[kenberg]

Skipping the mask for the moment, I have a thought or two on the elction steal.

An example from last night that I thought was a m mistake. or at least not a point we want to dwell on.
If I watch news on television it is PBS. Last night they mentioned that Trump is focusing on minority neighborhoods in his attempts to get ballots thrown out and that this is discriminatory. I don't doubt that this is true but I think it tales away from the main point. What Trump is doing is wrong, whether he is trying to get my vote thrown oout or a minority vote thrown out.
Simple is best.
Civil rights people have a point, no doubt lawyers will have a point, many many points that they wish to make, but KISS: It's wrong.

I have previously advocated not writing people off. But I also said that there were exceptions and this is one.
If a person cannot see that calling in legislative leaders from Michigan to pressure them into replacing electors chosen by voters with electors chosen by the state legislature then I write him off. Fortunately, or so I believe, such people are the exception. There is more than a little hyped up energy out there right now, but this can be calmed, at least somewhat, by serious Republican leaders such as Shirkey and Chatfield saying "No, we are not going to do that". Tis does not require that they trust me or even listen to me. It's people that they probably voted for saying "No, we are not going to do that". Of course we need more. But this is a crisis and history will judge leaders by what they do in a crisis.


For the rest of us, I think the main thing is to keep things simple, and to be clear that what has to be done is to not only stop this but to stop it in such a way and with such broad agreement that no one, no R, no D, no anyone will attempt it again. The optimistic view is that we come to broad agreement that this is wrong. Wrong for Trump, since Trump is now doing it, but further it is wrong forever and for anyone. I hope we manage it.

[kenberg]

As for masks, perhaps this: "Ok, I understand you have a God given right to go out without a mask. You also have a God given right to squat down and take a ---- in public. Society is interfering with these God given rights. So pull up your pants and put on your mask."

[Winstonm]

kenberg, on 2020-November-21, 12:43, said:

Skipping the mask for the moment, I have a thought or two on the elction steal.

An example from last night that I thought was a m mistake. or at least not a point we want to dwell on.
If I watch news on television it is PBS. Last night they mentioned that Trump is focusing on minority neighborhoods in his attempts to get ballots thrown out and that this is discriminatory. I don't doubt that this is true but I think it tales away from the main point. What Trump is doing is wrong, whether he is trying to get my vote thrown oout or a minority vote thrown out.
Simple is best.
Civil rights people have a point, no doubt lawyers will have a point, many many points that they wish to make, but KISS: It's wrong.

I have previously advocated not writing people off. But I also said that there were exceptions and this is one.
If a person cannot see that calling in legislative leaders from Michigan to pressure them into replacing electors chosen by voters with electors chosen by the state legislature then I write him off. Fortunately, or so I believe, such people are the exception. There is more than a little hyped up energy out there right now, but this can be calmed, at least somewhat, by serious Republican leaders such as Shirkey and Chatfield saying "No, we are not going to do that". Tis does not require that they trust me or even listen to me. It's people that they probably voted for saying "No, we are not going to do that". Of course we need more. But this is a crisis and history will judge leaders by what they do in a crisis.

For the rest of us, I think the main thing is to keep things simple, and to be clear that what has to be done is to not only stop this but to stop it in such a way and with such broad agreement that no one, no R, no D, no anyone will attempt it again. The optimistic view is that we come to broad agreement that this is wrong. Wrong for Trump, since Trump is now doing it, but further it is wrong forever and for anyone. I hope we manage it.

I've long said - in fact, said so in this WC - that Trump's "base" is really only around 25% of the population; however, the results of the election have me questioning that idea. 74 million votes for Trump - after seeing him in action for nearly 4 years - makes me question the argument about the numbers of "reasonable" Republicans there truly are. I'm beginning to think I underestimated the "base" - that white privilege, which is disguised racism, isn't the common denominator across Trump's base, and that common denominator covers nearly all 74 million.

[y66]

Quote

One spent the week carefully trying to build a government and preparing to take on a pandemic.

The other was at a mostly empty White House, using his office to try to subvert the results of an American election in a dangerous breach of democracy.

Week offers snapshot of how Trump, Biden approach presidency by Jill Colvin, Steve Peoples and Jonathan Lemire at AP.

[y66]

Yuval Noah Harari said:

Conspiracy theories come in all shapes and sizes, but perhaps the most common form is the global cabal theory. A recent survey of 26,000 people in 25 countries asked respondents whether they believe there is “a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together.”

Thirty-seven percent of Americans replied that this is “definitely or probably true.” So did 45 percent of Italians, 55 percent of Spaniards and 78 percent of Nigerians.

Quote

Global cabal theories are able to attract large followings in part because they offer a single, straightforward explanation to countless complicated processes. Our lives are repeatedly rocked by wars, revolutions, crises and pandemics. But if I believe some kind of global cabal theory, I enjoy the comforting feeling that I do understand everything.

The war in Syria? I don’t need to study Middle Eastern history to comprehend what’s happening there. It’s part of the big conspiracy. The development of 5G technology? I don’t need to do any research on the physics of radio waves. It’s the conspiracy. The Covid-19 pandemic? It has nothing to do with ecosystems, bats and viruses. It’s obviously part of the conspiracy.

The skeleton key of global cabal theory unlocks all the world’s mysteries and offers me entree into an exclusive circle — the group of people who understand. It makes me smarter and wiser than the average person and even elevates me above the intellectual elite and the ruling class: professors, journalists, politicians. I see what they overlook — or what they try to conceal.

Rs's don't have a monopoly on kooks but the fact that half of them believe the election was stolen by Ds suggests they could have a natural majority.

[shyams]

y66, on 2020-November-21, 15:04, said:

Rs's don't have a monopoly on kooks but the fact that half of them believe the election was stolen by Ds suggests they could have a natural majority.

Could there be another explanation? Perhaps they look to their leaders (i.e. their trusted GOP leadership at the Federal or State level) to clarify the situation and tell them that Trump is wrong. When their leaders do not contradict, they tend to believe the only person who is talking; Trump!

In other words, Republican voters are not at fault (or exclusively at fault).

[Winstonm]

shyams, on 2020-November-21, 15:20, said:

Could there be another explanation? Perhaps they look to their leaders (i.e. their trusted GOP leadership at the Federal or State level) to clarify the situation and tell them that Trump is wrong. When their leaders do not contradict, they tend to believe the only person who is talking; Trump!

In other words, Republican voters are not at fault (or exclusively at fault).

Yours is a reasonable hypothesis:

Quote

Authoritarian voters value centralizing power in one individual, party, or network in order to defeat a real or concocted enemy. They divide society based on loyalty to the authoritarian leader or regime, and because winning is their ultimate value, they do whatever is necessary to win, including distorting or hiding the truth, breaking norms and rules, and suppressing dissent. Because winning is their prime directive, lying, cheating, colluding with foreign adversaries, and using violence and violent threats are not seen as moral failures, but rather, acceptable tactics.

[Zelandakh]

Winstonm, on 2020-November-21, 10:34, said:

How can that message be simplified?

#StopTheCoup

[Winstonm]

Zelandakh, on 2020-November-21, 18:36, said:

#StopTheCoup

Not personal enough. People need to know Trump doesn't care or even like any of them.

[thepossum]

Winstonm, on 2020-November-21, 16:08, said:

Yours is a reasonable hypothesis:

It's strange how certain interests/tendencies in the world have flipped the meaning of so many political concepts over recent years

And, as is very common with some of them, they are so used (in their circles) to asserting everything as facts unchallenged they keep doing it

All I know is that the values I have had from being a child right up to now have not changed substantially, but my poliitcal leaning has supposedly completely moved

The definition of conservative in that link sounds very close to what many left and progressive people used to believe etc

And the label authoritarian is being used by the most authoritarian tendei to attack those who believe in people's rights, freedoms and liberty.

I wonder if it's tied to having to grovel to, pander to, or have become excessively dependent on a different powerful State in the world

I for one find it a bit alarming especially when those changing definitions have tended to rely on authority in the past

But whatever happened to smashing the state

Many so called progressive tendencies in their attack on those who value freedoms and rights have actually deserted the UN Declaration on Human Rights for starters. Although having read it recently to remind myself that it still said what I thought it did, it only seems to apply to men but I always took it in the spirit I thought intended that it means everyone (sorry just found an updated version)

[Winstonm]

Quote

And the label authoritarian is being used by the most authoritarian tendei to attack those who believe in people's rights, freedoms and liberty.

This explains the basic problem with the libertarian view - there is no acknowledgement that rights, freedoms, and liberties only extend to the end of their own noses, that as soon as their actions have a negative effect on others they have no right of infringement. Not wearing a mask outside during a pandemic is an action that places personal choice superior to public safety - a childish notion - and a notion that threatens others' rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. There is no right to place others in jeopardy in order to adhere to dogma. Requiring public safety to take precedence over personal choice is not an attack on rights - it is an attack on a common enemy - the virus.

As I have claimed many times, libertarian views (in the sense of the current understanding of that word) are an immature philosophy IMO, similar to the me, me, me thinking of children and teenagers; the mature understanding is that me, me, me is really not as important as we.

[y66]

shyams, on 2020-November-21, 15:20, said:

Could there be another explanation? Perhaps they look to their leaders (i.e. their trusted GOP leadership at the Federal or State level) to clarify the situation and tell them that Trump is wrong. When their leaders do not contradict, they tend to believe the only person who is talking; Trump!

In other words, Republican voters are not at fault (or exclusively at fault).

Is it reasonable to infer that the majority of the 37% of Americans who believe the global cabal conspiracy theory are Rs because 50% of Rs believe the election was stolen. No. I was being facetious.

Do Rs who choose to believe the election was stolen on the basis of zero evidence of widespread voter fraud deserve to be cut some slack because Donald Trump has been pushing this theory and William Barr has been laying the groundwork since August and practically the entire Republican Party has played along? Nope. People of voting age are responsible for their choices.

[johnu]

y66, on 2020-November-21, 21:31, said:

Is it reasonable to infer that the majority of the 37% of Americans who believe the global cabal conspiracy theory are Rs because 50% of Rs believe the election was stolen. No. I was being facetious.

I thought 50% sounded incredibly low.

Some other numbers shed more light.

Only 29% of Republicans believed Biden had "rightfully won". (e.g. 71% did not believe Biden was the rightful winner.)
68% of Republicans had concerns about a "rigged" vote.
52% of Republicans thought that the Manchurian President had "rightfully won"

It's past time for the red states to have their own country, Constitution, Congress, and courts where their ideas can be fully realized. If they want to make the Manchurian President's family official royalty who rule for life, I encourage them to secede.

Half of Republicans in new poll say election was 'rigged,' stolen from Trump

[y66]

Good summary here of Trump's bizarre conspiracy campaign adventures in court by Zach Montague and Alan Feuer at NYT:

Quote

In a chaotic effort to overturn the election results, President Trump and lawyers representing his campaign have spent weeks claiming without convincing proof that rampant voter fraud corrupted vote tallies in many battleground states.

But their lawsuits challenging the outcome have repeatedly broken down because of defective filings, sloppy paperwork, dubious claims by witnesses and lawyers who have admitted in court that they were not alleging fraud.

Here are some of the more embarrassing moments.

Arizona

Days after the election, lawyers for the Trump campaign brought a lawsuit in Maricopa County claiming, in part, that some number of Republican voters used Sharpies to mark their ballots, rendering them unreadable by voting machines and leading to uncounted votes.

The complaint also included affidavits from several voters and poll watchers who said that poll workers had capitalized on the confusion to nullify votes for Mr. Trump.

But in a hearing on Nov. 12, Kory Langhofer, a lawyer for the Trump campaign, conceded that the complaint was not based on evidence of voter fraud but rather on a “limited number of cases” of “good-faith errors” in the count.

“This is not a fraud case,” Mr. Langhofer said. “We are not alleging fraud. We are not saying anyone is trying to steal the election.”

Under questioning, witnesses repeatedly stated that they did not have any reason to believe that their ballots or those of other voters were not counted.

Later in the hearing, Daniel Arellano, the Arizona Democratic Party’s counsel, directed questions to Zack Alcyone, one of the witnesses, who admitted that he was a business partner of Mr. Langhofer’s.

Asked if he was being paid to testify in the case, Mr. Alcyone said he was uncertain.

“Um, not that I know of, I haven’t discussed it,” he said.

“But you may be?” Mr. Arellano asked.

“It’s possible, I guess, I’m not sure,” Mr. Alcyone said.

Georgia

A federal lawsuit brought by the conservative lawyer L. Lin Wood Jr. sought to halt the statewide certification of the vote in Georgia, claiming that systemic issues with the election process had marred the state’s results.

Russell J. Ramsland Jr., a cybersecurity worker and an expert witness in the case, filed an affidavit on Wednesday claiming that his company had uncovered evidence of inconsistencies in electronic voting machines. But the inconsistencies he claimed to identify were in districts in Michigan, not Georgia.

The affidavit also listed a number of towns and counties in which Mr. Ramsland’s analysis ostensibly showed that the number of votes cast exceeded the number of eligible voters. But most, if not all, of the places Mr. Ramsland listed appeared to be townships and counties in Minnesota, not Michigan.

In a hearing on Thursday, the Trump-appointed judge, Steven D. Grimberg, pushed back against claims of voter fraud.

“I understand that’s your argument, but what’s your evidence?” he asked after listening to Ray S. Smith III, a lawyer for Mr. Wood.

“To halt the certification at literally the 11th hour would breed confusion and disenfranchisement that I find have no basis in fact and law,” Judge Grimberg said.

He rejected the challenge.

Michigan

In an opinion issued on Nov. 13, a state court judge in Michigan methodically dismantled testimony from six witnesses who claimed to have observed irregularities in the vote-counting process in Detroit.

Casting doubt on their credibility and knowledge of the electoral process, Judge Timothy M. Kenny noted that the witnesses had skipped an information session that may have answered many of the questions they raised.

“Perhaps if plaintiffs’ election challenger affiants had attended the Oct. 29, 2020, walk-through of the TCF Center ballot-counting location, questions and concerns could have been answered in advance of Election Day,” he wrote. “Regrettably, they did not and, therefore, plaintiffs’ affiants did not have a full understanding” of the absentee ballot tabulation process.

In a separate case targeting absentee ballots in Michigan, a lawyer for the Trump campaign appeared to have initially filed the lawsuit in error in a federal claims court in Washington, D.C., that lacked the authority to hear it.

“The complaint is captioned as though it were filed in the United States District Court for the Western District of Michigan,” Judge Elaine D. Kaplan wrote in an order transferring the case to the proper court. “Instead, however, it was filed with this court, presumably by accident.”

Pennsylvania

Anticipating that Pennsylvania would be the tipping point in the election, lawyers for the Trump campaign prepared for legal challenges contesting votes in several parts of the state.

In recent weeks, however, the lawyers have repeatedly acknowledged when pressed by judges that no evidence of election fraud materialized.

In Federal District Court in Williamsport, Pa., the president’s lead lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, broke with his comments outside the courtroom backing the president’s claims of widespread fraud.

“This is not a fraud case,” he told Judge Matthew W. Brann.

In oral arguments in a case in Montgomery County on Nov. 10, Jonathan Goldstein, a lawyer for the Trump campaign, stated repeatedly that he also had not seen evidence of voter fraud in the vote that was contested there:

THE COURT: In your petition, which is right before me — and I read it several times — you don’t claim that any electors or the Board of the County were guilty of fraud, correct? That’s correct?
MR. GOLDSTEIN: Your honor, accusing people of fraud is a pretty big step. And it is rare that I call somebody a liar, and I am not calling the board of the D.N.C. or anybody else involved in this a liar. Everybody is coming to this with good faith. The D.N.C. is coming with good faith. We’re all just trying to get an election done. We think these were a mistake, but we think they are a fatal mistake, and these ballots ought not be counted.
THE COURT: I understand. I am asking you a specific question, and I am looking for a specific answer. Are you claiming that there is any fraud in connection with these 592 disputed ballots?
MR. GOLDSTEIN: To my knowledge at present, no.
THE COURT: Are you claiming that there is any undue or improper influence upon the elector with respect to these 592 ballots?
MR. GOLDSTEIN: To my knowledge at present, no.

Lawyers representing the Trump campaign in Bucks County signed court documents on Wednesday informing a judge that there was no evidence of fraud in relation to ballots they were contesting there.

The campaign had filed suit in the county’s Court of Common Pleas challenging more than 2,200 ballots as invalid. But in a joint stipulation of facts with lawyers for the Democratic Party, the Trump campaign’s lawyers admitted, “Petitioners do not allege, and there is no evidence of, fraud in connection with the challenged ballots.”

The lawyers also stated there was no evidence of any “misconduct” or “impropriety” in the election.

Corinne Ramey at WSJ said:

The [Pennsylvania] lawsuit was the Trump campaign’s last remaining major federal legal action in its attempt to challenge state results. Historians and election-law experts say the effort is unprecedented and amounts to an effort to subvert the vote.

Quote

Time is running out for the president’s lawsuits. Pennsylvania is scheduled to certify its election results Monday, all but ensuring its 20 Electoral College votes go to Mr. Biden. Michigan also is scheduled to certify results Monday, and Nevada on Tuesday.

[y66]

From Politics, Science and the Remarkable Race for a Coronavirus Vaccine by Sharon LaFraniere, Katie Thomas, Noah Weiland, David Gelles, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Denise Grady at NYT:

Quote

WASHINGTON — The call was tense, the message discouraging. Moncef Slaoui, the head of the Trump administration’s effort to quickly produce a vaccine for the coronavirus, was on the phone at 6 p.m. on Aug. 25 to tell the upstart biotech firm Moderna that it had to slow the final stage of testing its vaccine in humans.

Moderna’s chief executive, Stéphane Bancel, a French biochemical engineer, recognized the implication. In the race to quell the pandemic, he said, “every day mattered.” Now his company, which had yet to bring a single product to market, faced a delay of up to three weeks. Pfizer, the global pharmaceutical giant that was busy testing a similar vaccine candidate and promising initial results by October, would take the obvious lead.

“It was the hardest decision I made this year,” Mr. Bancel said.

Moderna’s problem seemed fitting for late summer 2020, when the United States was reeling from not just a pandemic but unrest over racial injustice. Dr. Slaoui informed Mr. Bancel that Moderna had not recruited enough minority candidates into its vaccine trials. If it could not prove its vaccine worked well for Black and Hispanic Americans, who have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic, it would not make it over the finish line.

Both companies ultimately completed the crucial stages of their human trials this month and reported spectacular initial results, vaccines that appear to be about 95 percent effective against a virus that has killed 1.3 million people, a quarter million of them in the United States.

Few corporate competitions have unfolded with so much at stake and such a complex backdrop. At play were not just commercial rivalries and scientific challenges but an ambitious plan to put the federal government in the middle of the effort and, most vexingly, the often toxic political atmosphere created by President Trump. Betting that a vaccine would secure his re-election, he waged both public and private campaigns to speed the process.

Pfizer’s chief executive, Dr. Albert Bourla, had vowed to avoid the political minefield but was forced to maneuver through it nonetheless. After promising progress on a timetable that seemed to support Mr. Trump’s prediction of a breakthrough before Election Day, Dr. Bourla pushed back the schedule in late October, fearing his firm’s clinical trial results would otherwise not be convincing enough for federal regulators to grant emergency approval of its vaccine. News of Pfizer’s success was announced just after the election was called for Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Dr. Bourla had chosen from the start to keep Pfizer and its research partner, the German firm BioNTech, at arms length from the government, declining research and development money from the crash federal effort, called Operation Warp Speed.

Mr. Bancel, with a far smaller company, made the opposite bet, embracing the assistance of a government led by a science-denying president. Moderna got nearly $2.5 billion to develop, manufacture and sell its vaccine to the federal government and teamed up with the National Institutes of Health on the scientific work, a highly successful partnership that managed to sidestep the political meddling by Mr. Trump and his aides that had bedeviled other efforts to confront the virus.

Pfizer and Moderna alone would not meet domestic or global demand, but other companies in the United States and around the world are also rushing toward effective vaccines, some of them using more proven technologies, so other winners are likely to emerge.

Still, both companies, in their own very different ways, have pulled off a remarkable feat: developing a vaccine that appears safe and effective in a matter of months, rather than the years or decades that such developments usually take. They were aided by a confluence of three factors. A new method of developing vaccines was already waiting to be tested, with the coronavirus a perfect target. Sky-high infection rates accelerated the pace of clinical trials, the most time-consuming part of the process. And the government was willing to spend whatever it took, eliminating financial risks and bureaucratic roadblocks and allowing mass production to begin even before the trials were done.

Their apparent success showed that in an era of polarized politics, science was able to break down barriers between government, countries and industry to produce one of the few pieces of good news in a year of suffering and division.

So the head of the Trump administration’s effort to quickly produce a vaccine did not communicate the importance of having the mix of Moderna trial participants meet FDA acceptance criteria until August? That looks like a pretty basic planning error that may have cost Trump the election. You hate to see it.

[Winstonm]

Paging Dr. Berg.

Ken, I hope you read this: This is from the WaPo so it is behind a paywall.

Quote

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) rightly received praise last week when he condemned Trump for putting “overt pressure on state and local officials to subvert the will of the people and overturn the election,” adding: “It is difficult to imagine a worse, more undemocratic action by a sitting American president.”

But Romney’s statement is more a reason for distress than hope because it should not take political courage — whether on his part or from GOP state officials in Michigan and Georgia — to recognize the simple fact that Biden won. Nor do you have to be liberal to recognize that a legal strategy based on throwing out ballots cast in heavily Black Detroit or Philadelphia is racist.

And you only need to honor the legacy of Abraham Lincoln and Dwight D. Eisenhower to be horrified that the Republican National Committee made itself the venue last week for an incendiary, untrue and insane statement by Trump lawyer Sidney Powell. Her screed was worthy of some marginal, anti-democratic, far-right nationalist party in some other country.

“American patriots are fed up with the corruption from the local level, to the highest level of our government,” she said, making you wonder who is president. “We are going to take this country back. We are not going to be intimidated. We are not going to back down. We are going to clean this mess up now. President Trump won by a landslide. We are going to prove it, and we are going to reclaim the United States of America for the people who vote for freedom.”


The ballots of the majority that did not “vote for freedom” by Powell’s bizarre definition — nearly 80 million so far — can be tossed into the dustbin.


That’s the party Biden has to deal with. And he can take no comfort if Republicans who stayed mum during Trump’s attempted election theft turn around later and pretend that they had nothing to do with this. Their silence is complicity.

This is the result of almost 74 million votes for autocracy over democracy, and the Republican politicians cannot turn their backs on those votes. Now what?

[kenberg]

Winstonm, on 2020-November-22, 10:27, said:

Paging Dr. Berg.

Ken, I hope you read this: This is from the WaPo so it is behind a paywall.




This is the result of almost 74 million votes for autocracy over democracy, and the Republican politicians cannot turn their backs on those votes. Now what?

As it happens, I had just finished reading it when I brought up the WC. I was thinking that I only disagree with one of his points:
"And you only need to honor the legacy of Abraham Lincoln and Dwight D. Eisenhower to be horrified that the Republican National Committee made itself the venue last week for an incendiary, untrue and insane statement by Trump lawyer Sidney Powell. Her screed was worthy of some marginal, anti-democratic, far-right nationalist party in some other country."

You do not have to even know who Eisenhower and Lincoln were to be horrified. In fact Eisenhower was a bit slow in condemning Joe McCarthy. But forget bout Ike. Republicans really want their party to be associated with Sidney Powell? And Giuliani? Really? Really?

And while I of course remember Ike and know about Lincoln, and I read Edmund Burke in college (Dionne cites him as well) I had to look up who Robert Nisbet was. I had heard the name before but couldn't place it. But again this doesn't matter. Crazy is crazy. And never mind whether Powell and Giuliani are actually as crazy as they sound or they are just being well-paid lawyers. It's a to try to sort that out.

We have some serious matters to attend to as we go forward.

[Winstonm]

kenberg, on 2020-November-22, 11:47, said:

As it happens, I had just finished reading it when I brought up the WC. I was thinking that I only disagree with one of his points:
"And you only need to honor the legacy of Abraham Lincoln and Dwight D. Eisenhower to be horrified that the Republican National Committee made itself the venue last week for an incendiary, untrue and insane statement by Trump lawyer Sidney Powell. Her screed was worthy of some marginal, anti-democratic, far-right nationalist party in some other country."

You do not have to even know who Eisenhower and Lincoln were to be horrified. In fact Eisenhower was a bit slow in condemning Joe McCarthy. But forget bout Ike. Republicans really want their party to be associated with Sidney Powell? And Giuliani? Really? Really?

And while I of course remember Ike and know about Lincoln, and I read Edmund Burke in college (Dionne cites him as well) I had to look up who Robert Nisbet was. I had heard the name before but couldn't place it. But again this doesn't matter. Crazy is crazy. And never mind whether Powell and Giuliani are actually as crazy as they sound or they are just being well-paid lawyers. It's a to try to sort that out.

We have some serious matters to attend to as we go forward.

During Watergate, CREEP stood for Committee to RE-Elect the President, meaning Nixon. I think another type of creep has been occurring for as long - the insidious creep of the Southern Strategy across the nation and all that entails. Ta Nehisi-Coates wrote The First White President and, to my knowledge, was the first to show that Trump's 2016 victory came from support by white voters across all sections of the country and economic statuses. In my view, that election was simply a culmination of the the inherent racism of the Southern Strategy. I am firmly convinced that in the U.S. only one side - the Republican side - would try to exclude as many people as possible while creating a schism between races for the sole purpose of gaining and retaining power.

The idea of exclusion is antipathy to the liberal mindset and worldview.

If we are to move forward, we must regain the balance of trust that both sides have at heart the best interests of the country - not their own raw power. As Mr. Miyagi said, Balance the key, Daniel-san.

[Zelandakh]

Winstonm, on 2020-November-21, 19:28, said:

Not personal enough. People need to know Trump doesn't care or even like any of them.

You are still thinking like a liberal Winston. If you want a message to resonate amongst conservatives it has to be short and simple, like the #StopTheSteal hashtag that has gained traction there. #StopTheSteal takes that momentum and tries to turn it around. Sure, a more complex and detailed message would be great...but conservatives are simply not to take notice of you for long enough for that message to be heard.

[Zelandakh]

y66, on 2020-November-22, 08:05, said:

Good summary here of Trump's bizarre conspiracy campaign adventures in court by Zach Montague and Alan Feuer at NYT:

The Arizona case was largely a result of a misunderstanding. Some voters were suspicious of the "sharpie" they were given at the voting booth and went online to check their vote status. When they saw that the status was "canceled" their worst fears were realised. Only it turns out that the website they were using was specifically tracking their postal ballot and the "canceled" status was proof that the voting procedure was working to prevent people from voting both in-person and absentee. In fact Trump's lawyers here inadvertently managed to prove the absence of fraud. It's the sort of thing that could be a SNL sketch if it were not so serious.