monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Every court case has gotten shot down.

And Biden already reached 306.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris named Time Person of the Year

By Kerry Flynn, CNN Business
Updated 11:17 PM ET, Thu December 10, 2020

New York (CNN Business)---Time magazine has named Joe Biden and Kamala Harris 2020's Person of the Year.

The two made history on November 7 when they beat Donald Trump in a bitter election that put him in a small club of presidents who served only one term. Harris on that day became the country's first female, first Black and first South Asian vice president-elect.

"For changing the American story, for showing that the forces of empathy are greater than the furies of division, for sharing a vision of healing in a grieving world, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are TIME's 2020 Person of the Year," wrote Time editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/10/media/joe-biden-kamala-harris-time-person-of-the-year/index.html

To tell a joke to a crowd is to learn a little something about the people who laugh

For our purposes, the “joke” is President Trump’s ongoing fight to overturn the election results and hold on to power against the wishes of most Americans, including those in enough states to equal far more than the 270 electoral votes required to win the White House.

“#OVERTURN,” he said on Twitter this week, adding in a separate post that “If somebody cheated in the Election, which the Democrats did, why wouldn’t the Election be immediately overturned? How can a Country be run like this?”

Unfortunately for Trump, and fortunately for the country, he has not been able to bend reality to his desires. Key election officials and federal judges have refused his call to throw out votes, create chaos and clear a path for the autogolpe he hopes to accomplish. The military has also made clear where it stands. “We do not take an oath to a king or a queen, a tyrant or a dictator. We do not take an oath to an individual,” Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a speech not long after the election.

But there are others who — out of partisanship, opportunism or a simple taste for mayhem — have chosen to support the president’s attack on American democracy. They refuse to acknowledge the president’s defeat, back lawsuits to throw out the results, and spread lies about voter fraud and election malfeasance to Republican voters. They are laughing at Trump’s joke, not realizing (or not caring) that their laughter is infectious.

What was a legal effort by the Trump campaign, for instance, is now one by the state of Texas, which has petitioned the Supreme Court to scrap election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, depriving Biden of his victory. Filed by Ken Paxton, Texas’s attorney general, the suit says it would be a violation of due process to accept the outcome in those states, on account of “election irregularities” and “interstate differences in the treatment of voters” that disadvantage Republican voters in areas with stricter voting rules.

This lawsuit rests on the novel argument that the Constitution gives exclusive and unquestioned authority to state legislatures to appoint presidential electors as they see fit and renders any action to expand voting without direct legislative consent unconstitutional. The Supreme Court already rejected that argument once this week when it turned away a similar lawsuit by the Trump campaign to overturn the results in Pennsylvania.

Regardless, on Wednesday, 17 Republican attorneys general filed a brief in support of Texas, urging the court, in essence, to cancel the election and hand power back to Trump. “Encroachments on the authority of state Legislatures by other state actors violate the separation of powers and threaten individual liberty,” reads the brief, which also claims that “States have a strong interest in ensuring that the votes of their own citizens are not diluted by the unconstitutional administration of elections in other States.” The next day, more than 100 Republican members of Congress filed a brief in support of this lawsuit, in effect declaring allegiance to Trump over the Constitution and urging the court to end self-government in the name of “the Framers.”

There’s a paradox here. This sloppy, harebrained lawsuit has no serious chance of success. Granting Texas (and, by extension Trump, who joined the lawsuit) its relief would plunge the country into abject chaos, with violence sure to follow. That this quest is quixotic is, in all likelihood, one reason it has so much support. It is only with the knowledge of certain defeat that Republican officeholders feel comfortable plowing forward with an effort that would tear the United States apart if it succeeded. They can play politics with constitutional government (Paxton, for instance, hopes to succeed Greg Abbott as governor of Texas) knowing that the Supreme Court isn’t going to risk it all for Donald Trump.

Then again, it was only two weeks before Election Day that four of the court’s conservatives announced their potential willingness to throw out votes on the basis of this theory of state legislative supremacy over electoral votes. It is very easy to imagine a world in which the election was a little closer, where the outcome came down to one state instead of three or four, and the court’s conservatives could use the conflict over a narrow margin to hand the president a second term.

With no evidence that Republicans have really thought about the implications of a victory in the courts, I think we can say that these briefs and lawsuits are part of a performance, where the game is not to break kayfabe (the conceit, in professional wrestling, that what is fake is real). Still, we’ve learned something from this game, in the same way we learn something about an audience when it laughs.

We have learned that the Republican Party, or much of it, has abandoned whatever commitment to electoral democracy it had to begin with. That it views defeat on its face as illegitimate, a product of fraud concocted by opponents who don’t deserve to rule. That it is fully the party of minority rule, committed to the idea that a vote doesn’t count if it isn’t for its candidates, and that if democracy won’t serve its partisan and ideological interests, then so much for democracy.

None of this is new — there is a whole tradition of reactionary, counter-majoritarian thought in American politics to which the conservative movement is heir — but it is the first time since the 1850s that these ideas have nearly captured an entire political party. And while the future is unwritten, the events of the past month make me worry that we’re following a script the climax of which requires a disaster.

'Seditious abuse of judicial process': States fire back at Texas' Supreme Court election challenge

Dec. 10, 2020, 6:58 AM CST / Updated Dec. 10, 2020, 3:53 PM CST
By Rebecca Shabad, Dareh Gregorian and Josh Lederman

WASHINGTON — More than two dozen states filed motions with the Supreme Court on Thursday opposing Texas' bid to invalidate President-elect Joe Biden's wins in four battleground states, a long-shot legal move that Pennsylvania blasted as a "seditious abuse of the judicial process."

"Overturning Pennsylvania’s election results is contrary to any metric of fairness and would do nothing less than deny the fundamental right to vote to millions of Pennsylvania’s citizens," the state's Democratic attorney general, Josh Shapiro, wrote in response to Texas GOP Attorney General Ken Paxton's bid to toss out the presidential election results in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia and Michigan.

Shapiro's filing said, "Nothing in the text, history, or structure of the Constitution supports Texas’s view that it can dictate the manner in which four other states run their elections.

"Nor is that view grounded in any precedent from this court. Texas does not seek to have the court interpret the Constitution, so much as disregard it," the filing continued, urging the court to "send a clear and unmistakable signal that such abuse must never be replicated.”

The Democratic attorney general of Michigan, Dana Nessel, noted in her filing that the claims in Texas' suit have already "been rejected in the federal and state courts in Michigan" and said the Supreme Court should follow suit or else find itself "the arbiter of all future national elections."

Wisconsin pointed to Texas' argument that the Supreme Court's "intervention is necessary to ensure faith in the election."

"But it is hard to imagine what could possibly undermine faith in democracy more than this court permitting one state to enlist the court in its attempt to overturn the election results in other states," said the state's Democratic attorney general, Josh Kaul.

The response from Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, a Republican, called Texas' action an "attack on Georgia’s sovereignty" that should be dismissed outright.

A coalition of 23 Democratic states and territories also submitted a brief opposing Texas' bid, as did the Republican attorney general of Ohio, Dave Yost, who argued that what Texas was seeking "would undermine a foundational premise of our federalist system: the idea that the States are sovereigns, free to govern themselves."

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-meet-state-attorneys-general-after-joining-supreme-court-election-n1250678

oristarA wrote:

‘There’s no place for them to go’: ICU beds near capacity across US

Quote:

3 Studies That Show Lockdowns Are Ineffective at Slowing COVID-19

Quote:

1. The Lancet, July

A study published on July 21 in The Lancet, a weekly peer-reviewed general medical journal founded in 1823, indicated that government lockdowns were ineffective.
2. Frontiers in Public Health, November

Similarly, a study published by Frontiers in Public Health several months after The Lancet paper found neither lockdowns nor lockdown stringency were correlated with lower death rates
3. Tel Aviv University Study, October

Research from Tel Aviv University published in October on the website medRxiv said that strict lockdowns may not save lives.

The bigger the lie the more it is repeated and eventually believed. Keep in mind 99.7% survive.
https://fee.org/articles/3-stuies-that-show-lockdowns-are-ineffective-at-slowing-covid-19/

The ‘Trump Won’ Farce Isn’t Funny Anymore

Nobody’s trying to ‘overturn’ the election. We’re CORRECTING fraudulent results.

The memo came down from the prince of darkness that everyone in media, Big Tech, and the Democratic Party are supposed to frame challenges to election results as attempts to “overturn” the election. This is ludicrous and disingenuous, especially when we consider the likelihood that this election was plagued by rampant voter fraud on a massive scale.

There’s a reason they’re using that word. “Overturned” is, in its very nature, a violent and often unwanted action. A car can get “overturned” in an accident. But it’s also an important word because it insinuates the election results are already determined and the perceived winner, former Vice President Joe Biden, has his name already etched onto a plaque in the Oval Office.

First and foremost, this is gaslighting. They know that tens of millions of Americans do not believe the election was fair or that the results are finalized, but they want us to believe that we’re the crazy ones for not denouncing thousands of sworn affidavits. They want us to believe our eyes are lying to us when we see clear voter fraud in videos that have been shown as evidence before state legislature hearings. Most importantly, they want us to believe that it’s a widely accepted fact that Joe Biden won the election fair and square and if we don’t, we’re delusional. It’s gaslighting in its purest form.
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They’re also using a logical fallacy called “begging the question.” They’re taking the conclusion of their argument, that Joe Biden won the election, and using it as evidence to try to prove their point. It’s sort of like circular reasoning, but with a slight detour around the mountains of evidence that point to their conclusion and premise both being wrong.

In the latest episode of the NOQ Report, JD examines these topics and explains why we need to change the narrative framing from “overturn” to “correcting.” But he wasn’t all cheery about everything that’s happening. In fact, he’s not confident that the Texas lawsuit will yield the result people are expecting. It may delay the selection of electors on December 14, but it will not in and of itself sway the selection otherwise. That delay, he notes, is still extremely important and a huge win for the Trump team if it happens because it will buy time for other lawsuits that have direct evidence of voter fraud to work their way into the Supreme Court.


He noted there’s one fatal flaw in the lawsuit, the fact that they are suing only states that didn’t go for President Trump. What they’re accusing the Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Georgia of doing are the things that were also done in other states. The difference is that the results in the four defendant states were close and went to Biden.

Do not let the left dictate the narrative. They want us to use terms like “overturn” because it insinuates sinister intent. But our true goal is for the righteous and lawful results of the election to come to light, and that would be a Trump landslide.

biden clealy beat trump in the swing states