…I may have mentioned being tired once or twice…but there’s tired like I-haven’t-slept-since-forever & there’s tired like this-shit-has-been-going-on-since-before-I-was-born…& somewhere between the two lies the daily bout of what-fresh-hell-is-this that is 2020
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/trump-says-it-could-take-months-or-years-know-election-result
…so apologies if some of these are either late/tired/not remotely suitable for a day of rest…but seriously, now…does anybody know what the fuck is going on at this point?
…why the old tweet, you might wonder…well, I can’t bring myself to keep up with all the dumbass shit that the man spouts from his little twitter pulpit…& like so many of us has done so many times it’s exhausting in its own right…I thought there was somewhere the semi-sentient effigy of a human being they insist is the duly appointed president (despite the generally accepted meaning of those words independently and in concert along with all logic, sense or ounce of common decency) would…much like his suits…bottom out
…but we are through the looking glass
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/14/edward-snowden-trump-presidential-pardon-speculation
…& all the way down the rabbit hole apparently
…not that that’s exactly news
Essentially, the administration has weaponized wasting everyone else’s time.
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/6-former-epa-bosses-call-agency-reset-election-rcna78
…but there used to be at least a polite fiction we could cling to that somewhere in the mix were people who knew what they fuck they were supposed to be doing even if they weren’t altogether up to the task of getting it done….& you’re going to think that this is the oddest thing (surely) the papers could throw up
…but you’d be wrong…because some fucking idiot at the washington post (you know that totally-in-the-bag-for-bezos trump-hating bastion of the press that they made a whole movie about) gave space to Mr Ivanka Trump in all his spineless toadyism
…& frankly everwhere you look things are kind of a shitshow
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/08/14/whats-behind-belarus-protests
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/08/15/putin-lukashenko-belarus-russia
…even the not-altogether bad news could use some improvement
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/15/defund-police-movement-us-victories-what-next
…so, not to put too fine a point on it…your man joe, there…he needs every vote he can lay hands on…& more importantly that can get counted…but all the same it’s nice to know he remembers this bit of his audience
…& passion is all well & good…but can we maybe skip the “think about 2024” stuff for at least another few months…ideally more but I’d settle for after christmas?
…aren’t there other things we could usefully spend that time figuring out?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/13/kamala-harris-california-senate-seat-democrats
…in fact…I don’t think I’d object overmuch if we just went ahead & agreed that it makes no practical sense to let the imperfect candidate be the enemy of the greater good when the other side of the equation is is a candidate so bad that fielding him ought itself to be illegal purely on the basis by which it demonstrates such epic reserves of bad faith
As he struggles in the polls, Trump reaches for the racist playbook again
…all in all it’s a good job it’s sunday…or…well, shit…I might be worried?
*checks local news*
hmmm..some dude got beaten to death one town over from me…putin aproves of the presidential election in belarus…theres a shocker…the stuck ship off the coast of africa broke in half..coz of course it did…america continues to be a shitshow and germany decided gypsy sauce is racist…now calls it hungarian style paprika sauce
pretty quiet for a sunday really
I doubt Donald Trump knows this but if there is election chaos and it’s unknown who won a majority of electoral votes (because the electors now are supposed to vote according to the popular votes of their states’ elections; it wasn’t always this way), the Constitution says that the President and VP are out at noon on January 20th regardless. The Speaker of the House (that would be Nancy Pelosi) assumes the Presidency. Someone should tell Trump that and see if he follows his beloved brother Robert (RIP) to the grave.
If there is so much chaos that the composition of the House is unknown, since all the Reps are up for re-election this year, there wouldn’t be a Speaker. Next in line is the President pro tempore of the Senate. There would be Senators because they’re not all up for re-election this year. There are 35 Senate seats to be decided this year, of which 23 are held by Republicans. If those Senate seats are undecided, the Democrats would hold a majority in the “rump” Senate. They would choose the president pro tem, and he or she would then assume the Presidency. At least until this whole mess was sorted out, I guess. The Senate could choose anyone for this role. The Senate loves seniority, so it might go to Patrick Leahy of Vermont, 80, the longest-serving Democratic Senator.
The founders, in their wisdom, thought of everything. This whole succession plan was probably devised because in the early days of the Republic they feared that the British or someone else would try to come in and wage war on the new United States so electoral chaos might ensue. Little could they have imagined that a sitting President would try to instigate this himself 2 1/2 centuries later.
I keep saying this and no one seems to notice and or care.
There is no electoral mechanism in the Constitution that allows Trump to stay in office after January 20, 2021. Everything changes. The Secret Service would move to protect the next President, be it Biden or Pelosi or whoever, the nuclear codes change, the military listens to the orders of the commander in chief.
The entire idea that Trump is somehow going to steal the Presidency relies on too many far out scenarios that basically require too many things to go in Trump’s favor for it to actually work. Even his attempts to obliterate the post office seemed doomed to backfire on him (spoiler: old white Republicans love mail-in voting and if Trump annihilates those votes he’d be screwing himself over). All his attempts to undermine it will just mean more people will show up at the polls, regardless of the danger to themselves.
It is far more likely that Trump straight up wins re-election than it is that he somehow rigs the election to stay in power, because he literally *can not stay in power if he loses*. I understand we’re all still shellshocked from 2016, but I still think people give Trump WAY too much credit for tripping head first into the Presidency when even he had no actual intention of winning.
…if it helps at all I’ve noticed (& I’m pretty sure I care) although the screwing-with-the-vote-&-argue-the-result thing is enough to keep me on edge?
I think the reality is that the only theft that works is in a narrow Bush v Gore situation where a handful of votes in one or two places make the difference.
Which could happen. But I think a lot of what we are seeing is just desperate flailing, and I agree the odds are higher that Biden somehow screws up in the next ten weeks.
I think if Trump loses the GOP moves on to Part B of Operation Chaos and does it with Trump in the dumpster, rather than try to prop him up.
I notice and care. You’re a consistent bringer of optimism that I need…and I will be more than happy to be on the receiving end of your “I told you so!” come the end of January.
So long as the House can meet, Pelosi can muscle through. The way the Constitution works, the House has authority over disputed elections — it can decide on winners, or even overrule the decisions of state election boards. The last time this happened was the 1980s, when the House Democrats on swearing in day refused to seat the Republican who was certified in a race in Indiana and chose the Democrat as the winner instead after their own investigation was done months later.
This and other cases were upheld by the courts, which ruled that only the House has the authority to decide. Now, of course the Roberts court could break with precedent and try to step in. At that point, Pelosi has the authority to order the House police to enforce her decisions as far as who can and cannot vote.
Of course, if we get to that point, there are probably a million people in the streets of DC due to other things going on.
what if the vote count takes too long and is halted at some point? doesn’t the house vote with each state delegation having one vote?
If there is a deadlock in the Electoral College, the vote goes to the House, with each state getting one vote regardless of population.
If the vote is thrown to the House by cheating, Pelosi could in theory block the seating of reps from Wyoming, Alaska,, and the Dakotas to guarantee a Democratic majority in state delegations. But I agree with KC that getting that far is a crazy scenario.
That first comment was a little tl;dr. The upshot is, the more Trump, in his “Madness of King George III” way, tries to subvert an accurate and timely vote this November, by sabotaging the USPS and other shenanigans, the more likely it is that we’ll have a Democratic President on January 20, 2021.
Not too long, very informative.
Because I am so bored I will bore you with more political trivia as we head into this extraordinary 2020 election season:
Martin van Buren, the 8th President of the United States, is notable for two reasons.
1. He was the first President born in the United States of America. His seven predecessors were British subjects at birth, since the colonies hadn’t formed the United States of America yet.
2. He’s the only President whose native language wasn’t English. He grew up in a Dutch-speaking Hudson Valley (NY) family. There was still a lot of Dutch influence in New York at the time. Many of the place names in New York City and its environs are Dutch-derived. A famous family descended from the Dutch settlers whom you might have heard of are the Roosevelts.
That is literally the first time it occurred to me that Roosevelt is Dutch and now it’s totally obvious. TIL!
They pop up all over the place. The Vanderbilts. Gloria Vanderbilt was married four times but never took any of her husband’s last names, and one of her husbands was Sidney Lumet. Probably too “common” for a Vanderbilt to give up the name for. That’s why her son is Anderson Cooper, because his father was Wyatt Cooper, Gloria’s last husband.
The Schuylers were another prominent family. They’ve kind of kept a low profile. You might have heard of them, though. Alexander Hamilton married a Schuyler and Hamilton’s father-in-law shows up in the musical “Hamilton.”
Now ask me about the French Huguenots in Boston, the most famous of whom was Peter Faneuil, who built Boston’s Faneuil Hall. Go on, I dare you. (Full disclosure: I once helped out on a book about the French Huguenots in colonial Boston. You do not want to go down this road).
Anti Semites during the 1930s like Father Coughlin claimed he wasn’t Dutch and the family changed the name from Rosenfeld to hide his Jewish background.
Roosevelt responded that he wasn’t Jewish, but he would be proud if he was.
I saw the Social Network and read the damn book. There is no soul in FB except money and a tech guy’s naive definition of power/influence.
So…. something for tomorrow’s DOT(Today’s, since we’re after Midnight?😉)
I honestly can’t decide if I’m on the side of “God, PLEASE SAVE US FROM ALL THE STUPID PEOPLE!!!!”
*OR* if I’m leaning a bit cynically more toward, “Ya KNOW WHAT? Go ahead, fellas, JUST GO AHEAD AND *TAKE* YOUR STUPID ‘Miracle Cure’ there, (and put us all out of the misery of *trying* to keep on saving y’all from your OWN goddamned stupidity…)
BECAUSE OLEANDER EXTRACT, y’all!!! Motherfucking OLEANDER… the plant whose leaves KILLED some preschoolers in CA last spring**
Of COURSE it’s Mike Lindell (the
manDUMBASS, who’d like to be Governor🙄🙄🙄), and Ben–Pediatric Neurosurgeon–NOT Infectious Disease Specialist/Virologist–Carson who have invested in, and are trying to shill this (potentially LITERALLY!!!) poison.Chriiiiist-on-a-Bun, y’all🤯🤯🤯…
At this point, I think I *might* be getting to the place, where I’m almost willing to let them Darwin-Award(s) themselves, just so that we don’t need to deal with their aggressively malignant stupidity (aggressively stupid malignancy?) anymore…
🙄🥴🙃
**A heartbreakingly tragic case, also linked in an LA Times article in the thread. The boys were adopted from a Siberian orphanage, where they went hungry A LOT, and because of that, they had issues around food/hunger, which were even *larger* than their parents realized.
The boys (age 2 & 3) decided to eat some leaves off of the Oleander plants in the back yard… they got sick, and their parents didn’t realize until too late, what had happened–when the kiddos ate some leaves *again*💔