The Trump Presidency

Trump's latest tirade sounded tired. He knew he was spouting bullshit, but of course every time he says anything that's what he does.

He wants Americans to believe that the Biden campaign and the liberal media engineered a fake polling system so his supporters wouldn't bother voting, which kind of skips past what his supporters would do if they saw the polls, which would be go and vote for him to bolster his chances. After all, most of his supporters don't have much faith in what the liberals say about polls.

But, yeah, of course the liberals wanted him to lose, and they wanted the Republicans to hold the Senate, and win more seats in the House. Of course.
That's why it's happening before our eyes.

 

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Adding to this, there does seem to be a lack of transparency - poll watchers from both parties should be allowed to oversee the counting of ballots. (And that’s not happening, apparently) That makes me question the integrity of our system. Counting mail in ballots isn’t unfair or unethical, but pausing vote counting ON Election night, and finding piles of ballots days after Election Day seems odd.

Trump or Biden asking for a recount of mail in ballots is well within their rights, so maybe that needs to happen with observers from both parties.

 

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I don't think anyone is "finding" piles of ballots are they? They just haven't all been counted yet and mail-in ballots tend to go for Biden.

I think an electronic system that has properly been set up with security and verification in mind would be best but it is what it is.

Trump told his people to vote in person which means most mail-in will be for Biden which means that he can cast bogus aspersions on mail-in ballots and it will only help him. There's no real history of big voting fraud issues so he is just making all this up.

If he won by a landslide he wouldn't have any problem with voter fraud.

I think all the ballots that weren't delivered by the USPS in time is a bigger problem and that's pretty much due to the slow down ordered by Trump.

 

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Yea, overall I think there haven’t been any issues but there are some counties that seem to lack transparency.

 

In other words....
No, i don't indulge the appropriate words, even under extreme provocation.

 

Because they're refusing to obey safety protocols, being disruptive, harassing and menacing the election officials. They were permitted legal access; they were not given license to behave like thugs.

 

There are some counties that lack the material resources to comply with every armchair critic's demand. Those people are under the closest scrutiny, the most responsibility and worst pressure of their lives, from all directions, and they're trying to do a long, difficult, meticulous job under the most unusual and onerous conditions that have ever existed in the history of elections.
In the circs, I'm amazed at the patience and resolution of the spokesmen I've seen.
If there are heroes in this sad story, it's the counters.

Because of all the smoke Trump has blown about the validity of the process - he started this campaign against mail-in ballots back in the spring! - plus all the previous gerrymandering, obstacles to registration, voter suppression, internet bullying, misdirection and disinformation that was already in place, a great many Democratic votes have already been disregarded (some Republican ones, too, but wtf - he doesn't mind infecting his supporters with a deadly virus; why should he care about disenfranchising a few, as long as his numbers look good in the end?) He's trying to erase the rest. Read "his" first book. He laid out his central strategy in The Art of the Deal

 

Trump will lose soon

 

Of course, there is a lot of nonsense around in the net. Those who are unable to distinguish nonsense from serious information will end with disinformation or complete nonsense. Such is life. Some part of the information I think is reliable may be manipulated too, but usually I use quite safe techniques. It is not, BTW, to classify some sources as reliable and then believe them. It is much more about identification of sources which provide information and the bias of that source. As an example, it is possible to extract information even from sources which are known as disinformation sources, like the SOHR which is known as a disinformation source of the (plausibly British) intelligence against Syria. Say, their information about the front line was quite accurate, and even their numbers of "civilian victims" I have regularly used to compute an approximate number of the real number of civilian victims (< 2*women + children) and the jihadist fighters (all "civilian" victims - real civilian victims as computed above). So, they lie a lot, and in this particular case they name all the jihadists killed "civilian victims", but beyond this particular lie the numbers made sense. (It was even possible to see that when the "coalition" forces attacked then the part of civilian victims was higher.)

 

Maybe it's the alcohol and marijuana but you lost me half way through the paragraph.

 

On Thursday, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon said Trump should put Dr. Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray’s 'heads on pikes’ during a live taping of his podcast. After Bannon posted the clip on Twitter, the site permanently suspended his show’s account.

Well done, Twitter. Can we expect blowback from Republicans who agree with Bannon?

 

Not any brand names. They're keeping their heads down, scribbling drafts of "never heard of him" speeches, while mentally rehearsing the words to "for he's a jolly good emperor ", just in case.

 

Mitch McConnell's silence is deafening. After Trump's speech last night, Mitch appears complicit in Trump turning the US into a fascist state.

 

He has been aiding and abetting all along. And now he's exposed : will have to hold onto his seat without trump's protection.

 

"I think what the President needs to do is, frankly, put his big boy pants on. He needs to acknowledge the fact that he has lost. And he needs to congratulate the winner" Jim Kenney - Mayor of Philadelphia

 

Excellent! The more people chide him, the more publicly he'll melt down. Supporters need to see that.

 

Actually, they weren't. The difference is that the Trump campaign complained that social distancing imposed an unfair barrier of ten feet instead of six.

Several months ago, I wondered↗ about an aspect of your posts, and we ought to reconsider it, here:

• But I do have a question: Part of what sets people off is when others around them start behaving like an internet axiom. I've seen this before, and I never know quite what to think of it. But why do people strike middling yet consequential postures from pretenses of ignorance? It's not like weird rhetorical habits are limited to one range of the politic, or something, but there is a form that reads like someone has suddenly gone test-market, and it does, actually, often follow general trends.​

There was a moment in court, yesterday, during an emergency hearing, when a judge asked a Trump campaign lawyer if observers were in the room; the lawyer replied that there was "a non-zero number" of observers in the room. The judge demanded to know, explicitly, "Are people repping Donald Trump for president in that room?" When the lawyer said yes, the judge asked, "Then what's the problem?" After a brief recess, they argued over the number of observers and distances.

If I contain myself solely to msnbc during this period, it's actually kind of nerve-wracking; it was weird that FOX News and my local Sinclair station were the ones calling Arizona early, especially when the parent network of the local is ABC, who has not yet called Arizona for Biden. Watching msnbc has not brought the kind of confidence I wish I could have assumed when FOX called Arizona and Nevada was going Biden's way. Still, there's this: The inaccuracies of how I perceive what is happening are not as consequential as most inaccurately imagine. And since I know how to read news—more an everyday skill than a top-shelf specialty—what has me pacing has mostly been my own nagging doubts. Like AP calling Arizona: I get it, they have people in place who hear the chatter and murmur and buzz, except this is the lesson we were supposed to learn last time. Honestly, the bit about one of Trump's lawsuits reading an like a child wrote it both sounded about right and worried me for the talking heads' amusement because all it takes is one conservative-leaning judge to decide it's just important enough to go forward despite the merits or lack thereof because it would be unfair if he didn't in the middle of this most consequential and fraught election. But then we heard Giuliani was in on writing it, and that's when we felt better about laughing about the childish lawsuit.

I don't know where you're getting your news, but there really is a routine some advocates play, in which an allegedly well-educated, well-informed person pretends confusion, and the middling utterance they deliver is a shiny, polished right-wing talking point: "Why are observers being banned or kept far away from those counting the mail in ballots in some parts of PA and Detroit?" you asked, today. And, to reiterate from June:

• It's true, the idea of a "not a Trump supporter" who just happens to be the perfect Trump consumer isn't new, but it really is a head scratcher .... And, sure, you don't really need to prove anything↗ to anyone, but you really did just hit your marks for some sort of performance.​

And you really do continue to hit your marks. Checking around, I can see FOX News was pushing the observer-access lie, which Trump raised sometime Tuesday, as late as last night, even after Trump campaign lawyers admitted otherwise. And just because I can observe the coincidence: Your post came three minutes after a reporter signed out↱ of his livetweet from the hearing. To be clear: There was a court hearing, yesterday, in which a Trump campaign attorney uncomfortably acknowledged their observers were present, and, His Honor apparently further annoyed by a question of numbers, ordered more observers than they had asked for. Within minutes of that hearing adjourning, you turn up to ask the talking-point question—("Why are observers being banned or kept far away from those counting the mail in ballots in some parts of PA and Detroit?")—that had just been rendered obsolete.

That was unsurprising. Except, okay, out of all the world, sure, it's unsurprising that someone would encounter that coincidence of events, and yet here, in this small community, we don't need to look out at all the world to find it. I don't know, if I say, convenient accident of circumstance, is that tailoring of words a matter politically correct or bureaucratically suitable priorities?

And, okay, maybe that's not fair, but still, mere minutes later we're to circle 'round right back to square one.
____________________

Notes:

@alanfeuer. "Hearing adjourned. Out." Twitter. 5 November 2020. Twitter.com. 6 November 2020. https://bit.ly/3p4bnrp

 

I didn’t vote for Trump and I’m allowed to post a question. Your need to assign a nefarious motive to my asking a question is odd.

I’ve been discussing this with friends and they shared much of what you have here and I’ve also found information countering what I initially heard. I’ll watch Fox News at times - as well as other networks. I think it’s good to listen to everyone’s point of view, not just those who agree with mine.

 

One aspect to bear in mind is that the principle of observers in the room is one thing, but how many and how far away from the people doing the counting is important. We all know how hard it is to do a job requiring concentration if you have someone looking over your shoulder for errors all the time. That can easily shade into intimidation.

At the very least it will slow the count, because the people being scrutinised will feel they have to be even more careful not to give any reason, justified or not, for the hostile observer to object.

 

It’s interesting you suggest that because there have been clips showing some of the monitors kind of lurking about and I can see where it would feel unsettling by those handling the ballots. If they stood any closer, they’d be breathing on them! Lol
That said, if Biden or Trump were to ask for a recount in certain states, it’s within their rights to do so. But, Trump seems to be taking that to an entirely different level.

It’s been an eye opening look at the election process, for sure.