the majority to have presented reasonable suspicion of some wrongdoing or negligence. I didn't find it to be convincing proof that "the election was stolen". That's a nuance you continue to miss or ignore, but I imagine it's hard to see anything objectively when you're influenced by the vitriolic anger you demonstrate. Of course, you would have to look first if you were to see anything; and you have made clear that you're not interested in looking.

Many other people have seen the circumstantial evidence. It's reported in various sources of varied political leaning. It's reasonable for that to undermine confidence in the integrity of the system. It doesn't matter what the outcome of the election is. It doesn't matter whether or not a pipe burst at the counting center in Atlanta. What matters is that reasonable concerns are addressed fairly in order to increase voter confidence. Your Trump tirades and "delusional conspiracy theorist" accusations are not addressing a reasonable concern fairly.

As for what is deep in my head, it's strange that you can't or won't articulate exactly what it is that you think is deep in my head. I'll take a stab at it though. I suspect that you are so blinded by your Trump-induced rage that you can only envision that an opposing view must be an equally blind Trump-loving outrage at the election result. You do have a penchant for false dichotomies, after all; not to mention a tendency to set up strawmen.

What's clear is that Trump remains deep in your head. That's unfortunate, because life's way too short to waste so much emotional energy. "BUT, BUT, BUT... TRUMP IS A BIG LYING MEANINE!!!", you lunatics will scream as the spittle flies from your mouth. It's hilarious, and you should be embarrassed that you're so easily triggered by something so insignificant.

[TSherbs]

Calm down, dneal.

I hear you say that you are not a Trumper. I accept this. I have never said otherwise.

What I see in your arguments here (thus in your head) is a persistent suspicion of the legitimacy of this election and a corollary spurious application of logic to the evidence and to the arguments in these court cases. You persist in the "yes, but" vein of argument despite the continual lack through 56+ court cases, including that presented to the SC, of any persuasive evidence of any pervasive or systemic fraud or inaccuracies in the counting, no matter what party (team A or team B) is actually in charge of that state government.

This persistence, despite having no substantial or even mildly persuasive material evidence, is what I call "in your head." Maybe you don't support Trump. But you sure cling to these "possibilities" and suspicions, etc. I think it's clear that you consider the suspicions and fears and alternate possibilities valid. I consider them manipulative and corrosive fictions.

[dneal]

I'm quite calm. I don't suspect the legitimacy of the election, but I also wouldn't be surprised if it were "stolen". I see evidence, but it's not persuasive for me at this point and it doesn't constitute proof. I do understand why people are convinced by it though.

The more left the media (or politician), the more in line with the "nothing to see here, you delusional pricks" the messaging gets. The media (and politicians) on the right pick that up and run with it for their own purposes. The opposite is true as well, for what it's worth.

I'm concerned with disinformation from both sides. I'm concerned with societal breakdown. The left is already happy to smash windows, burn things, and all the other things we saw over the past year; and media calls it "mostly peaceful". The right hasn't gotten to that point yet. If they ever do, it will be exponentially worse than anything we've seen from the left. I'm an operational planner. We always consider the enemy's "most likely course of action", and "most dangerous course of action". "Enemy" isn't a perfectly applicable term here, but I suppose "societal breakdown" is the enemy in this context.

MAGA is protesting in D.C. today. They brought their kids. They'll pick up their trash. Antifa / BLM types will show up and instigate a clash with Proud Boy types. I'm not worried about that. That's the "most likely course of action". I'm worried about when the right starts acting like Clive Bundy and his supporters (see Nevada Standoff). When they decide to make a stand and refuse to budge. That's the "most dangerous course of action".

My point is that this needs to be defused. You do that by addressing the concerns no matter how illegitimate you think they are. You don't do it by dismissing them or ridiculing them.

[TSherbs]

I'm quite calm. I don't suspect the legitimacy of the election, but I also wouldn't be surprised if it were "stolen". I see evidence, but it's not persuasive for me at this point and it doesn't constitute proof. I do understand why people are convinced by it though.

Like I said, the possibility of conspiracy without any evidence even nearly convincing to an objective court judge has a pull on you.

It has no pull on me.

If the act of telling an addict that he is, in fact, addicted to a harmful substance, drives that person to further addiction, that is not the responsibility of the truth-teller. The conspiracy theorists need to take responsibility for their own actions and consequences, including the effect on the culture of 56+ bogus court cases.

It makes entire logical sense to me that Trump lost all these states in question, that he both received more votes than he did in 2016 AND lost to Joe Biden. The craziest, least likely, most complicated, least evidential, and least logical conclusion is that there was a conspiracy to defraud the election in any of these states. After all, Trump's electoral victory while also losing the popular vote by 3 million votes ACTUALLY was the statistically (historically) rarer occurrence. And after all of Trump's missteps and gaffs and inaction on Coronavirus and the unrest of the social justice movement (and Trump's deaf ears and winks to white nationalists), and then the GOP resistance to mail-in voting and the politicization of mail-in voting, how is it any wonder to anyone that the increase in Dem votes outpaced the increase in GOP votes? The GOP has acknowledged for years that as turnout % increases, they lose the majority. Trump has even said this on the record. Well, what happened? Turnout % increased, and Trump lost BOTH the popular vote and the EC. The Dems lost in 2016 because HC did not focus enough on certain swing states. They did not make that mistake again.

No fraud, no inaccuracy, no conspiracy, no "steal." Just plain lack of popularity in comparison to the desire for change to a different kind of leader and a battle over turnout that the Dems won. Trump's approval rating has been historically low, and has shown resilience against improvement.

[dneal]

I’ve already said that a strategy focusing on metro areas in battleground states (if that was the strategy) was brilliant. You keep focusing on the actual legitimacy of the election. I’m talking about the perceived legitimacy. You also seem to ignore (again) my point.


My point is that this [perception of illegitimacy] needs to be defused. You do that by addressing the concerns no matter how illegitimate you think they are. You don't do it by dismissing them or ridiculing them.

[TSherbs]

True. And I argue that the states and the courts have done more than enough to dispel these perceptions. And certainly, contrary to your earlier claim, the SC need not take up the case simply to dispell perceptions. As I and others, including the courts, have said, that is what the States have already done. All 50 of them. Some of them multiple times!

Time to let go of the conspiracies. The thrill and excuse making of the fiction is over.

[dneal]

So it’s true that you don’t defuse concerns by dismissing or ridiculing them.

And

“Time to let go of the conspiracies. The thrill and excuse making of the fiction is over.”

[Freddie]

dneal wrote:I'm quite calm. I don't suspect the legitimacy of the election, but I also wouldn't be surprised if it were "stolen". I see evidence, but it's not persuasive for me at this point and it doesn't constitute proof. I do understand why people are convinced by it though.

Inconsequential. Ya know more of your claptrap. We have a sitting President that wants to be a dictator and has been
trying to invalidate a democratic election. With the help of various individuals ... including members of Congress who by doing so
have engaged in a insurrection..ie violated their oath to the Constitution of the USA.



Fred
The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.

[dneal]

More of your TDS, as you’ve demonstrated since the second post of the thread.

Fascinatin‘

[Freddie]

More of your TDS, as you’ve demonstrated since the second post of the thread.

Fascinatin‘

Yo Pal Same BS from day one... I'm sure you'll respond...With usual BS.....

Still your friend and mine,

Fred

[kazoolaw]

The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.

Fred-

Appreciate your self-deprecating humor: this helps not only with your posts, but TS's too.

Be well!

[Chuck Naill]

The problem with this discussion is we are not really trying to connect and understand the other sides position. When Trump won in 2016 the feelings I had are probaby the same as many Trump voters are feeling now. Then it was a Russian involvement and now it is voter fraud. Why cannot we see that it is possible to think the reason our side won or lost is rooted in what most voters wanted? Why do we believe some other reason exists?

Trump lost the popular vote in 2016. He lost it this time as well. He also got the second most votes of a candidate in US history. He must appeal to a lot of people, just not enough to win the electorial college. So, in 2016 Trumpians were joyful he won without the majority, but now it is different???

[dneal]

Chuck,

I am a member of a gun forum where the politics lean much to the right. Like here, many of the posters are upset with me because I offer opinions contrary to theirs. In that case, I point out that there is no proof of fraud, and that it's circumstantial evidence at this point. That alone is enough to launch people into tirades of various intensity. It doesn't matter that I also say I agree it needs to be looked into (for the same reasons I say it here). Here, it is insinuated I'm a Trumpist. There, it's insinuated I'm an anti-Trumper. Each forum has members with equal bias, only on the opposite political spectrum. Like most forums, there is a spectrum of civility exercised. There, just like here, I respond with the same amount of respect and consideration I receive.

I don't think the popular vote is an issue for "Trumpians" either way. To understand the other side's position, or to use "strategic empathy" I mentioned in an earlier post; the Trump supporter sees many novel occurrences that they believe constitutes "proof" of a rigged election. It's exacerbated by pollsters who go into detail on just how supposedly improbably these novel occurrences are. It's exacerbated by political historians and pundits that point out the historical (Democrat) corruption of a few of those cities - Philadelphia and Detroit in particular. It's exacerbated by a change in voting rules (mainly mail-in ballots) that occurred this year (again, a novel incident). It's exacerbated by media and the echo chambers they retreat to which only further reinforces their belief(s). It's exacerbated by the opposite media that dismisses or "fact-checks" (poorly, I might add) their "evidence". I see clearly why they suspect fraud. I see that their argument has some plausibility, however improbable it may be.

Yes, there are similarities with 2016 when all we heard from one side was "Russian Collusion". That notion was reinforced in much the same way this year's conspiracy is. Three years after that election, several million dollars spent, a special prosecutor unable to make a case and yet many still believe it. It's not surprising to anyone paying attention to the polarization and reinforcement of it. In my former profession we would call it an "information campaign", and there is an entire career field dedicated to influencing populations.

Mark Twain wrote: "We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking". That's the reason we look for some other reason for our candidate's loss. It's a form of cognitive dissonance, and we let our emotions override our reason. Curiously, it seems that some believe I'm trying to convince them of the validity of the pro-Trump argument. I'm actually just trying to crack the door to their echo-chamber, and get them to see the other side's view and why that side thinks it has merit. No good will come of our continued polarization, and should either side reach a tipping point it will be particularly painful. The right reaching that tipping point is much more dangerous than the left.

You might find the 2016 election thread interesting (https://fpgeeks.com/forum/showthread.php/18213-Choices)

[dneal]

More of your TDS, as you’ve demonstrated since the second post of the thread.

Fascinatin‘

Yo Pal Same BS from day one... I'm sure you'll respond...With usual BS.....

Still your friend and mine,

Fred

Fred,

Has it dawned on you that my responses to you are nearly identical to what you post? Surely you see by now that there's no value in that sort of exchange. I get a chuckle out of it, but I'd rather engage in something more substantial than our reiterations of "BS" and "TDS".

D

[TSherbs]

My discussion isn't at all about "appeal." I grant the appeal of all sides. I accept the vote count of both sides. I did so in 2016 also. Whatever the Russian influence was on the votes via their media mucking about (this is established), I don't think that it swung the election. My upset about 2016 was only that the Russians were mucking about in our shit at all and we were none-the-wiser. I later became upset that Trump was denying their actions when his own intelligence agency conclusions were to the contrary. The 2016 result was legit, and HC conceded. I have/had no belief that outside or inside agency actually changed the outcome of that election. Same as I feel about this one. The investigation into "collusion" does not require that the possible coordination actually have a determining effect on the result of the election.

I didn't blame the Russians; I blamed the Dems for not exposing Trump's giant con more effectively and for not getting out more of their voters. Fortunately, the Dems did not make that mistake again. Trump and his cadre just can't take the loss with any grace, maturity, or rationality.

[TSherbs]

And I should add that the intelligence community concluded that Russian interference in 2016 was real. The state reviews and gov't reviews this time around determined that the conspiracies of voter fraud were false.

So, let's not make false equivalencies here. In fact, the whole debate is about what is actually real and what is not. I am not interested in coddling or massaging or otherwise nurturing conspiracy theories in order to assuage their stubbornness or fears. Truth is the virtue.

[Chuck Naill]

Nothing new under the sun.
"“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” Charles Dickens

Heck yes it was real and Trump's boy was in up over his head as he's always been according to the "fam".

When has it been strange for a boy/son to be president....AKA George Bush Tw0

[TSherbs]

And NOW, the best thing that any one person could do to calm the waters would be for Trump to concede and say this: "Joe Biden has won the presidency with a legitimate and fair and accurate election. I was driven by ambition to question and undermine my followers' confidence in the result. I concede to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and will work to assist in the transition for the good of our country."

I checked Trump's Twitter feed to see if he shared my sentiments on this.

Nope.

More lies and divisive entrenchment.

Atta boy, Donnie. Way to lead!

I am aware, by the way, that Donnie wrote in his book "never apologize." Awesome, that.

[dneal]

And I should add that the intelligence community concluded that Russian interference in 2016 was real. The state reviews and gov't reviews this time around determined that the conspiracies of voter fraud were false.

So, let's not make false equivalencies here. In fact, the whole debate is about what is actually real and what is not. I am not interested in coddling or massaging or otherwise nurturing conspiracy theories in order to assuage their stubbornness or fears. Truth is the virtue.

James Clapper, 2017 testimony to the House Intelligence Committee:

"“I never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting/conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election,”

“That’s not to say that there weren’t concerns about the evidence we were seeing, anecdotal evidence. … But I do not recall any instance where I had direct evidence,”

So do we want to talk about delusional conspiracy theories, or not?

[dneal]

Nothing new under the sun.
"“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” Charles Dickens

Heck yes it was real and Trump's boy was in up over his head as he's always been according to the "fam".

When has it been strange for a boy/son to be president....AKA George Bush Tw0

Chuck, you should stop pretending. You're not interested in seeing another side or engaging in reasonable discussion.

[TSherbs]

And I should add that the intelligence community concluded that Russian interference in 2016 was real. The state reviews and gov't reviews this time around determined that the conspiracies of voter fraud were false.

So, let's not make false equivalencies here. In fact, the whole debate is about what is actually real and what is not. I am not interested in coddling or massaging or otherwise nurturing conspiracy theories in order to assuage their stubbornness or fears. Truth is the virtue.

James Clapper, 2017 testimony to the House Intelligence Committee:

"“I never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting/conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election,”

“That’s not to say that there weren’t concerns about the evidence we were seeing, anecdotal evidence. … But I do not recall any instance where I had direct evidence,”

So do we want to talk about delusional conspiracy theories, or not?

Go for it.

I was referring to the evidence of Russian presence and influence in social media.

I don't believe in the "collusion" theory.

But you can write about it all you want. Maybe start a separate thread on it and see if anyone wants to debate that. This thread is on this election.

[dneal]

But you can write about it all you want. Maybe start a separate thread on it and see if anyone wants to debate that. This thread is on this election.

HA!! Why in the world would I want to do that? To hear more hyperbole on the evil of the orange one? To demonstrate your contradictions, only to have you evade, or quibble semantics? No thanks.


And I should add that the intelligence community concluded that Russian interference in 2016 was real. The state reviews and gov't reviews this time around determined that the conspiracies of voter fraud were false.

For posterity, it was you who found it "necessary to add". BTW, the gov't reviews also determined that Russian Collusion was false. ;)

[TSherbs]

HA!! Why in the world would I want to do that?

I guessed you might because you keep bringing it up. :noidea:

[TSherbs]

Best political analysis I've seen yet :)

https://youtu.be/GP_K5czbny4

[dneal]

HA!! Why in the world would I want to do that?

I guessed you might because you keep bringing it up. :noidea:

I'm pretty sure that you're the one who gave it credence. I've pointed out the ridiculousness and hypocrisy of it.

[Chuck Naill]

You two should give each other a phone call.

[dneal]

You should stop trying to moderate the forum.

[welch]

What can cause deeply-believing Trump-voters to admit to themselves that the US elections of 2020 have been, as have all American national elections (except 1877), honest, fair, and almost hum-drum in all states and counties?

We have seen the Trump Campaign file suit after suit -- almost sixty suits by now -- and lose over and over as it attempts to present evidence. I have read ruling after ruling. Each one demonstrates that the judges has carefully considered the Trump case and ruled against it.

- Again and again, the Trump Campaign stipulated that same facts as the defending states. We do not claim fraud, said Giuliani in court. No matter what he said in front of TV cameras outside a court.

- Again and again, the Trump campaign presented affidavits that judges ruled inadmissible because the Trump campaign did not -- neglected to -- depose their affidavit-makers to examination or cross-examination. (See, for instance, Judge Stewart's detailed ruling in Nevada).

- Again and again, as in Michigan, judges evaluated Trump Campaign witnesses and found them not credible. In the rulings the judges explain why.

- Again and again, the Trump Campaign introduced expert witnesses who do not appear to be experts and who could not justify their opinions. (Again, easiest to spot in Judge Stewart's Nevada case)

What else can we conclude but that true-believing Trump followers will not believe anything except whatever comforts their beliefs that Trump was defeated by "libtard" magic?

Having lost every case they brought to court, Trumpists have vowed to:

- hold their believe in non-reality as long as Trump asks them,

- fight the results of the honest 2020 election in the House and Senate in January

- file more cases, I think, even though the Electoral College is voting right now (at 1:38pm, EST, Biden leads Trump 166 - 103)

- ask Trump to declare martial law and to overthrow the election.

All of that seems madness. It seems oblivious to reality. Conclusion: only Trumpists can stop this, and probably only Trump can stop his followers. Ordinary, "hum-drum", Republicans have spoken with realism throughout the Trump Campaign's campaign against the elections. Reading up from county and state elections officials, it is impossible to tell, without looking up party labels, whether those officials are officially members of the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. I doubt that even senior Republicans can speak election reality to the country without directly contradicting Trump. By specifics, by detail of every Trump tweet and speech. When they do it, they seem to lose standing as senior Republicans. Perhaps after the Electoral College vote more will be free to do it, but not so far, judging from the irrational howls from the two Republican candidates for US Senate in Georgia.

Any other ideas?

[TSherbs]

...All of that seems madness. It seems oblivious to reality. Yup. It's a mass psychological problem that I have called delusion. There is a fervent belief in what is not real. Either that, or a very cynical massive manipulative lie.


Any other ideas? Nope. Maybe just wait for the GOP to tear itself apart and put itself back together again. That will probably take a while. But maybe, if voter turnout stays high and the Dems keep winning, the GOP will come to its senses, become more inclusive, give up the idea that it has to veer right in order to win, and get back to more mainstream and professional values and practices. Electing Trump was a dead-end.

[TSherbs]

@2:40 EST, the submitted count is Biden 171, Trump 158

Wait. That is too close to call! Wait, is there going to be another massive ballot dump in the next few hours? What are the odds that a race this close at 2:40 pm will have Biden at 306 at the end? Ten quadrillion to 1??? Wait, what about Burisma???? And Chavez?? And unmarked vans and "suitcases"???????

[kazoolaw]

Wait, is there going to be another massive ballot dump in the next few hours? What are the odds that a race this close at 2:40 pm will have Biden at 306 at the end? Ten quadrillion to 1??? Wait, what about Burisma???? And Chavez?? And unmarked vans and "suitcases"???????

Wait, are you saying the electoral college system is working? That the legal system is working?

[Ray-VIgo]

It seems to me that neither side will be convinced by anything the other will say in our present circumstances. I have become increasingly convinced over the past few years, that our country is headed into what one might call a "simmering" sort of civil war with spasms of unrest and violence, and sense that each side is living in what amounts to a separate country (perhaps a separate "reality" from a political standpoint).

I am reminded of a couple things: an 1820 letter written by Thomas Jefferson in which he saw the admission of Missouri to the Union through compromise as, Discussing the question of Missouri's admission to the Union, Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Holmes, "like a fire bell in the night" and, "a reprieve only, not a final sentence."

I am also reminded of a portion of an early speech Abraham Lincoln made in 1838, in which he noted:

"At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."

I fear there is a sort of denial in which people think to themselves that we go through periods of unrest, but ultimately it turns out to be OK and sort of muddle through as best we can. The problem is that sometimes your political system passes the point of no return before anyone realizes it. I think many people who voted for Biden voted for a seeming "return to normal", but that this will not heal the deep national wounds that exist and we're in for a very rough time for several years based on the right and left entrenching themselves ever deeper. It's not that I think disunion will be the thing, but that we'll enter a period where the country is so hopelessly divided that it becomes unable to function, even though the shells and form of the institutions continue to exist.

[welch]

It seems to me that neither side will be convinced by anything the other will say in our present circumstances. I have become increasingly convinced over the past few years, that our country is headed into what one might call a "simmering" sort of civil war with spasms of unrest and violence, and sense that each side is living in what amounts to a separate country (perhaps a separate "reality" from a political standpoint).

***

I fear there is a sort of denial in which people think to themselves that we go through periods of unrest, but ultimately it turns out to be OK and sort of muddle through as best we can. The problem is that sometimes your political system passes the point of no return before anyone realizes it. I think many people who voted for Biden voted for a seeming "return to normal", but that this will not heal the deep national wounds that exist and we're in for a very rough time for several years based on the right and left entrenching themselves ever deeper. It's not that I think disunion will be the thing, but that we'll enter a period where the country is so hopelessly divided that it becomes unable to function, even though the shells and form of the institutions continue to exist.

- Ray, tell us how Trumpists come to accept reality? Go through their claims that their Leader was, somehow, cheated by fraud from his "landslide victory" in November. Consider that they have not demonstrated anything in any of the 58 court cases that claimed fraud. What can change their minds?

- What do you mean by "left and right"? I see that the far right-wing has taken much of the Republican Party, although how much is a personal loyalty to Trump I can't see. Why claim that there is an equally divorced-from-reality "left" and that "left" lives in the Democratic Party? Yes, Trump is off his rocker, but that does not prove that anyone who disagrees with Trump is equally off their rocker.

It would be nice if the crazy Trumpists took their belief in The Kraken off to the same corners where everyone believes that the world is under attack from lizard-people, or that the Oklahoma City bombing was an inside job. That would allow Republicans with a normal grip on reality to operate in and argue within the same reality the rest of us do. My fear, though, is that the hardest-core Trumpists, showing themselves in the "Stop the Steal" demonstrations (and Arizona Republican Party call to die for Trump), will hang on.

[welch]

Here is what Americans expect. Good for Republicans in the Michigan legislature.


Michigan Republican leaders affirm state’s electoral votes and reprimand lawmaker who suggested there might be violence.

The two most senior leaders in the Michigan legislature, both Republicans, on Monday affirmed the state’s electoral votes that would formalize Joseph R. Biden’s victory, as a fellow lawmaker was punished for suggesting there may be violence at the meeting of electors.

In blistering terms, House Speaker Lee Chatfield wrote that he “can’t fathom risking our norms, traditions and institutions to pass a resolution retroactively changing the electors for Trump, simply because some think there may have been enough widespread fraud to give him the win,” describing such a move as “unprecedented for good reason.”

“That’s why there is not enough support in the House to cast a new slate of electors,” he added. “I fear we’d lose our country forever. This truly would bring mutually assured destruction for every future election in regards to the Electoral College. And I can’t stand for that. I won’t.”

Last month, Mr. Chatfield and Mike Shirkey, the state Senate majority leader, were both summoned by President Trump to the White House in a bid to get lawmakers to substitute their own slate of electors. The two men, both rumored to be interested in higher office, went through with the visit but rebuffed Mr. Trump’s request.


https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/14/us/michigan-republican-leaders-affirm-states-electoral-votes-and-reprimand-lawmaker-who-suggested-there-might-be-violence.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage

[TSherbs]

Biden 302, Trump 232 (@ 6:11PM EST)

Only Hawaii still left.... (4 votes, going to Biden)

So, it is working out exactly as it was projected and "called" after all the first counts were finished.

Some friggin' "Kraken," huh?

Except the crazies will say things like, "Well, of course it worked out that way. That's how you know that there is a Deep State!" For the truly delusional, all scenarios reinforce the delusion. There is no limit to the twisted logic that the human brain can apply.

[TSherbs]

Here is what Americans expect. Good for Republicans in the Michigan legislature.


Michigan Republican leaders affirm state’s electoral votes and reprimand lawmaker who suggested there might be violence.

The two most senior leaders in the Michigan legislature, both Republicans, on Monday affirmed the state’s electoral votes that would formalize Joseph R. Biden’s victory, as a fellow lawmaker was punished for suggesting there may be violence at the meeting of electors.

In blistering terms, House Speaker Lee Chatfield wrote that he “can’t fathom risking our norms, traditions and institutions to pass a resolution retroactively changing the electors for Trump, simply because some think there may have been enough widespread fraud to give him the win,” describing such a move as “unprecedented for good reason.”

“That’s why there is not enough support in the House to cast a new slate of electors,” he added. “I fear we’d lose our country forever. This truly would bring mutually assured destruction for every future election in regards to the Electoral College. And I can’t stand for that. I won’t.”

Last month, Mr. Chatfield and Mike Shirkey, the state Senate majority leader, were both summoned by President Trump to the White House in a bid to get lawmakers to substitute their own slate of electors. The two men, both rumored to be interested in higher office, went through with the visit but rebuffed Mr. Trump’s request.


https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/14/us/michigan-republican-leaders-affirm-states-electoral-votes-and-reprimand-lawmaker-who-suggested-there-might-be-violence.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage

Yes, but Michigan is one spooky place with plenty of gun-toting wackos. They had to close the government buildings because the State Police reported credible threats of violence. Jeez.

[dneal]

- Ray, tell us how Trumpists come to accept reality? Go through their claims that their Leader was, somehow, cheated by fraud from his "landslide victory" in November. Consider that they have not demonstrated anything in any of the 58 court cases that claimed fraud. What can change their minds?

Not Ray, but it seems to me the "Trumpists" believe they haven't had their case really heard. The Supreme Court's denial of Texas' suit for lack of standing is an example. The court should have heard the case, and then ruled against Texas' claims.

A good example is the belief in manipulation of Dominion systems. They think States are rushing to "destroy the evidence" and wipe systems. I'm only aware of one case in Michigan where a court has ordered these systems analyzed by experts, and that originated from three votes changing a marijuana law when they were manually recounted. "Krakenists" ;) are party to the inspection (it's some security organization from Texas), and the MI Secretary of State has attempted to block this, and now is trying to keep the results under seal.

That lack of transparency fuels conspiracy. It's also picked up by right wing outlets and amplified. They're stuck in their echo-chambers and being fed even more information that confirms their beliefs.

So if you want them to accept reality, you need to satisfy their conspiratorial curiosity (to a reasonable extent). You have to bust the myth, and you do that by demonstrating it's a myth; not just calling them crazy and ignoring them.


- What do you mean by "left and right"? I see that the far right-wing has taken much of the Republican Party, although how much is a personal loyalty to Trump I can't see. Why claim that there is an equally divorced-from-reality "left" and that "left" lives in the Democratic Party? Yes, Trump is off his rocker, but that does not prove that anyone who disagrees with Trump is equally off their rocker.

I'm curious, are you not aware of the existence of a radical left? Of a #walkaway movement of more centrist Democrats? It's not a Trump thing. There are many liberal intellectuals who have distanced themselves, and they're now labeled "The Intellectual Dark Web" while the radical left protests outside their lectures or talks. Bret Weinstein is a liberal biological/evolutionary theorist. Look at the Evergreen College incident. See Douglas Murray's The Madness of Crowds, or any of his hour-long interviews on Youtube. I can point you to some of the better ones, if you like.


It would be nice if the crazy Trumpists took their belief in The Kraken off to the same corners where everyone believes that the world is under attack from lizard-people, or that the Oklahoma City bombing was an inside job. That would allow Republicans with a normal grip on reality to operate in and argue within the same reality the rest of us do. My fear, though, is that the hardest-core Trumpists, showing themselves in the "Stop the Steal" demonstrations (and Arizona Republican Party call to die for Trump), will hang on.

The thing I don't think you understand is that there are a whole lot of honest, average decent people who go from curious to suspicious to convinced in these conspiracy theories. Dismiss them at your own peril. There's much more to fear than them just "hanging on". Ray is right about the danger of a tipping point. I've raised that issue as well.

[dneal]

Here is what Americans expect. Good for Republicans in the Michigan legislature.


Michigan Republican leaders affirm state’s electoral votes and reprimand lawmaker who suggested there might be violence.

The two most senior leaders in the Michigan legislature, both Republicans, on Monday affirmed the state’s electoral votes that would formalize Joseph R. Biden’s victory, as a fellow lawmaker was punished for suggesting there may be violence at the meeting of electors.

In blistering terms, House Speaker Lee Chatfield wrote that he “can’t fathom risking our norms, traditions and institutions to pass a resolution retroactively changing the electors for Trump, simply because some think there may have been enough widespread fraud to give him the win,” describing such a move as “unprecedented for good reason.”

“That’s why there is not enough support in the House to cast a new slate of electors,” he added. “I fear we’d lose our country forever. This truly would bring mutually assured destruction for every future election in regards to the Electoral College. And I can’t stand for that. I won’t.”

Last month, Mr. Chatfield and Mike Shirkey, the state Senate majority leader, were both summoned by President Trump to the White House in a bid to get lawmakers to substitute their own slate of electors. The two men, both rumored to be interested in higher office, went through with the visit but rebuffed Mr. Trump’s request.


https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/14/us/michigan-republican-leaders-affirm-states-electoral-votes-and-reprimand-lawmaker-who-suggested-there-might-be-violence.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage

Yes, but Michigan is one spooky place with plenty of gun-toting wackos. They had to close the government buildings because the State Police reported credible threats of violence. Jeez.

Think a little deeper along this train of thought. Who likely leans to the Trump supporting, gun-toting "wacko" point of view?

- Oil workers
- Food producers
- Transportation workers
- Energy providers
- Law Enforcement
- Military

Essentially, the entirety of the infrastructure.

Compare that to the left:

- Journalists
- Actors / artists
- Educators and intellectuals
- Bankers and businessmen

Feel free to add what you think I omitted.

These people have watched the radical left burn cities. They've had "lockdown" initiatives destroy their livelihoods. They believe democrat politicians are taking away their liberty, with Biden and Co promising more of the same. Now they believe an election has been stolen. You need to take 70+ million very pissed off people, very seriously. Your boys from Southie certainly won't be kicking their asses, nor will some skinny malcontents in black masks.

You've got a brushfire right now. You can put it out, or you can let it spiral out of control.

[Freddie]

The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.

Fred-

Appreciate your self-deprecating humor: this helps not only with your posts, but TS's too.

Be well!



Thank you young man....Take care.........

Fred

[Freddie]

More of your TDS, as you’ve demonstrated since the second post of the thread.

Fascinatin‘

Yo Pal Same BS from day one... I'm sure you'll respond...With usual BS.....

Still your friend and mine,

Fred

Fred,

Has it dawned on you that my responses to you are nearly identical to what you post? Surely you see by now that there's no value in that sort of exchange. I get a chuckle out of it, but I'd rather engage in something more substantial than our reiterations of "BS" and "TDS".

D

Still more of your claptrap. {freakin'happysmileyfacetimethingie} Continue on young fella enjoy.

Fred
chow time....

[TSherbs]

And....it's done.

Biden 306, Trump 232

Deadline met.

December 23: EC votes delivered to Washington

January 6: EC votes counted in Congress

I anticipate that ugliness and delusional objections will continue.

[welch]

dneal writes,
Not Ray, but it seems to me the "Trumpists" believe they haven't had their case really heard. The Supreme Court's denial of Texas' suit for lack of standing is an example. The court should have heard the case, and then ruled against Texas' claims.

A good example is the belief in manipulation of Dominion systems. They think States are rushing to "destroy the evidence" and wipe systems. I'm only aware of one case in Michigan where a court has ordered these systems analyzed by experts, and that originated from three votes changing a marijuana law when they were manually recounted. "Krakenists" are party to the inspection (it's some security organization from Texas), and the MI Secretary of State has attempted to block this, and now is trying to keep the results under seal.

That lack of transparency fuels conspiracy. It's also picked up by right wing outlets and amplified. They're stuck in their echo-chambers and being fed even more information that confirms their beliefs.

So if you want them to accept reality, you need to satisfy their conspiratorial curiosity (to a reasonable extent). You have to bust the myth, and you do that by demonstrating it's a myth; not just calling them crazy and ignoring them.

What Trump Campaign claim was NOT taken to court, judged, and rejected? Which of the judgements was dishonest?

The Texas suit pointed to the claims as if they had not been dismissed whenever argued and examined. Often enough, the Trump Campaign, Inc., was afraid to present those claims. All too often, they agreed with the targets -- counties and states -- that there was no evidence of fraud. Trump argued and lost in state trial courts, in state supreme courts, in US district courts, and in US appeals courts.

Why can anyone complain that the Supreme Court did not hear details of the Texas claims?

[TSherbs]

You've got a brushfire right now. You can put it out, or you can let it spiral out of control.

It's not the job of the rational to end the delusions of the crazy. Let's have a little self-responsibility. It's not those rational, professional, responsible Michigan lawmakers and EC electors who are causing the threats of violence in Michigan.

[TSherbs]

Why can anyone complain that the Supreme Court did not hear details of the Texas claims?

Yeah, after 60+ cases? And the SC DOES read their submitted materials and the responses from the defendant States? In other words, after they actually DO read their request? They read the request and DENIED it. Alito and Thomas even projected that if they heard it, they would still reject it. The SC knew fully what the case was about. They knew what was being asked and on what grounds. The arguments were enumerated in the request. They were read. They were rejected, on standing and on relief requested.

How can anyone complain? Cuz anyone can complain about anything, especially on the internet.

But logically or persuasively complain? Yeah, you are right. They can't.

[welch]

dneal writes,


I'm curious, are you not aware of the existence of a radical left? Of a #walkaway movement of more centrist Democrats? It's not a Trump thing. There are many liberal intellectuals who have distanced themselves, and they're now labeled "The Intellectual Dark Web" while the radical left protests outside their lectures or talks. Bret Weinstein is a liberal biological/evolutionary theorist. Look at the Evergreen College incident. See Douglas Murray's The Madness of Crowds, or any of his hour-long interviews on Youtube. I can point you to some of the better ones, if you like.

I know the "radical left" better than these do. I became a New Leftist when I was in Junior High School in the early 1960's, when I had come to admire Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and read about SNCC's allies, Students for a Democratic Society. The Civil Rights Movement had the most heroic and decent people I knew about. Later, I worked against the War in Vietnam, argued against all the various little Leninist cult groups that tried to build themselves by picking members from SDS, and, out of self-defense, learned the Old Left inside and out. Having been a member of New American Movement, our last-ditch attempt to revive a non-dogmatic and experimental organization of the sort that SDS had once claimed to be, I was among the founding members of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

Some college kids are, I think, well-meaning liberal children with no idea how or why to persuade anyone to make a better society. Maybe they will learn, but they do not tell me what to think or do. Not DSA, as best I understand DSA now.

[dneal]

dneal writes,
Not Ray, but it seems to me the "Trumpists" believe they haven't had their case really heard. The Supreme Court's denial of Texas' suit for lack of standing is an example. The court should have heard the case, and then ruled against Texas' claims.

A good example is the belief in manipulation of Dominion systems. They think States are rushing to "destroy the evidence" and wipe systems. I'm only aware of one case in Michigan where a court has ordered these systems analyzed by experts, and that originated from three votes changing a marijuana law when they were manually recounted. "Krakenists" are party to the inspection (it's some security organization from Texas), and the MI Secretary of State has attempted to block this, and now is trying to keep the results under seal.

That lack of transparency fuels conspiracy. It's also picked up by right wing outlets and amplified. They're stuck in their echo-chambers and being fed even more information that confirms their beliefs.

So if you want them to accept reality, you need to satisfy their conspiratorial curiosity (to a reasonable extent). You have to bust the myth, and you do that by demonstrating it's a myth; not just calling them crazy and ignoring them.

What Trump Campaign claim was NOT taken to court, judged, and rejected? Which of the judgements was dishonest?

The Texas suit pointed to the claims as if they had not been dismissed whenever argued and examined. Often enough, the Trump Campaign, Inc., was afraid to present those claims. All too often, they agreed with the targets -- counties and states -- that there was no evidence of fraud. Trump argued and lost in state trial courts, in state supreme courts, in US district courts, and in US appeals courts.

Why can anyone complain that the Supreme Court did not hear details of the Texas claims?

I don't dispute that. It's not resonating with them. I'm surprised they haven't picked up on the "I would never vote for Trump / You want your king to win" justice yet.

You're telling them why they're wrong, instead of listening to why they think they're right and addressing that. They think the judges are biased. You have to disprove their evidence, and that's getting harder to do the more they're pushed deeper into their echo chambers.

*note I mean the general "you", not the specific

[dneal]

dneal writes,


I'm curious, are you not aware of the existence of a radical left? Of a #walkaway movement of more centrist Democrats? It's not a Trump thing. There are many liberal intellectuals who have distanced themselves, and they're now labeled "The Intellectual Dark Web" while the radical left protests outside their lectures or talks. Bret Weinstein is a liberal biological/evolutionary theorist. Look at the Evergreen College incident. See Douglas Murray's The Madness of Crowds, or any of his hour-long interviews on Youtube. I can point you to some of the better ones, if you like.

I know the "radical left" better than these do. I became a New Leftist when I was in Junior High School in the early 1960's, when I had come to admire Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and read about SNCC's allies, Students for a Democratic Society. The Civil Rights Movement had the most heroic and decent people I knew about. Later, I worked against the War in Vietnam, argued against all the various little Leninist cult groups that tried to build themselves by picking members from SDS, and, out of self-defense, learned the Old Left inside and out. Having been a member of New American Movement, our last-ditch attempt to revive a non-dogmatic and experimental organization of the sort that SDS had once claimed to be, I was among the founding members of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

Some college kids are, I think, well-meaning liberal children with no idea how or why to persuade anyone to make a better society. Maybe they will learn, but they do not tell me what to think or do. Not DSA, as best I understand DSA now.

Ok, I didn't understand your challenge of Ray's far-left point; and it sounded like you were saying there was no such thing.

Anyway, I think it's more than just well-meaning liberal children. Bernie and Liz Warren certainly aren't kids anymore. The democratic party seems to be courting their supporters and leaving the "moderate" democrat behind. Alan Dershowitz and Camille Paglia got "cancelled", ferchrissakes. Question the intersectional nonsense, and you become an apostate.

[Chuck Naill]

What can cause deeply-believing Trump-voters to admit to themselves that the US elections of 2020 have been, as have all American national elections (except 1877), honest, fair, and almost hum-drum in all states and counties?

We have seen the Trump Campaign file suit after suit -- almost sixty suits by now -- and lose over and over as it attempts to present evidence. I have read ruling after ruling. Each one demonstrates that the judges has carefully considered the Trump case and ruled against it.

- Again and again, the Trump Campaign stipulated that same facts as the defending states. We do not claim fraud, said Giuliani in court. No matter what he said in front of TV cameras outside a court.

- Again and again, the Trump campaign presented affidavits that judges ruled inadmissible because the Trump campaign did not -- neglected to -- depose their affidavit-makers to examination or cross-examination. (See, for instance, Judge Stewart's detailed ruling in Nevada).

- Again and again, as in Michigan, judges evaluated Trump Campaign witnesses and found them not credible. In the rulings the judges explain why.

- Again and again, the Trump Campaign introduced expert witnesses who do not appear to be experts and who could not justify their opinions. (Again, easiest to spot in Judge Stewart's Nevada case)

What else can we conclude but that true-believing Trump followers will not believe anything except whatever comforts their beliefs that Trump was defeated by "libtard" magic?

Having lost every case they brought to court, Trumpists have vowed to:

- hold their believe in non-reality as long as Trump asks them,

- fight the results of the honest 2020 election in the House and Senate in January

- file more cases, I think, even though the Electoral College is voting right now (at 1:38pm, EST, Biden leads Trump 166 - 103)

- ask Trump to declare martial law and to overthrow the election.

All of that seems madness. It seems oblivious to reality. Conclusion: only Trumpists can stop this, and probably only Trump can stop his followers. Ordinary, "hum-drum", Republicans have spoken with realism throughout the Trump Campaign's campaign against the elections. Reading up from county and state elections officials, it is impossible to tell, without looking up party labels, whether those officials are officially members of the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. I doubt that even senior Republicans can speak election reality to the country without directly contradicting Trump. By specifics, by detail of every Trump tweet and speech. When they do it, they seem to lose standing as senior Republicans. Perhaps after the Electoral College vote more will be free to do it, but not so far, judging from the irrational howls from the two Republican candidates for US Senate in Georgia.

Any other ideas?

To answer the first question, 200 million dollars. That’s how much has been raised since 11/3.

[TSherbs]

You have to disprove their evidence...No, we don't. That's now how it works in a rational democracy with law based on evidence. In our country, THEY have to PROVE that the evidence of crime is real and convincing. FIRST.

I already addressed this, above. You are giving the argument of conspiracy, which is, "My theory is true until and unless you persuade me otherwise. And in this circumstance of the election, it does not matter that 60 courts have dismissed the cases. That just feeds my narrative of bias against my theory. So, good luck!"

Come on, dneal. Don't you recognize the irrational trap in this argument? Trump did the same thing when he stated back in October that he would only accept an election that resulted in his winning. He begins with this premise--that the only fair result is his victory--and then argues backwards from that when he lost. The entire argument is based on a premise that assumes only one legitimate outcome.

[dneal]

You have to disprove their evidence...No, we don't. That's now how it works in a rational democracy with law based on evidence. In our country, THEY have to PROVE that the evidence of crime is real and convincing. FIRST.

I already addressed this, above. You are giving the argument of conspiracy, which is, "My theory is true until and unless you persuade me otherwise. And in this circumstance of the election, it does not matter that 60 courts have dismissed the cases. That just feeds my narrative of bias against my theory. So, good luck!"

Come on, dneal. Don't you recognize the irrational trap in this argument? Trump did the same thing when he stated back in October that he would only accept an election that resulted in his winning. He begins with this premise--that the only fair result is his victory--and then argues backwards from that when he lost. The entire argument is based on a premise that assumes only one legitimate outcome.


Aside from other text you conveniently omitted, the context was welch's original question: "...tell us how Trumpists come to accept reality? Go through their claims that their Leader was, somehow, cheated by fraud from his "landslide victory" in November. Consider that they have not demonstrated anything in any of the 58 court cases that claimed fraud. What can change their minds?"

I'm starting to question whether you're disingenuous, or if you are just demonstrating your habit of not reading more than 10% of something. Either explains why your incessant selective quoting though. Brevity for the reader is one thing. A straw man because you're insincere or lazy is another.

[TSherbs]

My point is, that your reply to welch is not persuasive (to me).

But I am simply pointing out the illogic of your suggestion which posits accepting their delusion and then having to disprove it with a logic that is already dismissed in the premises.

Here is another way of putting it: you suggest disproving an unfounded accusation. The logical trap is that unfounded accusations often have no disproof: they are speculations beyond the eyes of observation. This is like saying, "Disprove that there are aliens on the earth. And, by the way, we don't trust scientists who testify against alien beings. Additionally, don't require me to show persuasive evidence in the first place. My claim should be sufficient warrant."

Do you have another suggestion?

PS: your other snipes that you take at me are not consistent with your requests here for "reasonable" and "serious" conversation. I actually am trying to rely on reason and reasonableness as I explain here. I actually think that there is no way to persuade those of deep conspiracy thinking to give up their thinking. And I have yet to read anything from you that suggests otherwise. That's not personal to say. I am speaking from reason and my understanding of conspiracy thinking. Even yesterday I listened to a piece where victim-thinking (conspiracy theory) releases endorphins in the same pleasure centers where addiction does. I don't know how that might also suggest a solution, but most times you can't just talk an addict off of their drug. I don't think that one can talk a conspiracy believer out of their belief, either. At least not via a summary of talk or persuasion that you have suggested.

[dneal]

You do not understand, because you haven't made an attempt to understand the "delusional Trumpkins". You can't see through your own bias (and it seems you can't even admit to having it).
I'll give you an actual example. Trumpists are convinced Dominion software manipulated votes. No access to Dominion systems had been granted by any court until recently. Telling people they can't prove something, when you won't let an investigation happen when there is what would constitute probable cause in a criminal case, is hardly what you describe above.

A Michigan court did order an examination of Dominion systems. The Secretary of State fought it and lost. Her even doing that reinforces suspicion. Russell Ramsland and his company did the forensic analysis. Mr. Ramsland (a Republican and former political candidate) is also one of the affiants. He found serious problems and released that in a draft report. Some of it is persuasive (if true). I'm also skeptical of his credibility.

The CEO of Dominion attended a special hearing today, to the Michigan oversight committee. Much of what he said was persuasive (if true) as well. I'm skeptical of his credibility. He certainly has something at stake. He did recommend an independent examination / audit by the EAC. THAT is how you disprove the "myth". I'll add that this "myth" still has a lot of circumstantial evidence to substantiate it. It's hardly settled, and just because a judge tossed a case for standing doesn't mean it was considered.

Will some people remain in their conspiracy mindsets, regardless of what's proven or disproven? Certainly, and I made that point some time ago. 30% of Democrats surveyed also think something is up with this election. Not all Trump voters are crazed. Those are the sort of people you need to persuade. Most of the Democrat politicians (mainly at the State level) are doing the opposite. They're antagonizing them. But I've already posted all this, if you would bother to reflect on my point instead of just post how many cases judges have tossed or how many electoral votes were counted at some point in time.

And that brings us to the last point.

YOU, my friend, have made very little attempt at reasonable or serious conversation. You have spent a great deal of time in this thread calling people "delusional" and "liars". You immediately dismiss and ridicule anything that does not support your argument. You ignore at your leisure, and misrepresent posts. Your posts smack of disingenuity. Basically, you're being a dick. That's fine, and I'm happy to play by those rules. Simply put, don't dish it out if you can't take it. Want to have a polite, reasonable discussion? Then do it. I'll respond in kind.

[TSherbs]

There's a qualitative difference between saying that the promulgating of conspiracy theories is delusional or deceitful and calling someone a "dick."

Maybe I'm the delusional one because I keep thinking that things might improve when we discuss a topic. But maybe not. I actually wish you well and feel no animosity toward you. I wish you and your family health and peace in this holiday season and beyond.

[dneal]

I never take any of this personally. When I was a young lieutenant, my platoon sergeant and I used to get into shouting matches about all kinds of stuff we disagreed on at the moment. When it was done, we would smoke cigars and laugh about silly stuff.

[Chuck Naill]

This reminds me of a 6 month flat earth discussion I had 5 years ago. Evidence made no difference to the person who supported a flat Earth even when we debunked his photos and linked information. He would simply find something else to post.

However, I did learn much about the American space program and what was required to travel in space.

[Freddie]

My point is, that your reply to welch is not persuasive (to me).

But I am simply pointing out the illogic of your suggestion which posits accepting their delusion and then having to disprove it with a logic that is already dismissed in the premises.

Here is another way of putting it: you suggest disproving an unfounded accusation. The logical trap is that unfounded accusations often have no disproof: they are speculations beyond the eyes of observation. This is like saying, "Disprove that there are aliens on the earth. And, by the way, we don't trust scientists who testify against alien beings. Additionally, don't require me to show persuasive evidence in the first place. My claim should be sufficient warrant."

Do you have another suggestion?

PS: your other snipes that you take at me are not consistent with your requests here for "reasonable" and "serious" conversation. I actually am trying to rely on reason and reasonableness as I explain here. I actually think that there is no way to persuade those of deep conspiracy thinking to give up their thinking. And I have yet to read anything from you that suggests otherwise. That's not personal to say. I am speaking from reason and my understanding of conspiracy thinking. Even yesterday I listened to a piece where victim-thinking (conspiracy theory) releases endorphins in the same pleasure centers where addiction does. I don't know how that might also suggest a solution, but most times you can't just talk an addict off of their drug. I don't think that one can talk a conspiracy believer out of their belief, either. At least not via a summary of talk or persuasion that you have suggested.

]Hear! Hear!

By the way Last nite in my garage there was an invisible unicorn trying to take stuff............... Don't believe me Prove me wrong

Fred

Dictum sapienti sat est Verbum sapienti sat est

Plautus

[dneal]

This reminds me of a 6 month flat earth discussion I had 5 years ago. Evidence made no difference to the person who supported a flat Earth even when we debunked his photos and linked information. He would simply find something else to post.

However, I did learn much about the American space program and what was required to travel in space.

Chuck - The problem with going from sanctimonious asshole to sarcastic prick is that it gives up the game, and makes the sanctimonious asshole less believable in the future. It'll put you out of the running for the hall monitor job you covet.

Fred - I applaud your consistency. Chuck could learn a thing or two from your example.

[dneal]

For TSherbs and Welch, you should get a kick out of this. As I mentioned earlier, I argue with Trumpers on a gun forum. They posted some Newsmax video of Greg Kelly speculating that the GOP could challenge the electors during the joint session, thus paving the way to a Trump victory.

My response:

This nonsense needs to stop. You need to have a member of the House and the Senate challenge a vote, and then a majority in both houses to toss that elector's vote. Republicans don't have a majority in both houses.
Frankly, this isn't a lot different than Rachel Maddow's wishful speculating on "faithless electors" strategy in 2016.

A few agreed, but most started chimp-screaming various nonsense about how I was wrong because "each State gets one vote", ignorant of the fact that only applies if one candidate doesn't reach 270 electoral votes.

For our foriegn friends, a member of each house may join to challenge an electoral vote from a State. It then goes to each house and requires a majority in both to sustain the motion and toss the electoral votes from that state.

Some examples of the chimp-screaming:


This is not nonsense! This is about voter fraud! If this doesn’t straighten out we will never have an honest election ever again. If Biden wins this will all get swept under the rug and the next time you cast your vote you won’t even know if it matters anymore. Don’t you realize how important this is? Don’t you realize what’s at stake? The Democrats will pack the supreme court they will make DC and Puerto Rico states which means that we will never have enough congressmen to stand up to the Democrats. They will open the borders and let everybody in and we will have to support them. They will pass their green new deal for trillions and trillions of dollars and we will have to support that. Your taxes will be so high that your quality-of-life will never ever be what it is now. You better pray that Trump wins


not quite right. The Vice President can accept or reject the electors and they are sent to the House of Reps where it is one vote per state. The republicans have a majority of states and if they hold the line under those circumstances, Trump would be re-elected. Don’t also forget that more evidence should have been released by that stage.


Rachael Maddow sucks!


but the BLATANT Fraud should be enough to have no doubts what so ever as to who really won this election ,and if they cannot sort the illegitimate ballots from the ones that are legitimate ,then another election ,with far more scrutiny by ALL PARTIES should take place


Doesn’t matter about the House or Senate, We, the people have been robbed and after four years of Hell, accusing President Trump, and Russia Hoax- Don’t tell me, it doesn’t matter-

[welch]

Incidentally, dneal, I thought the "faithless elector" call in 2016 was just silly. I did not like the result of that election, but the votes are the votes. Same thing in 2004. In early December that year, I went to a Move-on "after election" meeting where the Move-On organizer from Ohio spoke. She explained how the Democratic Party of Ohio had fallen apart. One guy, someone I had talked with as we made phone calls, perked up to shout, "It was a fraud. This election was stolen". Did it twice. As the rest us us turned to give him the hard stares, the chair said, "OK, no more. Leave. Don't come back."

Today, I skimmed a Facebook site where I used to post, a place where, it was said, "liberals" and "conservatives" could argue politics.


Investigations take time.
A few more raids.
A few more arrests.
A few more deals.
The cards will fall.


✶ Secession Is The Only Answer Left ✶
My, your, and your mother's President Donald J. Trump has a 1×10¹⁵ chance of being our next president. The same 1 in 1×10¹⁵ chance that Biden had for a single state swinging in his favor after Trump leading in the number that he led by. A figure that exponentially grows when accounted for multiple states swinging. That chance in 1 in 1×10⁶⁰
The facts are clear: 1000s of sources of evidence clearly showing numerous criminal act of voter fraud and other crimes. 1000s of lies pushed out by nearly every "media" source.
Multiple states usurping their legislature in violation on the constitution. 100s of thousands of accounts of factual and legally "invalid" votes counted that should not have been counted.
I say all that to say this: With the facts before us, countless atrocities have happened as result of criminal activity in the 2020 presidential election. So with the criminal voter fraud, states usurping the authority of their state legislature directly violating the constitution, and SCOTUS denying the filing of bill of complaint in case of Texas V. Pennsylvania even though they technically cannot do that AND ALSO their exact reason for denying it goes against their own precent from past rulings (Citatations 1&2- below end of comment).. When I say they cannot do that it means: they don't have the discretion to deny the filing in the case of Texas v. Pennsylvania. As stated by Supreme Court Justice, Thomas (citation 3)
It is clear that the ONLY thing that can and must be done now is to secede from the union. We have tried to get everything done in every way possible, in every legal way, and have been ultimately shutdown by the powers that be.
Secession is the ONLY answer. And no war is needed unless the democrat whore war-mongers start it.
FACT: There's also absolutely NOTHING "traitorous" or "treasonous" about seceding from the union. I state that fact because I know that the ignorant uneducated subspecies of humans know as liberals will instantly claim how "traitorous" and "treasonous" the concept of seceding is.
If you're one who actually believes that then you need to learn a whole lot about the history of America and American government and The American revolution. With such an ignorant logic, then you would also think, using said ignorant logic, that America itself would be "treasonous" or "traitorous" since we basically did the same thing. As did every other country founded after the first country ever in history.



yes there are 7 states sent 2 sets of electors
and the ones for biden were sent by governors- the ones for trump were sent by state legislatures-- the constitution is explicate that legislatures choose electors


Marshall law stops all of this, until all the investigations are done.
Then have a paper election with ID to vote.
Just like old times.

[dneal]

The thing that gets me is how a similar comment can get two drastically different responses, depending on political bias.

"There's a lot of circumstantial evidence."

Gun Forum: THERE'S PROOF!!! DEMS STOLE THE ELECTION!!!

Pen Forum: THERE'S NO PROOF!!! PUBS ARE FLAT EARTHER'S!!!

This is the disappointing state of our modern political discourse.

[kazoolaw]

https://mclaughlinonline.com/2020/12/15/newsmax-article-mclaughlin-poll-mclaughlin-poll-majority-see-vote-fraud-as-national-problem/

Make of it what you will. Including paragraph 4.

[welch]

The thing that gets me is how a similar comment can get two drastically different responses, depending on political bias.

"There's a lot of circumstantial evidence."

Gun Forum: THERE'S PROOF!!! DEMS STOLE THE ELECTION!!!

Pen Forum: THERE'S NO PROOF!!! PUBS ARE FLAT EARTHER'S!!!

This is the disappointing state of our modern political discourse.

Strikes me that the current Startrek: Discovery accidentally shows us: a parallel universe. I think that people who believe all of this "election fraud" believe in an alternate reality, one that conflicts with the election workers, the judges, and their decisions. I hope that fewer and fewer people will believe in alternate realities. If not, this country is heading toward catastrophe.

Incidentally, I've been reading Pauline Maier's Ratification, a history of the year or so when the states ratified the Constitution. Recently, some people have called for their states to secede. In January, 1788, the South Carolina legislature organized a ratification convention, and some anti-Constitutionalists called for South Carolina and Virginia to form a separate country. "Charles Cotesworth Pinckney went so far as to describe the assertion that the Declaration of Independence had made each state 'separately and individually independent' as a 'species of political heresy'. The Declaration, which never mentioned the states by name, was meant, he argued, was meant to impress on America the maxim that 'our freedom and independence arose from our union, and that without it we could neither be free nor independent.'" (Maier's p249. She refers to the original sources.)

[dneal]

https://mclaughlinonline.com/2020/12/15/newsmax-article-mclaughlin-poll-mclaughlin-poll-majority-see-vote-fraud-as-national-problem/

Make of it what you will. Including paragraph 4.

I've seen quite a few polls, and generally they line up with your cite; but I'd be interested in the demographics of their sample. How many Biden supporters are in the 46% that think fraud occurred, and how many Trump supporters are in the 45% that don't think so? for example. Of the 1000 sampled, hypothesizing 500 Conservatives and 500 Liberals, 460 Conservatives thinking fraud is the case, and 450 Liberals thinking it isn't (with the remainder "no opinion"); isn't surprising. Mix those numbers up and it gets a little more interesting.

[dneal]

The thing that gets me is how a similar comment can get two drastically different responses, depending on political bias.

"There's a lot of circumstantial evidence."

Gun Forum: THERE'S PROOF!!! DEMS STOLE THE ELECTION!!!

Pen Forum: THERE'S NO PROOF!!! PUBS ARE FLAT EARTHER'S!!!

This is the disappointing state of our modern political discourse.

Strikes me that the current Startrek: Discovery accidentally shows us: a parallel universe. I think that people who believe all of this "election fraud" believe in an alternate reality, one that conflicts with the election workers, the judges, and their decisions. I hope that fewer and fewer people will believe in alternate realities. If not, this country is heading toward catastrophe.

Incidentally, I've been reading Pauline Maier's Ratification, a history of the year or so when the states ratified the Constitution. Recently, some people have called for their states to secede. In January, 1788, the South Carolina legislature organized a ratification convention, and some anti-Constitutionalists called for South Carolina and Virginia to form a separate country. "Charles Cotesworth Pinckney went so far as to describe the assertion that the Declaration of Independence had made each state 'separately and individually independent' as a 'species of political heresy'. The Declaration, which never mentioned the states by name, was meant, he argued, was meant to impress on America the maxim that 'our freedom and independence arose from our union, and that without it we could neither be free nor independent.'" (Maier's p249. She refers to the original sources.)

THIS 36-page .pdf (https://bannonswarroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/The-Immaculate-Deception-12.15.20-1.pdf) was linked on the Trump-leaning site, considered yet one more nail in the coffin to the case of fraud... :/

If you want a peek into the parallel universe (and I've spend plenty of time wading around in each), it is definitely that.

Although it's clearly partisan, it has some utility. First, it consolidates the key and majority grievances / perceptions of that side. You can see what they view as "proof". Second, it's footnoted well, with hyperlinks.

If you want to know what it will take to convince that side of the debate, their positions (and perceptions) are laid out.

I don't think it's sufficient to hope fewer people will believe in alternate realities. The Left and Right are vehemently intrenched. The current situation is highly volatile.

[welch]

Being an honest Republican election official in Philadelphia: attacks from Trump, death threats against his family.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/16/magazine/trump-election-philadelphia-republican.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

Two things America faces:

1. Trump voters seem to believe all of Trump's tweets that he won by a landslide but was cheated. This defies plan evidence as we saw in every decision against the Trump campaign. How do those voters come back to normal? I hope they lose interest in all the self-sealing conspiracy theories as time passes, but that seems unlikely unless Trump admits that he lost in an honest election. Trump has never done something like that -- not as President and not as a businessman in New York.

2. What if a party unites behind someone like Trump but who is competent?

[dneal]

I think Georgia is on the right track. They're going to do a signature comparison now. Either it does indicate fraud, or it doesn't; but it should help put the issue to rest. Similar efforts should be made in the other States. The die-hards will remain, but they need to be made a minority.

I think you'll see Republicans unite behind a "polite" Trump-like person. Kristi Noem, for example. A no-nonsense "fighter" that doesn't swing blindly.

[welch]

I think Georgia is on the right track. They're going to do a signature comparison now. Either it does indicate fraud, or it doesn't; but it should help put the issue to rest. Similar efforts should be made in the other States. The die-hards will remain, but they need to be made a minority.

I think you'll see Republicans unite behind a "polite" Trump-like person. Kristi Noem, for example. A no-nonsense "fighter" that doesn't swing blindly.

I found this from the Atlanta Journal Constitution. The audit will be of one county -- Fulton, I think -- and should take about two weeks. The audit will compare signatures on file against the signatures on the outside ballot envelopes, but cannot count who the voter voted for. Ballots, of course, are unsigned and secret.

Loefler says that's not enough. She wants every county to have an audit. "One down and 156 counties to go", her spokesperson said, best I remember.

https://www.ajc.com/politics/georgia-official-orders-ballot-signature-audit-in-cobb-county/MHLOCDS6AJFORG4FWLNJQQUIPM/

[Freddie]

https://mclaughlinonline.com/2020/12/15/newsmax-article-mclaughlin-poll-mclaughlin-poll-majority-see-vote-fraud-as-national-problem/

Make of it what you will. Including paragraph 4.

What are the chances that what you've given me {i e McLaughlin & Associates} is just a blizzard of bullshit?


Fred

[dneal]

I think Georgia is on the right track. They're going to do a signature comparison now. Either it does indicate fraud, or it doesn't; but it should help put the issue to rest. Similar efforts should be made in the other States. The die-hards will remain, but they need to be made a minority.

I think you'll see Republicans unite behind a "polite" Trump-like person. Kristi Noem, for example. A no-nonsense "fighter" that doesn't swing blindly.

I found this from the Atlanta Journal Constitution. The audit will be of one county -- Fulton, I think -- and should take about two weeks. The audit will compare signatures on file against the signatures on the outside ballot envelopes, but cannot count who the voter voted for. Ballots, of course, are unsigned and secret.

Loefler says that's not enough. She wants every county to have an audit. "One down and 156 counties to go", her spokesperson said, best I remember.

https://www.ajc.com/politics/georgia-official-orders-ballot-signature-audit-in-cobb-county/MHLOCDS6AJFORG4FWLNJQQUIPM/

There are lots of others (like the various Dominion accusations), but it seems to me that the GOP's main argument is:

- Mail-in laws/rules were changed outside the legislative process
- These changes relaxed "checks" on validity of voters
- This created the opportunity for mail-in ballot fraud
- This fraud was concentrated in key counties in key states

My understanding is that it's Cobb county that will be audited. It did go to Biden by a significant margin, and it's a suburb of Atlanta, but I don't understand why they're not looking at the county the GOP is complaining about (Fulton). At any rate, I think Loefler is wrong and there's no need to audit the entire state. If you are going to argue it happened in a specific area, then audit the specific area in question. The other side of the coin is those states who are fighting audits (like Michigan). I can't understand why, particularly when it adds to the perception of the election being rigged.

The biggest problem is the media. Look left, and "50 courts prove Trump doesn't have a case". That's not entirely true, and a gross overgeneralization. NBC has a decent list of the cases (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/trump-s-election-fight-includes-over-30-lawsuits-it-s-n1248289). Most were withdrawn or denied. Some were dismissed. It would be nice for journalists to do the analysis and explain how many cases were heard on the merits and found to be insufficient - and there are some.

Look right, and it's the argument above about fraud in key areas (among other things). Was it just these four states that changed their rules due to COVID? Were there any other states that did likewise and ended up going to Trump? It would be nice for journalists to do that sort of analysis too.

None of that sort of thing happens, and we just end up with sensational headlines that appeal to their subscribers' political leanings. It's no wonder we're so polarized.

[Chuck Naill]

I think Georgia is on the right track. They're going to do a signature comparison now. Either it does indicate fraud, or it doesn't; but it should help put the issue to rest. Similar efforts should be made in the other States. The die-hards will remain, but they need to be made a minority.

I think you'll see Republicans unite behind a "polite" Trump-like person. Kristi Noem, for example. A no-nonsense "fighter" that doesn't swing blindly.

I found this from the Atlanta Journal Constitution. The audit will be of one county -- Fulton, I think -- and should take about two weeks. The audit will compare signatures on file against the signatures on the outside ballot envelopes, but cannot count who the voter voted for. Ballots, of course, are unsigned and secret.

Loefler says that's not enough. She wants every county to have an audit. "One down and 156 counties to go", her spokesperson said, best I remember.

https://www.ajc.com/politics/georgia-official-orders-ballot-signature-audit-in-cobb-county/MHLOCDS6AJFORG4FWLNJQQUIPM/

Since beginning to use a fountain pen, my signature has changed. I am more prone to provide a legible signature. I have read that sometimes it is required to write a cursive signature that anyone can read. Signature are not DNA.

[welch]

Yes, my signature has also changed. It depends on whether I am standing or sitting to write, whether I take the time to write out my first and last names or whether I dash it off quickly. It was interesting, before this election, to see my signatures over the years and elections.

However, the audit will do nothing to stop the claim that:

- the voting machines turned hundreds of thousands of Trump votes to Biden votes in Georgia, and Michigan, and other places.

- dead people voted from out of state, although that has already been submitted to a Georgia Legislature hearing and question by a state representative. She took a quick look at the names and addresses of people that an "election expert" told the legislature had voted illegally. She noticed that the first or second name was someone she knew, leading her to sample a lot more names. All that she could track down were Georgians who had voted legally for years; most had a p.o. box in the apartment complex where they lived, such that the box was their mailing address. When confronted, the "expert" shrugged it off. She, incidentally, was furious that the "expert" had given out the full names, including middle names, and addresses of legal voters at a time and in a place that lunatics are making death threats against everyone from the Secretary of State, the election commissioner, and ordinary people who worked the election.

- that it was "statistically impossible" for Biden to have won. I still see that claim...the lie that won't die. Incidentally, Fivethirtyeight was not far off in predicting the election. They had Georgia as a toss-up, Pennsylvania as solidly for Biden, Michigan as even more Biden, Arizona as about even with a slight edge to Biden, and on and on. The electoral vote came in about where they predicted. Nothing statistically surprising.

- that affidavits are evidence of voting fraud, and that Trump was not given his day in court. Yet we know that in almost every one of the 58 or more cases, Trump did not try to bring the affidavit-affirmers to court where they could be cross-examined.

- people continue to claim that the House of Representatives can ignore the electoral vote and have a special election, just like 1800 and 1824, with each state having one vote.

- right-wing people keep calling for Trump to declare martial law. Ex-general Flynn continues.

This seems like an onward-rolling disaster unless Republican leaders say, clearly, that the November election was clean, fair, and resulted in Joe Biden being elected.

Here is where right-wing conspiracy-thinking leads. In Texas, a former police officer drove a truck off the road, then pulled a gun on the truck driver, claiming that the truck was hauling thousands of fake ballots.

David Lopez-Zuniga, an air-conditioner installer, had just left his mobile home for his typical predawn commute when he noticed an SUV’s headlights closely trailing his small cargo truck.

Within seconds, the SUV swerved alongside the passenger’s side, striking the truck and forcing Lopez-Zuniga to the side of a highway. There, he said, the SUV’s driver feigned an injury before ordering Lopez-Zuniga to the ground at gunpoint.

“I was very scared,” Lopez-Zuniga, said in an interview with The Washington Post. “I didn’t know who this person was.”

As it turned out, the incident was the extraordinary culmination of a misguided undercover surveillance operation — financed by a conservative nonprofit group and carried out by private investigators — that sought to uncover a massive election fraud scheme before the November election.

(Offhand, I find that there are conservatives and then there are right-wing crazies. I would call the organizers "crazies".

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/texas-anti-voter-fraud-operation/2020/12/20/98969dbc-4157-11eb-a402-fba110db3b42_story.html

[TSherbs]

crazies, indeed

and the craziness continues in Pennsylvania with another Trump suit over the constitutionality of the voting procedures there

and the suckers have given Trump's PAC hundreds of millions of dollars in this crass and doomed effort. With another suit in the system, he can keep asking for more money, and use it after he leaves office.

[dneal]

However, the audit will do nothing to stop the claim that:...


I don't disagree, particularly with the crazier theories. I'm curious whether or not you're sympathetic in terms of understanding why they think this, and why they are more and more zealous.

I firmly believe it's the mainstream and social media, and I see a spectrum on the right from biased to crazy. The same is the case for the left. I've been tempted to ask if people can list three positive things the Trump Presidency accomplished, but why he was a bad President (other than bombast) seemed to be a bridge too far...

57976

[welch]

I don't care to ask the Trumpists why they think irrational things about the Presidential election. Instead: when will enough Republican leaders tell those Trumpists that they believea myth? When will Trumpoisrts stop conspiring to send death threats to anyone who did an honest job to make this a free and fair election during a pandemic that has killed 300,000 Americans.

Meanwhile, here is Bill Barr, as reported by the Washington Post:



Undercutting Trump, Barr says there’s no basis for seizing voting machines, using special counsels for election fraud, Hunter Biden

By Matt Zapotosky
Dec. 21, 2020 at 12:13 p.m. EST

Outgoing Attorney General William P. Barr said Monday that he saw no basis for the federal government seizing voting machines and that he did not intend to appoint a special counsel to investigate allegations of voter fraud — again breaking with President Trump as the commander in chief entertains increasingly desperate measures to overturn the election.

At a news conference to announce charges in a decades-old terrorism case, Barr — who has just two days left in office — was peppered with questions about whether he would consider steps proposed by allies of the president to advance Trump’s claims of massive voter fraud.

Barr said that while he was “sure there was fraud in this election,” he had not seen evidence that it was so “systemic or broad-based” that it would change the result. He asserted he saw “no basis now for seizing machines by the federal government,” and he would not name a special counsel to explore the allegations of Trump and his allies.

“If I thought a special counsel at this stage was the right tool and was appropriate, I would name one, but I haven’t, and I’m not going to,” Barr said.

Similarly, Barr said he would not name a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden, President-elect Joe Biden’s son, who revealed earlier this month he was under investigation for possible tax crimes. Barr said the investigation was “being handled responsibly and professionally” by regular Justice Department prosecutors, and he hoped that would continue in the next administration.

“To this point, I have not seen a reason to appoint a special counsel, and I have no plan to do so before I leave,” Barr said.

The comments are likely to further erode what is already a significantly damaged relationship between Barr and Trump, though they also could help insulate Barr’s successor, Deputy Attorney General Jeff A. Rosen, from any White House pressure. Reacting to a news story about the comments, Trump campaign legal adviser Jenna Ellis, who has been involved in the effort to challenge election results, wrote on Twitter, “Maybe you should sit down now, Bill. You certainly did enough sitting down on the job.”

Earlier this month, Barr broke with President Trump on his unfounded allegations of voter fraud, telling the Associated Press he had “not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”

Tension already had been simmering between the two men for months because Barr did not on the eve of the election release results from Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham’s investigation into the FBI’s probe of Trump’s 2016 campaign, which Trump thought might be a political windfall. And after Barr’s comments, the president’s frustration was compounded when Hunter Biden revealed he was under federal investigation for possible tax crimes, and Barr had apparently kept that probe a relative secret, too.

Trump told Fox News recently that Barr “should have stepped up” and publicized the case — which would have violated Justice Department policy.

“All he had to do is say an investigation’s going on,” Trump said, adding later, “When you affect an election, Bill Barr, frankly, did the wrong thing.

After a meeting with Trump last week, Barr handed in his resignation, saying he intended to leave this Wednesday.

Since then, Trump has intensified his effort to overturn the results of the election. On Sunday, he said in a radio interview that he had spoken with Sen.-elect Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) about challenging the electoral vote count when the House and Senate convene on Jan. 6 to formally affirm Biden’s victory.

And at a frenetic Oval Office meeting days earlier, he seemed to entertain other steps that some advisers warned are baseless and exceed the bounds of his power.

A frustrated Trump redoubles efforts to overturn election result

He suggested, for example, naming lawyer Sidney Powell — who has promoted the wild, false claim that Venezuelan communists programmed U.S. voting machines to flip votes for Biden — as a special counsel to investigate voter fraud, though the idea appeared to be a non-starter, people familiar with the meeting have said.

Barr had previously seemed to throw cold water on Powell’s allegation of a grand conspiracy, telling the Associated Press, “There’s been one assertion that would be systemic fraud, and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results. And the DHS and DOJ have looked into that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that.”

Trump also suggested that homeland security officials should seize state voting machines and investigate alleged fraud, though acting homeland security secretary Chad Wolf and other homeland security officials have previously told the White House they have no authority to do so unless states ask for inspections or investigations.

Powell was present at the meeting, as was Michael T. Flynn, Trump’s disgraced national security adviser who has said publicly Trump could use the military to “basically rerun an election.” Flynn came to the Oval Office to discuss that idea, people familiar with the matter said, though Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and White House counsel Pat Cipollone pushed back “strenuously.” Trump later tweeted, “Martial law = Fake News.

Barr leaves the lectern on Dec. 21 at the end of his last scheduled news conference.
Barr leaves the lectern on Dec. 21 at the end of his last scheduled news conference. (Michael Reynolds/Pool/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Trump and his political allies had in recent weeks been pressuring the Justice Department, in particular, to appoint a special counsel to explore his unfounded claims of voter fraud. On Dec. 9, 27 House Republicans wrote to Trump urging him to direct Barr to make such a move, and Trump retweeted a post from Rep. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) that contained an image of the letter and appealed to the Justice Department to act immediately. “The DOJ needs to listen to #WeThePeople and address their election concerns NOW,” Budd wrote.

Some Republicans have similarly called for a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden. After Barr’s news conference, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) wrote on Twitter that he was concerned the current Justice Department investigation would not be sufficiently broad.

“My concern is the scope of the Delaware investigation is limited to tax fraud and will not be a thorough review of Hunter Biden’s extensive business dealings with foreign nations,” Graham wrote. “The question for the country is: to what extent did Hunter Biden and his family have problematic business dealings with China, Russia, and other nations which could impact the Biden administration’s foreign policy? Some investigative body needs to take a broader view beyond the tax issue.”

Whoever President-elect Biden picks as attorney general is likely to also face pressure to appoint a special counsel to assure the public the probe will be conducted free of White House interference.

Barr said at the news conference that he knew when he accepted the attorney general job, it would be a difficult one, but added: “I don’t regret coming in.” In addition to breaking with Trump on election fraud, Barr also seemed to put himself at odds with Trump in attributing recently uncovered cyberhacks of the U.S. government to Russia. Though Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had already done so, Trump later suggested on Twitter China might be the culprit.

“From the information I have, I agree with Secretary Pompeo’s assessment,” Barr said. “It certainly appears to be the Russians.”

After he departs on Wednesday, leadership of the department will fall to Rosen, who declined to answer questions in a recent interview with Reuters about whether he would name special counsels to investigate voter fraud or Hunter Biden. Rosen did not appear at Monday’s news conference.



https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/barr-trump-special-counsel-voter-fraud-hunter-biden/2020/12/21/4d85f060-439c-11eb-b0e4-0f182923a025_story.html

[kazoolaw]

with another Trump suit over the constitutionality of the voting procedures there

TS-
You do know that this isn't new lawsuit, right?

[dneal]

Undercutting Trump, Barr says there’s no basis for seizing voting machines, using special counsels for election fraud, Hunter Biden

58007

[welch]

Come off it, dneal. If even Barr says there is no evidence that massive fraud changed millions of Trump votes to Biden, and if you have read the court decisions around the country saying the same thing, and I think you have, then what is your point?

Meanwhile, Judge Brian Hagedorn, from the Wisconsin Supreme Court, is getting death threats because he ruled against Trump's claims. Take a read:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/20/us/politics/wisconsin-justice-brian-hagedorn.html?searchResultPosition=1


What is your response to Wisconsinites who supported you when you ran for the court and now are deeply unhappy with some of the decisions you’ve made?

When I ran, I was pretty consistent that I believe deeply that law and politics are not the same thing. Most of us probably have some hope that our preferred candidate or our preferred policies, that the law runs in the same direction, but that isn’t always the case. And I said I was going to be a textualist and an originalist. I believe very deeply in those things.

And I think my decisions have reflected that. And I made clear even when I was running that I would make decisions that I’m sure some folks, certainly conservatives, may not like from a policy outcome and that when I do, I was just following the law. People should know that.

Do you feel any sort of kinship with Republican officials in states like Arizona and Georgia who have had to defend their election system against a resistance from conservative grass roots?

The hard thing to do, the courageous thing to do, is to fulfill your oath, especially when you know it’s going to make your political supporters unhappy. It doesn’t matter what your role is, whether you’re the Republican secretary of state of Georgia or any other elected official.

So I’m not unaware of the political criticism that some of my decisions would bring. I’m well aware of that, and so I think it’s a wonderful reflection of the strength of our country when people can do what they think is right and fulfill their oath as they understand it regardless of what political pressure may come their way.

How have you become aware of some of that criticism?

Talk radio in Wisconsin, particularly on the conservative side, is very prominent. I turned on the radio one morning driving to work and heard what a horrible person I was. So it’s hard to miss it.

Yes, I’ve been called a traitor. I’ve been called a liar. I’ve been called a fraud. I’ve been asked if I’m being paid off by the Chinese Communist Party. I’ve been told I might be tried for treason by a military tribunal. Sure, I’ve gotten lots of interesting and sometimes dark messages.

Does that change your approach to your job at all, having that sort of feedback?

Maybe members of the public forget this because their civic culture really just doesn’t know how to debate issues in a very healthy way right now. And there is sort of this tribal understanding that either you’re with us or you’re against us.

I’ve got five young kids and, sure, there’s certain uncomfortableness, too, when your child asks you whether it’s OK to play in the front yard or whether they should just stay in the backyard. [My emphasis]

What did you think about the broader conservative push led by the president to change the results of the election and the widespread rejection of that from courts at multiple level

I can’t speak to all the other cases out there, but certainly in the cases before us, they were asking us to throw out those elections. There was certainly nothing in the nature of the law or the facts that supported getting anywhere close to that, and I communicated that clearly. And I do think if you’re going to make a claim like that, you better have your evidence and you better have the law on your side and make your case. And at least in the cases before us, that wasn’t the case.

[dneal]

Sorry, but there's no shortage of the left's talking points here. I'm just pointing out the hypocrisy. Is the hyperbole and snark only allowed by one side? Your "go away" reply to another poster has changed my attitude.

If the opposite were true, and this was a bastion of conservative hyperbole; I would be pointing that out too. I'm an equal opportunity critic.

So about Justice Hagedorn... Why didn't the NYT talk about Justice Jill Karofsky? She's been getting angry, threatening calls too. She's also the Justice who, when running for the bench earlier this year, said "I will not vote for Donald Trump... (https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2020/01/15/trump-and-scott-walker-loom-wisconsins-race-supreme-court/4467748002/)[for] ...so many reasons. I don't even know where to start." She also said on Twitter that: "They [republicans] want this seat on the WI Supreme Court so they can rig the election this fall."

Liberals were pretty adamant that ACB should recuse herself should anything in this election come to the court. Strangely they were (and remain) silent on Justice Karofsky - who during the latest case said "you want us to overturn this election so your king can stay in power." But liberals nod sagely and say the courts have given Trump a fair hearing and dismissed his arguments on the merits.

I have been consistently warning that the way this is being dealt with is akin to playing with fire, so I'm not surprised about Justice Hagedorn. I don't condone it, of course; and I'm sure you'll get right on citing the death threats received by election "whistleblowers" and other people threatened for submitting affidavits (if anyone can get past calling them delusional). Maybe I missed it, but the three election workers in Georgia who were told their services were no longer needed was also addressed by you guys too... right? After all, the left has expressly advocated for the protection of whistleblowers. Or is that just when they blow the whistle on Trump?

BTW, Our recently fired director of CISA, who said this election was perfect and free from foreign interference; now admits he was wrong and a massive hack happened on his watch. Curiously that hasn't seemed to have been a talking point from the WashPost or NYT.

Former cybersecurity expert Chris Krebs accepts responsibility for massive hack (https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/cybersecurity-expert-chris-krebs-accepts-responsibility-massive-hack-russia)

[welch]

Sorry, but there's no shortage of the left's talking points here. I'm just pointing out the hypocrisy. Is the hyperbole and snark only allowed by one side? Your "go away" reply to another poster has changed my attitude.

If the opposite were true, and this was a bastion of conservative hyperbole; I would be pointing that out too. I'm an equal opportunity critic.

So about Justice Hagedorn... Why didn't the NYT talk about Justice Jill Karofsky? She's been getting angry, threatening calls too. She's also the Justice who, when running for the bench earlier this year, said "I will not vote for Donald Trump... (https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2020/01/15/trump-and-scott-walker-loom-wisconsins-race-supreme-court/4467748002/)[for] ...so many reasons. I don't even know where to start." She also said on Twitter that: "They [republicans] want this seat on the WI Supreme Court so they can rig the election this fall."

Liberals were pretty adamant that ACB should recuse herself should anything in this election come to the court. Strangely they were (and remain) silent on Justice Karofsky - who during the latest case said "you want us to overturn this election so your king can stay in power." But liberals nod sagely and say the courts have given Trump a fair hearing and dismissed his arguments on the merits.

I have been consistently warning that the way this is being dealt with is akin to playing with fire, so I'm not surprised about Justice Hagedorn. I don't condone it, of course; and I'm sure you'll get right on citing the death threats received by election "whistleblowers" and other people threatened for submitting affidavits (if anyone can get past calling them delusional). Maybe I missed it, but the three election workers in Georgia who were told their services were no longer needed was also addressed by you guys too... right? After all, the left has expressly advocated for the protection of whistleblowers. Or is that just when they blow the whistle on Trump?

BTW, Our recently fired director of CISA, who said this election was perfect and free from foreign interference; now admits he was wrong and a massive hack happened on his watch. Curiously that hasn't seemed to have been a talking point from the WashPost or NYT.

Former cybersecurity expert Chris Krebs accepts responsibility for massive hack (https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/cybersecurity-expert-chris-krebs-accepts-responsibility-massive-hack-russia)

- dneal, this was a little slippery. Krebs says that the cyberattack infected many US government agencies, but that says nothing about his findings regarding election mechanics and voting machines. Different devices.

- People connected with voting in Georgia have been getting death threats. Same with people in several other states. Meanwhile, Kelli Ward, head of the Republican Party in Georgia, has called for Republicans there to fight to overturn the election: die for something rather than live for nothing. That sounds dangerous, and a bit cracked.

- We both read through the Trump Campaign's failure in court. Each time, the Trump Campaign neglected to bring evidence of fraud to court, sometimes, as in Pennsylvania, admitting that there had been no fraud. In other cases. the Trump Campaign tried to use affidavits without allowing the affidavit-signing person to be examined in court. In other cases, we saw that the Trump campaign presented expert witnesses who could not explain why they held their opinions about the election. In other cases, the Trump Campaign presented statistical claims that vanished when someone with common sense considered them: advanced statistics based on false assumptions yields false results. Garbage in - garbage out.

- Those were all in trial courts. The Trump Campaign failed when it appealed, often because the original court had demolished Trump's pseudo-evidence, and because Trump's state constitutional arguments were judged to be slivers of nonsense.

- The final Trump suit, the Texas suit asking the Supreme Court to throw out the elections in four other states, well, that suit was silly to the point of being bizarre. We read through Texas, and through the responses.

How could the US have responded in a way that placates Republican voters who have a heart-felt -- almost religious -- belief that Trump was elected by a landslide? We cannot fix a delusion by agreeing to the delusion. The country's election officials and courts responded by carefully considering all the Trump suits. That's the most I would do.

(Anyone spitting Trumpist conspiracy thinking is someone not worth treating seriously. "China Joe" and commie Harris and "Biden corrupted Ukraine" is spouting far right-wing conspiracy propaganda. I ignore Qanon and the Fox claim that a Democratic staffer, rather than the modern KGB, gave information to Wikileaks. No reason to accept self-sealing conspiracy nonsense)

[dneal]

Krebs says that the cyberattack infected many US government agencies, but that says nothing about his findings regarding election mechanics and voting machines. Different devices.

You don't see any possible problem with this statement, and characterize mine as "a little slippery"?

Krebs, the chief of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency wasn't aware that a large scale cyber attack occurred across multiple government systems. He wasn't aware of any of it until after he was fired (and perhaps that's why he was fired instead of the left's characterization of it centering on mean-ole vindictive Trump's thin skin). There's really nothing else to talk about with regard to what he did or didn't say, other than him admitting that he failed completely. Nothing he says other than he's now aware of his own ignorance has any credibility.

Lots of people get death threats, for lots of reasons. Pointing out that certain people got death threats for certain reasons is usually intended to persuade. There's a reason the conservative media reports on whistleblowers and affiants getting death threats. There's a reason liberal media reports on justices getting death threats. It's not really about the threats, it's about portraying the opposing side.

Your description of the suits is one side, and you omit the other. I don't feel like typing out the rebuttal to balance it out. There are too many cases and too many variables. Some of it as you say, and some of it is political bias (e.g.: Justice Karofsky). I see both sides of the argument, and some merit on each. A suit getting dismissed because of laches leaves lots of room for legitimate complaint. Texas' suit being dismissed for standing leaves lots of room for legitimate complaint. In truth, I think it's as simple as no judge or court wants to touch this with a 10 foot pole; and most of them have figured out how to rule against it or pass it on.

I browse the far-right stuff just like I browse the far-left stuff. Forget Rachel Maddow, are Keith Olberman or Lawrence O'Donnell voices of sanity??? The abandonment of Fox by the far-right is cause for concern. Newsmax grabbed some of the viewership, but there are a lot of other new contenders popping up. Tucker Carlson isn't satisfying the conservative masses like he used to, and they're listening to more radical ones.

--edit--

So I think what I haven't articulated is the notion of ideology. Ideology can be a dangerous thing. The inquisition was based off ideology. Communism, Socialism, Fascism and Nazism are all ideologies. Radical Islam is an ideology.

They're not limited to the ideologies that have killed millions. Any religion is an ideology. "Defund the police" is an ideology (or a subset of one). The point is that they're based off of beliefs.

The argument in this thread seems to keep revolving back to the "fact" that Trump's win or loss is a clear truth. There's evidence to support either argument, but I don't see it as conclusive either way yet. I would submit that the Trumpers think you guys are just as delusional as you think they are.

Their belief will remain until they feel they had a fair shake. Some will still grumble, just like some still say Muller's report "proves" Russian Collusion; but you've got to go through the process to put an end to it.

[welch]

Sure. Krebs says:

(1) There is no evidence of fraud in the voting machines used during the election, and

(2) US government agencies and technology and defense companies have been hit by a Russian hack, by a hack from the same Russian spy agency that broke into the DNC server in 2016 and gave what they found to Wikileaks.

Those are two different targets. I haven't seen Krebs change his finding on election security. His comment on the US government hack says nothing about the election, at least nothing that I've seen

Yes, I understand that Trumpists believe that anyone who disagrees with Trump is "you guys". All one group with no thought except patience to repeat whatever "someone", meaning a nebulous thing called the mainstream media, tells people.


Their belief will remain until they feel they had a fair shake. Some will still grumble, just like some still say Muller's report "proves" Russian Collusion; but you've got to go through the process to put an end to it.

We have been through the process. The Trump Campaign filed more than 55 lawsuits but produced nothing that any judge took seriously. If those suits and those failures do not convince Trumpists that they got a fair shake, then what will? What, that is, other than having the entire country agree with them? Should the rest of us accept the affidavits that Trump is afraid to bring to court? Should we accept a giant lie just because Trump repeats it every day and someone believes it? That is no better than the "stab-in-the-back" legend that Germans believed right to their end.

Joe Biden got more votes and carried enough states to win more electoral votes than Trump. Biden carried the states that pollsters and poll-statisticians like FivethirtyEight were sure he would carry, plus a few that were predicted to be toss-ups. Trump also carried a few, such as Florida and Iowa, that were predicted to be very close. That's what happens in elections.

(Incidentally, I don't pay attention to MSNBC or any other TV news. I read books. I try, also, to read a fair sample of journalism, try to ignore news articles that have no sourcing. It happens that I was an apprentice historian many years ago, and have been a "software engineer" for almost 40 years. Source code does not lie and computers do not follow fancy talk. Either a system works or it doesn't. Many commercial people try to wave their arms while asserting that they are doing magic, but I have no more patience.)

[dneal]

I'm sorry, but "different systems", and "he hasn't changed his findings" (particularly since he's been fired) is a weak excuse.

Krebs' remarks on "no evidence" were made while he was completely unaware that a cyber attack was happening across the infrastructure. He was the cyber chief under homeland security. Any cyber attack was in his lane. A massive one happened. He knew nothing about it when it happened, or after it happened, or even after he was fired; until he was told. Krebs isn't your authority to appeal to for pretty much anything. You might as well be citing Neville Chamberlain's assurance that there was no evidence Hitler intended to invade France, and you haven't seen him change his assurance.

The circles we're running around are frankly getting boring. I don't discount your point, although I do point out your selectivity. I'm asking you to look at it from the other perspective, because there are points that are potentially equally valid. I don't believe you have (or will), and we are stuck at an impasse of reiteration. Like your Krebs argument, you seem to be cherry picking what you perceive as "true".

Just as you cite "55+ cases", the other side cites: a whole lot of statistics, affidavits, photo and video evidence, etc... They're as convinced in the conclusive truth of their argument as you are yours. Mark Twain said: “The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.” That probably applies to politics too.

Your Anti-Trump bias is readily apparent throughout this thread, and that's ok with me; although it's curious that you can't seem to concede that it might be clouding your judgement. The Trump campaign has not filed 55 lawsuits, for example, since you want to talk about "lies". 55 suits did not "fail". That's a lie too. Do we really want to dig through every lawsuit, who filed it where, whether it was withdrawn, denied or dismissed - and if the latter what evidence was presented and considered? Hint: The number of the latter is not 55, and that's why people on the other side are still pissed off.

I'm not sure what the point of the "incidentally" portion of your post is, particularly your software background. Plenty of systems work poorly. They aren't optimized, have flaws, bugs, etc... They (and their source code) can also be exploited - as the Russians demonstrated. Just don't ask Krebs, because he "completely missed it".

[welch]

A review, in detail and by a National Review writer, of the latest Republican attempt to overthrow the election in Pennsylvania. Trump-followers need something more convincing to persuade this country that Trump was cheated out of his "election landslide".

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/12/a-fatally-flawed-trump-petition-to-the-supreme-court/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first&fbclid=IwAR0guFVcfg36i114gsCCDz1j4KwpYaS3UQDcm7bNi 51tnVqsFsWxEU8vT5U

[dneal]

Well, if we're just going to post links to opinion pieces... here you go:

Gingrich: 2020 Is A Corrupt, Stolen Election, Democrats "Stole What They Had To Steal" (https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/11/08/gingrich_this_is_a_corrupt_stolen_election_democra ts_stole_what_they_had_to_steal.html#!)

Even a Large Number of Democrats Believe Biden Stole the Election (https://redstate.com/brandon_morse/2020/11/30/even-a-large-number-of-democrats-believe-biden-stole-the-election-n286942)

WAYNE ROOT: Of Course This Election Was Stolen. (https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/12/wayne-root-course-election-stolen/)

Mathematical evidence the election was stolen (https://www.wnd.com/2020/11/mathematical-evidence-election-stolen/)

Whoa: Nearly a Third of Democrats Believe the Election Was Stolen From Trump (https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2020/11/19/whoa-nearly-a-third-of-democrats-believe-the-election-was-stolen-from-trump-n1160882)

The Proof Is In: The Election Was Stolen (https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/11/30/the-proof-is-in-the-election-was-stolen/)

I haven't bothered to read any of those, although the last one looks interesting with all the references. They've got "convincing" titles. That's enough for me! lol

[TSherbs]

How about them pardons! After the FBI and the justice system removed them from the swamp, POTUS has let them back in. So much for that promise to "drain" it.

[dneal]

How about them pardons! After the FBI and the justice system removed them from the swamp, POTUS has let them back in. So much for that promise to "drain" it.

More TDS hyperbole...

Trump ranks 38 of 45 Presidents. His predecessor is #4.

https://www.potus.com/presidential-facts/pardons-commutations/

https://www.justice.gov/pardon/clemencyrecipients

[TSherbs]

It also slipped my notice that on the 24th another panel of federal judges (appeals court), this time unanimously (in legal effect, this doesn't actually matter), rejected another Trump team lawsuit to invalidate a state's (Wisconsin) election result on constitutional grounds. I've lost track of the cumulative record on all these legal challenges, but we all know where this is headed. I consider these continuing efforts to overturn these state results to be morally bankrupt.

[dneal]

Then why are there laws allowing these "morally bankrupt" efforts?

Your arguments are weaker than your trolling.

[TSherbs]

Trump's tweets Saturday raging against the Supreme Court and various other representatives of Congress and even President Elect Joe Biden reveal a desperate petty king lashing out at those he feels has betrayed him. Trump flattered the SC just a few months ago as he pushed his minions forward with legal cases, but now that he has been rejected by every level of court in the land they are "totally incompetent." What a joke is this so-called "leader". This whole devolvement into angry mess reminds me of Macbeth as Burnham Wood advances toward him and he realizes that he has been fooled by the witches. He just wasn't smart enough for what being king required, and his ambition carried him beyond his abilities to lead.

As the thread titled states, what an election this has been!

[TSherbs]

The NY Post last night published an opinion asking Trump to give up his "dark charade." But in a twist/mirror to my previous post, they liken him to a mad King Lear ranting in the wilderness. Ouch, from the Post!
https://nypost.com/2020/12/27/give-it-up-mr-president-for-your-sake-and-the-nations/?utm_source=url_sitebuttons&utm_medium=site%20buttons&utm_campaign=site%20buttons

[Linger]

Can somebody help me understand - I might not use the exact correct terminology, but I hope you understand my meaning:

The local voting procedures are governed by laws, rules and regulations agreed upon by both parties?

The actual local voting activity on election day is organized and executed by officials and volunteers of both parties?

The votes cast are counted by organizations and bodies staffed by individuals of both parties?

The complaints and recounts and audits are followed up by similar or comparable bodies staffed by individuals of both parties?

If so, how can one party commit fraud in a way that the other party does not observe it?

If so, why did the other party not do it to the other party 4 years ago? Or in any election at any level?

[TSherbs]

Linger, your logic and reasonableness are correct. The court cases have been a sham and, as even the editorial from a very pro-Trump newspaper says, a "dark charade." Trump started raising money on fraud claims the very next day after the election. He is a con man bilking hundreds of millions of $ from his gullible and impressionable followers.

[TSherbs]

Republicans in the U.S. have a longer-term strategy of trying to sow doubt in the legitimacy of our elections in order to restrict voting access and ease through things like mail-in voting and early voting. They also support requiring a special identification in order to vote. These Republican-led restrictions all are designed to reduce the number of poor and urban black voters who have for two generations now voted predominantly Democratic (Republicans purposely abandoned them in the 1970s to increase their share of the white vote). Restricting voter ease and access requires generating mistrust with our current voting system, thus the howling of the wolves about "fraud," etc. Trump and other Republican leaders have been taped stating that if "everyone votes," we'll never have another Republican "in the White House."

And there it is.

[dneal]

TSherbs has presented the Democrat-biased view, and seemingly confused answering your questions with babbling his own opinions.

To address your questions specifically:


Can somebody help me understand - I might not use the exact correct terminology, but I hope you understand my meaning:

The local voting procedures are governed by laws, rules and regulations agreed upon by both parties?

There are national election laws, but within that framework each State enacts laws governing elections.


The actual local voting activity on election day is organized and executed by officials and volunteers of both parties?

They're organized by election officials, and often have volunteers assisting. Both parties are normally allowed to have "poll watchers", to verify propriety and contest impropriety. Local results are tallied and forwarded to the State.


The votes cast are counted by organizations and bodies staffed by individuals of both parties?

The votes are counted by election officials. They can be of either party.


The complaints and recounts and audits are followed up by similar or comparable bodies staffed by individuals of both parties?

Generally recounts and audits are conducted by election officials. Usually representatives of each party witness.


If so, how can one party commit fraud in a way that the other party does not observe it?

When the system is run as designed, they usually can't. The argument from the Republican side is:

- Mail in voting was increased significantly in certain states, contrary to law.
- Poll watchers were prevented from observing in a manner that would allow them to verify that valid ballots were cast.
- In some instances (like the video of Georgia), ballots were scanned without poll watchers observing. The accusation is that the same ballots were scanned numerous times.
- If there are problems with ballots, they go to "adjudication" and are resolved. The accusation is that votes were manipulated during adjudication.


If so, why did the other party not do it to the other party 4 years ago? Or in any election at any level?

They do it all the time, on a small scale; and there are lots of convictions. Because there are so many precincts across the country, it's hard (if not impossible) to do it with a Presidential election.

The argument here is that the Democrats focused on fraud in roughly four specific cities in four specific states. By concentrating their effort there, they could swing those states to their candidate which would be enough to win nationally.

Note that I am not asserting whether or not this happened. There are plenty of sources that will justify either argument.

[TSherbs]

...There are plenty of sources that will justify either argument.

Not any that judges accept as relevant, persuasive, or legitimate with standing.

In other words, no legal "justification" for changing even one single vote has been demonstrated over all these 60+ cases.

Not a thing has been "justified" by any of these legal cases.

There never was a chance for any change to the outcome of this election, which dneal acknowledged in an earlier post. Trump and his coterie are either deluded or simply crass moral manipulators working toward a different endgame (which is what I believe). Republicans also filed suits in Georgia to limit voting access and ease for this upcoming January 5 runoff. Just goes to show. Georgia recounts (twice) showed no fraud or miscounts that would matter in the outcome.

The Democratic and Republican divide on this is that Democrats want young people and poor blacks to vote in high numbers; the Republicans do not. That is the battle-ground of the future.

[Linger]

The argument here is that the Democrats focused on fraud in roughly four specific cities in four specific states. By concentrating their effort there, they could swing those states to their candidate which would be enough to win nationally.

But even to pull this off, a planned fraud in four cities in four states would necessitate the planning and coordinating across multiple voting precincts, thus involving many election officials and local volunteers, to conspire into something that is clearly illegal. Not just the act itself, but on top of it a possible perjury (also illegal) when questioned afterwards.

A fraud big enough to move multiple precincts in cities in states to actually change the outcome of a national election seems so incredibly illogical and impossible, that I am surprised that not more of the “gullible and impressionable” Americans simply realize that. Not to speak of members of congress and senate. It simply totally defies normal, rational, common sense.

[TSherbs]

I know, I know.

I called it "delusional" OR a cynical ploy for a different end result (greater restrictions on access to voting, and fundraising from the gullible--America has a lot of them).

Take your pick.

[dneal]

The argument here is that the Democrats focused on fraud in roughly four specific cities in four specific states. By concentrating their effort there, they could swing those states to their candidate which would be enough to win nationally.

But even to pull this off, a planned fraud in four cities in four states would necessitate the planning and coordinating across multiple voting precincts, thus involving many election officials and local volunteers, to conspire into something that is clearly illegal. Not just the act itself, but on top of it a possible perjury (also illegal) when questioned afterwards.

That's right. Note that the four cities (Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta) are all controlled by Democrats.


A fraud big enough to move multiple precincts in cities in states to actually change the outcome of a national election seems so incredibly illogical and impossible, that I am surprised that not more of the “gullible and impressionable” Americans simply realize that. Not to speak of members of congress and senate. It simply totally defies normal, rational, common sense.

The results indicate that voter turnout in these four cities was large enough to sway the entire state. It doesn't matter to me whether it were a concentrated effort to "get out the vote", or a coordinated effort for fraud; either strategy was brilliant. Those four cities swung those four States

The enormity of the votes (in some cases reaching 120% of voters on the registered voter rolls, and predominately by mail-in ballot) is the incredibly illogical and impossible event that causes the Republicans to believe it was fraud.

They think TSherbs (for example) is similarly "gullible and impressionable" to believe it was legitimate. Do you think he would be as absolute in his belief were the shoe on the other foot? His party was happy to believe Russian Trolls posting on Facebook cost Hillary Clinton the election 4 years earlier, and used evidence fabricated by Team Hillary to spend 3 years and 30 million dollars to "investigate". Many still believe Muller "proved" Trump conspired with Russia. Their standards of proof seem to have changed, curiously, when their guy won. At least the Republican argument has more (and more credible) evidence - circumstantial though it be.

Conspiracy or coincidence? Depends on who you ask...

Here's a hypothetical for TSherbs - If enough State legislatures were to tip the election (and it really only takes two), either by decertifying Biden electors or allocating them to Trump; would you be so adamant in your defense of the rule of law? Would it be sufficient that the legislative body found the evidence convincing enough? They do have the legal and constitutional power to do exactly that.

For Linger - The reason I post that is because that is exactly one strategy Trump is employing. He either needs to bring Joe Biden's electoral votes below 270, in which case the election goes to the U.S. House of Representatives and Trump likely wins; or he needs to swing enough electoral votes to give him more than 270, in which case he wins. I do not think he will be successful, but there is some support in each of the four states for this... and stranger things have happened!

[welch]

The psychotic Louie Gohmert and a band of defeated Trumpists in Arizona have sued VP Pence, demanding that Pence: recognize Trumpist electors defeated by votes in a half dozen states be recognized as "competing slates of electors". Gohmert and gang claim that self-elected Trump-electors were selected by Republican legislatures; their votes should have been counted instead of the electors elected by the American people in November.

Here is Gohmert's text:

https://electioncases.osu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Gohmert-v-Pence.pdf

Gohmert adds a word, "[legislature"] to a Supreme Court decision from 1892, as if readers will ignore their brackets:
The Supreme Court has affirmed that the “power and jurisdiction of the state
[legislature]” to select electors “is exclusive,” McPherson v. Blacker, 146 U.S. 1, 11 (1892)

**

Incidentally, dneal, you persist in misspelling the name of the Democratic Party. Look it up.

[dneal]

Incidentally, dneal, you persist in misspelling the name of the Democratic Party. Look it up.

Sue me. ;)

[TSherbs]

The psychotic Louie Gohmert and a band of defeated Trumpists in Arizona have sued VP Pence, demanding that Pence: recognize Trumpist electors defeated by votes in a half dozen states be recognized as "competing slates of electors". Gohmert and gang claim that self-elected Trump-electors were selected by Republican legislatures; their votes should have been counted instead of the electors elected by the American people in November.

Here is Gohmert's text:

https://electioncases.osu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Gohmert-v-Pence.pdf

Gohmert adds a word, "[legislature"] to a Supreme Court decision from 1892, as if readers will ignore their brackets:
The Supreme Court has affirmed that the “power and jurisdiction of the state
[legislature]” to select electors “is exclusive,” McPherson v. Blacker, 146 U.S. 1, 11 (1892)



dear lord

[TSherbs]

What a stinking, nasty, cynical request. Absolutely morally craven.

[welch]

Joe Biden is the president-elect of the United States, with a wide lead in both the electoral college and in the popular vote. President Trump has refused to concede, uttering baseless allegations of election fraud that have been amplified by allies and conservative media outlets. His campaign and others have gone to court in six states, where Biden’s total margin is more than 312,000, to challenge certain ballots or the certification of the vote — and have lost more than 50 cases, including at the Supreme Court.

Here are the facts about the president’s efforts to question the fairness and integrity of the election, as well as updates on litigation. In each section, we’ve highlighted quotes so readers can see their significance at a glance.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/interactive/2020/election-integrity/?itid=hp_politics

Trumpists cling to fantasy, to a belief that evil magic took away Trump's landslide victory. The article lists every Trumpist claim plus each test test in court and found wanting. There is no way to argue someone out of a belief in things that are not real. A standard psychometric test, the Psychiatric Status Schedule, has an interviewer ask a subject, "Do you sometimes see things that other people do not?" If the subject answers "yes", that's a sign of psychosis. I gave the test long ago to patients being released from Bronx State Hospital. Treatment then was a heavy drug called Thorazine.

The US today faces the threat that a large number of people disbelieve reality. Biden defeated Trump. As each anti-reality fantasy was held up in daylight and shriveled, anti-reality believers have clung even more tightly to their paranoid fantasies. Those fantasies present something like a mass psychosis, but something more remote, far from the sorts of maladies that psychiatry treats. This is a paranoid fantasy in a society.

By now, there is no simple way to cure it.

[dneal]

The WashPost did a good job of consolidating the Democrat talking points. They're also the same outlet whose lead "fact-checker" called the President-elect's son's criminal investigation "laptop stuff"

58087

Perhaps a Newsmax or Epoch Times article asserting the opposite of the WashPost carries the same validity? Or is each outlet simply as biased as the other, just on opposite ends of the political spectrum?

FBI Collecting Data on Vote Fraud (https://www.newsmax.com/politics/fbi-voter-fraud/2020/11/30/id/999369/)
2020 Election Screaming Red Flags That Deserved Criminal Inquiry (https://www.theepochtimes.com/2020-election-screaming-red-flags-that-deserved-criminal-inquiry_3629042.html)

For someone who "...[tries], also, to read a fair sample of journalism, [tries] to ignore news articles that have no sourcing." you sure seem to cite only one outlet.

p.s.: Democrat. n. A member of the Democratic party of the U.S. ;)

[TSherbs]

FBI Collecting Data on Vote Fraud (https://www.newsmax.com/politics/fbi-voter-fraud/2020/11/30/id/999369/)
2020 Election Screaming Red Flags That Deserved Criminal Inquiry (https://www.theepochtimes.com/2020-election-screaming-red-flags-that-deserved-criminal-inquiry_3629042.html)


This link requires submitting an email address. No thank you.

Perhaps you can post the text of the article here for us to examine more closely.

[dneal]

FBI Collecting Data on Vote Fraud (https://www.newsmax.com/politics/fbi-voter-fraud/2020/11/30/id/999369/)
2020 Election Screaming Red Flags That Deserved Criminal Inquiry (https://www.theepochtimes.com/2020-election-screaming-red-flags-that-deserved-criminal-inquiry_3629042.html)


This link requires submitting an email address. No thank you.

Perhaps you can post the text of the article here for us to examine more closely.

Here are the points you seem to have overlooked:


Perhaps a Newsmax or Epoch Times article asserting the opposite of the WashPost carries the same validity? Or is each outlet simply as biased as the other, just on opposite ends of the political spectrum?

Those links are counter-examples. I didn’t read them, because I don’t read biased media - whether it’s Newsmax or Washington Post. I look at the actual evidence and then form an opinion. I listened to or read the court proceedings. I listened to the testimony given to State committees (and the U.S. Senate hearings). I read the affidavits.

Again, it’s not conclusive. It is compelling and certainly not something to be blithely dismissed as “delusional”, particularly by people who refuse to look at it. I suppose life is a lot easier for those who just let pundits tell them what to think (whether right or left).

It’s kind of painful to sort through, but some of the “Kraken” evidence has been posted (https://wpcdn.zenger.news/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/24190822/2020-12-23-Sidney-Powell-Team-Binder-ZENGER-NEWS.pdf) on a site. Who knew Liz Warren and Amy Klobuchar were such delusional conspiracy theorists!?! And using their official status as U.S. Senators to make such “stinking, nasty, cynical request(s)” surely makes them also “absolutely morally craven”. (See pages 201-215) The IP trace information is interesting too.

[welch]

Might as well go through the claims made by Trump and his most fanatic followers. Here's the first:


Was voting software from Dominion compromised?
Trump claim: Trump has spread claims that voting software is “used in states where tens of thousands of votes were stolen from us and given to Biden.” He said in repeated tweets that Dominion Voting Systems is “horrible, inaccurate and anything but secure,” all of which were flagged by Twitter as disputed. He retweeted a baseless report that the voting-machine system had “deleted 2.7 million Trump votes nationwide.”

Reality: There is no evidence that any voting systems were compromised, according to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security. “The systems and processes used by election officials to tabulate votes and certify official results are protected by various safeguards that help ensure the accuracy of election results,” the agency notes on its “Rumor Control” page that refutes disinformation and misinformation about the accuracy of the election results. “These safeguards include measures that help ensure tabulation systems function as intended, protect against malicious software, and enable the identification and correction of any irregularities.”


The president fired the agency’s director on Nov. 17 with a tweet that carried a now-commonplace disclaimer from Twitter: “This claim about election fraud is disputed.” Christopher Krebs led successful efforts to help state and local election offices protect their systems and oversaw efforts to safeguard against foreign and domestic disinformation campaigns. He had countered the president’s unfounded claims of ballot fraud.

And the next:


Did software misallocate 6,000 votes in Antrim County?
Trump claim, Dec. 2: “In one Michigan county, as an example that used Dominion Systems, they found that nearly 6,000 votes had been wrongly switched. From Trump to Biden.”

Reality: “The software did not cause a misallocation of votes; it was a result of user human error,” reported Michigan’s secretary of state. “Michigan’s elections were conducted fairly, effectively and transparently and are an accurate reflection of the will of Michigan voters.”

Antrim County, which Trump won by 30 points in 2016, initially was awarded to Biden. Election officials questioned those unofficial results and found human, not machine, error. The county clerk failed to update the software used to collect voting-machine totals before sending the results. The mistake caused a discrepancy in vote tallies for a few hours, according to an explanation posted Nov. 6 on the website of Michigan’s secretary of state, and it was corrected.

An Antrim County judge on Dec. 4 ordered ballots preserved on 22 tabulation machines, which Trump attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani tweeted was a “big win for honest elections.” However, the judge was responding not to Trump campaign entreaties, but to a voter who argued that damaged ballots might have caused a village marijuana proposal to win by a single vote, the Detroit Free Press reported.

Biden won Michigan by nearly 155,000 votes. The state certified the election results on Nov. 23 and awarded Biden all 16 electoral votes.

A Michigan lawsuit led by former Trump adviser Sidney Powell that sought to decertify the results was dismissed on Dec. 7 by U.S. District Judge Linda V. Parker, who noted that the plaintiffs had not offered any proof that Dominion machines had flipped votes from Trump to Biden, but rather brought “an amalgamation of theories, conjecture and speculation that such alterations were possible.”



Here is the opinion:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/read-the-opinion-judge-rejects-sidney-powell-s-lawsuit-in-michigan/54c08179-3af2-4931-85e3-c59dfb1dee31/


For these reasons, the Court finds that Plaintiffs are far from likely to
succeed in this matter. In fact, this lawsuit seems to be less about achieving the
relief Plaintiffs seek—as much of that relief is beyond the power of this Court—
and more about the impact of their allegations on People’s faith in the democratic
process and their trust in our government. Plaintiffs ask this Court to ignore the
orderly statutory scheme established to challenge elections and to ignore the will of
millions of voters. This, the Court cannot, and will not, do.

The People have spoken.

The Court, therefore, DENIES Plaintiffs’ “Emergency Motion for
Declaratory, Emergency, and Permanent Injunctive Relief”

Is this a democratic "talking point" or the conclusion of a judge who heard every bit of evidence that the Trump Campaign lawyers could find?

Of course, as Judge Parker wrote, it might be a "talking point" for a democratic way of life: "more about the impact of their allegations on People’s faith in the democratic
process and their trust in our government".

[dneal]

So about those impartial courts handing out fair decisions...

A U.S. District court heard a complaint about Georgia voter rolls being purged of people who have moved (https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/45/2020/12/show_temp.pl-2-1.pdf). The judge ruled those voters can vote using their old addresses.

Seriously.

If that doesn't seem strange enough on its face, it turns out that the judge is the sister of Stacy Abrams. You know, that former candidate for Governor of Georgia who (I suppose delusionally) said she lost due to voter fraud. If that's not enough to stir your memory, she's also the leader of "voting-rights" groups and said she had millions of mail in ballots ready for the Georgia runoff elections for U.S. Senate.

A motion was filed for recusal (https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.gamd.118722/gov.uscourts.gamd.118722.7.1.pdf), but apparently being a relative of the prospective plaintiff isn't a reason her judgement might be biased.

Politico article for those who prefer a journalist's view (https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/28/georgia-voter-rolls-senate-451820)


I'm sure the Washington Post will be along shortly to fact-check, and let us all know that there's...

58091

[dneal]

Might as well go through the claims made by Trump and his most fanatic followers.


Your post mixes news opinion with a court decision, creating the appearance that the court addressed the merits of the argument or the evidence with the detail of the opinion of the journalist. It did not.


Here is the opinion:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/read-the-opinion-judge-rejects-sidney-powell-s-lawsuit-in-michigan/54c08179-3af2-4931-85e3-c59dfb1dee31/


For these reasons, the Court finds that Plaintiffs are far from likely to
succeed in this matter. In fact, this lawsuit seems to be less about achieving the
relief Plaintiffs seek—as much of that relief is beyond the power of this Court—
and more about the impact of their allegations on People’s faith in the democratic
process and their trust in our government. Plaintiffs ask this Court to ignore the
orderly statutory scheme established to challenge elections and to ignore the will of
millions of voters. This, the Court cannot, and will not, do.

The People have spoken.

The Court, therefore, DENIES Plaintiffs’ “Emergency Motion for
Declaratory, Emergency, and Permanent Injunctive Relief”

Is this a democratic "talking point" or the conclusion of a judge who heard every bit of evidence that the Trump Campaign lawyers could find?

Of course, as Judge Parker wrote, it might be a "talking point" for a democratic way of life: "more about the impact of their allegations on People’s faith in the democratic
process and their trust in our government".

You are selective in your quoting, not that it's even necessary. The ruling was primarily about procedure rather than merit.

- Plaintiffs’ state law claims against Defendants are barred by Eleventh Amendment immunity.

- The time has passed to provide most of the relief Plaintiffs request in their Amended Complaint; the remaining relief is beyond the power of any court. For those reasons, this matter is moot. (Curiously, this court references a Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision on Pennsylvania law, for a case regarding Michigan state law - and the reason they cite 11th Amendment Immunity)

- The Court concludes that Plaintiffs’ delay results in their claims being barred by laches. (This is a reason the Trump side is upset. The courts seem to expect discovery wasn't an issue, when Democrat politicians - specifically the Michigan Secretary of State - fought any type of investigation or forensic analysis. The court says the plaintiff waited too long, but ignores the stonewalling committed by the defendant)

- For these reasons, abstention is appropriate under the Colorado River doctrine. (for the lay person, this essentially means that since so many other similar cases had been brought; the court shouldn't listen to this one)

- Accordingly, Plaintiffs have failed to show that their injury can be redressed by the relief they seek and thus possess no standing to pursue their equal protection claim. (I see the court's dilemma. The problem of determining what vote is and isn't valid, particularly when evidence has been destroyed; is a Gordian Knot they don't want to untangle)

- [The Court] finds that Plaintiffs lack standing to sue under the Elections and Electors Clauses. (The court uses the Constitutional language of the Legislature having the power to appoint electors to assert that they and not the electors themselves would have standing)

- With nothing but speculation and conjecture that votes for President Trump were destroyed, discarded or switched to votes for Vice President Biden, Plaintiffs’ equal protection claim fails. (This is the first time the court addresses the evidence presented. I agree that no one has produced irrefutable evidence at this point. I recognize that it's also near impossible given the time constraints and in some cases outright obstruction. This is why Trump voters are not and will not be satisfied, and why a post election investigation needs to occur in order to assuage all voters' concerns about election integrity)

[welch]

Another claim: that Trump MUST have won because he won both Florida and Ohio and no one has ever won those two states but lost the election. Of course that's a silly claim, but this is Trump.


Has a presidential candidate ever won Florida and Ohio and still lost?
Trump claim, Dec. 9, in a tweet: “No president has ever won both Florida and Ohio and lost,” Trump tweeted. “I won them both, by a lot!”

Trump lawyer John C. Eastman expanded on that assertion and entered it into the record at the Supreme Court on Dec. 9 as part of a Texas case that challenges results in four states, none of which are Texas: “The fact that nearly half of the country believes the election was stolen should come as no surprise. President Trump prevailed on nearly every historical indicia of success in presidential elections. For example, he won both Florida and Ohio; no candidate in history — Republican or Democrat — has ever lost the election after winning both States.”

Reality: In 1960, Richard Nixon won Florida and Ohio and lost to John F. Kennedy. Further, it doesn’t matter whether a candidate “won them both, by a lot,” or a little. Florida and Ohio award all their electoral votes to the top vote-getter, no matter the margin of victory, as do all the other states except Nebraska and Maine.

[welch]

Next:


Were there enough voting errors to overturn results in any state?
Trump claim, Dec. 2, in White House video: “So we’re not looking to show you 25 faulty or fraudulent votes, which don’t mean anything because it doesn’t overturn the state. Or 50 or 100, we’re showing you hundreds of thousands, far more than we need. Far more than the margin, far more than the law requires. … The corrupt forces who are registering dead voters and stuffing ballot boxes are the same people who have perpetrated one phony and fraudulent hoax after another.”

Fact: State officials have certified election results in six swing states that Biden won: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In two states, Georgia and Wisconsin, recounts made no difference in the results.

On Dec. 7, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, recertified the state’s results after an audit-triggered hand recount and a formal recount requested by the Trump campaign. Biden’s margin was about 12,000 votes, a decline of a few hundred votes.

“Whether it is the president of the United States or a failed gubernatorial candidate, disinformation regarding election administration should be condemned and rejected,” Raffensperger said, referring both to Trump’s claims and to Stacey Abrams’s 2018 Democratic run for governor. “Integrity matters. Truth matters.”

Learn more: The certified results of state and federal races can be found on the Georgia secretary of state’s website

Does Trump rule over a post-truth or a post-reality presidency?

[dneal]

Fact: Litigation continues in accordance with law and his rights.

Trump is not likely to prevail.

[welch]

On to Pennsylvania.


Were representatives from both parties allowed to observe counting of votes in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia?
Claim: Trump tweeted on Nov. 13 that he won Pennsylvania because “700,000 ballots were not allowed to be viewed in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.” He and Giuliani, his personal attorney, have continued to make the claim. In a court filing, the Trump campaign contended that “Allegheny and Philadelphia Counties alone received and processed 682,479 mail-in and absentee ballots without review by the political parties and candidates.”

On Dec. 2, in a 46-minute video from the White House, Trump repeated his claim and added: “There is only one possible reason that the corrupt Democrat political machine would oppose transparency during the vote counting. It’s because they know they are hiding illegal activity. It’s very simple. This is an egregious, inexcusable and irreversible harm that stains the entire election. Yet this unprecedented practice of excluding our observers, our vote watchers, as some people call them, occurred in Democrat-run cities, in key states all across the nation.”

Fact: Under Pennsylvania election law, each political party and candidate is entitled to have a representative “in the room” to watch ballots being counted, and state and local officials have said that all parties had access to the count. Allegheny County spokeswoman Amie Downs has said that “at no time were canvassing operations conducted without observers having the opportunity to see the process and the counting.” Braced for conspiracy theories, Philadelphia authorities live-streamed the count online. Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D) said on Nov. 4 that “all parties have canvass observers” during the count, which continued for several days. Some 2.4 million people in Pennsylvania voted by mail in the 2020 election, and their ballots could not be opened and counted until Election Day, according to a law enacted by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature.


In its ongoing federal suit against the state and county boards of election, the campaign dropped its claim for legal action based on the assertion that observers were denied access to the count. In a revised suit filed on Nov. 15, the campaign again asked U.S. District Judge Matthew W. Brann to block the certification of Pennsylvania’s election results. But a secondary request to block the certification of all votes where observer access was allegedly restricted was deleted in the amended suit. And the new version stripped out all of the legal counts based on the allegation that ballots were counted in secret.

Trump’s pared-down lawsuit then focused on allegations that Republicans were illegally disadvantaged because some Democratic-leaning counties allowed voters to fix errors on their mail ballots. Counties have said this affected only a small number of votes.

In a ruling on Nov. 21, Brann dismissed the suit, writing that the Trump campaign had used “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations” stitched together “like Frankenstein’s Monster” in a bid to throw out millions of votes. A federal appeals court upheld that ruling on Nov. 27, writing: “Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here. Voters, not lawyers, choose the President. Ballots, not briefs, decide elections.”

Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar (D) certified Biden’s victory on Nov. 24, after receiving official confirmation of the presidential vote totals from all 67 counties in the state. Wolf then signed a certificate selecting Biden’s slate of electors, which was submitted to the federal government.

US District Court, Judge Brann, dismissed Trump's lawsuit on November 21. Here is Judge Brann's opinion: https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/read-the-opinion-federal-judge-dismisses-trump-campaign-lawsuit-in-pennsylvania/2afd3821-220b-4596-b172-aaa1d3ab63a5/

Judge Brann writes, at the beginning,


INTRODUCTION
In this action, the Trump Campaign and the Individual Plaintiffs
(collectively, the “Plaintiffs”) seek to discard millions of votes legally cast by
Pennsylvanians from all corners – from Greene County to Pike County, and
everywhere in between. In other words, Plaintiffs ask this Court to disenfranchise
almost seven million voters. This Court has been unable to find any case in which
a plaintiff has sought such a drastic remedy in the contest of an election, in terms
of the sheer volume of votes asked to be invalidated. One might expect that when
seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with
compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption, such that this
Court would have no option but to regrettably grant the proposed injunctive relief
despite the impact it would have on such a large group of citizens.

That has not happened. Instead, this Court has been presented with strained
legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative
complaint and unsupported by evidence. In the United States of America, this
cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its
sixth most populated state. Our people, laws, and institutions demand more. At
bottom, Plaintiffs have failed to meet their burden to state a claim upon which
relief may be granted. Therefore, I grant Defendants’ motions and dismiss
Plaintiffs’ action with prejudice.

An opinion from the US Appeals Court, written by Judge Bibas, about a week later:


Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations
and then proof. We have neither here.

The Trump Presidential Campaign asserts that Pennsylvania’s 2020 election was unfair.
But as lawyer Rudolph Giuliani stressed, the Campaign “doesn’t plead fraud. . . . [T]his is
not a fraud case.” Mot. to Dismiss Hr’g Tr. 118:19–20, 137:18. Instead, it objects that
Pennsylvania’s Secretary of State and some counties restricted poll watchers and let voters
fix technical defects in their mail-in ballots. It offers nothing more.

This case is not about whether those claims are true. Rather, the Campaign appeals on
a very narrow ground: whether the District Court abused its discretion in not letting the
Campaign amend its complaint a second time. It did not.

Most of the claims in the Second Amended Complaint boil down to issues of state law.
But Pennsylvania law is willing to overlook many technical defects. It favors counting
votes as long as there is no fraud. Indeed, the Campaign has already litigated and lost many
of these issues in state courts.

The Campaign tries to repackage these state-law claims as unconstitutional discrimination. Yet its allegations are vague and conclusory. It never alleges that anyone treated the
Trump campaign or Trump votes worse than it treated the Biden campaign or Biden votes.

And federal law does not require poll watchers or specify how they may observe. It also
says nothing about curing technical state-law errors in ballots. Each of these defects is fatal,and the proposed Second Amended Complaint does not fix them. So the District Court
properly denied leave to amend again.

Nor does the Campaign deserve an injunction to undo Pennsylvania’s certification of
its votes. The Campaign’s claims have no merit. The number of ballots it specifically challenges is far smaller than the roughly 81,000-vote margin of victory. And it never claims
fraud or that any votes were cast by illegal voters. Plus, tossing out millions of mail-in
ballots would be drastic and unprecedented, disenfranchising a huge swath of the electorate
and upsetting all down-ballot races too. That remedy would be grossly disproportionate to
the procedural challenges raised. So we deny the motion for an injunction pending appeal.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/read-the-third-circuit-court-of-appeals-ruling-in-pennsylvania-election/e2bfd645-efb5-4862-8680-ce92c9ccf6e2/?itid=lk_interstitial_manual_9

Yet another claim by Trump fanatics and by Trump himself, another claim that shattered, unsupported by anything but fantasy and a deep desire to destroy democratic constitutionalism in the United States: a desire to eliminate elections.

[dneal]

This case is not about whether those claims are true.

And that's why Trump voters are upset.

You guys keep trumpeting (heh, heh...) there's no proof. You don't understand that you sound as delusional to the Trump voter as they sound to you.

Two groups of people yelling at each other from their own echo chambers, wondering why one can't hear the other.

[TSherbs]

This case is not about whether those claims are true.

And that's why Trump voters are upset.

You guys keep trumpeting (heh, heh...) there's no proof. You don't understand that you sound as delusional to the Trump voter as they sound to you.

Two groups of people yelling at each other from their own echo chambers, wondering why one can't hear the other.

We know why Trump supporters are upset: they lost to an old man rival candidate who had failed to win several times before, ending Trump's tenure after just one term. That's gotta hurt, especially if one has a big ego and thin skin. It hurts even more that, basically, Trump has been campaigning since his first month in office in 2017, holding rallies all over the nation, bragging about crowds, and suggesting his invincibility everywhere he went. Throw in dashes of impeachment, racism, privilege, protests, and pandemic, and you get quite a bitter mixture, no doubt.

But that's what happens when one hitches one's psychological wagon to a con-man who ended up not smart enough and not wise enough to lead this country through its challenges.

So, yes, Trump supporters should be upset. That kind of loss, to "fucking Joe Biden" as Trump said, must really hurt.

[dneal]

We know why Trump supporters are upset: they lost to an old man rival candidate who had failed to win several times before, ending Trump's tenure after just one term. That's gotta hurt, especially if one has a big ego and thin skin. It hurts even more that, basically, Trump has been campaigning since his first month in office in 2017, holding rallies all over the nation, bragging about crowds, and suggesting his invincibility everywhere he went. Throw in dashes of impeachment, racism, privilege, protests, and pandemic, and you get quite a bitter mixture, no doubt.

But that's what happens when one hitches one's psychological wagon to a con-man who ended up not smart enough and not wise enough to lead this country through its challenges.

So, yes, Trump supporters should be upset. That kind of loss, to "fucking Joe Biden" as Trump said, must really hurt.

Nope. That’s a bullshit narrative you’ve invented (or heard in your echo chamber), and based on your consistent bias it’s no wonder to me why you can’t fathom the reality. Wanna talk delusional? Your caricature of Trump supporters is precisely that.

Economist John Lott is about as much of a data wonk as you’re going to find, and definitely not a conspiracy theorist. He just published a paper titled A Simple Test for the extent of Vote Fraud with Absentee Ballots in the 2020 Presidential Election: Georgia and Pennsylvania Data (https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=9171011020780730260870720961020191 07050021073083017034007004111101093126089113015098 04310101012004202503508700306702309607901710205009 40590500820051230050190680710650101210230920140871 25100015093127084109067123088015124090077064008086 095087026091&EXT=pdf&INDEX=TRUE).

He understands, and in his introduction states:

Courts have frequently rejected Republican challenges to the 2020 presidential vote because they want evidence that a case involves enough fraud to alter the vote’s outcome in a particular state. Republicans argue that since their observers couldn’t watch the vote count, they can’t provide that evidence and have asked for discovery. Still, while the courts have agreed that irregularities have occurred, they weren’t willing to grant discovery unless Republicans first present enough evidence of fraud to overturn the election. Republicans thus faced a kind of Catch 22.

[Sphere]

Donald Trump lost. There is no evidence otherwise. Evidence of voter fraud simply doesn't exist outside of ill-informed armchair lawyers speculation. To deny this is to support an attemepted coup against the US. Now, with Donald Trump calling for a "wild time" on January 6th, as Congress certifies the votes the situation is becoming quite serious, on many levels. If there is any violence in the effort of overturning the election, Mr. Trump opens himself and his cultists up to charges of treason and/or sedition. Based on his rhetoric he can be seen as inciting violence against the government. His cultists will also become part of the same traitorous group.
Mr. Neal, I can tell you are fervent in your support of the current President, but again, there has been no actual evidence presented that has been found to be credible in a court of law. This fact has been validated and upheld in every single court case (60 and counting), but one. All America now has a choice, accept the results and move forward, or paint yourself as sore losers whose personal ideology is devoid of facts. Or, you can start another Civil War, just as many on the far right would lke to see. This would clearly be treason.

[TSherbs]

... Republicans argue that since their observers couldn’t watch the vote count, they can’t provide that evidence and have asked for discovery....

I don't believe that ballot room observers ever are afforded the opportunity to make vote counts themselves. That is not their purpose and not the dispensation under law (to my knowledge). Expecting this seems legally unfounded, particularly during a pandemic!

[TSherbs]

Fact: Litigation continues in accordance with law and his rights.

yes, but it is morally craven

Not everything permissible by law is morally proper or beneficial. Not everything permissible by law is even good for either the individual or the community or both. This country over-values litigation and litigiousness, and Trump has bragged with how well-versed he is in litigation (as both defendant and plaintiff). I would argue that Trump and his GOP legal team have lost their moral and ethical sense of balance in this regard.

As you note, he is unlikely to win (I say that he has no chance). What, then, is the point of these legal suits? How are they ethically justified beyond simply their permissibility?

[Empty_of_Clouds]

But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.

Edmund Burke

[Chuck Naill]

But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.

Edmund Burke

Wisdon and virtue is/are not an agreed upon topic. If you only provided freedom to those with whom you agreed, it would not be freedom. Burke and Payne were at odds, but both were brillent thinkers IMHO.

Cutting some slack is essential for true freedom to exit.

[Empty_of_Clouds]

"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right."

Paine

[Chuck Naill]

Regardless of what side you relate, Mitch McConnel is not someone who was elected to have as much power as he does. I have read and heard that many elected officals in Congress would like to get things done, but cannot because of the majority leader. Mitch thinks Americans don't need another "fire hose" stimulus check and I am willing to agree and disagree because I don't claim to know how many Americans have needs. I don't need a stimulus check. My point is I doubt a man who has been in politics as long as McConnel and got married to a wealthy person knows any more about the needs of ordinary Americans as I do. That said, he should know since the poverty and opiod addiction in the state that elected him is well known.

[Chuck Naill]

"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right."

Paine

Did you post this because you think it is related to what I posted?

[welch]

Your post mixes news opinion with a court decision, creating the appearance that the court addressed the merits of the argument or the evidence with the detail of the opinion of the journalist. It did not.


Here is the opinion:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/read-the-opinion-judge-rejects-sidney-powell-s-lawsuit-in-michigan/54c08179-3af2-4931-85e3-c59dfb1dee31/


For these reasons, the Court finds that Plaintiffs are far from likely to
succeed in this matter. In fact, this lawsuit seems to be less about achieving the
relief Plaintiffs seek—as much of that relief is beyond the power of this Court—
and more about the impact of their allegations on People’s faith in the democratic
process and their trust in our government. Plaintiffs ask this Court to ignore the
orderly statutory scheme established to challenge elections and to ignore the will of
millions of voters. This, the Court cannot, and will not, do.

The People have spoken.

The Court, therefore, DENIES Plaintiffs’ “Emergency Motion for
Declaratory, Emergency, and Permanent Injunctive Relief”

Is this a democratic "talking point" or the conclusion of a judge who heard every bit of evidence that the Trump Campaign lawyers could find?

Of course, as Judge Parker wrote, it might be a "talking point" for a democratic way of life: "more about the impact of their allegations on People’s faith in the democratic
process and their trust in our government".

You are selective in your quoting, not that it's even necessary. The ruling was primarily about procedure rather than merit.

- Plaintiffs’ state law claims against Defendants are barred by Eleventh Amendment immunity.

- The time has passed to provide most of the relief Plaintiffs request in their Amended Complaint; the remaining relief is beyond the power of any court. For those reasons, this matter is moot. (Curiously, this court references a Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision on Pennsylvania law, for a case regarding Michigan state law - and the reason they cite 11th Amendment Immunity)

- The Court concludes that Plaintiffs’ delay results in their claims being barred by laches. (This is a reason the Trump side is upset. The courts seem to expect discovery wasn't an issue, when Democrat politicians - specifically the Michigan Secretary of State - fought any type of investigation or forensic analysis. The court says the plaintiff waited too long, but ignores the stonewalling committed by the defendant)

- For these reasons, abstention is appropriate under the Colorado River doctrine. (for the lay person, this essentially means that since so many other similar cases had been brought; the court shouldn't listen to this one)

- Accordingly, Plaintiffs have failed to show that their injury can be redressed by the relief they seek and thus possess no standing to pursue their equal protection claim. (I see the court's dilemma. The problem of determining what vote is and isn't valid, particularly when evidence has been destroyed; is a Gordian Knot they don't want to untangle)

- [The Court] finds that Plaintiffs lack standing to sue under the Elections and Electors Clauses. (The court uses the Constitutional language of the Legislature having the power to appoint electors to assert that they and not the electors themselves would have standing)

- With nothing but speculation and conjecture that votes for President Trump were destroyed, discarded or switched to votes for Vice President Biden, Plaintiffs’ equal protection claim fails. (This is the first time the court addresses the evidence presented. I agree that no one has produced irrefutable evidence at this point. I recognize that it's also near impossible given the time constraints and in some cases outright obstruction. This is why Trump voters are not and will not be satisfied, and why a post election investigation needs to occur in order to assuage all voters' concerns about election integrity)

dneal, take a look at Judge Brannan's decision in the Pennsylvania case. He is a US District Court judge who heard Trump's lawsuit. Judge Bilbas wrote for the majority pf the US Appeals Court. Judge Brannan rejected the Trump-Giuliani claims of fraud after Giuliani and withdrew their claim of fraud. That's a content-facing decision.

In a previous decision in, best I remember, Pennsylvania courts, Trump claimed that no Republican vote-counting watchers were allowed to watch. The judge asked if any Republican watchers had been in the room where the counting took place. Pennsylvania law, we learned, requires that watchers be in the counting room, but not close enough to count the votes themselves. Were any Republican watchers in the room, the judge asked Trump's lawyers. "There was a non-zero number", the lawyer replied...after being reminded that a lawyer who lies to a judge might be disbarred.

Unless the Trump campaign lawyer meant that there were a negative number of watchers, then there were watchers in the room.

Yet the Trump-controlled media continues to say that vote-counting was fraudulent in Pennsylvania.

How can Trump-fanatics be convinced? Their conspiracy-fantasy claims have been given a fair hearing everywhere. Their claim have been rejected everywhere. Trumpism has become a social-psychosis.


With nothing but speculation and conjecture that votes for President Trump were destroyed, discarded or switched to votes for Vice President Biden, Plaintiffs’ equal protection claim fails. (This is the first time the court addresses the evidence presented. I agree that no one has produced irrefutable evidence at this point. I recognize that it's also near impossible given the time constraints and in some cases outright obstruction. This is why Trump voters are not and will not be satisfied, and why a post election investigation needs to occur in order to assuage all voters' concerns about election integrity) While it might be the first time in the Appeals Court decision election "evidence", the purpose of the District Court -- Judge Brannan -- was to hear that evidence. Read Brannan's decision, to which I provided a link.

[welch]

AG Barr says that he has not found evidence of voting fraud sufficient to overturn the election anyplace.


Trump claim, on call-in to Fox, Nov. 29: “This is total fraud. And how the FBI and Department of Justice — I don’t know — maybe they’re involved, but how people are getting away with this stuff — it’s unbelievable. … You would think, if you’re in the FBI or Department of Justice, this is — this is the biggest thing you could be looking at. Where are they? I have not seen anything. … It’s an embarrassment to our country.”

Fact: Attorney General William P. Barr said Dec. 1 that FBI agents and U.S. attorneys have been investigating complaints, but “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”

Before the election, he had repeatedly echoed the president’s warnings about the potential for fraud in mail-in voting, which many states expanded to offer voters a safe alternative during the coronavirus pandemic. After the election, Barr cleared prosecutors to pursue allegations of “vote tabulation irregularities.”

On general matters, with a quote from the Secretary of State of Georgia:


On Dec. 7, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, recertified the state’s results after an audit-triggered hand recount and a formal recount requested by the Trump campaign. Biden’s margin was about 12,000 votes, a decline of a few hundred votes.

“Whether it is the president of the United States or a failed gubernatorial candidate, disinformation regarding election administration should be condemned and rejected,” Raffensperger said, referring both to Trump’s claims and to Stacey Abrams’s 2018 Democratic run for governor. “Integrity matters. Truth matters.”

Recently, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation compared the signature on every mail-in ballot in Cobb County, finding that the county was 99.99% accurate. They found two mismatches, one of which was a wife signing for her disabled husband.

https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fthehill.com%2Fhomenews%2Fcam paign%2F532042-georgia-signature-audit-finds-no-fraud-in-presidential-election%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR0fNIuLxMSUt50Imrc4Owt_EM-1N22bZjVGTd1bwuGv0Wg7qdE3QhOJlG4&h=AT2bR_yxheCFvKcAUMFwy56HLVZoJz4LNmb4I6kDQdFmUTHy _jz1Gcwqb0YQyG3YEJSgjHAaL1LcoGL20KAQAq1o62g35nzjLZ NoGoLKFAJOtat-17VIF1a7mtFXVEcyKe46&__tn__=%2CmH-R&c[0]=AT3Slk34nxG29rZMVCm8Tio6CFFzsdmsPNRo0q4CWAmXW8Br9 GQEcmwdm74yxlaQWpZujkcIocevUBfhUJU5vlXhlbDv_ncTUiE jqsiSyHJWdCiUFuu1udfXk9wYnfxrOguJswIyYO8qwd7_afuHw r9cYbDl3zrh9hpgHw_SkYdnZnKVF7hXYZwk8M7DUvVY3erQ7Tt sOGW6dFi_rg


Georgia signature audit finds no fraud in presidential election
BY TAL AXELROD - 12/29/20 10:34 PM EST

A signature audit of the presidential election results in a key Georgia county confirmed there was no fraud, the third review to confirm that President-elect Joe Biden won the Peach State in November.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) said in a press release that the review in Cobb County, which Biden won by more than 14 percentage points, found that the election board there achieved “a 99.99% accuracy rate in performing correct signature verification procedures.”

The signature audit of ballots submitted followed a hand recount of statewide votes and a subsequent machine recount that also affirmed Biden’s victory in the Peach State. President Trump has made Georgia a top target of his claims that widespread voter fraud and irregularities cost him a second term, though lawsuits over such claims have been tossed for lack of evidence and standing.


“The Secretary of State’s office has always been focused on calling balls and strikes in elections and, in this case, three strikes against the voter fraud claims and they’re out,” said Raffensperger. “We conducted a statewide hand recount that reaffirmed the initial tally, and a machine recount at the request of the Trump campaign that also reaffirmed the original tally. This audit disproves the only credible allegations the Trump campaign had against the strength of Georgia’s signature match processes.”

Raffensperger first announced the signature match audit for Cobb County on Dec. 14 over allegations of process foul-ups, but the review found “no fraudulent absentee ballots” with a 99 percent confidence threshold. The audit found that only two ballots should have been flagged, but fraud was not suspected in either instance.

Raffensperger’s office teamed up with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to conduct the audit.

[welch]

More signature verification claims; states other than Georgia:


Did election officials manipulate signature-verification machinery?
Trump claim: Trump has repeated unfounded claims that election officials in Democratic-leaning Clark County manipulated a machine used to verify signatures to “allow large numbers of ballots to be counted that otherwise would never have passed muster.” In a 46-minute video posted online, Trump claimed that officials had “intentionally lowered” the machine’s standard for matching a ballot signature to signatures on file. “This machine was set at the lowest level, according to one report,” he said. “They said you could sign your name as Santa Claus and it would be accepted.”

Reality: After a nine-hour evidentiary hearing that focused in large part on the signature-verification machine, a Carson City judge found no evidence that the use of the so-called Agilis machine was illegal, error-prone or had led to the counting of fraudulent votes. In fact, he pointed out, Clark County had used the same Agilis machine in the June primary, and Republicans had not complained until the eve of the general election.

Pro-Trump demonstrators, reflected in the window, protest outside the Clark County Election Department on Nov. 6 in Las Vegas. (Mikayla Whitmore for The Washington Post)
Pro-Trump demonstrators, reflected in the window, protest outside the Clark County Election Department on Nov. 6 in Las Vegas. (Mikayla Whitmore for The Washington Post)
Clark County Registrar of Voters Joe Gloria said the manufacturer of the Agilis did not recommend any particular setting; the machine had arrived preset at a default level of 50. Clark County adjusted that level to 40, but even with that adjustment, the machine verified only the most obvious signature matches, about 30 percent of the total. The rest were verified manually by election workers.

The Trump campaign appealed the judge’s ruling to the Nevada Supreme Court, which declined to order any changes to Clark County’s process, finding that the campaign did not have sufficient evidence to back up its allegations. Then other Republicans filed a lawsuit making similar claims in federal court, adding a new claim that the Agilis machine’s failure had disenfranchised one voter, Jill Stokke. Stokke said she went to vote in person, only to learn that county records showed her as already having cast a mail ballot. Her lawyers argued that was the fault of the Agilis machine, which had wrongly verified someone else’s signature as Stokke’s.

But there was no evidence that the Agilis machine was involved at all. In fact, when Stokke complained, officials reviewed her signature manually and found it to be a match. They told her she could vote if she signed an affidavit swearing that the signature on the mail ballot was not hers. She refused.

The federal judge also declined to order changes, finding “little to no evidence that the machine is not doing what it is supposed to do.”

The Trump campaign, in a lawsuit seeking to overturn the election results in Nevada, is still arguing that the Agilis machine is deeply flawed.

On Dec. 4, Judge James T. Russell of the First Judicial District Court in Carson City vetted each claim of fraud and wrongdoing made by the Trump campaign in the state and found that none was supported by convincing proof. The judge dismissed the challenge with prejudice, ruling that the campaign failed to offer any basis for annulling more than 1.3 million votes cast in the state in the presidential race.

The campaign “did not prove under any standard of proof that illegal votes were cast and counted, or legal votes were not counted at all, due to voter fraud, nor in an amount equal to or greater than” Biden’s margin of victory, which was about 33,600 votes, Russell wrote.

The Trump campaign has appealed the decision to the Nevada Supreme Court.

Here is a Nevada court's findings, just before election, that the Agilis signature verification system was accurate:

https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/45/2020/10/Untitled.pdf

Somewhere above, I posted a link to Judge Russell's decision. It explained why the Trump lawyers presented nothing persuasive.

[welch]

More on the claims that videos in Georgia showed ballots being stowed under tables, and that Republican observers were not allowed to watch. Current Republican Party-line says that ballots were secretly scanned over and over to create a Biden victory. That's sick stuff, says Georgia election staff:


Does video show suitcases stuffed with ballots or standard storage?
Trump claim: The president retweeted his own campaign account’s tweet that “video footage from Georgia shows suitcases filled with ballots pulled from under a table AFTER supervisors told poll workers to leave room and 4 people stayed behind to keep counting votes.” At a rally Dec. 5 in Valdosta, Ga., for Republican Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue ahead of runoff elections on Jan. 5, he said: “I don’t run to see if people are walking in with suitcases and putting them under a table with a black robe around it. I don’t do that. That’s up to your government here.”

Reality: An affidavit filed by the chief investigator for the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office on Dec. 6 stated that a review of security footage showed no ballots were placed under the table during the day.

Frances Watson wrote: “Investigation and review of the entire security footage revealed that there were no mystery ballots that were brought in from an unknown location and hidden under tables as had been reported by some.”

After interviewing witnesses and viewing the security footage from the arena, Watson “discovered that observers and media were not asked to leave. They simply left on their own when they saw one group of workers, whose job was only to open envelopes and who had completed that task, also leave.”

Boxes that were packed with ballots that had already been opened but not counted were resealed and placed under the table for the next session of counting, Watson said in the affidavit.

Georgia originally certified its election results on Nov. 20. The state has completed its third count of the more than 5 million ballots cast in the state and recertified the results on Dec. 7.


On Nov. 30, a top Raffensperger aide, Gabriel Sterling, said of the disinformation: “They’re insanity. Fever dream. Made up. Internet cabal.”

He called on Trump to stop spreading false claims about fraud, saying in an impassioned speech that the rhetoric was leading to threats of violence against election workers.

On Dec. 6, Sterling said he decided to speak out after receiving a phone call from a project manager at Dominion Voting Systems, the company that has been at the center of the false fraud claims by Trump and his allies.

Sterling said the manager told him “in a very audibly shaken voice” that one of his contractors, “a young tech” in Georgia, had been receiving death threats.

“He took a job a few weeks ago. He’s one of their better ones,” Sterling said on NBC News’s “Meet the Press.” “I was going through the Twitter feed on it, and I saw it basically had the young man’s name — it was a very unique name, so they tracked down his family and started harassing them. And it said, ‘His name, you have committed treason. May God have mercy on your soul,’ with a slowly swinging noose. And at that point, I just said, ‘I’m done.’ ”

[welch]

In Arizona, Trump Campaign lawyers could not prove voter fraud. In a hearing, it was found that mishandled ballots might, at most, have added 103 votes to Trump's total.


Were thousands of ballots mishandled in Maricopa County?
Trump claim: The president has made a slew of false statements about Arizona’s election processes. At a Dec. 6 rally in Georgia for its two U.S. senators, he said: “A sample of 100 ballots reviewed by a judge found that a very small percentage of these ballots — very small, but when you look at it, it was turned out to be very large. It was tens of thousands of votes, more than we would’ve needed to win Arizona.”

In a 46-minute prerecorded video released on Dec. 2, the president said: “In Arizona, in-person voters whose ballots produced error messages from tabulation machines were told to press a button that resulted in their votes not being counted. Also, in Arizona, the attorney general announced that mail-in ballots had been stolen from mailboxes and hidden under a rock.”

A lawsuit filed by Arizona’s Republican Party, the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee alleged that “up to thousands” of ballots had been mishandled in Maricopa County, the state’s largest, and would “prove determinative.” The suit contended that poll workers pressed or told voters to press a button on a tabulating machine to cast their ballots even after those tabulators flagged an apparent “overvote,” in which the machine believed a voter marked two candidates in the same race.

Fact: Biden won Arizona’s 11 electoral votes by about 10,000 votes. A judge dismissed the lawsuit on Nov. 13, after Trump campaign attorney Kory Langhofer acknowledged that only about 190 ballots had overvotes in the presidential race on the count’s ballots.

On Nov. 19, another state judge dismissed a separate lawsuit, also filed by the Arizona GOP, that sought to have Maricopa County redo a hand count of its audit.

The state’s attorney general said his office investigated the unopened ballots, which were delivered back to the proper voters, and found no wrongdoing.

The county certified its vote on Nov. 20, and Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, certified the state’s election results on Nov. 30. “This election was conducted with transparency, accuracy and fairness in accordance with Arizona’s laws and election procedures,” said Hobbs, “despite numerous unfounded claims to the contrary.”

The state’s Republican governor, Doug Ducey, also said the election was properly run. “The pandemic and covid-19 brought new unprecedented challenges for our state. But as I said before, we do elections well here in Arizona,” he said. “The system is strong, and that’s why I have bragged on it so much.”

Hours later, Trump lashed out at Ducey for the certification.

Shortly after the certification ceremony, Arizona Republican Party Chairwoman Kelli Ward filed a formal election contest in Maricopa County court. She asked the court to annul the election, claiming misconduct by election officials and widespread errors that had resulted in Biden wrongly being named the winner of the state.

As part of the legal proceedings, Ward’s lawyers were allowed to inspect 1,626 damaged ballots that were “duplicated” — a process by which a bipartisan group of election workers determine the voter’s intent and then fill out a clean, machine-readable ballot. They discovered a total of nine errors that, had they not occurred, would have netted Trump six votes. Applying that error rate to all duplicated ballots countywide would have netted Trump only 103 votes — not the thousands that Trump claimed.

A Maricopa County judge dismissed Ward’s lawsuit, finding no evidence of fraud, misconduct or widespread errors that would justify overturning the election. The Arizona Supreme Court affirmed his decision on Dec. 8, in time to meet the federal “safe harbor” deadline.

The “challenge fails to present any evidence of ‘misconduct,’ ‘illegal votes’ or that the Biden Electors ‘did not in fact receive the highest number of votes for office,’ let alone establish any degree of fraud or a sufficient error rate that would undermine the certainty of the election results,” Chief Justice Robert Brutinel wrote.

We should know that Kelli Ward, chair of Arizona Republicans, calls for Trump voters to die for Trump...die for something or live for nothing she posted.

[welch]

In Michigan, Republicans claim that the election was fraudulent in Detroit:


Was there any evidence of mishandled ballots, voter persuasion or inadequate observation of counting in Wayne County?

Claim: Two GOP poll watchers contended in a lawsuit that some poll workers in heavily Democratic Detroit coached voters to cast ballots for Biden and that some Republican poll observers were not given an adequate opportunity to monitor the vote count, an allegation Trump repeated in remarks on Nov. 5. They also contended that loads of ballots were improperly brought into the city’s convention center in the middle of the night and asked the court to delay certification of the election results.

Fact: Wayne County Circuit Chief Judge Timothy M. Kenny rejected the poll watchers’ suit. “It would be an unprecedented exercise of judicial activism for this court to stop the certification process” that would “undermine faith in the Electoral System,” he wrote in a Nov. 13 ruling.

One of the affidavits submitted by Republican challengers was “rife with speculation and sinister motives.” Another person who submitted an affidavit had posted on Facebook that Democrats had planned to commit fraud, Kenny noted, writing that “his predilection to believe fraud was occurring undermines his credibility as a witness.”

Since Election Day, four lawsuits have been filed challenging the results in Michigan, three of which have focused almost exclusively on Wayne County, Michigan’s most populated county and home to the state’s largest city. Biden won the Democratic-dominated county by 37 points over Trump, or by a margin of nearly 323,000 votes. He won the state’s 16 electoral votes by a margin of nearly 150,000 votes.

Lawyers for Detroit and for the Michigan Democratic Party had argued in court papers that about 100 Republican poll challengers had, in fact, been let into the convention center, but that some were not allowed to return after leaving once the room filled up and exceeded its legal capacity.

“Every one of these attempts is a blatant effort to undermine the voices of a majority of Michigan voters,” Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, said after the judge ruled. “No party or politician can steal this election.”


On Nov. 16, Michigan’s Court of Appeals rejected a request to reverse Kenny’s ruling, allowing certification to proceed as required by Nov. 17.

Earlier on Nov. 17, the Wayne County Board of Canvassers failed to certify its ballot count, deadlocking 2 to 2 along party lines. Then, in a dramatic reversal several hours later, they struck a compromise and sent the certified results along to the state board, which is also composed of two Republicans and two Democrats.

After that meeting, Trump called Monica Palmer, one of two Republican members of the board, she told The Washington Post on Nov. 19. She has asked to “rescind” her vote to certify the results.

Trump also invited leaders from Michigan’s Republican-controlled state legislature to meet with him at the White House, where he asked them to block certification of the state’s results. He has personally intervened with Republican leaders in Georgia and Pennsylvania, calling to ask them to reverse his election loss in their states.


Judge Kenny considered the evidence Republicans submitted. He rejected it:

https://www.scribd.com/document/484166784/Costantino-Et-Al-v-Wayne-BOC-Et-Al-Opinion-Order#download&from_embed

[welch]

Here is another vote-fraud affidavit that melted under investigation:


What happened with the postal worker’s allegation of ballot tampering in Erie?


Trump claim: The president brought up again a baseless claim that postal workers have tampered with ballots. At his Dec. 5 rally in Georgia, Trump said whistleblowers in multiple states have testified to witnessing postal workers and election workers illegally backdating thousands of ballots, fixing ballots, filling out false birthdays, registering ineligible voters and much more. On Nov. 11 and Nov. 15, Trump tweeted about a Pennsylvania postal worker, Richard Hopkins, who alleged that two days after the election, he heard the Erie postmaster say to a supervisor that they had “messed up” by failing to backdate the postmark on ballots that arrived after Election Day.

Reality: Hopkins admitted to U.S. Postal Service investigators that his story was not true, and he signed an affidavit recanting the claim on Nov. 9, according to three officials who were briefed on the investigation. He later recanted his recantation, and Project Veritas — the organization that initially aired Hopkins’s claims — said he had been coerced by investigators into signing “a watered down statement drafted by them using their words.” But the recorded interview shows that federal agents repeatedly reminded Hopkins that his cooperation was voluntary, and that Hopkins repeatedly expressed regret for signing an earlier affidavit attesting to the claims because it overstated what he witnessed. By then, the Trump campaign had cited Hopkins’s contentions in a lawsuit seeking to delay the certification of election results in Pennsylvania, part of a broad effort to overturn Biden’s win.

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) also had cited Hopkins’s story of purported fraud in asking the Justice Department to investigate. Attorney General William P. Barr subsequently authorized federal prosecutors to open probes into credible allegations of voting irregularities. The head of the Justice Department’s Election Crimes Branch stepped down in protest, telling colleagues in an email that Barr’s directive violated a long-standing department policy intended to prevent political interference in election results.

Sixteen assistant U.S. attorneys wrote a letter to Barr saying his authorization “thrusts career prosecutors into partisan politics.” The signers, who are all assigned to monitor malfeasance in the 2020 election, wrote that they observed no evidence of the kind of fraud Barr addressed.

[welch]

Is mail-in voting a way to fake an election?


Did mail-in voting create an opportunity for widespread fraud?

Trump claim: In a speech Dec. 2, Trump laid out “the corrupt mail-in balloting scheme that Democrats systematically put into place that allowed voting to be altered, especially in swing states, which they had to win.” He repeated claims that he’s made across the election cycle that mail-in ballots were “sent to unknown recipients with virtually no safeguards of any kind [allowing] fraud and abuse to occur on a scale never seen before.”

Reality: There is no evidence that mail-in voting leads to widespread voter fraud. An analysis by The Post found only 372 cases of potential fraud out of approximately 14.6 million ballots cast by mail in 2016 and 2018.

Historically, mail-in voting has not favored either political party. However, Trump’s continual attacks on mail-in ballots did make Republicans wary of absentee voting.

Election security laws vary by state, but numerous safeguards for mail-in voting exist in every state.

[TSherbs]

Is mail-in voting a way to fake an election?


Did mail-in voting create an opportunity for widespread fraud?

Trump claim: In a speech Dec. 2, Trump laid out “the corrupt mail-in balloting scheme that Democrats systematically put into place that allowed voting to be altered, especially in swing states, which they had to win.” He repeated claims that he’s made across the election cycle that mail-in ballots were “sent to unknown recipients with virtually no safeguards of any kind [allowing] fraud and abuse to occur on a scale never seen before.”

Reality: There is no evidence that mail-in voting leads to widespread voter fraud. An analysis by The Post found only 372 cases of potential fraud out of approximately 14.6 million ballots cast by mail in 2016 and 2018.

Historically, mail-in voting has not favored either political party. However, Trump’s continual attacks on mail-in ballots did make Republicans wary of absentee voting.

Election security laws vary by state, but numerous safeguards for mail-in voting exist in every state.

I actually think that part of Trump's frenzy is his inability to acknowledge that he blew it: he so vociferously opposed mail-in ballots (he even warned people that they would get COVID by using the drop boxes) that he politicized and discouraged Republicans from voting early or by mail and thereby lost a strategic battle in turning out the vote. The GOP got bulldozed in the turnout battle, and I blame Trump more than anyone else for that. Will he acknowledge this error? I doubt it. Maybe in a later book. Yeah, I doubt that too.

[dneal]

Gents, left shoulder is jacked. Lots of pain, can’t type. We would just keep going in circles anyway...

Sphere, please go back and read my posts. I’m not a Trump supporter. I’m playing devil’s advocate.

[Boston Brian]

The time is come to end this subject!

[TSherbs]

Interesting take on the psychology of Trumpism: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/12/deep-story-trumpism/617498/

[welch]

dneal, good luck with the shoulder.

[TSherbs]

Now the Gohmert suit has been dismissed. I think that there are a few more still in the system, likely to have similar results as the prior 60.

[TSherbs]

Corniche started this thread back on Nov 2. I wonder what he has to say about all these post-election legal maneuverings.

[dneal]

dneal, good luck with the shoulder.

Thanks. Adhesive capsulitis (frozen shoulder). It's been going through the freezing stage, and I spent 4 days laying as still as possible 'cause it hurts. A lot.

Throbbing excruciating pain has subsided, but shoulder is "frozen" pretty solid. Physical therapy at the VA starts this week.

[dneal]

Dear God, this electoral count is going to take forever. If there are 7 States that are objected to, and they spend 2 hours each, adding the time it takes to assemble and reassamble in the houses... Maybe we'll get a President-elect on Friday! lol

I know you guys think I'm a "Trumpist", but these proceedings (as I've stated before) are ridiculous. Democrats hold a majority in the House. There is no way both chambers are going to vote to sustain an objection to a State's electoral votes.

The historian in me is a little pleased to see it happen though, to add to the list with the other crazy electoral proceedings, if nothing else. I do wonder how many the Senate will sustain. I think none.

[Linger]

Are we witnessing the USA dethroning itself as the moral leader of the free world?

[dneal]

Are we witnessing the USA dethroning itself as the moral leader of the free world?

I'm kind of chuckling, since so many foreign nations are quick to decry the U.S. and it's policy (except when they need us).

But anyway, no. You're seeing a bunch of pissed off people vent their anger and frustration. Luckily, they're Trumpkins. If they were black-clad Democrat anarchists, they would have set fires.

Trump will get blamed for inciting this (like he does everything else), but in this case I agree. Tear gas in the Capitol is certainly one for the history books...

[TSherbs]

Are we witnessing the USA dethroning itself as the moral leader of the free world?

Well, no. Because we have never really occupied that throne (no one has). But have we once again embarrassed ourselves in front of the world? Absolutely.

This is all at the feet of that despicable immoralist, Donald J Trump.

His fate is now certain, and he will never be reelected. The majority of the country will be horrified, now that these protesters have caused guns to be drawn and evacuations.

The wake of Trump's destruction continues.

[Linger]

I am not gloating over this dneal, I am disappointed. With idiot presidents and dictatorships and fundamental religion leaders everywhere on the planet, we need some countries to show example. So yes, from that perspective we need the USA. Unfortunately also sometimes in a military role, but primarily as a democratic, regulated, law abiding, role model of democracy. What happens now is scary.

[TSherbs]

Every Republican should now desist from their objections to the EC roll call. Do your fucking jobs for America, you douchebags.

[TSherbs]

I am not gloating over this dneal, I am disappointed. With idiot presidents and dictatorships and fundamental religion leaders everywhere on the planet, we need some countries to show example. So yes, from that perspective we need the USA. Unfortunately also sometimes in a military role, but primarily as a democratic, regulated, law abiding, role model of democracy. What happens now is scary.

We (others) know that you are not gloating. I wish I could say that we were up to the job. I really do. Right now, we just are not. Populist energy put in the White House a megalomaniac with delusions of power and victimization. I'm sorry.

[welch]

Trump's coup -- a spectacle made for television -- fails. As we knew it would. Impeach him tonight.

- The Capitol was lightly defended. Nearly undefended. I've been to Washington many times for demonstrations, included a half-dozen times on either side of 1970 when a hundred thousand protesters showed up, the Capitol always had huge police presence to discourage anyone from trying to go into the Capitol. In addition, Capitol Police and DC's Metropolitan Police would shoot lots of tear gas if a crowd tried that. Last demonstration was late, 2002, the day after Paul Wellstone died in a plane-crash, when a couple hundred thousand people asked that the US not invade Iraq (my son, incidentally, was waiting for basic training, which was governed by a slot at advanced training, so it was personal). There far more police near the Capitol and up and down the Mall than we see now. Why were there so few police and so little tear gas?

- If this had been a crowd of black people, a BLM protest, for instance, well, we know that people would not have attacked the Capitol. They never have. However, if a crowd of black people had tried to capture the Capitol, they would have been shot.

[dneal]

I am not gloating over this dneal, I am disappointed. With idiot presidents and dictatorships and fundamental religion leaders everywhere on the planet, we need some countries to show example. So yes, from that perspective we need the USA. Unfortunately also sometimes in a military role, but primarily as a democratic, regulated, law abiding, role model of democracy. What happens now is scary.

No worries. Democracy is messy sometimes.

I said this sort of thing was going to happen. I believe my comment was something along the lines of "you have a brush fire...". This is why the concerns of election impropriety needed to be addressed and not dismissed (let alone derided). Senator Cruz (before the proceedings were disrupted) said that 40% of Americans think the election was "rigged".

That said, the overwhelming majority of these people will go home peacefully. MAGA folks are not ANTIFA. If this is as bad as it gets, I'm ok with it.

Trump needs to tweet his thanks for their support, and that they need to go home.

[welch]

I am not gloating over this dneal, I am disappointed. With idiot presidents and dictatorships and fundamental religion leaders everywhere on the planet, we need some countries to show example. So yes, from that perspective we need the USA. Unfortunately also sometimes in a military role, but primarily as a democratic, regulated, law abiding, role model of democracy. What happens now is scary.

No worries. Democracy is messy sometimes.

I said this sort of thing was going to happen. I believe my comment was something along the lines of "you have a brush fire...". This is why the concerns of election impropriety needed to be addressed and not dismissed (let alone derided). Senator Cruz (before the proceedings were disrupted) said that 40% of Americans think the election was "rigged".

That said, the overwhelming majority of these people will go home peacefully. MAGA folks are not ANTIFA. If this is as bad as it gets, I'm ok with it.

Trump needs to tweet his thanks for their support, and that they need to go home.

Being silly, dneal. Just found some sort of bomb.

I ask again, how can we explain reality to people who believe that the moon is made of green cheese? Cruz and what Trump calls "Trump media" have screamed that the election was stolen, even as Trump filed suit 60 times and 60 times judges considered all the evidence and rejected it. Recall that Giuliani admitted to Judge Brann, US District Court in PA, that he had no evidence of voter fraud. Cruz, the treasonous scum, tells people that Trump's votes were stolen, and then howls that Trump voters don't believe he lost, and therefore all their conspiracy thinking should be treated with great tenderness. It is a feedback loop.

We went through rational investigation of all the fifty state elections. Trump's storm troopers cling to their insanity. Why should rational people keep trying to explain reality to them?

[TSherbs]

Well, Maga can't blame Antifa for this disgrace. One tyrant alone is responsible.

I actually think that Trump's behavior has put the lives and well-being of his children all in jeopardy. This outrageous disgrace will forever taint them (something that some of them have also brought on themselves) and mean that they get no respect wherever people are free to speak their minds.

[dneal]

I am not gloating over this dneal, I am disappointed. With idiot presidents and dictatorships and fundamental religion leaders everywhere on the planet, we need some countries to show example. So yes, from that perspective we need the USA. Unfortunately also sometimes in a military role, but primarily as a democratic, regulated, law abiding, role model of democracy. What happens now is scary.

No worries. Democracy is messy sometimes.

I said this sort of thing was going to happen. I believe my comment was something along the lines of "you have a brush fire...". This is why the concerns of election impropriety needed to be addressed and not dismissed (let alone derided). Senator Cruz (before the proceedings were disrupted) said that 40% of Americans think the election was "rigged".

That said, the overwhelming majority of these people will go home peacefully. MAGA folks are not ANTIFA. If this is as bad as it gets, I'm ok with it.

Trump needs to tweet his thanks for their support, and that they need to go home.

Being silly, dneal. Just found some sort of bomb.

I ask again, how can we explain reality to people who believe that the moon is made of green cheese? Cruz and what Trump calls "Trump media" have screamed that the election was stolen, even as Trump filed suit 60 times and 60 times judges considered all the evidence and rejected it. Recall that Giuliani admitted to Judge Brann, US District Court in PA, that he had no evidence of voter fraud. Cruz, the treasonous scum, tells people that Trump's votes were stolen, and then howls that Trump voters don't believe he lost, and therefore all their conspiracy thinking should be treated with great tenderness. It is a feedback loop.

We went through rational investigation of all the fifty state elections. Trump's storm troopers cling to their insanity. Why should rational people keep trying to explain reality to them?

You did not go through a rational investigation, lib talking points notwithstanding. Putting up a chart (like in Georgia) of "claims" and "facts" is not an investigation. Courts dismissing cases for standing, laches, etc... is not an investigation.

Maricopa county still defies a congressional subpoena. Cases are still pending with the Supreme Court (not that they're going to do anything with them).

If Dems have nothing to hide, why not satisfy people's concerns? It's as simple as that.

What you see now is what happens when you dismiss them, as I have said for weeks. Trump bears a lot of blame for this, but not all of it.

[TSherbs]

So, Trump's message is that he "won in a landslide" and that everyone knows it.

This is why I call him and all the other motherfuckers "delusional". He's fucking crazy in his evil, manipulative inability to accept a loss. Everything ever said about his instability and narcissism exactly right. Exactly.

[welch]

Now Trump cuts a video saying: We won in a landslide. It was stolen from us. You are angry. We are angry. It was stolen and everyone klnows it. But go home now/ In peace. Because it was stolen. [Sniffle. Whimper] It was a fraud.

[TSherbs]

dneal, if you still think that it is "possible" that Trump actually won any state in which Biden was declared a winner, then you are a delusional idiot yourself. This "maybe" or "possible" or "plausible" shit that you write here is just another form of wishy-washy intellectual permissiveness that enables this violent bullshit and assault on democracy.

You continually criticize others for simply seeing Maga craziness for exactly what it is. And we reject it as stupid, vapid, gullible bullshit that Trump rode into office on and today stoked into outrageous violence on the seat of democratic power. All on the lie/delusion of a steal. Maga just can't take losing.

Fuck you and your mambi-pamby bullshit of "maybe" the vote was stolen and we should open an investigation in order to appease these people.

No, fuck them. Fuck every mambi-pambi ass-kissing Republican scared of them. Grow a fucking spine and stand for the principle of democracy and smooth transition of power.

I'm tired of being polite to adult idiots. We put an idiot in the White House, and now this is where we are.

[welch]

I am not gloating over this dneal, I am disappointed. With idiot presidents and dictatorships and fundamental religion leaders everywhere on the planet, we need some countries to show example. So yes, from that perspective we need the USA. Unfortunately also sometimes in a military role, but primarily as a democratic, regulated, law abiding, role model of democracy. What happens now is scary.

No worries. Democracy is messy sometimes.

I said this sort of thing was going to happen. I believe my comment was something along the lines of "you have a brush fire...". This is why the concerns of election impropriety needed to be addressed and not dismissed (let alone derided). Senator Cruz (before the proceedings were disrupted) said that 40% of Americans think the election was "rigged".

That said, the overwhelming majority of these people will go home peacefully. MAGA folks are not ANTIFA. If this is as bad as it gets, I'm ok with it.

Trump needs to tweet his thanks for their support, and that they need to go home.

Being silly, dneal. Just found some sort of bomb.

I ask again, how can we explain reality to people who believe that the moon is made of green cheese? Cruz and what Trump calls "Trump media" have screamed that the election was stolen, even as Trump filed suit 60 times and 60 times judges considered all the evidence and rejected it. Recall that Giuliani admitted to Judge Brann, US District Court in PA, that he had no evidence of voter fraud. Cruz, the treasonous scum, tells people that Trump's votes were stolen, and then howls that Trump voters don't believe he lost, and therefore all their conspiracy thinking should be treated with great tenderness. It is a feedback loop.

We went through rational investigation of all the fifty state elections. Trump's storm troopers cling to their insanity. Why should rational people keep trying to explain reality to them?

You did not go through a rational investigation, lib talking points notwithstanding. Putting up a chart (like in Georgia) of "claims" and "facts" is not an investigation. Courts dismissing cases for standing, laches, etc... is not an investigation.

Maricopa county still defies a congressional subpoena. Cases are still pending with the Supreme Court (not that they're going to do anything with them).

If Dems have nothing to hide, why not satisfy people's concerns? It's as simple as that.

What you see now is what happens when you dismiss them, as I have said for weeks. Trump bears a lot of blame for this, but not all of it.

Come off it, dneal. Be honest. You read the court findings. Not a single judge in a single case found a single bit of bel;ievable evidence in any of the 60 Republican suits filed to overthrow the election, in a coordinated attempt to overthrow democracy. I've read them all. I don't give a hoot about "laches", except that he was an Athenian general in the Second Peloponesian war. The Trump lawyers withdrew their claims of fraud in Pennsylvania. You have mistaken the decision of the US Appeals Court, written by Judge Bibas, for that of the trial court, written by Judge Brann. That's when Giuliani and the rest withdrew all claims of fraud.

Read the others. The Athenian general was a minor player compared to the outright silly claims dismissed in Michigan and Nevada and Georgia, the Kraken concocted by Fidel in Red Heaven, the pathetic beggig complaints by which Trump insisted that he won Georgia because he had big rallies. Did you watch Gabe Sterling's point-by-point refutation of Trump's psycho-wacko claims? Or listen to the entire hour-long call in which Trump and his loyal helpers assaulted logic and evidence as known by Georgia Secretary of State Raffensberger?

Still, Hawley, Cruz, and the rest claim that they cannot believe that the elections were honest. They had their chance. They failed in court. They are history.

[TSherbs]

In other news, Joel Ossoff was just declared the winner of the other seat.

Trump's legacy continues to deteriorate, from bad to devastating.

[dneal]

I am not gloating over this dneal, I am disappointed. With idiot presidents and dictatorships and fundamental religion leaders everywhere on the planet, we need some countries to show example. So yes, from that perspective we need the USA. Unfortunately also sometimes in a military role, but primarily as a democratic, regulated, law abiding, role model of democracy. What happens now is scary.

No worries. Democracy is messy sometimes.

I said this sort of thing was going to happen. I believe my comment was something along the lines of "you have a brush fire...". This is why the concerns of election impropriety needed to be addressed and not dismissed (let alone derided). Senator Cruz (before the proceedings were disrupted) said that 40% of Americans think the election was "rigged".

That said, the overwhelming majority of these people will go home peacefully. MAGA folks are not ANTIFA. If this is as bad as it gets, I'm ok with it.

Trump needs to tweet his thanks for their support, and that they need to go home.

Being silly, dneal. Just found some sort of bomb.

I ask again, how can we explain reality to people who believe that the moon is made of green cheese? Cruz and what Trump calls "Trump media" have screamed that the election was stolen, even as Trump filed suit 60 times and 60 times judges considered all the evidence and rejected it. Recall that Giuliani admitted to Judge Brann, US District Court in PA, that he had no evidence of voter fraud. Cruz, the treasonous scum, tells people that Trump's votes were stolen, and then howls that Trump voters don't believe he lost, and therefore all their conspiracy thinking should be treated with great tenderness. It is a feedback loop.

We went through rational investigation of all the fifty state elections. Trump's storm troopers cling to their insanity. Why should rational people keep trying to explain reality to them?

You did not go through a rational investigation, lib talking points notwithstanding. Putting up a chart (like in Georgia) of "claims" and "facts" is not an investigation. Courts dismissing cases for standing, laches, etc... is not an investigation.

Maricopa county still defies a congressional subpoena. Cases are still pending with the Supreme Court (not that they're going to do anything with them).

If Dems have nothing to hide, why not satisfy people's concerns? It's as simple as that.

What you see now is what happens when you dismiss them, as I have said for weeks. Trump bears a lot of blame for this, but not all of it.

Come off it, dneal. Be honest. You read the court findings. Not a single judge in a single case found a single bit of bel;ievable evidence in any of the 60 Republican suits filed to overthrow the election, in a coordinated attempt to overthrow democracy. I've read them all. I don't give a hoot about "laches", except that he was an Athenian general in the Second Peloponesian war. The Trump lawyers withdrew their claims of fraud in Pennsylvania. You have mistaken the decision of the US Appeals Court, written by Judge Bibas, for that of the trial court, written by Judge Brann. That's when Giuliani and the rest withdrew all claims of fraud.

Read the others. The Athenian general was a minor player compared to the outright silly claims dismissed in Michigan and Nevada and Georgia, the Kraken concocted by Fidel in Red Heaven, the pathetic beggig complaints by which Trump insisted that he won Georgia because he had big rallies. Did you watch Gabe Sterling's point-by-point refutation of Trump's psycho-wacko claims? Or listen to the entire hour-long call in which Trump and his loyal helpers assaulted logic and evidence as known by Georgia Secretary of State Raffensberger?

Still, Hawley, Cruz, and the rest claim that they cannot believe that the elections were honest. They had their chance. They failed in court. They are history.

Yes, let's be honest. 50+ cases were not heard by courts. The majority that were not denied or withdrawn were dismissed procedurally. The Supreme Court had a chance to hear a valid constitutional argument, and denied it for standing.

"Voter fraud" aside, there is absolutely zero doubt that Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia altered their elections through the executive and/or judicial branches. Texas has a valid argument when they point out that the U.S. Constitution forbids that. The Supreme Court in Bush v Gore notes that State legislatures have plenary authority in this matter.

As for the rest, like laches, you just ignore what's convenient. Why are you going on about the Peloponnesian war, other than to deflect?

But you continue to miss or ignore my actual point. It's about satisfying 40% of the population, not about whether Trump's argument is valid. So again, why not investigate if there's nothing to hide? What's the harm?

[dneal]

dneal, if you still think that it is "possible" that Trump actually won any state in which Biden was declared a winner, then you are a delusional idiot yourself. This "maybe" or "possible" or "plausible" shit that you write here is just another form of wishy-washy intellectual permissiveness that enables this violent bullshit and assault on democracy.

You continually criticize others for simply seeing Maga craziness for exactly what it is. And we reject it as stupid, vapid, gullible bullshit that Trump rode into office on and today stoked into outrageous violence on the seat of democratic power. All on the lie/delusion of a steal. Maga just can't take losing.

Fuck you and your mambi-pamby bullshit of "maybe" the vote was stolen and we should open an investigation in order to appease these people.

No, fuck them. Fuck every mambi-pambi ass-kissing Republican scared of them. Grow a fucking spine and stand for the principle of democracy and smooth transition of power.

I'm tired of being polite to adult idiots. We put an idiot in the White House, and now this is where we are.

One chance. Is this how you want this "discussion" to devolve? You want to start with name-calling?

Just need to point it out, since I'll be the one that gets piled on when it gets nasty.

[TSherbs]

"chance"? I don't give a shit about a "chance". You don't give out "chances."

I'm calling anyone who states even that "maybe" Trump won an "idiot." In fact a "delusional idiot."

Especially if you (or others or Donald Trump) are an adult.

It's time to be outraged at the idiocy and squishy intellectualism that has enabled this delusional bullshit. Welch has been too long polite (and repetitive) with his insistence on reason even while he knows reason does nothing to erase delusion.

And now that delusion has been used to stoke into violence on our Capitol, I call fuck you to the delusion and anyone who excuses it or enables it.

Take it however you want.

[TSherbs]

And I will again say, it is time for these Republican sycophants to withdraw their crass and empty objections to these certified EC tallies. They are all complicit in what has been a national disgrace. Finally, finally, finally, some Republicans are saying that there has been nothing to these objections but political expediency. For fuck's sake, that's is what the non-idiot adults have been saying all along.

[TSherbs]

The only "conspiracy" out there has been Democratic outrage at having lost in 2016 to a corrupt egomaniac, and they have been working tirelessly to defeat him ever since. Yes, people are out to get Trump. They are called Democrats, the team he beat. So, in the rematch of 2020, they kicked his ass, fair and square. And the narcissist baby has been inciting violence and discord in his name ever since.

[dneal]

"chance"? I don't give a shit about a "chance". You don't give out "chances."

I'm calling anyone who states even that "maybe" Trump won an "idiot." In fact a "delusional idiot."

Especially if you (or others or Donald Trump) are an adult.

It's time to be outraged at the idiocy and squishy intellectualism that has enabled this delusional bullshit. Welch has been too long polite (and repetitive) with his insistence on reason even while he knows reason does nothing to erase delusion.

And now that delusion has been used to stoke into violence on our Capitol, I call fuck you to the delusion and anyone who excuses it or enables it.

Take it however you want.

vitriol deleted since you're now civil again, if a little sarcastic

*kisses*

[dneal]

LMAO

58169

--edit--

God bless the Babylon Bee.

Mostly Peaceful Protesters Breach U.S. Capitol (https://babylonbee.com/news/mostly-peaceful-protestors-breach-us-capitol/?utm_content=buffer85e3a&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer&fbclid=IwAR0MeWy7ZZtJT-32HCVBItUEQxqnVpc-EcVsPfbfQh1FwVPk8lz6s75TPeA)


WASHINGTON, D.C.—In a mostly peaceful demonstration that was very peaceful, some peace-loving and very nonviolent protestors stormed the Capitol building in Washington D.C. and attempted to occupy it in support of Trump.


Trump asked the demonstrators to tone down the wanton peacefulness so it wouldn't get too out of hand ahead of his planned rally.

All the mostly peaceful demonstrators mostly ignored Trump's pleas because that's how much they love peacefulness.

After shuffling around the Capitol building for a few hours, they eventually filed out since they were unsure of what to do next.

[TSherbs]

Is your lack of a rejection of the steal idea an indication that you accept the possibility? Contrary to your more personal disparagement of me, mentioning my job and other things, I simply despise and have no civility for one thing: this vapid, stupid, ignorant idea that the election was stolen.

You believe in the possibility of a stolen election, dneal?

[TSherbs]

Trump just tweeted that he actually won in a "sacred landslide". You support that, dneal? Your answer should only take a few words.

[dneal]

I'm agnostic on the stolen election issue. There is no proof at this point, so I assume it wasn't.

What happened in the four cities in four states was a novel event, and an anomaly compared to previous elections. I see how that creates suspicion.

There has been a lot of effort to document evidence. I've looked at most of it. It's worth looking into further, but not convincing at this point. It's certainly not convincing enough to stop the inauguration or overturn an election.

I don't have a problem with the lawsuits. The ability to address a grievance is what makes America what it is. Some of the courts were political. The Wisconsin Justice Jill Karofski was unprofessional and clearly biased, having to be called out by the chief justice. They're elected, and it is what it is. I understand why the SC doesn't want to touch this with a 10 foot pole. I think they should have heard the Texas case, and issued a ruling. Sure a lot of folks wouldn't be happy, but at least they would feel like their argument was considered. That's the problem, and why what happened today at the Capitol happened.

Trump bears a lot of the blame in this. He stoked the fires. My 77 year old mother still believes Trump will be successful. She has been brainwashed by right-wing media, and she drifts to crazier shit daily. My sister and I were arguing about who was going to call her today (she did). Somewhere Mom got the idea that Biden is dead, and the guy we see is a clone. Seriously.

I know what it's like to deal with truly delusional Trumpers. I know what it's like to deal with everyday people who passionately support Trump. I have a good idea what they need to move on, and that's what I've been trying to say throughout these threads.

The vitriol coming from the Michigan Secretary of State, and the Pennsylvania AG, contribute to this too. You can't harp on "baseless claims" to people who think the claims have merit. It's the same principle that got us Trump in the first place. Average middle American was told daily how they were racists, the country they love is evil, and anyone they like is "literally Hitler". The left pushed them to far, and they elected Trump. I'm concerned the left is pushing them too far again with this election. The society is too volatile for it right now.

I don't believe I've said it here yet, but a lesson from Orwell that most people miss is that the Party knew to leave the proles alone. Trump and protestors storming the capitol is what happens when you don't.

[TSherbs]

I'm agnostic on the stolen election issue. There is no proof at this point, so I assume it wasn't.

What happened in the four cities in four states was a novel event, and an anomaly compared to previous elections. I see how that creates suspicion.

I see how "novel" events creates suspicion, too. Suspicion is different from convinced and unshakable faith. Trump's victory was "novel" in its own way--had not occurred in that manner before. So what. You know that there is no actual evidence beyond some new patterns, so I wont get into any list-making like welch has. I let the 50 states and then the 60 subsequent courts do the responsible work of vetting and responding to concerns. And they have. That is done and over and certified as valid.

Your agnosticism is part of the problem, and what I have sensed all along. This agnostic permissiveness is just what, spread wide, enables sick and twisted paranoid thinking to multiply (the internet sure helps too). Those 60 or so Republicans signing on to these objections may have been acting on "suspicions" or "maybes" or "well if it is not true, then prove it." And that is morally craven in a democracy built on this Constitutional process.

Then get a psycho leader stoking these delusional ideas (Biden won by 7 million votes--to believe otherwise, with a sense of actionable certainty, is a form of delusion) and suggesting violence to the suggestible, and you get just what we got.

So fuck that, and fuck its enabling. Especially those Republicans lining up to object to those honest and true certifications from the states. Nothing was fucking "stolen" and there was no "sacred landslide election victory" for Trump. Not even a fucking "maybe." Not even a tiny morsel of possibility.

[TSherbs]

Oh, and you can't blame the "Left" for "pushing" Maga "too far" in this election. All the Dems did was win, for crissake. And they elected a moderate. For fuck sake, what are you talking about "pushing them too far"? Losing is not getting "pushed too far" unless you share Trump's megalomania and victim complex. And those aren't rational nor worthy of accommodation.