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Facebook’s Political Ads Ban Has Been An Ominous Disaster
Just days from the election, the tech giant wrongly blocked thousands of Biden ads due to “technical flaws” — and that’s only the beginning.
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Wow - a Friday event cancelled by BIden’s group heading to Austin from San Antonia because they were met by a MAGA mob who were armed. 
Joe Biden’s presidential campaign canceled a Friday event in Austin, Texas, after harassment from a pro-Trump contingent.
Texas has emerged as a battleground state in Tuesday’s presidential election, with polls showing the typically Republican stronghold now only marginally favoring President Donald Trump. The Biden campaign scheduled a Friday event in the state, in a bid to drum up last-minute support.
But when the Biden campaign bus drove to Austin, it was greeted by a blockade of pro-Trump demonstrators, leading to what one Texas House representative described as an escalation “well beyond safe limits.”
The cancelation comes amid national anxiety about voter intimidation, a tactic the Trump campaign has implicitly endorsed.
Historian Dr. Eric Cervini was driving to help with the Biden campaign stop when he filmed a line of pickup trucks along the highway, many of them flying Trump flags. The drivers were “waiting to ambush the Biden/Harris campaign bus as it traveled from San Antonio to Austin,” Cervini tweeted.
“These Trump supporters, many of whom were armed, surrounded the bus on the interstate and attempted to drive it off the road,” he alleged. “They outnumbered police 50-1, and they ended up hitting a staffer’s car.”
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FFS. The Hunter Biden laptop conspiracy theory has officially become a video game quest.
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Here is the nightmare scenario…throw it over to the Supreme Court.
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Guestimate of how many people at Trump Rallies 30,000 were affected by Covid, spreading covid and subseqent deaths 700 between June 20 and Sept. 22. Not peer reviewed so it has not been fully checked.
President Donald Trump’s campaign rallies led to more than 30,000 coronavirus cases, according to a new paper posted by researchers at Stanford.
Researchers looked at 18 Trump rallies held between June 20 and Sept. 22 and analyzed Covid-19 data the weeks following each event. They compared the counties where the events were held to other counties that had a similar trajectory of confirmed Covid-19 cases prior to the rally date. Out of the 18 rallies analyzed, only three were indoors, according to the research.
The researchers found that the rallies ultimately resulted in more than 30,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19. They also concluded that the rallies likely led to more than 700 deaths, though not necessarily among attendees.
The researchers said the findings support the warnings and recommendations of public health officials concerning the risk of Covid-19 transmission at large group gatherings, “particularly when the degree of compliance with guidelines concerning the use of masks and social distancing is low.”
“The communities in which Trump rallies took place paid a high price in terms of disease and death,” said B. Douglas Bernheim, chairman of Stanford’s economics department and a lead author of the paper, wrote.
The paper, which has not undergone a peer review yet, was published on open access preprint platform SSRN.
In response to the paper, Trump campaign spokesperson Courtney Parella said, “Americans have the right to gather under the First Amendment to hear from the President of the United States.”
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He did it again.
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Oh wow.
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Trump has officially given the attack on Biden’s campaign bus the thumbs up.
Picture of one of the accounts apparently organizing it.
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Alarming pre-election request from Trump Campaign in FL. As well, similar requests were made in PA
Security info request from Trump campaign perturbs Cumberland County officials ahead of election | Politics | cumberlink.com
Cumberland County officials received an email this week from the Trump campaign requesting highly specific details about the county’s ballot security.
The email, obtained by The Sentinel, went so far as to ask for the address and room numbers of ballot storage locations, and requested that the information be sent to the Gmail account of a Florida-based Trump operative.
County officials said they have not responded to the request and do not intend to, according to the county commissioners.
The Trump campaign described the request as “standard election transparency details,” but local officials find the implication — that the President’s campaign staff is harvesting election security plans through what appears to be a personal web-based email account — to be extremely concerning.
It’s almost kind of chilling the sort of data they wanted us to provide,” Cumberland County Commissioner Gary Eichelberger said. “This is basically the whole security plan. We’ve never received a request of this detail and I find it troubling that one of the interested parties [in the election outcome] feels they have a right to information that obviously could jeopardize the security of the ballots.”
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Villages sees spike in COVID-19 cases as state tops 800,000 positive results -
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Still very good numbers for Biden - holding steady.
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The Republican playbook - anticipate that Election night Trump will be ahead, and therefore he has won. Anything else - ie, wait to get a full count of ballots will be the Dems ‘stealing’ the election.
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Trump’s plan to declare premature victory
President Trump has told confidants he’ll declare victory on Tuesday night if it looks like he’s “ahead,” according to three sources familiar with his private comments. That’s even if the Electoral College outcome still hinges on large numbers of uncounted votes in key states like Pennsylvania.
The latest: Speaking to reporters on Sunday evening, Trump denied that he would declare victory prematurely, before adding, “I think it’s a terrible thing when ballots can be collected after an election. I think it’s a terrible thing when states are allowed to tabulate ballots for a long period of time after the election is over.”
- He continued: “I think it’s terrible that we can’t know the results of an election the night of the election. … We’re going to go in the night of, as soon as that election’s over, we’re going in with our lawyers.”
- “We don’t want to have Pennsylvania, where you have a political governor, a very partisan guy. … We don’t want to be in a position where he’s allowed, every day, to watch ballots come in. See if we can only find 10,000 more ballots.”
Behind the scenes: Trump has privately talked through this scenario in some detail in the last few weeks, describing plans to walk up to a podium on election night and declare he has won.
- For this to happen, his allies expect he would need to either win or have commanding leads in Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Iowa, Arizona and Georgia.
Why it matters: Trump’s team is preparing to falsely claim that mail-in ballots counted after Nov. 3 — a legitimate count expected to favor Democrats — are evidence of election fraud.
Details: Many prognosticators say that on election night, Trump will likely appear ahead in Pennsylvania — though the state’s final outcome could change substantially as mail-in ballots are counted over the following days.
- Trump’s team is preparing to claim baselessly that if that process changes the outcome in Pennsylvania from the picture on election night, then Democrats would have “stolen” the election.
- Trump’s advisers have been laying the groundwork for this strategy for weeks, but this is the first account of Trump explicitly discussing his election night intentions.
What they’re saying: Asked for comment, the Trump campaign’s communications director Tim Murtaugh said, “This is nothing but people trying to create doubt about a Trump victory. When he wins, he’s going to say so.”
- Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller predicted that Trump “will be re-elected handily and no amount of post-election Democratic thievery will be able to change the results.”
Reality check: Mail-in ballots counted after Election Day as set forth in state-by-state rules are as legitimate as in-person votes recorded on Nov. 3.
- Many states won’t be done counting mail ballots by Tuesday night.
- In Pennsylvania, state law prevents election officials from counting mail-in ballots before Election Day.
- Night-of counts may be deceptive. It could be days, if not weeks, before we know who won Pennsylvania. If it’s a close race, this could also be true for other states, given the record numbers of Americans who voted by mail this year.
- Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” today that there could be 10x as many mail ballots this year than in 2016, “so, yes, it will take longer” to count.
- “I expect that the overwhelming majority of ballots in Pennsylvania, that’s mail-in and absentee ballots, as well as in-person ballots, will be counted within a matter of days,” Boockvar said.
What we’re watching: Miller, on ABC’s “This Week,” predicted 290+ electoral votes for Trump on election night, and he claimed Democrats are “just going to try to steal it back after the election.”
- He described any prospective challenges by Democrats as “hijinks or lawsuits or whatever kind of nonsense.”
Between the lines: Trump advisers are more optimistic about winning than they were three weeks ago, based on my conversations with multiple senior campaign officials over the past week, including two officials with direct knowledge of sensitive internal data.
- They said analyses of early-vote totals in battleground states indicate he’s doing substantially worse in Iowa and Georgia compared with this point in 2016, but better than expected in Texas, Nevada, North Carolina, Arizona and Wisconsin.
- Just a few weeks ago, senior Trump advisers were bearish about Wisconsin and had reduced TV advertising there to an insignificant figure. A senior campaign official told me, then, that the state didn’t figure in his paths to 270 electoral votes.
- But that appears to have changed. In recent days, senior Trump advisers have privately expressed growing optimism about Wisconsin, based on their analysis of early vote data.
The other side: “It comes as no surprise that Donald Trump and his campaign plan to declare victory before all the votes are counted. That has been his strategy for months, and nobody should fall for it,” Sen. Bernie Sanders said in a statement to Axios.
- “It’s why he is demonizing mail-in ballots and sabotaging the postal service. … We will not allow that to happen. Every vote must and will be counted."
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WTF
adding
Federal authorities are expected to put back into place a “non-scalable” fence around the entire perimeter of the White House on Monday as law enforcement and other agencies prepare for possible protests surrounding the election, a source with knowledge of the matter confirmed to CNN.
The fence, the same type that was put up during protests this summer, will encompass the Ellipse and Lafayette Square. It will go down 15th Street to Constitution Avenue and then over to 17th Street. The fence will then run up to H Street and across by Lafayette, and then come down 15th Street, the source said.
NBC News was first to report the new fencing. The Secret Service did not respond to a request for comment.
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I begin to suspect this is more than typical Trump callousness; I think Donnie is skimping on return buses due to serious money issues.
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Building in funding well after election under this ‘gimmick’ to state there is election fraud to counter. WTF
President Trump’s campaign is raising money for a prolonged political and legal fight long after Nov. 3 and recently began automatically checking a box to withdraw additional weekly contributions from online donors through mid-December — nearly six weeks after Election Day.
"Predicting “FRAUD like you’ve never seen,” the language on Mr. Trump’s website opts contributors into making the weekly post-election donations “to ensure we have the resources to protect the results and keep fighting even after Election Day.” Users must proactively click to avoid making multiple contributions.
The unusual post-election revenue stream would help Mr. Trump pay off any bills that his campaign accumulates before Tuesday — a campaign spokesman said no such debts had been incurred — and could help fund a lengthy legal fight if the results are contested.
“This race will be very close, and it is possible that multiple states will require recounts and potential additional spending from our campaign,” said Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for Mr. Trump’s campaign. “The election process this year is under extraordinary circumstances, and we are also anticipating that Silicon Valley will attempt to interfere with our online fund-raising efforts post-election.”
Democrats said automatically opting contributors into post-election giving was a misleading tactic.
“They’re inventing new deceptive tactics to essentially steal money from people,” said Mike Nellis, a Democratic digital strategist with an expertise in fund-raising. “They’re going completely and totally scorched earth on their own supporters. I’ve never seen anything like this in my life.”
Mr. Murtaugh said that no one would receive a “recurring charge without their knowledge” and that donors could opt out of recurring contributions both before donating and afterward. “Three days before each recurring charge, donors are emailed a reminder that the charge is about to occur,” he said. “There is a one-click link inside this email for donors to cancel if they wish. Our process is extremely transparent.”
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