Glad to know that T does not intend to go to the Inauguration, and escape from a meet and greet at the White House with Biden because that’s who he is - a child.
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Well, this is both nut and illegal. Just like Michael Flynn himself.
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This whole kraken camp is a special kind of nuts.
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Oh, what fresh stupidity is this, and does this belong in humor?
Roger Stone Says North Korean Boats Delivered Ballots Through Maine Harbor As Trump Boosts Fraud Claims
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Jeff Zients to act as Coronavirus czar. He worked with Obama/Biden on Ebola scare.
WILMINGTON, Del./WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President-elect Joe Biden has selected two former Obama administration officials to senior roles to help fight COVID-19, including the appointment of Jeff Zients as White House coronavirus coordinator, Politico reported on Thursday.
Biden adviser Vivek Murthy will return to his role as Surgeon General but with a broader portfolio as the pandemic rages through the country, Politico said, citing two people familiar with the decision.
Dealing with the virus that has killed more than 274,000 Americans as well as the economic fallout from the crisis is one of Biden’s top priorities once he takes office on Jan. 20.
Politico also said Marcella Nunez-Smith, a co-chair of Biden’s COVID-19 advisory board, will play a key role in the incoming administration’s pandemic response, focused on disparities.
Current White House coronavirus task force member Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. government infectious diseases expert, was scheduled to have his first substantive talks with the new administration on Thursday.
Fauci told media he expected to have a comprehensive discussion with the members of Biden’s team working to establish priorities and ensure a smooth transition on Inauguration Day on Jan. 20.
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So Biden now has 270 electors points officially as California is one of the later ones certifying.
YAY!
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Helpful explainer of what goes on with the Republicans/Trump and all their deceit, and desires to make the 2020 election a sham. Heather Cox Richardson writes a newsletter which a few of you read…but getting an historical perspective is helpful too.
Amazing all the inertia from the R’s - too afraid to speak out. Just another WTF moment. Unreal.
December 5, 2020
Heather Cox Richardson Dec 6 
Today’s news just amplifies yesterday’s, but the stories add up to an interesting scenario.
Coronavirus continues to devastate the country, with official deaths topping 281,000 today, but it turns out that the Trump administration did not actually have a plan for distribution of vaccines. Federal officials have drastically slashed the amount of vaccine they promised to states before the election. Instead of the 300 million doses the administration had promised before the end of 2020, the plan is currently to distribute 35 to 40 million doses. Even those, though, are plagued by bottlenecks in parts of the production process, as well as manufacturing issues. This means a longer struggle with the disease than many had come to expect.
Trump continues to refuse to acknowledge his loss in the November election. This morning, before a scheduled rally in Georgia for two Republican senators facing runoffs against their Democratic challengers, Trump called Georgia Governor Brian Kemp to pressure him to overturn Biden’s win in the state. Trump asked Kemp to convince the state legislature to ignore Biden’s victory and appoint their own slate of electors who would give the president the state’s votes in the Electoral College. Biden won Georgia by about 12,000 votes, and Georgia law does not permit the legislature to submit alternative electors. When Kemp, who is a Republican, declined to do as Trump asked, Trump took to Twitter to attack him.
Trump also asked Kemp to demand an audit of the signatures on mail-in ballots, which Kemp does not have the power to do. Georgia’s governor may not interfere in elections. Instead, the state secretary of state has jurisdiction, and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, has defended the existing signature match process and says there is no evidence of fraud.
At tonight’s rally, Trump continued to insist he had won the election and to assure attendees they are all victims of the Democrats’ plot to steal the election. The rally was nominally about the senate candidates, but Trump treated it pretty much as he treated his rallies before the election. He is convincing his supporters that the election was rigged, and that President-Elect Biden will be an illegitimate president.
Trump loyalists at the Pentagon continue to refuse to let Pentagon officials communicate with Biden’s transition team. According to an official, the Pentagon chief of staff Kash Patel, a former staffer for California Representative Devin Nunes appointed after the election, has rewritten policy descriptions to reflect well on Trump before letting Biden’s people see them. He has also stopped communications. He “told everybody we’re not going to cooperate with the transition team,” an official said, and he has “put a lot of restrictions on it.” He is “controlling the information flow.” This will put the Biden camp behind on getting up to speed on sensitive foreign policy issues with Iran, Afghanistan, Russia, and North Korea, hurting national security.
Also today, the Washington Post printed the results of its query to all 249 Republicans in the House and Senate, asking them who won the 202 presidential election. Only 27 of them are willing to acknowledge that Biden won. Two Republicans insist that Trump won the election, all evidence to the contrary. The rest of them—220 of them—refuse to say who won.
This is a big deal. This was not a close election. Biden currently has over 7 million more votes than Trump, and has won by 306 to 232 in the Electoral College. And yet, Republican leadership is permitting Trump to undermine our democracy. Try to imagine any past Republican president doing what Trump is doing, and you can’t. But today’s Republican lawmakers are standing to the side, permitting Trump to poison our democracy.
To what end? Why are Republicans accepting this anti-American behavior from Trump?
It seems to me they are unwilling to risk losing Trump’s voters in the future because they are determined to regain power. They don’t much care about our democracy, so long as they have a shot at keeping Trump’s people on their side. But then, again, to what end? If Republicans regain power in 2022 or 2024, what will that look like? Do we have any reason to think they will then begin to defend our democracy? Do we have any reason to think they are interested in anything but even more legislation that moves wealth upward?
We have been in a spot much like this before. In 1884, Americans turned against the Republican Party because it had abandoned its support for ordinary Americans in favor of the industrial leaders who put money into Republican lawmakers’ political war chests, as well as into their pockets. Voters put Democrat Grover Cleveland into the White House, the first Democrat to hold the presidency since James Buchanan was elected in 1856.
Horrified, the Republicans flooded the country with stories of how Democrats were socialists who would attack the rich by ending the legislation that protected businesses. If Democrats continued to control the government, Republicans said, they would destroy America. In 1888, they suppressed Democratic votes and created modern political financing as they hit up businessmen for major donations. Despite their best efforts, voters reelected Cleveland by about 100,000 votes, but Republicans managed to eke out a win for their candidate, Benjamin Harrison, in the Electoral College. Harrison promised a “BUSINESSMAN’S ADMINISTRATION,” and indeed, in office, he and his men did all they could to cement the Republican Party into power so it could continue to defend business (among other things, they added six new states to the Union to pack the Electoral College).
But voters still didn’t like the Republicans’ platform, which seemed more and more to funnel money from hardworking Americans upward into the pockets of those men who were increasingly portrayed as robber barons. In 1892, they voted for Cleveland in such numbers they couldn’t be overridden in the Electoral College. Voters also put Democrats in charge of Congress, both the House of Representatives and the Senate.
And that is the moment I cannot help thinking about today. Faced with a legitimately elected Democratic government, Republican leaders deliberately sabotaged the country. They swamped the media with warnings that Democrats would destroy the economy and that men should pull their capital out of stocks and industries. Foreign capital should, they said, go home or face disaster. Money began to flow out of the country and stocks faltered. When financiers begged the Harrison administration to shore up the markets in the face of the growing panic, administration officials told them their job was only to keep the country afloat until the day of Cleveland’s inauguration.
They didn’t quite make it. The economy collapsed about ten days before Cleveland took the oath of office, saddling the new president with the Panic of 1893 and very few ways to combat it. Republicans had deliberately sabotaged the country in order to discredit Cleveland, then demanded he honor the demands of financiers to stabilize the economy. Caught between a rock and a hard place, Cleveland tried to work with moneyed interests to combat the depression and promptly split his own party. The country roiled as out-of-work Americans despaired, some of them marching on Washington, D.C., to demand the government do something to address their plight.
The Republicans went into the 1894 midterm elections blaming the Democrats for the crisis in the country. They won the midterms in what remains the largest seat swing in the history of the House of Representatives. Then they claimed that, with Republicans back in power, the economy was now safe. They papered the country with media announcing that the panic was over and people should reinvest. The panic was over, and a Republican president won in 1896, once again insisting the Democrats were socialists, but this time adding that the past four years had proved the Democrats could not run the economy.
There is no excuse for the silence of Republican lawmakers as their president attacks our democracy. But there might be a precedent.
Notes:
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AG Bacerra to be named HHS head…Biden’s team announces today. He’s done a good job for CA.
This California AG’s name was being thrown out for potential replacement for Sen Kamala Harris’ spot for CA Senator. Bacerra was also thought to be considered for US Attorney General.
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11th Hour move on R’s part. Trying to get SCOTUS involved in the election results when today is Safe Harbor Deadline day and Biden has reached 270 electoral votes (excluding PA for now)
Texas has filed an audacious suit with the Supreme Court challenging the election results
The state of Texas filed an audacious lawsuit in the Supreme Court on Tuesday against four other states, asking the justices to extend the Dec. 14 deadline for certification of presidential electors.
The suit, filed by the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, said Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin had engaged in election irregularities that require investigation, and it asked the court to “enjoin the use of unlawful election results without review and ratification by the defendant states’ legislatures.”
Legal experts called the suit outlandish, and it comes at a time when Mr. Paxton is battling a scandal in his own state over whistle-blower allegations that he engaged in bribery and other wrongdoing to illegally help a wealthy Austin real estate developer and political donor.
“It looks like we have a new leader in the ‘craziest lawsuit filed to purportedly challenge the election’ category,” Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas, wrote on Twitter.
The Constitution gives the Supreme Court “original jurisdiction” to hear disputes “in which a state shall be party.” In such cases, the Supreme Court acts much like a trial court, appointing a special master to hear evidence and issue recommendations. Though the Constitution seems to require the court to hear cases brought by states, the court has ruled that it has discretion to turn them down and often does.
When the court does exercise its original jurisdiction, it is usually to adjudicate disputes between two states over issues like water rights. In 2016, the justices turned down a request from Nebraska and Oklahoma to file a challenge to Colorado’s legalization of recreational marijuana. The states said the Colorado law had spillover effects, taxing neighboring states’ criminal justice systems and hurting the health of their residents.
Texas asked the justices to put its case on an exceptionally fast track, but the court has acted with measured deliberation in considering similar requests and may defer consideration of whether to hear the suit until it can have no practical impact. Indeed, the Dec. 8 safe harbor deadline, which largely insulates states that have certified their election results from legal challenges, is about to pass.
In a blog post, Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, called the Texas filing a “press release masquerading as a lawsuit.”
He listed what he said were its shortcomings: “Texas doesn’t have standing to raise these claims as it has no say over how other states choose electors; it could raise these issues in other cases and does not need to go straight to the Supreme Court; it waited too late to sue; the remedy Texas suggests of disenfranchising tens of millions of voters after the fact is unconstitutional; there’s no reason to believe the voting conducted in any of the states was done unconstitutionally; it’s too late for the Supreme Court to grant a remedy even if the claims were meritorious (they are not).”
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I give it 5 until they accuse Justice Alito, who would have been instrumental in this decision, of being part of the Deep State:
U.S. Supreme Court rejects GOP congressman’s last-minute effort to upend Pennsylvania’s election results
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Red states are piling onto the Texas lawsuit. Meanwhile, Michigan lays it out:
The rank hypocrisy of the Texas AG’s election case
Ken Paxton is a lawman being chased by the law. And when the Texas Republican attorney general filed a suit on Tuesday with the US Supreme Court on behalf of his state, he also became an even more rank hypocrite.
Paxton, who has been indicted on securities fraud and accused by top aides of bribery, abuse of office and other potentially criminal offenses – charges that he has denied – argued that a handful of battleground states destroyed the integrity of the 2020 election vote totals. He insists the US Constitution was violated by allowing their legislatures to make last-minute changes that ignored federal electoral regulations.
Earlier in the campaign, Paxton played a key role in President Donald Trump’s fight against expanding mail-in ballots. Now Paxton’s plea to the Court is that Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia must be found to have used the Covid-19 pandemic as an excuse to manipulate outcomes.
If that argument has merit, he ought to have included his home state in the lawsuit.
Texas’ Republican Gov. Gregg Abbott extended early voting by a week and expanded the period in which mail-in ballots could be hand-delivered. “Using his emergency authority because of the pandemic,” Glenn Smith, a Texas Democratic political consultant, told me, “our governor accomplished exactly what his attorney general is saying other states did, improperly. Nonsense. None of this harmed the presidential election. It helped turnout.”
But apparently, to Paxton, it’s only legal if the rule changes help the GOP win.
To make his case, the Texas AG marches out the same unproven allegations numerous courts have already found specious. His paranoia includes hidden suitcases full of ballots, a secret laptop and several USB drives supposedly used to program favorable Democratic results in Pennsylvania, and even alleged videos of poll workers cheering as poll watchers are ordered out of counting rooms. Credible evidence of such allegations has never been produced, and the US Supreme Court rejected another GOP bid to block certification of the Pennsylvania result on the same day that Paxton filed his suit.
There is, meanwhile, an accumulating body of allegations against Paxton. A letter obtained in October by the Austin American-Statesman and television station KVUE, noted that a number of Paxton’s top aides had reported to “the appropriate law enforcement authority” a “potential violation of law” by Paxton. The staffers insisted they had “a good faith belief that the Attorney General is violating federal and/or state law, including prohibitions relating to improper influence, abuse of office, bribery and other potential criminal offenses.”
Several of Paxton’s former employees filed a whistleblower lawsuit against the attorney general, saying Paxton retaliated against them after they accused him of intervening in legal matters to help his friend, a real estate investor who had made a $25,000 donation to his 2018 campaign, according to the suit. Paxton has denied their allegations.
The investor named by the lawsuit, Nate Paul, said he had also employed a woman based upon a recommendation by Paxton. Although Paul said he was not doing favors for the attorney general, the Texas Tribune and The Dallas Morning News have reported at least two people say Paxton told them he had an extramarital affair with the woman Paul later hired. Paxton insists the allegations are all part of a “political witch hunt” and denies any wrongdoing.
Paxton has already been indicted for felony securities fraud, accused of failing to register with the State Securities Board while selling stock to investors without disclosing he was making a commission. The case has been hung up on questions of venue, and payment and replacement of county prosecutors, and has slogged through appeals that have dragged it out for five years without adjudication.
The indictments did not stop Paxton from winning reelection at the same time his wife was being voted into a seat in the Texas state senate. In one of her earliest acts in public office, Angela Paxton filed a bill to broadly increase her husband’s power with legislation allowing him to exempt individuals from state securities law. Surely, it is only coincidental that those are the laws Paxton is accused of violating. The measure appears to have stunk too much even for the Texas legislature and didn’t get a committee hearing.
The Texas AG’s latest US Supreme Court plea might just be currying favor with Trump in an attempt to get a pardon before Paxton is potentially tried and convicted. Even a bad lawyer like our attorney general is likely to know he has no real case. The electoral fraud argument is considerably weaker than the pleadings his office made to ask the high court to overturn the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act, which it denied.
It’s hard to believe the Supreme Court will bother to hear Paxton’s case, which has the potential to disenfranchise tens of millions of voters, especially after its Tuesday ruling on Pennsylvania. But at one point it also seemed improbable that the narcissistic host of a reality TV television show could become the President of the United States.
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Trump Allies Eye Long-Shot Election Reversal in Congress, Testing Pence
Some House Republicans plan to try to use Congress’s tallying of electoral results on Jan. 6 to tip the election to President Trump. The attempt will put Republicans in a pinch.
President Trump lost key swing states by clear margins. His barrage of lawsuits claiming widespread voting fraud has been almost universally dismissed, most recently by the Supreme Court. And on Monday, the Electoral College will formally cast a majority of its votes for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.
But as the president continues to refuse to concede, a small group of his most loyal backers in Congress are plotting a final-stage challenge on the floor of the House of Representatives in early January to try to reverse Mr. Biden’s victory.
Constitutional scholars and even members of the president’s own party say the effort is all but certain to fail. But the looming battle on Jan. 6 is likely to culminate in a messy and deeply divisive spectacle that could thrust Vice President Mike Pence into the excruciating position of having to declare once and for all that Mr. Trump has indeed lost the election.
The fight promises to shape how Mr. Trump’s base views the election for years to come, and to pose yet another awkward test of allegiance for Republicans who have privately hoped that the Electoral College vote this week will be the final word on the election result.
For the vice president, whom the Constitution assigns the task of tallying the results and declaring a winner, the episode could be particularly torturous, forcing him to balance his loyalty to Mr. Trump with his constitutional duties and considerations about his own political future.
The effort is being led by Representative Mo Brooks, Republican of Alabama, a backbench conservative. Along with a group of allies in the House, he is eyeing challenges to the election results in five different states — Arizona, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Georgia and Wisconsin — where they claim varying degrees of fraud or illegal voting took place, despite certification by the voting authorities and no evidence of widespread impropriety.
“We have a superior role under the Constitution than the Supreme Court does, than any federal court judge does, than any state court judge does,” Mr. Brooks said in an interview. “What we say, goes. That’s the final verdict.”
Under rules laid out in the Constitution and the Electoral Count Act of 1887, their challenges must be submitted in writing with a senator’s signature also affixed. No Republican senator has yet stepped forward to say he or she will back such an effort, though a handful of reliable allies of Mr. Trump, including Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rand Paul of Kentucky, have signaled they would be open to doing so.
The president has praised Mr. Brooks on Twitter, but has thus far taken no evident interest in the strategy. Aides say he has been more focused on battling to overturn the results in court.
Even if a senator did agree, constitutional scholars say the process is intended to be an arduous one. Once an objection is heard from a member of each house of Congress, senators and representatives will retreat to their chambers on opposite sides of the Capitol for a two-hour debate and then a vote on whether to disqualify a state’s votes. Both the Democratic-controlled House and Republican-controlled Senate would have to agree to toss out a state’s electoral votes — something that has not happened since the 19th century.
Several Senate Republicans — including Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitt Romney of Utah — have forcefully rejected the idea of overturning the results, and their votes would be enough for Mr. Biden to prevail with the support of Democrats.
“The Jan. 6 meting is going to confirm that regardless of how many objections get filed and who signs on, they are not going to affect the outcome of the process,” said Edward B. Foley, a constitutional law professor at Ohio State University who has written extensively on the electoral process. “We can say that with clear confidence.”
But he noted that the session could still carry consequences for the next few years. If even one Republican senator backed the effort, it could ensure that the partisan cloud hanging over the election would darken Mr. Biden’s presidency for years to come. If none did, it could send a definitive message to the country that despite Mr. Trump’s bluster, the party trusted the results of the electoral process and was finally ready to recognize Mr. Biden as the rightful winner.
Mr. Brooks is far from the first lawmaker to try to use the tallying process to challenge the results of a bitter election loss. House Democrats made attempts in 2001, 2005 and even 2017, but they were essentially acts of protest after their party’s nominee had already accepted defeat.
What is different now is Mr. Trump’s historic defiance of democratic norms and his party’s willing acquiescence. If Mr. Trump were to bless the effort to challenge the congressional tally, he could force Republicans into a difficult decision about whether to support an assault on the election results that is essentially doomed or risk his ire. Many Republicans are already fearful of being punished by voters for failing to keep up his fight.
The dilemma is particularly acute for Mr. Pence, who is eyeing his own presidential run in 2024. As president of the Senate, he has the constitutionally-designated task of opening and tallying envelopes sent from all 50 states and announcing their electoral results.
But given Mr. Trump’s penchant for testing every law and norm in Washington, he could insist that Mr. Pence refuse to play that role. And either way, it will call for a final performance of the delicate dance Mr. Pence has performed for past four years, trying to maintain Mr. Trump’s confidence while adhering to the law.
“The role the V.P. plays in the transition is something that people have never focused on and never think about, but with Donald Trump, you now have to consider all the possibilities,” said Gregory B. Craig, a White House counsel under President Barack Obama.
In 1961, Richard M. Nixon, who had just lost the election, oversaw the vote tabulation and had to decide whether to recognize competing electors from the new state of Hawaii. Mr. Nixon ultimately made a decision that hurt his vote total but had no effect on the final result that John F. Kennedy had won. Forty years later, after the 2000 election, Al Gore had to reject objections from his fellow Democrats and certify the victory of George W. Bush, who had won the state of Florida after the Supreme Court ordered a recount ended in that state.
Since the election, Mr. Pence has sent mixed messages about how far he would be willing to go to help Mr. Trump. In the early days of the transition, Mr. Pence fended off requests from the president’s loyalists to back specious claims about election fraud. But more recently, he publicly praised the failed lawsuit brought by the attorney general of Texas to have votes from battleground states thrown out.
Democrats said they were confident that Mr. Biden would emerge unscathed, but his transition team has begun coordinating with Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, to prepare for the possibility that one or more senator would sign onto the challenges.
Mr. Brooks has been trying to drum up support. He met last week with about a half-dozen senators, including Mike Lee of Utah, and separately with the conservative House Freedom Caucus.
“My No. 1 goal is to fix a badly flawed American election system that too easily permits voter fraud and election theft,” Mr. Brooks said. “A possible bonus from achieving that goal is that Donald Trump would win the Electoral College officially, as I believe he in fact did if you only count lawful votes by eligible American citizens and exclude all illegal votes.”
It remains unclear how broad a coalition he could build. More than 60 percent of House Republicans, including the top two party leaders, joined a legal brief supporting the unsuccessful Texas lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to overturn the election results. But it is one thing to sign a legal brief and another to officially contest the outcome on the House floor.
Some Republicans including Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Matt Gaetz have also signaled they could support an objection. Mr. Brooks said he had been speaking with others who were interested. But prominent allies of the president who have thrown themselves headfirst into earlier fights, like Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio or even the House minority leader, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, have so far been publicly noncommittal.
“All eyes are on Jan. 6,” Mr. Gaetz said on Fox News Friday night after the Supreme Court rejected Texas’ suit. “I suspect there will be a little bit of debate and discourse in the Congress as we go through the process of certifying the electors. We still think there is evidence that needs to be considered.”
Mr. Paul, Republican of Kentucky, said he would “wait and see how all the legal cases turn out” before deciding what to do.
Mr. Johnson plans to hold a hearing this week “examining the irregularities in the 2020 election,” featuring Ken Starr, the former independent counsel who is a favorite of the right, and at least two lawyers who have argued election challenges for Mr. Trump. Whether he proceeds to challenge results on Jan. 6, he told reporters last week, “depends on what we find out.”
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Recommendation - “They can now demonstrate a modicum of their professed patriotism by mustering the courage to say these simple words: “Congratulations, President-elect Biden.”
What is left to say about a political party that would throw out millions of votes?
The substance of a lawsuit filed by the State of Texas, and backed by more than 17 other states, would be laughable were it not so dangerous. Texas’ attorney general, Ken Paxton — who is under indictment for securities fraud — asked the Supreme Court to overturn the results of the presidential election in four other states. As a legal matter, this is the rough equivalent of objecting on the grounds that the other side is winning. As political rhetoric, however, it is incendiary.
The Supreme Court was right to toss out the lawsuit. But that the Republican Party tried and failed doesn’t make the attempt any less odious. There are a lot of Republican leaders who, the history books will record, wanted it to succeed.
What makes this entire episode so sad is that the nation needs a vibrant, honest, patriotic opposition party. A party that argues in good faith to win more votes the next time around. Many Republicans, particularly at the state and local level, stood tall and proud against the worst instincts of the national party.
The health of a democracy rests on public confidence that elections are free and fair. Questioning the integrity of an election is a matter of the utmost seriousness. By doing so without offering any evidence, Mr. Paxton and his collaborators have disgraced themselves. Attorneys general are sworn to uphold the rule of law.
At least 126 Republican members of Congress — more than half of all House Republicans — rushed to sign a court filing endorsing the Texas lawsuit. That misuse of the legal system was not restricted to the fringes of the party. The minority leader, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, said Friday that his name was inadvertently omitted from the original list.
It is particularly astonishing that 17 of the House signatories were elected by voters in the states whose election results Texas was seeking to invalidate. They signed a letter directly challenging the legitimacy of their own victories and the integrity of their own states’ elections.
These lawmakers were humiliating themselves to conciliate President Trump, a man who once created a coat of arms for himself emblazoned with the words Numquam Concedere — never concede. Mr. Trump, not a man to often place the national interest above his own personal interests, is pursuing a series of increasingly desperate strategies to overturn the election results and remain in power. Having failed to convince the voters, he is now pressing state legislators, the courts and Congress to defy the will of the people as well.
That the attacks on Mr. Biden’s victory are unlikely to succeed is a very cold bowl of comfort.
Republicans are establishing a new standard for elections that anything short of a fight to the death amounts to not trying hard enough. The old norm of graceful concession was not just an act of good manners. A concession has no legal force, but it has considerable value as an affirmation that the democratic process is more important than the result.
Conceding leaves the nation’s political and social systems functional for the winner.
This new policy of election denialism, by contrast, is the latest manifestation of the Republican Party’s increasingly anti-democratic tendencies. Rather than campaigning on issues that appeal to a majority of the electorate, the party has made a strategy out of voter suppression. Seeking to toss votes after the fact is a logical if perverse extension of that strategy. So is the growing willingness of Republican Party officials to deny the legitimacy of their opponents.
This isn’t really about Mr. Trump anymore. He lost, and his ruinous tenure will soon be over. This is now about the corruption of a political party whose leaders are guided by the fear of Mr. Trump rather than the love of this country — and who are falling into dangerous habits.
The events of recent weeks have demonstrated the strength and resilience of the election system. A larger share of American adults voted in the 2020 presidential election than in any previous cycle. The votes were counted, sometimes more than once. The results were certified. In the states that have attracted the particular ire of Mr. Trump and his allies, most officials, including most Republican officials, defended the integrity of the results.
But the incendiaries are playing a dangerous game. They are battering public trust and raising doubts about the legitimacy of future elections. Most of it is political theater: Mr. Biden’s decisive victory is difficult to overturn. But a great many voters trust their political leaders, they don’t expect to be lied to, they aren’t in on the grift.
It is also a short walk from rhetorical attacks on the legitimacy of the election to denying the legitimacy of Mr. Biden’s administration. Republicans are certainly within their rights to disagree with Mr. Biden and to challenge the decisions made by his administration, but those who refuse to accept his victory are undermining the rule of law. Those who stand silent are complicit.
The implications of this assault on truth and trust extend well beyond elections. We are in the midst of a public health emergency. Lives depend on the government’s ability to shape public behavior, including by persuading people to get vaccinated. By denying the authority of those who govern, Republicans are placing lives in danger.
They can now demonstrate a modicum of their professed patriotism by mustering the courage to say these simple words: “Congratulations, President-elect Biden.”
If they can’t bring themselves to do that, where does a party that rejects democracy go from here?
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Challenge…Hacking from Russia into Federal Agencies - Treasury and Commerce. Not good.
The Trump administration acknowledged on Sunday that hackers acting on behalf of a foreign government — almost certainly a Russian intelligence agency, according to federal and private experts — broke into a range of key government networks, including in the Treasury and Commerce Departments, and had free access to their email systems.
Officials said a hunt was on to determine if other parts of the government had been affected by what looked to be one of the most sophisticated, and perhaps among the largest, attacks on federal systems in the past five years. Several said a series of national security-related agencies were also targeted, though it was not clear whether the systems contained highly classified material.
The Trump administration said little in public about the hack, which suggested that while the government was worried about Russian intervention in the 2020 election, key agencies working for the administration — and unrelated to the election — were actually the subject of a sophisticated attack that they were unaware of until recent weeks.
“The United States government is aware of these reports, and we are taking all necessary steps to identify and remedy any possible issues related to this situation,” John Ullyot, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said in a statement. The Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity agency, whose leader was fired by President Trump last month for declaring that there had been no widespread election fraud, said in a statement that it had been called in as well.
…
If the Russia connection is confirmed, it will be the most sophisticated known theft of American government data by Moscow since a two-year spree in 2014 and 2015, in which Russian intelligence agencies gained access to the unclassified email systems at the White House, the State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It took years to undo the damage, but President Barack Obama decided at the time not to name the Russians as the perpetrators — a move that many in his administration now regard as a mistake.
Emboldened, the same group of hackers went on to invade the systems of the Democratic National Committee and top officials in Hillary Clinton’s campaign, touching off investigations and fears that permeated both the 2016 and 2020 contests. Another more disruptive Russian intelligence agency, the G.R.U., is believed to be responsible for then making public the hacked emails at the D.N.C.
“There appear to be many victims of this campaign, in government as well as the private sector,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, the chairman of Silverado Policy Accelerator, a geopolitical think tank, who was the co-founder of CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm that helped find the Russians in the Democratic National Committee systems four years ago. “Not unlike what we had seen in 2014-2015 from this actor, when they ran a massive campaign and successfully compromised numerous victims.”
Russia has been one of several countries that have also been hacking American research institutions and pharmaceutical companies. This summer, Symantec Corporation warned that a Russian ransomware group was exploiting the sudden change in American work habits because of the pandemic and were injecting code into corporate networks with a speed and breadth not previously seen.
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Challenge from T on Election
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Well, this is nuts, and of course Stephen Miller is the one pushing such nonsense.
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Challenge - More crazy in AZ regarding the Dec 14th Electoral State votes
In another sign of the lingering unrest over President Donald Trump’s election loss, an Arizona group sent the National Archives in Washington, D.C., notarized documents last week intended to deliver, wrongly, the state’s 11 electoral votes for him.
Copies of the documents obtained by The Arizona Republic show a group that claimed to represent the “sovereign citizens of the Great State of Arizona” submitted signed papers casting votes for what they want: a second term for Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.
Mesa resident Lori Osiecki, 62, helped created a facsimile of the “certificate of ascertainment” that is submitted to formally cast each state’s electoral votes as part of an effort to prevent what she views as the fraudulent theft of the election.
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Trump And His Allies Have Lost Nearly 60 Election Fights In Court (And Counting)
The campaign’s latest legal failures come as the Electoral College votes to affirm President-elect Joe Biden’s win on Monday.
Wisconsin’s Supreme Court denied a last-ditch Trump effort to toss 200,000 votes from Milwaukee and Madison.
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Check out Lawyer Neal Katyal discuss all the losses that Trump has had. He has been covering them daily…He’s a MSNBC contributor and had clerked for SCOTUS, and argued in front of it.
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