I now have a better understanding of the term “criminally insane”.
Sing this song to “Lose it”.
Just to mention one quote – among so may memorable ones – that I made earlier from the transcript:
The other thing, dead people. So dead people voted and I think the number is close to 5,000 people. And they went to obituaries.
Here I’m imagining 5,000 zombies from Night of the Living Dead marching ominously toward the polling stations. And, having voted, they return to their obituaries, in the same slow, staggering march. I’m not sure exactly what “they went to obituaries” means, but I presume it means that the zombies staggered back to the necropolis, and re-interred themselves.
I would certainly consider that grounds for overturning the vote in Georgia. Raffensperger did mention that their scrutiny did reveal 2 (not 5,000) votes that appeared to be of deceased registered voters, but he may have got his numbers wrong. Maybe it wasn’t 2, maybe it was 20,000! Who can know? The only solution is to give the election to Trump and be done with it.
I hope they dont. We cant go down that road.
Now, sure, cracking a little smile as various States prosecute trump- yeah, sure ya betcha.
This song, dammit.
I interpret this as follows:
“they” = after-the-fact auditors, election watchers, validation people
“went to” = searched through and matched voting records against
i.e. the way he knows dead people voted is that technical officials in his campaign were comparing voter rolls to printed obituaries in newspapers and finding death notices for people who later cast a ballot.
Which is, needless to say, delusional fiction barfed out of the paranoid stew that is his brain. Not least because “the obituaries” is being invoked because he’s a colossally ignorant man whose already-tenuous understanding of the world was formed back in the 60s, and he has no awareness of the fact that the obituary publication rate has fallen off a cliff in the last twenty years. So even if this kind of audit were being performed (which it was not), there’s insufficient source data to draw the conclusion he claims was drawn.
Yeah*, never* link to WaPo.
This makes me wonder what other interesting recordings of Trump phone calls might be out there. I hope anyone and everyone else he has asked this kind of thing from also kept the receipts. I assume anyone who is going to be on the phone with Trump between now and Jan 20th will be recording for their own safety.
Why did I read that? That was seriously Caine Mutiny level ranting. How can anybody think he is competent?
Trump was impeached. The Republicans made it clear that even if he shot someone on 5th Avenue they’d still acquit him. So the Democrats can impeach all they want and it doesn’t matter what evidence there is there will be no conviction with the Senate.
So… keep tilting at windmills or try to get other business done?
It’s not quite the lay-down-and-do-nothing you claim it is, but at this point Pelosi is better off lobbying for covid checks than another impeachment, because she MIGHT get the checks.
There is still time for him to try that. Even if the actual, professional military refuses to kowtow to the Toddler-in-Chief a posse of Proud Boys or other Trumpists get sufficiently organized to try it that could have repercussions down the line.
Are you SURE about that? Because Trump savaged Kemp and I’m not at all sure Kemp is a loyal fan anymore.
On the other hand, if Trump keeps handing out pardons like they’re popcorn then the States may be the legal avenue to pursue these slimeballs.
The reason not prosecuting Nixon worked is because he resigned in disgrace, acting as if he’d been impeached and convicted. Thus it could be seen that he was indeed punished in some way. But Trump hasn’t been.
If the States do their number on him (and I’m hoping Georgia can from this), maybe Biden can not bother prosecuting. But if it looks like Trump skates free, he’d better do what he can.
And if Trump does pardon himself, his administration should challenge that in Court, about whether the president really has that power. Not contesting it is essentially granting said power to the president. And there genuinely are quite a few legal arguments that such is not possible.
*Soooooooo…*since he was impeached over Ukraine, and the Senate Republicans said they didn’t care, the House should just give a pass to any other crimes Trump commits?
I think that would be a travesty. First of all, I believe good people should try to do the right thing, even if they know it probably won’t succeed. Second, if one party is going to draw a distinction between it and the other party on stuff like this - and the Dems damn well should - if they want to say that they stand for what is right and good, they’ve got to be seen doing it.
And as for your false choice between this tilt at windmills and getting other business done, this would take a fucking afternoon. Not like they don’t have a single afternoon to spare.
If they wanted to wait until after the Georgia vote (there’s an argument for that), and after whatever brouhaha the Republicans do with the counting of the Electoral College votes on Wednesday morning, they could do this Wednesday afternoon. Then back to regular business Thursday morning.
As for Covid relief, the only reason Mitch let anything happen with that last month was that he was worried that doing nothing might cost him the Georgia seats. If the Dems win both seats, Pelosi just has to convince Joe Manchin. If they don’t, then she’s negotiating with a brick wall, just like she was through 2019.
Tom Hanks. Yes. Love it. 
Wow. So late, so pointless, so stupid.
There is “do the right thing” and then there is “throw good money after bad”. So to speak.
I, too, would prefer actual criminal trials and the miscreants going to jail, but I’m old enough to have acquired some cynicism. I am interested in what can actually be done.
It’s not that the Senate Republicans didn’t care, they actively threw in with Trump. There is a rotten group that are not going to change.
I think that in the real world there may be other avenues to pursue because just repeated (and useless) impeachment.
You are, of course, free to disagree.
That’s utter nonsense.
I’m not defending the past actions of Secretary of State Raffensperger or Governor Kemp. In the specific context of the topic of this thread, and in response to a specific post, I’m saying they have stood up for democracy and the rule of law. Of course, that’s what they should be doing. But refusing to even acknowledge that they are doing it is dishonest.
I’m not holding either of them up as paragons of virtue. But people keep asking, including in this thread, when Republicans will finally stand up to Donald Trump. It’s horrific how many of them still aren’t. It’s horrific how many of them are actively supporting his delusional efforts to overturn a free and fair election. But let’s not pretend that no Republicans are standing up to him.
We’re witnessing the death throes of a megalomaniacal narcissist. This man wants to be the first dictator of the United States. He has no respect for our democracy, no moral compass, and absolutely no sense of right and wrong. After subverting and overthrowing our democratic process, his next step would be to engineer unlimited terms, steal every election, and have the job for life.
It does, but what does it say about the state of things that Trump feels so bold as to phone up elections officials and threaten them the way he did?
All along, the problem has been that Trump has never faced any serious consequences from his supporters. You could argue that he lost the election, which is true, but he didn’t lose his base of support, which encourages him and his ilk even more.
I agree that some have, but that is a really, really low bar we’re setting, gdave. I think that this is our source of frustration: there shouldn’t be a participation trophy for standing up for democratic norms.