Trump can't stop embarrassing himself, suggests DOJ and FBI cheated him out of election victory

 

 

Hellfire and Brimstone make a plan to steal the election.

Aldous J Pennyfarthing

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Sunday November 29, 2020 · 3:37 PM MST

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You have to feel a little sorry for Donald Trump, right? His dreams of becoming America’s first unaccountable, undemocratically installed dictator have been dashed, and now he’s just Pol Putz.

I mean, we can all relate, can’t we? To having our dreams dashed, that is. I’ll wager very few Americans ever wanted to stage a bloodless coup in order to despoil the world’s foremost exemplar of freedom and democracy. But Donny did, and he spectacularly failed, and now all he has to look forward to is someone else writing his memoirs for him. (He can still color in the pop-ups if he wants, but the actual prose will no doubt be left to someone whose brain remains conspicuously unencumbered by weevils.)

That said, someone really needs to rein in ol’ Donny Diapers before he gives the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Mayor McCheese. Because he’s fucking lost it, yo.

The latest paranoia-palooza? The DOJ and FBI might just be in on the “theft” of the 2020 presidential election. Because that makes total sense.

From Trump’s latest rant-erview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo:

TRUMP: “This is a terrible thing that’s happened. The mail-in ballots are a disaster. They sent millions and millions and millions of mail-in ballots. I’m sure you know people that got two, three, or four, because I do, where they said, ‘You know, we got four ballots.’ They got one at a country home. Dead people were seeing ballots. But even worse, dead people were applying to get a ballot. They were making application to get ballots. … And, you know, we’re not talking about 10 people, there are a lot of dead people that so-called voted in this election, but dead people were, in some cases, in many, many cases, thousands of cases, voted. But also dead people made application to vote. They were dead 10 years, 15 years, and they actually made application. This is total fraud, and how the FBI and Department of Justice — I don’t know, maybe they’re involved — but how people are allowed to get away with this stuff is unbelievable. This election was rigged. This election was a total fraud.”

Needless to say, he’s just making stuff up. That’s no surprise. But at some point during this dippy diatribe he realized, well, the FBI and DOJ don’t seem overly concerned about the integrity of the election so — BOOM! — they must be in on it, too.

Yes, Bill Barr, who’s dutifully carried Trump’s water since becoming attorney general, suddenly decided at the 11th hour to concoct a conspiracy that would hand the election to Joe Biden. And Christopher Wray, Trump’s handpicked FBI director, is part of the cabal. Because he must be, or Donny’s conspiracy theory won’t hold up to scrutiny, now will it?

Looney

Fucking

Tunes

Y’all

Of course, Trump has wandered so far away from the rest home in his half-closed robe and surplus casino slippers it’s unlikely anyone can set his mind right at this point. And he will almost certainly go to his grave insisting he won this election — before that grave is promptly drenched with the micturitions of a proud nation.

But until then we get to witness the barmy musings of our own “Mad King George,” as one White House insider put it in this delicious WaPo story:

The facts were indisputable: President Trump had lost.

But Trump refused to see it that way. Sequestered in the White House and brooding out of public view after his election defeat, rageful and at times delirious in a torrent of private conversations, Trump was, in the telling of one close adviser, like “Mad King George, muttering, ‘I won. I won. I won.’

I have no doubt he actually thinks he did win. Luckily, whatever’s ping-ponging around in Donald Trump’s Jiffy Pop head will no longer matter after January 20.

Breathe deep and exhale this poison, America. We’re cruising toward a Trump-free federal government.

How Mitch McConnell's Do Nothing Republicans Are Killing You and Your Family

 

Former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich. (photo: Steve Russell/Toronto Star)

By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog

28 November 20

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he Senate adjourned and left town without even trying to pass a COVID disaster relief bill. By the time they return on November 30, based on current trends, an additional estimated 16,000 Americans will have died from COVID-19.

We pay these elected officials to keep us safe, and they’ve failed us. To them I ask: How much death and suffering must the American people endure before you act?

Remember: House Democrats passed a comprehensive relief bill all the way back in May.

You, Mitch McConnell, have refused to lift a finger for months, and Senate Republicans have been happy to follow your lead.

Countless Americans are now paying the price for your malicious inaction.  You should have learned lessons about COVID during its first horrific wave last spring.

First, there’s no tradeoff between COVID and the economy, and no way to get the economy back until COVID is under control. As the virus surges and more shutdowns loom, the millions of jobs we’ve added since April are about to disappear again. I’ve said this since March and I’ll say it again: The only way to get our economy back to full strength is to control the virus.

Second, more shutdowns are necessary. Businesses like Tesla in Alameda County, California, and Tyson meat packing plants in Iowa remained open during previous shutdowns, and both companies suffered COVID outbreaks. No exceptions this time around.

Third, and most importantly, shutdowns are only viable if accompanied by disaster relief so Americans can survive financially. So pass disaster relief.

Re-up expanded unemployment benefits. The extra $600/week provisioned in the CARES Act expired on July 31st, and all federal relief will expire on December 31st. Expanded unemployment benefits were a financial lifeline for millions during the first and second waves, and must be instituted again to keep millions out of poverty this winter. Don’t listen to people who claim that we have to get people back to work, or keep them working. The best way to stop the spread is to pay people to stay home.

Stop evictions and foreclosures. It would be the height of cruelty to force even more people out onto the streets in the middle of winter as the virus surges. And with more job losses around the corner, we must ensure that a missed rent or mortgage payment isn’t a death sentence.

Distribute another round of Paycheck Protection Program loans to businesses, with strict oversight to ensure the funds actually go to businesses that need them, not massive, publicly-traded companies that have plenty of other options.

Shore up state and local budgets. State and local governments are facing huge budget shortfalls. Without federal aid, vital public services are on the chopping block – schools, childcare, supplemental nutrition, mental health services, low-income housing, healthcare – when the public needs them more than ever. And local governments need funds to shelter unhoused residents, especially as temperatures drop and COVID intensifies.

Protect essential workers. Tens of thousands of workers on the frontlines have contracted COVID over the past 10 months – including nearly 20,000 Amazon warehouse workers. At a minimum, they need generous hazard pay and paid sick leave.

When the last COVID relief package was passed on March 27th, there were 18,093 new cases that day. Now, there are over 100,000 new cases every day. With hospitalizations lagging behind cases, and deaths lagging behind hospitalizations, it’s clear that this is going to get much, much worse unless people shelter in place. But most Americans can’t do this without relief.

The writing is on the wall. Do your job, Mitch McConnell. Our lives depend on it. 

Wouldn't you think guns would be the last thing on his mind right about now?  Or sending the Senate on vacation?  Or refusing to allow House-passed COVID relief bills to get a vote on the Senate floor?  But he's Moscow Mitch, and he's one tough hombre with his rifle in hand.  Goin' huntin' for COVIDS, Mitch?
 

You don't want to hang out with Trump deplorables, and turns out, no one else does either

 

Hidden deplorables don't believe their lives can improve, so their only goal is to "make liberals cry." It's right there on their freakin' flags.

kos

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Wednesday November 25, 2020 · 11:21 AM MST

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Whiny-ass sore-loser Donald Trump has a legit super power—both times he’s run, he’s turned out voters that haven't shown up for any other election, and didn’t even show up in the polls. Remember, polling was perfectly fine in 2018, and Democrats swept races in 2017, 2018, and 2019. They even won governorships in blood-red Kentucky and Louisiana! 

Yet both 2016 and 2020 saw the emergence of a massive wave of white voters that polling totally missed. In fact, despite suffering some defections among suburban Republicans, Trump still managed to get 10 million more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016! So I came up with a theory: the Hidden Deplorables. 

The outline goes like this: 

The hidden deplorables aren’t Republican. They aren’t even conservative. They’re apolitical, otherwise ignoring politics, because their lives legitimately suck. They live in meth country, with dim job prospects (in fact, those two factors are highly correlated). Institutions have failed them—corporations abandoned them for cheaper labor overseas, government feels distant, and it’s certainly not improving their lives. Cities feel like walled gardens—unattainable, unaffordable, yet that’s where all the jobs are, the culture, the action. These deplorables have been left behind. So their attitude? “Fuck them all.”

In other words, these are people who have lost everything and simply want to burn everything to the ground. Trump didn’t offer hope for a better life, he promised to drag everyone down to their own sorry level. That’s why it didn’t even matter that Republicans failed to offer up a policy platform at their convention. No one needs to write “burn every norm, institution, and tradition to the ground” down in a platform. It was quite well understood. 

While the theory will get tested in the January Senate runoffs in Georgia (Trump got 360,000 new votes in the state between 2016 and 2020, will they turn out again?), fact is it is just that—a theory. It’s my best explanation as to why these Trump voters only show up when Trump is on the ballot, and why pollsters are unable to capture them. If their life sucks so much that they hate everything, why would they pick up a phone and talk to a pollster? Why would they join a polling panel? Why would they answer a polling text? And given that they’ve only shown up for Trump, it’s nearly impossible to just model them in. (Some conservative pollsters tried to do it by simply adding a “shy Trump voter” number to their polling, it ended up being just a way to “unscrew” the polls. They were even more wrong in the final outcomes as everyone else. They actually thought Trump would win.)

Wednesday morning brought fresh new evidence of my theory, in a piece by conservative pollster Daniel Cox of the American Enterprise Institute. 

Finally, research on the 2016 election by David Shor, a Democratic pollster, echoed what we found in our own pre-election 2020 survey: There was a large swing to Trump among white voters who had low levels of social trust — a group that researchers have found is also less likely to participate in telephone surveys.

In our pre-election survey on the strength of Americans’ social networks, we found that nearly one in five Americans (17 percent) reported having no one they were close with, marking a 9 percentage point increase from 2013.¹ What’s more, we found that these socially disconnected voters were far more likely to view Trump positively and support his reelection than those with more robust personal networks. Biden was heavily favored by registered voters with larger social networks (53 percent to 37 percent), but it was Trump who had the edge among voters without any close social contacts (45 percent to 39 percent).

And this was especially true among white voters even after accounting for differences in income, education level, and racial attitudes. Sixty percent of white voters without anyone in their immediate social network favored Trump, compared to less than half (46 percent) of white voters with more robust social ties.

These are incels and Q followers and militia members and just assholes in general who repel people around them. In fact, as Republican as white people are, less than half of white people with strong social networks supported Trump! That’s why urban whites are so heavily Democratic—they are surrounded by community. That’s likely why suburban whites are turning blue as well, and particularly women, going to PTA meetings and their yoga or barre classes. It could also explain why suburban men, less likely to engage in such social endeavors, remain more Republican. 

This theory really starts to explain a great deal, actually. Seniors are the age group most likely to be isolated, and they remain more heavily Republican. Rural areas are emptying out, with young residents moving to the big cities or other places with greater educational, recreational, and economic opportunities. Even the education gap that has emerged the last few cycles fits in—college is a community building experience. 

There’s no doubt this is an over-simplification of complex political trends, but there's the nut of something fascinating here. It certainly explains why the internet, and Facebook in particular, have been such a boon to conspiracy theorists and the socially marginalized, and provided rocket fuel to their growth.  These people are social failures yet human, thus desperate for social interaction and community. That makes them ripe for recruitment by QAnon, white supremacists, and all manners of deplorable groups. 

To be clear, this doesn’t apply to all Republicans. A mega-church-going Republican who votes on abortion isn’t isolated, but that individual also has no problem answering a pollster’s questions. Same with a Wall Street “don't tax me” Republican. Those people are easy to find and count. But it certainly speaks to a real percentage of Republicans, and certainly explains the hidden deplorable quite well. Isolation isn’t an absolute. You can’t turn it on and off. It’s a scale, and it’s easy to see how the further on the isolation scale someone is, the less likely they are to properly interact with society and its institutions … that is, until a Trump emerges speaking to their pain and anger. 

It certainly explains our own bewilderment that Trump got 10 million more votes than last time. Of course we don’t see these people. No one sees these people. That’s the point. 

Funny thing is, these hidden deplorables don’t even trust Trump himself. He literally begged them to turn out and vote for Republican candidates for governor in Louisiana and Kentucky last year, and they didn’t listen. It’s not Trump the institution (as president and head of the Republican Party) that motivates them. It’s Trump the destroyer of norms, traditions, and liberals that motivates them to vote. So why would they vote for some Republican governor who might actually try to govern? They’re attracted to Trump’s specific brand of destructive chaos. That’s my hope for the future—that we’ve seen the last of them for a while (until the next right-wing populist emerges, which seems quite inevitable at this point). 

Of course, past performance is no guarantee of future results, and as already noted, we’ll get to test this theory out in Georgia in January. But that just speaks to the hidden deplorables’ future voting habits. But as an explanation of who they are, and why they exist, this analysis by Cox is pretty solid supporting evidence. 

Here they are, folks - your average Trump voters.
 

Garrison Keillor: A post-Thanksgiving look into a post-pandemic future

 

Garrison Keillor. (photo: MPR)

A Modest Proposal to Head Off the Next One

By Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website

26 November 20

readersupportednews.org 

t’s a dangerous time, when families gather for Thanksgiving and pass the deadly virus from the young to the elderly and kill them off. This will be very hard on the Republican Party. Gamma and Gampy in South Dakota think the communistic Bidenists are the threat but actually it’s Oliver and Olivia home from the U. The kids see COVID as inapplicable to them, like dementia or hair loss, and return to the farm to cough on the cranberries and kill off Elmer and Gertrude. A generation, wiped out. By 2032, South Dakota’s two senators may be 30-year-old artisanal Democrats.

These are, as evangelicals keep pointing out, the Last Days. Forest fires, hurricanes, over-regulation, the closure of churches, face mask requirements, everything points toward apocalypse. But what if the world does not end? Somebody has to fix the highways, send out the Social Security checks, distribute the vaccine. Competence is required.

Back in the sixth grade some boys campaigned for a dog to be class president. We were just discovering our sense of irony and wanted to exercise it. And then in 2016, it actually happened and there he was on the inaugural platform, a big woofer who didn’t know the NSA from the NIH from the end of a broom handle, and the Clintons and Obamas and Bidens were all shaking hands with the goofus and he was counting the crowd and wondering why he wasn’t getting a bigger cut of souvenir sales.

Now, as he tools around his golf course while red states are inundated with COVID patients and his lawyers litter the courts with motions to coronate him, we need to figure out how to defend the country against the next tyrant who is likely to be more competent than he. The problem is us Democrats: half of the voting public is repelled by us and no wonder. We lack discipline and we have no sense of humor. At a time of real suffering and meanness, we listen respectfully to people who feel that their personal identity is a political issue. Height-challenged people, for example, who feel overlooked. We put them on a pedestal. This strikes most people as odd.

Face it. The American people don’t enjoy democracy. Italians do, the French mostly do, and Danes are devoted to it. They have ten political parties in the Danish parliament, plus some independent members who couldn’t find any of the ten to agree with. The idea of a two-party system is abhorrent to Danes; to them, an election is an exercise of individuality.

Americans want a Moses. Trump is more psychosis than Moses but the next one is likely to be worse unless we unite behind Kamala and cancel the 2024 Democratic primaries.

Did you see Kamala and Pence on the split screen? It was the Homecoming Queen/Valedictorian versus the Lunchroom Monitor. America prefers a charming intelligent woman to an angry dullard, hands down. Let Joe do the hard stuff that makes you unpopular, and meanwhile Kamala’s approval ratings soar into the seventies. There are people who know how to accomplish this.

In three years, Snoozin’ Cruz and Two-Cents Pence and Rotten Cotton will be raging in Iowa and New Hampshire, doing eye pokes and carrying on urination contests, and the Democratic Party will be quiet, all of our fools staying in their rooms, our socialists socializing among themselves, the police defunders zipping their lips, there will be Kamala on the ballot, no communists, just a goddess of goodness and light supported by 100% of Democrats. Discipline.

Americans tend to be loose and so we admire discipline and that’s the appeal of authoritarianism. We Democrats need to learn from this. The woofer got elected because he knew nothing and was proud of his ignorance and never once admitted it: that is discipline. You and I have apologized hundreds of times. He, never.

Life can be hard. Deer hunting season is here, which is also the mating season for deer, a nasty coincidence: you’re with a beautiful female with big brown eyes and you paw the ground and snort and wave your antlers and then you smell beer and see a fat man with a red cap pointing a stick at you and there is a burst of flame and she gallops away and he walks over and slits your throat. It’s tragic. There’s nothing I can do to prevent it. But we can defeat the next Trump by closing ranks behind Kamala now and stop the nit-picking. Shut up, fellow Democrats, and form straight lines.

There's always a fly in the ointment.  Let's keep this little guy alive until 2024.

Here's Something to Give Thanks for This Thanksgiving: Our Democracy Survived

 
Joe Biden. (photo: Alex Majoli/Magnum Photos)

By Art Cullen, Guardian UK

26 November 20

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Trump and company did everything possible to try to thwart rule of law. Americans wouldn’t stand for it

oing on 40 years I’ve been writing columns about giving thanks, and this year I mean it: thank God that America stood up for democracy again.

This year is among the worst. Pandemic is our parlance. Covid runs wild over Iowa while its government stands back and does little. The president thumbs his nose at the virus and at the rule of law, skirted impeachment thanks to feckless senators, and would steal a win through a faithless electoral college, if he could.

But he can’t.

The people spoke. They elected Joe Biden with the most votes ever, and by a convincing margin, as a rebuke to it all. It was a vote for Biden – made by millions, in hopes of good will – but it was as much an act of revulsion for what Donald Trump represents.

Biden promised to govern with fairness and decency. People endorsed a middling approach with a split Congress. They demand that government gets along somehow. Fair enough. There’s wisdom in that vote.

It was a record turnout. So many have lamented a lack of civic engagement for good reason. Our local school board elections typically muster 10% turnout. This year, however, the people were engaged. Especially in Iowa, where they came out in awful weather, young and old, to hear Julián Castro or John Delaney campaign during the run-up to the caucuses. Dr Jill Biden, first lady in waiting, talked education to a handful of folks at Better Day Café. It was something to behold. We had a ringside seat.

Trump and company tried to keep people from voting. They tried to slow down the mail. They tried to sow fear that the system was rigged. But the people came out the first day they could and stood in line for hours, if necessary, to make sure their vote counted. County election officials, no matter their politics, tried to make it as safe and smooth as possible and it was, for the most part. That, too, was something to behold.

The judicial system worked. Judges appointed by Republicans threw out Trump’s efforts to suppress or overturn the vote. A score of lawsuits filed following the election, claiming unspecified fraud, were dismissed. Chief Justice John Roberts has held the center and protected the judiciary’s independence under great trial over the past year.

None of this was destined. It could have gone the other way. The attorney general tested whether there were limits and discovered them when his field offices told him no fraud was to be found in the balloting. The military brass wanted nothing to do with any of it.

The Republican secretary of state in Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, stood up for the integrity of the system. So did the FBI and CIA directors and the head of cyber-security, who got the boot from Trump for vouching for a safe vote. So did the Republican governor of Maryland. If only Republican senators would have stood up with them to get Trump to move on. Democracy isn’t perfect. But when Trump personally asked Michigan Republican legislative leaders to rig their electoral college delegation, they refused. When it counted, people stood up. That is no small feat.

It should never have gone this far. Now we know. About a third of Americans think Biden stole the election and that Rudy Giuliani should be allowed to practice law. Many of us were suckered by Trump and wised up. Most of us voted for sanity and a little bit of respect.

Mainly, the people demonstrated that liberty means something. They knelt in the park for Black lives that are not fully free. They objected to caging families at the border. They demanded their franchise as citizens. It could not be denied.

From time to time this year, I had my doubts. Iowa voted for Trump, after all. It was too close for comfort in Wisconsin. The rants and ravings still echo in the crazy chambers of social media. Pray Biden will have a way of defusing things. Actually, he already has. Reporters asked the president-elect the other day about Trump refusing to allow an orderly transition. Biden stopped and thought, and just said that Trump is reckless. He left it at that. Lord, what a relief in restraint. I give thanks. Democracy prevails.

Let's do it together, Joe!

Trump burning down everything he can on way out

He can't have my planes.

Joan McCarter

Daily Kos Staff

Tuesday November 24, 2020 · 12:22 PM MST

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The sore loser impeached squatter in the Oval Office is never going to concede the election, but he will leave. And he's going to douse everything with kerosene and light a match on his way out. That's by doing things like putting a completely unqualified loyalist and conspiracy theory proponents on the transition team for a department as critical as Defense.

It also means further isolating the U.S. by withdrawing from critical arms control agreements. The U.S. officially withdrew from the Open Skies Treaty on Monday, a post-Soviet international agreement that allowed the participating countries—in particular the U.S. and Russia—to conduct surveillance flights over each other's countries. Not only is Trump officially withdrawing us from the treaty, he's getting rid of the U.S. Air Force planes that have been used for nearly 30 years to conduce the surveillance.

If Biden seeks to reenter the agreement, he won't have the specially equipped planes with which to do it. A Trump administration official told The Wall Street Journal that the planes are being classified as "excess defense articles," ready to ship off to other countries. "We've started liquidating the equipment," the official said. "Other countries can come purchase or just take the airframes. They are really old and cost-prohibitive for us to maintain. We don't have a use for them anymore." Congress has already appropriated over $40 million of the estimated $250 million for replacement planes, although then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper decided in July to cancel the program to buy new planes. With funds already appropriated, it's possible that purchase could go forward.

But it's unclear how simple rejoining the treaty will be if the Biden administration choses to do so. Back in May, Biden reiterated that he "supported the Open Skies Treaty as a senator, because I understand that the United States and our allies would benefit from being able to observe—on short notice—what Russia and other countries in Europe were doing with their forces." He has yet to indicate what he'll do now or how much of a priority this will be after rejoining the Paris climate accord, an extension of the New Start nuclear treaty, reconstituting the Iran nuclear deal, and dealing with Trump's withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and Iraq. Just to name a few of the international agreements Trump has scrapped.

Whether Biden can legally unilaterally rejoin is under debate. The Trump administration says that the Senate would need to approve a bid to rejoin, and with a two-thirds vote. But since the Trump administration ignored legislation that required a 120-day period of notice to and consultation with Congress to withdraw, experts say the withdrawal is illegal. Jean Galbraith of the University of Pennsylvania law school says that Biden could unilaterally rejoin. "It is possible and advisable that the Biden administration declare that it will continue to participate in Open Skies," said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association.

And he can't have my country, either.
 

Biden and Democrats try to lead while McConnell holds a hungry, sick, dying nation hostage

  

It's Nancy, Chuck and Joe with an empty seat at the table for Moscow Mitch.

Joan McCarter

Daily Kos Staff

Monday November 23, 2020 · 11:12 AM MST

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It's been 191 days since the House passed the $3 trillion HEROES Act, and 55 days since the House passed their compromise $2.2 trillion bill, both of which Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has refused to take up. And in just 37 days, the fraying remnant of the safety net created by the CARES Act back in March will expire.

With the impeached loser squatter in the Oval Office having pretty much entirely checked out from reality as he spins fantasies for his adoring followers about fraud and stolen elections and the Supreme Court riding to the rescue, President-elect Joe Biden is stepping into the breach to try to get some kind of coronavirus bill done before the end of the year to tide the nation over until he's in office two months from now. Biden had his first meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer last week to start talks on legislative priorities.

That includes, sources from The New York Times say, asking Pelosi and Schumer to strike a quick deal with Senate Republicans even if that means compromising further. Pelosi has already trimmed her HEROES bill by nearly $1 trillion. In response, McConnell actually cut what he had on offer, what he brought to the Senate floor as a show of partisan kibuki, by half a trillion. He's now at $500 billion, and presumably stuck there. As of now, Pelosi and Schumer are not backing down from their $2+ trillion demand, arguing that "despite the consensus from economists and experts that the country requires a much larger injection of aid," McConnell has been slashing his bottom line.

"There needs to be emergency assistance and aid during the lame-duck session to help families, to help small business," Jen Psaki, a Biden transition aide, said Friday before the Biden meeting with the leaders. "There's no more room for delay, and we need to move forward as quickly as possible." The transition team issued a statement after the meeting saying that the leaders "agreed that Congress needed to pass a bipartisan emergency aid package in the lame-duck session" but didn't specify the size of that package. Thus far, McConnell remains the brick wall. "We want to reach agreement on all the areas where compromise is well within reach, send hundreds of billions of dollars to urgent and uncontroversial programs, and let Washington argue over the rest later," he said the Senate floor last week, trolling the Democrats. "By playing all-or-nothing hardball with a proposal this radical, our colleagues have thus far guaranteed that American workers and families get nothing at all." Which is, of course, bullshit.

The situation is absolutely dire, with a group of bipartisan economists convened by the Aspen Institute and inducing former Treasury secretaries to publicly urge lawmakers to get something out there to families, small businesses, and state and local governments, saying the economy "cannot wait until 2021" for relief. McConnell has been adamant in opposing aid to state and local governments, and just as adamant that he will only agree to a proposal if it lets businesses off the liability hook. For example, the Tyson meatpacking plant in the news last week for the grotesque abuses it inflicted on workers, where individuals in management actually placed bets on how many workers would get sick with COVID-19. If McConnell had his way, those abuses would never have come to light since they were revealed in a lawsuit by the family of the late Isidro Fernandez, who was infected at the plant. As of now, McConnell hasn't lifted that demand.

Meanwhile, the crisis continues. "What I'm really worried about is the millions of people who are going to be without food or without a home during the winter," said Melissa S. Kearney, who directs the Aspen Institute strategy group. "That level of individual suffering, really, to me, should be everyone's priority and move them past their political differences." She clearly hasn't met Mitch McConnell.

Come on, Mitch, it's the holidays.  Give the 99% of us who are hurting a morsel or two.

Trump's final act is a horror-comedy, and no one in the world knows how to cover it

 

Is he a smug bastard because he thinks he knows something we don't, or is he just too dumb to realize this party is over.

Mark Sumner

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Saturday November 21, 2020 · 12:13 PM MST

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Right now, every journalist in America is not just walking a tightrope, but definitely swaying from side to side. When the man currently occupying the White House is openly and without question attempting to conduct a coup that would crush democracy and turn the nation into a single party dictatorship, how can that not be treated as the most serious threat in America’s history? On the other hand, when the team supposedly leading this overthrow is delivering their manifesto from the parking lot of Four Seasons Total Landscaping, how can it not be just … hilarious?

A bug-eyed Rudy Giuliani jabbing his finger into the sky as hair dye drips to his chin is objectively ridiculous. Sidney Powell claiming that Donald Trump’s downfall was plotted out in a meeting with a long-dead Venezuelan dictator is ridiculous. Jenna Ellis telling reporters that they have to report everything Trump’s team claims—as if it is fact—is ridiculous. And Giuliani stepping back to the microphone to say "There is nobody here who engages in fantasies” was probably the biggest single producer of coffee-out-the nose hilarity of the week—a week that includes both Four Seasons Total Landscaping and Giuliani’s star turn in the new Borat movie.

At this moment in time, it is impossible to distinguish between Republicans who are genuinely trying to destroy democracy, and those who just seek a sweet gig on Fox News. And sure, this also applies to most other moments in time, but this week both the threat and the silly both turned the dials up to 11, or 111, at the same time. And just how do you report on that?

Celebrate Biden’s victory, and get called a pollyanna. Point out that Trump is absolutely attempting to overthrow that victory, and be relegated to the voices of doom. Exactly how should reporters handle things, when what could be the most dangerous situation in the nation’s history is also definitely a scam for money, and also the most preposterous situation imaginable? 

When a lawyer that represents the most powerful man on the planet is seriously sitting on television saying that the vote in every swing state should be overturned and a dictatorship initiated, but she’s also saying it after a press conference in which she also announced that Trump was defeated by a cabal composed of the Clinton Foundation, George Soros, Hugo Chavez, and antifa … just how much weight does it get?

It’s easy enough to say “just report the facts,” but facts outside of context are useless, and the whole job of every journalist, whether at The Washington Post or Daily Kos, is to present those facts in a way that turns into knowledge, empowers decisions, and enables action. How do you report on the political equivalent of an invasion by Tickle Me Elmo dolls? Even if they are blood-sucking Elmos … does that help?

The fact is, the American system has multiple roadblocks in place that are intended to keep anyone from becoming a dictator, expressly because “guy in top job decides he really wants to keep the gig” was one of those concerns that really did come up when they were applying goose quill to parchment. There are reasons why people, myself included, have issued scads of pieces along the “calm down, it’s all going to be peachy” theme. On the other hand, there’s a reason why Masha’s Gessen’s sadly prescient Autocracy: Rules for Survival was most on the nose when it said “Institutions will not save you.” Again and again Trump has demonstrated that way, way, way too much of the American system existed in the forms of tradition, unwritten rules, and expectations that people would possess a moral compass that pointed at least to the right hemisphere. 

Any story that starts right now with the idea that Trump “can’t” do something because it would violate precedent, or even violate the law, should just go back to square one. Trump is a crook and a liar. He does illegal things while lying about it. Does it really matter that Trump’s crack legal team is 2-33 in court and just provided a judge evidence from the wrong state, when everyone trying to hold Trump to account is zero for infinity?  

Trump’s a dangerous monster. And an ignorant dickhead. It might seem like the second cancels out the first, but we’ve had four years to see that it does not.

Right now, Trump is engaged in an overt effort to rip apart the nation. And as The Washington Post reports, Republicans are doing what they’ve demonstrated to be their go-to move: Staying out of Trump’s way. How scary is Trump’s effort to turn the nation into one of the single party dictatorships he so admires? Exorcist scary. How laughable is it? Puffy shirt laughable. 

Expect the same struggle from just about every story created between now and Jan. 20, 2021.

And then there's Rudy, with one hand in his pants and hair dye dripping down his face.  You can't make this stuff up.

Trump overperformed the polls twice. Could this be the reason why?

 

Deplorables.

kos

Daily Kos Staff

Monday November 16, 2020 · 11:41 AM MST

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Two facts from this November’s elections have really gnawed at me: 

1) Impeached sore loser Donald Trump got 10 million more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016. Given some losses among suburban college-educated white women and other never-Trumpers, that means that over 10 million new people took a look at Trump’s last four years and thought, “Yeah, that’s the guy that’s getting me out to cast my first vote.” 

2) The polls once again undercounted Republican support, like in 2016. Yet in 2018 and 2019, the polls were fine. So what gives? 

I have a theory, and it’s the existence of a “hidden deplorable,” and it’s a wonder Joe Biden and the Democrats managed to salvage the White House given their existence. 

From the start, let’s dispense with the notion of a “shy Trump voter.” These people aren’t shy, yet they certainly exist. They’re the assholes trying to run the Biden campaign bus off the road in Texas. They’re the anti-government militias in Michigan. They’re these people: 

There’s nothing “shy” about these people or their support for Trump, yet pollsters aren’t catching them. They turn out for Trump, but they didn’t turn out for Republicans in 2017, 2018, or 2019. Remember, last year Democrats picked up governorships in the blood-red states of Louisiana and Kentucky. 

No amount of personal begging and pleading from Trump could get Republicans to the polls in those red states, nor did his extensive campaigning help his party during the 2018 Democratic wave year.

Yet with the national environment only worsened from the COVID-19 pandemic and other Trump self-inflicted wounds (like his failed trade war against China), Republicans stormed back this year, dealing Democrats painful down-ballot losses in the House, Senate, and state legislatures. Not only will those loses hamstring a Biden administration, even if we win both Senate runoffs in Georgia in January, but Republicans will have a free hand to redraw U.S. House and state legislative maps to their enduring, decades-long advantage. 

All because Trump was at the top of the ballot. 

So again, who are these people who only vote for Trump, otherwise ignore the Republican Party (despite Trump’s pleading), and don’t talk to pollsters? 

The hidden deplorables aren’t Republican. They aren’t even conservative. They’re apolitical, otherwise ignoring politics, because their lives legitimately suck. They live in meth country, with dim job prospects (in fact, those two factors are highly correlated). Institutions have failed them—corporations abandoned them for cheaper labor overseas, government seems and feels distant, and it’s certainly not improving their lives. Cities feel like walled gardens—unattainable, unaffordable, yet that’s where all the jobs are, the culture, the action. These deplorables have been left behind. So their attitude? “Fuck them all.” 

Trump shows up in 2016 and gives them hope for change, saying the quiet part out loud—that their lives suck not because of their own choices and that of those decamped corporations, but because all that sweet, sweet government money is going to “illegals” and “thugs” in those cities. He puts uppity Black and brown people and women in their place. He offers them hope that, if he can’t improve their lives, that at least he’ll hurt all those others. 

“I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said of Mr. Trump. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

Their lives suck, but Trump was supposed to be bringing everyone else down to their level. That’s why all that nonsense about “economic uncertainty” was such bullshit. None of these people ever thought Trump would bring back the factories, paying good middle-class wages. They can do the same math that the corporations have. But it would all be worth it if Trump would just hurt the people he needed to be hurt.

And then he did. He put brown kids in cages. He sent federal troops against the Black Lives Matter “mobs.” He nominated judges hostile to a woman’s right to have agency over her body.

And above else? He destroyed. He tore shit down. Norms, traditions, entire agencies. 

So 2020 rolled around, and Trump no longer offered hope of economic revival in these economically devastated meth counties. Instead, he was the personification of their rage made real, in the Oval Office itself. 

We saw this in Georgia, where Sen. Kelly Loeffler and Rep. Doug Collins were locked in a battle to make it to the January runoff in the state’s special election. Loeffler was originally chosen to try and appeal to the very white moderate college-educated suburban women that were abandoning the GOP and endangering the party’s electoral chances. Collins is a right-wing ideologue, a staunch Trump ally, and the clear favorite of the Freedom Caucus wing of the GOP. So how did Loeffler fend him off? By moving to Collins’ right, like this ad that claimed she was “More conservative than Attila the Hun” and had a ”100 per cent Trump voting record.”
 

Loeffler literally said she was worse than a king best known for raping, pillaging, plundering, and extorting the Roman Empire into near insolvency. There are no Hun ruins you can visit today because they built no civilization, created no lasting art or culture. 

So truly, Loeffler couldn’t have picked a better representative of the modern Trumpian Republican Party—destructive, barbaric, and corrupt. 

Now given their hatred for institutions like government and the media, is it any wonder that these hidden deplorables wouldn’t answer pollsters’ questions? Any attempt to survey them would likely be met with a middle finger and a “fuck you.” 

So the last four years have shown us that they only turn out when Donald Trump is in the battle. We’ll have an early test of my Hidden Deplorables theory in January, when the two Senate seats in Georgia are decided. Given the essentially tied result in the presidential race (we won by a sliver), that special election will come down to the party that suffers the last amount of drop-off from their November turnout. 

Trump got a remarkable 369,000 more votes in the Peach State this year compared to 2016, when he won the state by 5%. That should’ve been enough to seal the deal again. Yet Stacey Abrams, her volunteers, and an army of allied organizations did the near-impossible: Biden got 594,000 more votes than Hillary Clinton did in 2016. That is beyond mind-blowing!

If I’m right, Republican turnout among those new Trump voters could very well be catastrophic for the GOP. Now to be clear, no one should expect this. We assume they get every single one of their voters out. We need to out-hustle them, and they’ll be working their assess off to turn those people out. So to be 100% clear, this isn’t a prediction, nor is it even a hope. 

If Republicans can get these hidden deplorables out, then the political picture the next few cycles will be rough—more closely fought elections, control of Congress and the White House balancing on a razor’s edge. Making progress will be a tough slog. 

On the other hand, if the hidden deplorables only come out when Trump is on the ballot, then that gives us some breathing room in the next few cycles ahead. That is, until a Trump ends up back on the presidential ballot in 2024. 

Now this is an evolving theory, and it may be bolstered or undermined as additional data and information emerges (not to mention the Georgia runoff results will reveal a great deal). But regardless, Trump is likely the single greatest campaigner in modern presidential history. Hillary Clinton didn’t lose because she was a terrible candidate, she lost because she faced a political prodigy, someone whose ability to tickle the darkest recesses of the white American’s lizard brain is unparalleled, in a country that doesn't elect its presidents by popular vote, but by a system that overrepresents white rural states. Joe Biden cobbled together enough of a coalition to defeat Trump, but the damage was deep down-ballot precisely because so many of the House, Senate, and state legislative battles were fought in disproportionately white and rural states and districts—the places most excited by Trump’s candidacy. 

So take a man who has criminally mismanaged the country, enriching himself at the expense of its people and his donors, killed a quarter million Americans due to negligence, leading to the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression, and didn’t even bother to have a campaign platform because neither he nor his party cares about issues anymore … and he gets 10 million more votes than the last time? That number is a testament to his power as a vote-getter. Let’s hope no other Republicans reverse engineers that formula anytime soon. And let’s pray that these hidden deplorables, seeing their vote cast for a loser (and a loser who claims the vote was stolen!) decide to return to whatever dark crevices they emerged from. 

It's not like the deplorables still believe him, but as long as he's locking them brown babies in cages and keeping them uppity women from getting any more uppity, he's their guy.