After four years of this, I have lost my capacity to be outraged, but I can still stare at a quote in utter bafflement.
I'm listening to the full hour and its so painful. How do people sit in meetings with this guy? He just does not shut up.
How was he the goddamn president of the United States? I may never fully come to terms with the past four years.
Speculation about something weird going on at DoD which prompted the public letter from all previous secretaries of defense. Read Adam's followup as in the comments too, such as comparisons of the size of the DC national guard which technically Trump directly commands unlike state guards.
I thought "oh, previous secretaries of defense, I guess that's good, the military wasn't likely to get involved but good to further forestall it" and then came to a start when I realized that list includes Rumsfeld and Cheney.
Supposedly the effort was initiated by Cheney. When you've done something too extreme for Dick Cheney you need to look up to see the devil.
"Do you think its possible that they shredded ballots in Fulton County? Because that's what the rumor is...."
5: Yeah, I'd been thinking about the letter as a sign that things are going right, but it could also be a response to something we don't know about going horribly wrong.
5,8: Yes. There have been some hints that the truly whacko political types Trump installed are "trying to do something" but not clear what that is or if they are succeeding. Also could be ill-advised military adventurism, could be something internal. It's probably some half-assed mélange of everything most of which won't happen (or happen partially completely weirdly).
Comforting.
Would be dictator.
A (mildly held) peeve of mine is that Americans are overly fond of their gangster stories in an unhealthy way. But my God, you would at least hope that they would recognize (and reject*) would-be gangsterism in a President. The whole thing is coded crime boos speak just as Michael Cohen indicated.
*Or maybe not and that is related to most everyone beating off to Goodfella Soprano Godfathers like pathetic like powerless dipshits.
Now that I've skimmed the whole transcript, it's pretty agonizing (I'd never listen to the whole thing). Raffensperger and his general counsel just keep repeating in clear terms "That's incorrect" with reasons and Trump just keeps saying "no it's not" and regurgitating everything he's been watching, multiple times each. But in this case I guess that's karma - if you don't repudiate Trump politically, you don't have the luxury of saying "Stop being pathetic" and hanging up.
This past year the people who have taken the most grief from Rs have been public health professionals, health care workers, and election workers who have done there often thankless to begin with jobs.
They have sinned so egregiously in this (and other things) that there is no cognitively or emotionally get back to being mere assholes with bad opinions.
I do not know what to do with this rage. I have become most definitely part of the problem.
I want to read a deep dive on why "if the president does it then it's not a illegal" wasn't convincing to Republican's back in 1974. What changed and when did it change? Why did Republicans stick with Nixon?
There were still good Republicans and shitty racist Democrats back then. It wasn't all the shitty people on the same side.
The SecDefs feeling a need to speak up is worrying. Hagel was quoted in a story about the letter saying he at first didn't see the need but was convinced by the others.
I see that the NIMITZ carrier group has been ordered to turn around after having been ordered out of the 5th Fleet Area of Operations. Not that it necessarily means anything other than DoD doing a headless chicken imitation. But even that is concerning; it indicates a bit of unsteadiness at the top. March! Countermarch!
JP Stormcrow: "I do not know what to do with this rage. I have become most definitely part of the problem."
I have resolved to learn how to deliver withering insults and slurs with a calm and collected voice. Over and over and over. And when and if I am ever in a social setting with a GrOPer (which I will learn, by asking for attestations that nobody present is a fackin GrOPer) I will deliver those insults and slurs on that person, their relatives, their parentage, and their waste-of-protoplasm self, with a calm and collected demeanour. I will make it intolerable for any GrOPer to mix in polite company.
I will *never* forgive them. *never*. And that is being part of the solution, not part of the problem. Until they are taught that there is a price to pay for being the traitors they are, they won't stop.
I want to read a deep dive on why "if the president does it then it's not a illegal" wasn't convincing to Republican's back in 1974. What changed and when did it change? Why did Republicans stick with Nixon?
Surely a huge part of the answer is "Fox News".
15 I read somewhere some sort of speculation that the acting SecDef had ordered the Nimitz out of the area, overcoming objections from the JC, to prevent presidential mischief, but that the pres of Iran made joke about Trump leaving office, and the WH ordered the carrier back. Some mid-century Lin Manuel Miranda will do something with this. And then a 22d century Gilbert & Sullivan.
||
I just read Patricia Lockwood's diary in the London Review of Books, about her experience of the election as a GA voter. It's a gonzo masterpiece.
As we lay in bed that night, we still didn't know which way Georgia, our own state, would go. I woke at 4.24 on Thursday morning, feeling that something had happened, and twenty minutes later received an email from the Dutch poet Lieke Marsman, studded with hearts and champagne emojis. Georgia had just tipped 1400 votes in favour of Joe Biden. If Georgia's arch-villain governor, Brian Kemp, had still been in charge of our state elections as he was in 2016, he would have personally eaten those 1400 votes and died at the vet's of an obstructed bowel, rather than let that happen. But the unthinkable had come to pass: Georgia had gone blue. I had passed other elections of my adult life in Ohio and Florida: states that on election day had a tendency to open sinkholes into hell. That Georgia would eventually become a swing state, in the year it mattered most, was something I had not foreseen.
It was after Anderson Cooper's comment about Donald Trump being 'an obese turtle on his back flailing in the hot sun' that I began to feel it in my body. 'Did you just feel it?' I texted a friend. 'Almost like a thaw.' Like my heart slumped sideways in my chest, or like countless small muscles held rigid for the last four years relaxed. All this was involuntary and to a certain extent foolish. . . ..
[I'm tempted to quote all of the hilarious weirdness (" I have been subject to such compulsions since I was a child; anyone who's ever watched a basketball game with me has come away knowing I'm not quite right. But this was like the worst basketball game I had ever watched in my life - where one of the players was dribbling a human head and the other was being gently lifted by the mascot to help him dunk.") but it's worth reading them in context.
|>
"In private the President has been VERY aggressively threatening to torpedo the runoffs if he doesn't get his way. That explains a lot." - Josh Marshall
Fingers crossed!
Speaking of, he tweeted, "(The real Kraken was the perfect phone calls we released along the way.)" Which I appreciated greatly.
A member of Georgia's Board of Elections has referred the transcript to, among others, the Fulton County DA for investigation into soliciting election interference, in violation of Georgia state law.
The cockles of my heart, they are a tad warmer now.
13: Some Republicans turned on President Nixon in 1973-74, others did not. Three very prominent Republicans who never turned against President Nixon were the House Minority Leader, the Governor of California, and the Chair of the Republican National Committee, later known as Presidents Ford, Reagan, and Bush I. Not one of the anti-Nixon Republicans was ever elected President. Today's Republican senators are aware of this history.
23.last: There is no warm. There are no cockles. There is only Zuul.
To be fair, neither was Ford elected president.
People act like Bork is how all Republicans are treated but he's the only fucker who ever faced any consequences in his career. Even that wasn't for Watergate but because he was very vocal about his extreme legal views.
Every once in a while they turn on one of their own like Trent Lott, but not often.
16 is 100%, absolutely correct. Officeholders will continue supporting this shit as long as voters reward it. The real pressure point is social sanction on those voters. All of my Trump-voting relatives know they are not welcome in my house or around my kids ever again.
14: This is very true. Watergate was the first news story that I followed closely, and one of the heroes in this saga was Senator Sam Ervin, Democrat of North Carolina, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee that boldly investigated the corruption of the Nixon Administration. Over the years I became vaguely aware that he wasn't really such a great guy, but it was only recently when I read a Thurgood Marshall bio, that I learned that he was an unapologetic segregationist and the most determined foe of putting a black person on the Supreme Court.
13: One of the things I remember that was very different with Nixon was that people were genuinely shocked when they heard how crude and vulgar Nixon was when he was talking in private.
People clutched their pearls back then in ways we can no longer understand.
24: That's interesting. None of those Republicans were in the Senate, which was set to put Nixon on trial. I don't remember any Republican Senators pleading for Nixon not to resign after the final incriminating tapes were released.
Oh, the ravages of age! Why, I'm so old that I remember the days when this innocent nation was shocked to realize that politicians occasionally use language unfit for print! Children, let me tell you about Watergate; let me tell you of the shock and horror of seeing the phrase "expletive deleted" in written transcripts of actual White House conversations; let me tell you of another time in history when politicians were thought to have vocabularies consisting of words not less than six letters in length. And then came Watergate. Richard Nixon and his top aides were caught in the act of cussing. Politicians, it turned out, were intimately familiar with words that they clearly did not learn from their careful reading of family newspapers.
https://observer.com/1998/04/oh-for-the-days-of-expletive-deleted/
I googled "expletive deleted" and came upon this. The funniest part is that it's from 1998.
An interesting detail. Makes me think Raffensperger knew the call would be this bad and finally took it Saturday for reasons of his own.
Twitter politics trending is something called Lizard Squad and I'm sure I don't want to know what that means.
Lin Wood is one fucked up piece of shit.
36 The whole Lin Wood goes Q thing is just so bizarre.
Lin Wood called for Pence to be executed and suggested that John Roberts is a murderous pedophile. So I am inclined to take the glass-half-full view on him.
38: Can you elaborate? Had he earned a lot of respect for the work he'd done over the years, or was it just high-profile?
OK, my speculation was barely even speculation, basically confirmed by his staff.
38: Not heard anything since, but there was a report that the Nashville bomber might have been concerned about Lizard People. Various politicians and other celebs were supposedly part of it.
It's partly actual insanity on the part of somebody, but mostly carrots various Republicans have decided the Blood Libel worked so they changed a few details and ran it again.
Carrots? I'm not sure how that happened.
33: The Senate Republicans were generally anti-Nixon or silent. Howard Baker was the minority leader on the Watergate Committee, took the case seriously, and paid a price. He lost his 1980 presidential primary campaign, and was also rejected by Reagan as VP. Nixon resigned after Senator Goldwater told him the Senate would convict, saving most of the Republicans from having to take an official position.
The Goldwater wing of the party mostly thought Nixon should have been protected, right? Shows their true values.
A sad example of campus cancel culture, that could benefit from the famous conservative commitment to radical transparency and free speech.
Anyway, the loop has now been closed between pure QAnon craziness (Lin Wood is out there hollering uncut Pizzagate insanity, rape and murder of children for blackmail purposes coordinated by international spy agencies and, uh, the late minor Hollywood figure Isaac Kappy) and the Oval Office. Whatever newly invented nonsense--I bet the Democrats rigged the Michigan vote with 5G!--shows up on 8chan or /r/TheDonald is going to get repeated by Trump and therefore the Republican Party (some of them with furrowed brows, most of them with enthusiasm) will sign on.
I only just learned (via Charley) of the concept that the House could theoretically impeach an ex-President so that the Senate could impose the penalty of barring him from future federal office. Who knows, maybe once Biden has the White House archives enough will come to light that that could happen. (There must be even worse that hasn't been leaked so far...)
So, any hope that this will discourage some R voters in GA or be the bridge too far that makes Trumpism a losing proposition for more people? Tom Cotton's not signing on to the open sedition proposal.
Also, regarding Watergate, I've started listening to Maddow's 2018 podcast about Agnew's corruption and the investigation thereof; she has coauthored a recently published book based on the same material. Enjoying the podcast a lot-- envelopes full of cash for public contracts to a snarling elite-hating red-blooded conservative.
50.1: I think it depends if Trump denounces Perd/Loeff at the rally today. Otherwise, I'm not hopeful.
And now I'm baffled why the rally is scheduled for 9pm. It's going to be 46 degrees there!
Like when they tried to give the worst assholes in Omaha hypothermia.
52: did you not see the daily schedule?
President Trump will work from early in the morning until late in the evening. He will make many calls and have many meetings.
50, 51: Clearly one of the reasons the Georgia election officials held the press conference today was an attempt to forestall that. In addition to (admirably) debunking Trump's BS they repeatedly urged people to vote.
President Trump will work from early in the morning until late in the evening. He will make many calls and have many meetings.
Well, now I just feel silly.
Am I wrong to feel an impending sense of dread, an overwhelming sense of anxiety?
Because, you know, even if/when Trump fails at his attempted clown-car coup: he did make the attempt, and too many elected officials were willing to follow him (American Constitution be damned) there, and millions of Americans, his faithful followers (many of them not very well-educated, some of them quite shockingly clueless) are now convinced that a Biden presidency is illegal and illegitimate.
I sort of find this situation a little bit terrifying; but please feel free to talk me down from the ledge.
A lot of them, although probably not as big a percentage, also though Obama was illegal and illegitimate because he was born in Kenya. Hell a lot of people though Clinton was illegitimate because he smuggled drugs through an Arkansas airport or something. A significant number of Republicans will never think any Democratic President is legitimate.
Alexandra Petri once again hits it out of the park.
The US Attorney in Atlanta just left his post rather abruptly.
What can an acting US Attorney do in 15 days?
The "Middle Georgia" AUSA resigned in December. On the call, Trump referred to the Atlanta guy as a "Never Trumper."
And my God, can the fucking media stop it with the Regrettable Agonies of Mike Pence pieces. Just fuck off. You utterly soulless fucks. He has to "thread the needle."
Sentences somewhat out of order there...last ids how NY Times framed it.
Shitfuckers have all gone shitfucking crazy but let's dance around that.
Are we doing predictions? Because we live in the stupidest timeline, one of the races will come down to 10 votes and it will be revealed that there was fraud by a handful of Trump voters as there has been elsewhere, voting for dead relatives or "testing the system," and when Democrats point this out the media will say, "Both sides claim fraud."
Actual prediction Warnock +1.5% Ossoff +0.5%. One interesting point- right now isn't the Senate 50R-49D because Perdue's term has expired? So if Warnock wins clearly and is seated replacing Loeffler, but the other race count is drawn out, there will be a period of 50D-49R.
Wait, nevermind- it's currently 51-48 with Lorffler so Warnock+empty is still 50R-49D.
64: Per usual they have replaced him with a Trump-appointed underling rather than the "usual" ranking career person. From bio looks to be an anodyne conservative with a military background.
||
Our politicians flout COVID rules. The republicans do it openly, but some Democrats chose to travel for the holidays too after begging their constituents to stay home. (The Denver mayor flew to Mississippi for Thanksgiving)
What does it say about Canada/Ontario that the finance minister of Ontario felt the need to post a fake video of himself by the fire while he was on vacation in the Caribbean?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/31/ontario-minister-resigns-caribbean-holiday-coronavirus
|>
This is a link to a forum held by a local voter education group on election laws and Constitutional issues with a current Pitt law professor and a retired one from Chicago. It is really quite good and recommended. Much of it I knew, but well-presented. There are a few minutes of prelims, about an hour of election material.
For you masochists out there, NYT is doing the needles.
After about 16k votes there is a net total of four split ballots so looks like it will be all or nothing.
What does it say about Canada/Ontario that the finance minister of Ontario felt the need to post a fake video of himself by the fire while he was on vacation in the Caribbean?
Canadians have generally been more compliant and cooperative about the COVID-19 restrictions than Americans. I guess the anti-mask brigade would say that Canadians have been more cowed and cowardly, more like sheeple, who don't understand the true stakes of liberty, and who don't appreciate the importance of carrying a Glock into the legislative chamber, or something like that...
But Canadians also demand a higher standard of accountability than do Americans of their legislators and Cabinet ministers, I think, because of some, probably now mostly nostalgic/historic, sense of 'responsible government' and ministerial responsibility.
In any case, "lockdown for thee, but not for me" is not polling very well in Canada at the moment....
o, I'm back to saying that Joe Biden should call Stacey Abrams tonight, and ask her if she'd like to be a judge, run the DNC, be an ambassador, anything at all. US Atty of ND Ga. Chair a special commission on voting rights. Chair a commission on justice reform. First, though, she'll have to attend the inauguration so she can get her PMOF, at whatever podium he's got, right after he finishes his speech.
Is everybody live-blogging their nail-biting at the Other Place? I am not ready to see the news until I see it here.
Live-blogging is so 2020.
Follow this list for relevant updates.
Looks like Hazzard County went Purdue/Loeffler. I'm really disappointed in the Duke boys.
I'm here but trying not to look at results and get my heart broken.
I'm weirdly optimistic . . . It looks OK at the moment?
I think Warnock has it in the bag but Ossoff still has a little risk.
Wasserman (Mr. "I've seen enough") calls the race for Warnock.
74: It seems so dumb. He was almost asking to get caught. And the grey backddop is weirdly sterile.
Control of the Senate rests on 250k votes remaining to be reported from DeKalb county. They appear to be the early votes so should blow away Perdue.
83: And got his tweet "flagged" by Twitter for his trouble.
The Constitution lets the vice president pick the winner.
He calls the Ossoff race and Senate control to Democrats. However that race may be within recount threshold of 0.5%. In 2009 Republicans delayed Franken seating until the summer and they're even bigger assholes now.
Actually Ossoff should net about 45k from the remaining vote, well outside the ~23k 0.5% recount margin.
McConnell did this to himself. If he had agreed to T's demanding $2k instead of $600 that would have made the difference.
Holy crap, I can't believe they pulled it off.
The Constitution lets the vice president pick the winner.
Why didn't I think of that?
What might have made the difference is the President getting caught on tape two days before trying to shake down the GA Secretary of State. Some voters find that kind of thing unseemly.
Yeah, imo all those things are but-fors, but it's SA and her crew, working their tails off for years, that made it close enough that those other things could be decisive.
My Twitter feed is starting to say Democrats have won both. Good morning everyone!
yes. This is fucking amazing. I think that the Trump revolution has started to devour its own children. Charley is of course right in 94, but at the same time this looks as if at last, at long last, Trump's character and record are making their electoral mark.
See also the sacking of Cleta Mitchell. So, for the moment, the rats are sent back to their beer halls.
Just absolutely delighted by the news from Georgia. Bye bye Mitch.
98: Ossoff still too close to call. I'm not taking that one for granted yet.
He's winning by more than Biden with ballot classes (oversea absentee, provisional, some mail) remaining that went 2:1 for Biden. Short of an enormous data entry error, the only remaining question is whether he clears the 0.5% recount threshold which seems likely.
100: It's superstitious of me, but I still can't give up my anxiety. Also crossing the 0.5% threshold is important.
I don't know why I stayed up so late last night. SP called it in 66.
People keep looking at me when I cackle and I'm like "What?"
Omg omg omg. What a thing to wake up to. I think it warrants a new thread?