"Emily Murphy is the reason more people may die. Emily Murphy is the Trump-appointed head of the General Services Administration. She has the sole legal authority to ascertain - the legal word - the winner in a presidential election. And she can sign the document to begin the transition process. Donald Trump does not have that power, Emily Murphy does. None of what Donald Trump does matters because we have what the law calls an apparent winner." - Lawrence O'Donnell on 'The Last Word', Monday night.
"As a technical matter, it’s inconsequential if the president fusses about the outcome of the election because it is not a fully decided process until all of these steps (to certification) have taken place. The broader picture is it is a violation of all of the expectations of the office and a violation of the standards of fair play that make democracy possible,” - Russell Riley, co-chair of the Miller Center presidential oral history program.
"If Trump and his enablers had resisted for only a day or two, OK, no big deal. But the fact that they continue to do so, flailing for ways to overturn the will of the people, egged on by their media toadies — Lou Dobbs actually said on Fox Business that the G.O.P. should refuse to accept the election results that deny Trump “what is rightfully his” — raises this question:
How do you trust this version of the Republican Party to ever hold the White House again....If this is how this Republican Party behaves when Trump loses, imagine how willing to tolerate his excesses it would have been had he won? Trump wouldn’t have stopped at any red lights ever again." - Thomas L. Friedman, NY Times, Monday
"My colleague Greg Sargent wrote before the election, Trump’s legal strategy was predicated on getting within “cheating distance,” with the margins narrow enough that he could convince Republican judges to intercede on his behalf and hand him the election. It hasn’t happened. But it was closer than you think. And it raises the frightening possibility that if Trump’s team were not such a bunch of buffoons, and if Republican officials at the state level were just a little more corrupt than they already are, he might have been able to steal the election after all."- Paul Waldman, Washington Post today
That Trump is a tinpot dictator wannabe and sore loser crybaby traitor is by now self- evident. Now, two weeks post-election we see what a real loser this orange, fungal maggot is as he refuses to face reality and admit his fat putrid ass is history on January 20th next year. The trouble is that while he continues his pathetic efforts to retain power - authoritarian asswipe that he is - his stooges are all out to try to do his bidding. These Repuke stooges and traitors include Lindsey Graham -interfering in the Georgia recount - to try to intimidate the Secretary of State (Brad Raffensperger) to toss out votes - helped along by Doug Collins and the two runoff GA Senators: David Perdue and a QAnon groupie, Kelly Loeffler. As reported in the Washington Post, Raffensperger has even received multiple death threats for not tossing out pro-Biden votes.. Then there is Rudy the Vampire Giulani
All of this sedition (defined as subversion of the constitution in this case) has been fueled and fanned by a demented imp who still hasn't figured out he lost an election - and by the same "landslide" (as he defined it) when he beat HRC four years ago: 306 electoral votes to 232. The imp has refused to concede and - as far as we know - may refuse to leave as well. In which event 'Donald the Mad King' can consider this:
Then there is the seditious Trumpie mole named Emily Murphy buried at the General Services Administration.
A foul functionary flouting the transition law that specifically defines the apparent winner of a presidential election. As Lawrence O'Donnell clearly noted in his Monday night MSNBC show, Murphy "has been violating the transition law every single day since November 7th when Joe Biden officially became the apparent winner." Murphy took an oath of office for her job and is now violating it every damned day. She's doing it not only in a way that defies the will of the people, but in the sense that more people will die as the virus continues its rampage - with over 1700 deaths yesterday alone. This is the seditious sow who has refused to permit the Biden team's seamless transition, thereby impeding critical PDBs and other intelligence from being received - as well as Covid 19 data. In so doing, and breaking the law, this overpaid Bimbo has created a national security threat of stupendous magnitude. Trump can squawk, piss, whine and moan how badly he was treated and how the election was "rigged" because he lost- but she holds the power to allow transition to proceed, with or without Trump's blessing.
Anyway, below are other voices on the current transition turmoil - spawned by a destructive and traitorous spoiled brat and his assorted fascist authoritarian accomplices:
When presidents are voted out of office — whether it's Gerald R. Ford in 1976, Jimmy Carter in 1980 or George H.W. Bush in 1992 — they typically lick their wounds, give a concession speech and go about telling the winner what they will need to know after being sworn in as president. But President Donald Trump has yet to concede to President-elect Joe Biden, preposterously claiming that he was robbed of reelection by widespread voter fraud.
And journalist Sonam Sheth, in a Business Insider article published this week, emphasizes that Trump's spitefulness is raising national security concerns.
Business Insider, Sheth explains, interviewed some "national security veterans" to get an idea of what to possibly expect from Trump during this lame-duck period. One of them was Bob Deitz, former general counsel for the National Security Agency.
Deitz told Business Insider, "One worries that a person like Trump, who's pissed off at the world and sitting there sucking his thumb and feeling sorry for himself, will wake up at 3 in the morning and tweet something that could be really destabilizing. There's also the concern that he might just — and he's been trying to do this — declassify information about Russia because of his vendetta over the Mueller investigation."
According to Deitz, "Trump seems to wake up every day with a kind of anxiety or hatred. He didn't get reelected; so, he's in vengeance mode. His bloodlust is rising up. And he'll go after people like (FBI Director Christopher) Wray and (CIA Director) Gina Haspel."
Former CIA operative Glenn Carle told Business Insider that he is more worried about what Trump will do in the weeks ahead than he is about Trump refusing to leave the White House on January 20.
by Jaime O'Neill | November 17, 2020 - 8:37am | permalink
by Joan McCarter | November 17, 2020 - 8:31am | permalink
As the days drag on and Biden racks up a bigger lead in state after state, the Trump campaign is still fighting in court in numerous states, including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. It's Pennsylvania's 20 electoral votes that Trump really wants, however, and where a flurry of some his most bullshit legal claims have been centered. One of those cases is so bad, his own campaign has had to admit one key claim was frivolous, and has scrapped it.
On Sunday, the campaign removed a key component of its claim against Democratic counties in Pennsylvania, that election officials had limited their observers’ ability to watch the vote counts. The campaign has been trying to nullify more than 600,000 votes on this claim, and now have had to revise their case. Because it was bullshit. Now the case is alleging only that some Democratic counties allowed voters who had errors on their mail-in ballots were allowed to fix them before Election Day. The number of ballots now in contention is far too small to change the outcome of the election, even though the campaign is still asking U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Brann to prevent the state from certifying the election. Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar amended and resubmitted her request for the judge to dismiss the lawsuit, writing the Trump amended suit "materially narrows the pending allegations to a single claim."
by Robert Reich | November 17, 2020 - 8:08am | permalink
Leave it to Trump and his Republican allies to spend more energy fighting non-existent voter fraud than containing a virus that has killed 244,000 Americans and counting.
The cost of this misplaced attention is incalculable. While Covid-19 surges to record levels, there’s still no national strategy for equipment, stay at home orders, mask mandates or disaster relief.
The other cost is found in the millions of Trump voters who are being led to believe the election was stolen and who will be a hostile force for years to come – making it harder to do much of anything the nation needs, including actions to contain the virus.
by Thom Hartmann | November 17, 2020 - 7:50am | permalink
It turns out that Donald Trump was right: the election was rigged. He would know, of course, because he and Lewis DeJoy were the ones who rigged it. ...Letting the pandemic run wild while telling his supporters they should only vote in person, Trump and DeJoy dismantled over 600 multimillion dollar high-speed mail sorting machines, hitting swing states the hardest, so mailed ballots would arrive too late to count. <
Recent reporting suggests that if the courts had not intervened when and how they did, the mail would have been so slowed in several critical swing states that Trump would’ve been declared the winner. We were saved by a federal judge.<
Now the scam Republicans are promoting is to challenge the signatures on the outside of mail-in ballots from big cities, and this has helped them throw out literally millions of ballots just this month.
by Christian Christensen | November 17, 2020 - 7:21am | permalink
It is an enduring belief that the vast majority of U.S. media are "liberal" or "leftist." This is a powerful myth, used by the political right to convince citizens that a secular, urban elite pushes a leftist agenda on the nation via television, newspapers and Internet. This notion wasn't invented by Trump. But Trump has, more than any other president, leveraged that pre-existing distrust and taken it to new depths. As we watch Trump openly fight democracy post-election, it is worth considering how this myth is perpetuated, even internationally.
by Paul Street | November 16, 2020 - 8:08am | permalink
Trump and Pence need to be removed from power immediately for three basic reasons.
First, consistent with my own and others’ understanding of the current White House as proto-fascist, Trump and his inner circle continue to absurdly claim that the 2020 election vote was fraudulent and have yet to give up conducting a coup. Key Trump operatives speak seriously of a “transition” to “a second Trump administration.”
It would be foolish to laugh off such reckless talk. The Trump campaign and White House are scheming to get the Republican-controlled state legislatures of Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona and Pennsylvania to declare invalid the mail-in ballots required by the pandemic Trump fueled and fanned across the nation. This would be the pretext for some or all those legislatures trying to install (over the protests of Democratic governors in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan) un-elected slates of Trump electors to the Electoral College, claiming that Trump won the “legal” popular vote in their states. The murky legal and constitutional tangle that could result from such an action could involve Congress and the far-right Trump-appointed Supreme Court (6-3 Republican, including three justices who served on George W. Bush’s side in Bush v. Gore) installing Trump for a second term.
by Amanda Marcotte | November 14, 2020 - 8:03am | permalink
The far right had a dream: That one day, people who had been exiled to the unacceptable margins of American political life could play the role of Donald Trump's brownshirts.
In the weeks leading up to the election, excitement was rising among those Americans who convinced themselves that Trump would be the glorious leader in a national purge of their perceived enemies. QAnon fans buzzed with excitement that "the storm" — their term for their belief that the entire Democratic establishment, as well as many popular celebrities, would be rounded up into prison camps — was coming soon. The Proud Boys, a neofascist group that claim to defend "Western civilization," were also riled up after Trump told them to "stand by" during a presidential debate in September. The menagerie of white supremacists and militia groups were stepping up recruitment efforts, stoked about what they believed would soon be the eruption of a new civil war.
Then came the election. Trump lost. This has been very difficult for those people to accept.
People with fanatical and delusional beliefs famously don't give them up just because they've been hit over the head with reality, of course. The various subcultures of crackpots that have sprung up under Trump are no exception.
Still, the election results have sent these groups reeling. All of them have spent the past four years growing their ranks and orbiting around Trump, convinced that he was a savior figure who would crush their perceived enemies.
Donald Trump’s refusal to accept the judgment of the American people might just seem like denial. But in denying the legitimacy of over 77 million votes against him, Trump and leading Republican politicians are implementing a design more sinister than poor sportsmanship.
Trump and his party have declared war on the fundamental principle of American constitutional democracy: When an incumbent loses an election, they leave office. A peaceful transfer of power follows.
Republicans know full well that Biden won. Republican as well as Democratic election officials from across the country confirm there’s no evidence of voter fraud. The election was not stolen.
Nonetheless, Trump and Republican politicians are scheming to persuade tens of millions of Republican faithful that our elections cannot be relied on and that Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.
In doing so, they are undermining the bedrock of American democracy: trust in peaceful elections in a constitutional order. And they demonstrate their animosity to electoral democracy itself.
Trump himself made his views all too clear before the election, when he repeatedly refused to agree he would accept it if he lost. His excuse was that mail-in votes were going to perpetrate a massive fraud. Consistent with that fabrication, he now asserts he won the election.
Voting by mail is allowed under the law of every state in the union, and citizens have voted that way for decades without fraud or other issues. In all their lawsuits, Republicans have presented zero evidence of even remotely significant fraud.
Trump’s insidious rhetoric on the election won’t stop Biden from taking office, but it’s not harmless. For if the election was “stolen,” the hate groups Trump asked to “stand by” could well take it as a signal to move against the new government and its supporters.
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