Very well said, sweepkick.
Overall, I love our country but I can see some things we need to fix. People and countries change, none of us are the same as we were 20 or 200 years ago.
I’ve always liked Senator Schurz’s view of patriotism:
For those who are wondering whether Trump recognizes he lost, he does :
But after claiming publicly and falsely that he won the election, sources say Trump is not denying the outcome privately.
…
On Friday, aides were considering how to best convey to the President the reality that he’d lost, including discussing which person might be best to reckon with him. But others who’d spoken to Trump said it was evident he knew he has no electoral path to victory and is simply planning to exhaust his legal options.Advisers expect a furious bout of finger-pointing in the coming days, even as the President mounts his quixotic legal battle, which appears designed more to undermine the election’s legitimacy than to surface actual votes.
I keep remembering Saddam Hussein’s similar hissy fit as he was forced to withdraw troops from Kuwait. Trump may not set oil wells ablaze or dump oil into a major waterway, but make no mistake, the message will be the same.
Yes, here locally someone took down the American flag on a hilltop, and replaced it with a trump flag.
He reminds me of Juror No. 3 in 12 Angry Men when he finds the votes are now eleven to one against him and he’s asked to explain his position again.
The administrator of the GSA won’t sign off on Biden starting his transition. Normally, the winner get government funded office space and money to start their transition. According to the Washington Post, this will be the only delayed transition, other than 2000, which occurred because the election wasn’t decided until December.
This is part of some of the depressing news I’ve been reading lately. Apparently the GSA administrator is a Trump appointee who claims the election hasn’t been decided. Since the WaPo has various paywall restrictions, here’s the story on Politico:
But the other news is that Trump is not only escalating his useless legal challenges, he’s also planning to ramp up his super-spreader rallies that he loves so much, as if the election had never happened. But this time the focus will be to raise money, allegedly for his legal challenges, but more importantly to fire up and embolden his base, leading to ever more divisiveness and very likely to violent conflicts.
He doesn’t care, of course, as long as his ego is satiated. The man is a disease, a cancer on American politics that just won’t go away, even in the aftermath of a clear election loss. I have no idea where this unprecedented recklessness will end. Maybe Giuliani and friends will be charged with contempt for a string of frivolous lawsuits wasting the courts’ time. Maybe they’ll try to screw with the electoral college. Maybe it will come to a showdown on January 20. But I’m not as happy and optimistic as I was on Saturday. Trump is a real danger to the nation. Perhaps this chicanery will provide more grounds – and more motivation – for prosecuting him after he’s thrown out in January.
Thanks for sharing. Horrific. So many people entrusted with power colluding to stroke a little man’s fragile ego for a few more days (please let it be days, not weeks), thus jeopardizing real lives and livelihoods through unnecessary, critical delays in the transfer of information and laying the groundwork for the functions of government that must be up and running on time, for the good of ALL of us.
And that’s not even getting into the undermining of confidence in our democracy— which means the undermining of our democracy itself.
I turned on Fox News Channel this morning, just to see what craziness I might expect from the Right this week. While their news folks have accepted the Biden win, their talking heads and guests seem to be full steam behind Trump. They are clearly continuing with the Trump strategy of simply repeating made-up BS so that half the people believe it. Infuriating on a Monday morning.
The good news is that Biden spent all those years as Senator, and 8 years as VP. The transition period goes a long way toward helping the new person acclimate, and Biden simply doesn’t need that kind of help from the Trump so-called administration. But yeah, Republicans are petty assholes.
What about the rest of the transition team and all the incoming administrators?
It looks like, in the end, Biden will win PA by about 50,000 votes, and of course WI by about 20,000, plus AZ and GA by about 10,000 each. That figure of “90,000 spread across four states” is almost identical to Trump’s 2016 (vs. Clinton) “80,000 spread across three states” that made all the difference. Interesting.
John Kerry’s 118,000 in one state — Ohio — isn’t far behind these.
Of course, nothing compares to the 2000 election (Bush/Gore) — a few HUNDRED votes in one state (Florida). That’s the one example within the margin of error for a complex human activity Iike this. It’s literally impossible to know who won the 2000 election. Not so for the other examples: John Kerry and Hillary Clinton definitely lost the electoral college vote, while Joe Biden definitively won it.
It sounds like trump plans to hold a series of rallies and press conferences in which he displays obits of dead people who supposedly voted for Biden. Since there were likely many people who voted early but died from Covid in the interim, it’s probably not hard to find a few of those obits.
Maybe that’s why trump refused to do anything about Covid: his grand strategy was to kill off enough Biden supporters (along with his own, but hey, collateral damage) to make this claim.
“Evacuate? In our moment of triumph? I think you over-estimate their chances!”
The transition team absolutely needs current information from agencies and time and money to staff up and begin to make necessary plans for taking over. Biden knows how things work, but he doesn’t know how things are working, and he’s not the only person moving into a new job.
Even more importantly, this is one of the worst signs yet in the direction of autocracy and away from democratic norms. Trump personally denying the outcome of a free and fair election is different from the government itself doing so. Having department heads who are personally loyal to Trump rather than the country and the constitution has always been bad, and this is why.
Republicans who do not repudiate this will be complicit. And even if it does all work out in days or weeks, this will be one of the most ominous signs for how close we came to not being a democracy anymore.
I remember bumper stickers from the 1970’s. Some people’s stickers said “My country, right or wrong!” to which a batch of others responded “My country, right the wrongs!”
He needs updates on current situations from various agencies; including FBI, CIA, and whatever’s left of the State Department.
What’s unconscionable is that most Republicans are going along with Trump’s desire to overthrow the republic. No matter how bad you might think the GOP is, they just keep getting worse.
You can have ours (NE FL). We set an all-time record for May-Aug this year, and currently are enjoying (:sarcasm:) our warmest November in ages (lows are the lows you would see in August, drizzle all day long).
I suspect Trump will continue to push this narrative of a stolen election the rest of his life; it will gradually become less meaningful, but that will come in stages. The first reality check for the Trump team will be the final certification of elections. Right now a few states are still outstanding and votes are being counted. Once that’s in the books, that will be a new level of real.
Then the electoral vote in December, and then the inauguration in January.
Yeah. It’s even in congress and the White House now. If you don’t have a flag lapel pin you are not a patriot.
I mean, if you want to wear such a pin fine. But no one should be called out for not wearing one since wearing one or not tells us absolutely nothing. But god help the politician who forgets their flag pin (I bet staffers have bags of them they keep wherever they go…just in case).