Zorro
Zorro's JournalTrump invites Michigan Republican leaders to meet him at White House
Source: Washington Post
Complete headline: Trump invites Michigan Republican leaders to meet him at White House as he escalates attempts to overturn election results
President Trump has invited the leaders of Michigan’s Republican-controlled state legislature to meet him in Washington on Friday, according to a person familiar with those plans, as the president and his allies continue an extraordinary campaign to overturn the results of an election he lost.
Trump’s campaign has suffered defeats in courtrooms across the country in its efforts to allege irregularities with the ballot-counting process, and has failed to muster any evidence of the widespread fraud that the president continues to claim tainted the 2020 election.
Trump lost Michigan by a wide margin: At present, he trails President-Elect Joe Biden in the state by 157,000 votes. Earlier this week, the state’s Republican Senate majority leader said an effort to have legislators throw out election results was “not going to happen.”
But the president now appears to be using the full weight of his office to challenge the election results, as he and his allies reach out personally to state and local officials in an intensifying effort to halt the certification of the vote in key battleground states.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/11/19/wayne-county-rescind-certifying-election/
It's blatant, in your face sedition.
Pasco's sheriff uses grades and abuse histories to label schoolchildren potential criminals.
The kids and their parents don’t know.The Pasco Sheriff’s Office keeps a secret list of kids it thinks could “fall into a life of crime” based on factors like whether they’ve been abused or gotten a D or an F in school, according to the agency's internal intelligence manual.
The Sheriff’s Office assembles the list by combining the rosters for most middle and high schools in the county with records so sensitive, they’re protected by state and federal law.
School district data shows which children are struggling academically, miss too many classes or are sent to the office for discipline. Records from the state Department of Children and Families flag kids who have witnessed household violence or experienced it themselves.
According to the manual, any one of those factors makes a child more likely to become a criminal.
Four hundred and twenty kids are on the list, the Sheriff’s Office said.
https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/police-pasco-sheriff-targeted/school-data/
GOP Leaders Begin Search For Prissy, Miserable Shithead Who Can Compete With Trump In 2024
WASHINGTON—Casting an eye towards the next presidential election, Republican party leaders had reportedly begun a search Tuesday for a new prissy little shithead who would be able to compete against Trump in 2024.
“We’ve obviously had a wonderful relationship with President Trump, but we feel our interests may best be served by a different whining, prim fuckface to lead the party forward,” said RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, confirming that the GOP would be looking at figures from politics, media, and law enforcement in an effort to find a candidate with the right mix of froufrou aesthetics and raging assholishness to build on and expand Trump’s base.
“We expect this to be an exhaustive process, as the most obvious prissy little shitheads such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio have not caught on with the American public as we had hoped, though fortunately, we have thousands of effete fuckwads who are clamoring for the position. Whoever we finally select, voters can rest assured it will be a little fancy man absolutely ravaged by insecurity and self-loathing.”
At press time, McDaniel added that if they could not find such a person, equipping Donald Trump with a different messaging strategy could make him a great candidate for 2024.
https://politics.theonion.com/gop-leaders-begin-search-for-prissy-miserable-shithead-1845698547
A NASA official asked Boeing if it would protest a major contract it lost.
Source: Washington Post
Complete headline: A NASA official asked Boeing if it would protest a major contract it lost. Instead, Boeing resubmitted its bid.
The conversation between NASA’s Doug Loverro and Boeing’s Jim Chilton is now the subject of a grand jury investigation
Boeing’s bid to build a spacecraft capable of flying NASA astronauts to the moon didn’t meet NASA’s requirements, and the company was going to lose out on a contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
But NASA was worried that the corporate giant would protest the contract award, potentially holding it up for months at a time when the space agency was trying to meet a White House mandate to get astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024.
So in February, Doug Loverro, then the head of NASA’s human exploration directorate, called Jim Chilton, the senior vice president of Boeing’s space and launch division, to explain that the company was going to lose the contract and to inquire whether it would file a challenge, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.
That call, which occurred during a period when the agency was to have no contact with any of the bidders, is now the subject of investigations by the NASA inspector general and the Justice Department into the integrity of the procurement, according to multiple people. It also led NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine to force Loverro to abruptly resign in May.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/17/nasa-boeing-lunar-lander-probe/
The timing of Loverro's resignation earlier this year was very curious, happening just before the manned test flight in SpaceX's Dragon capsule. There was some speculation at the time that it was because of Loverro's lack of confidence in the integrity of Dragon testing prior to a manned mission.
Now it looks like his resignation was due to something else, entirely.
We need an investigation into Lindsey Graham's intervention in Georgia
Opinion by Jennifer Rubin
The Post reports on an interview with Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who said he spoke on Friday to Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.):
Raffensperger said he was stunned that Graham appeared to suggest that he find a way to toss legally cast ballots. Absent court intervention, Raffensperger doesn’t have the power to do what Graham suggested, as
counties administer elections in Georgia.
“It sure looked like he was wanting to go down that road,” Raffensperger said.
Graham denied to The Post that he encouraged Raffensperger to discard ballots, saying he was only investigating signature-matching rules. That raises the question why he would need to know this information and decide directly to contact Raffensperger, who is under death threats and has been subject to baseless accusations of misconduct by fellow Republicans.
Federal and/or state law enforcement should get to the bottom of this, requiring both parties to the conversation, and any witnesses, to preserve evidence. Stephen I. Vladeck, an election law guru and University of Texas law professor, tells me, “At least as relayed in the Post story, Sen. Graham appears to have been attempting to convince Secretary Raffensperger to alter the valid results of Georgia’s election — in a manner that may run afoul of numerous provisions of Georgia election law.” He adds, “At the very least, it’s a serious matter that might warrant further investigation — and that is grossly unbecoming of any United States senator, let alone the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.”
Depending on the facts — and we do not definitively know what occurred — any number of laws might be implicated.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/17/we-need-an-investigation-into-lindsey-grahams-intervention-georgia/
Trump fights to keep a job he shows no interest in performing
Opinion by Max Boot
Imagine if, in November 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had decided to check out of World War II because it wasn’t going as well as he had hoped. Imagine if he had secluded himself in the Oval Office, listening to the radio all day, laughing at “Fibber McGee and Molly” and cursing at Walter Winchell’s news program. Imagine if, instead of attending meetings with his military chiefs, he spent his time purging government officials who weren’t loyal New Dealers and screaming about supposed fraud in the midterm elections (a big Republican victory).
That’s roughly where we stand today with President Trump and the coronavirus. A million new cases of covid-19 were recorded in the United States last week. On Saturday alone, we lost more than 1,300 people — equivalent to some three Boeing 747 crashes. To put our tragedy in perspective: As economist Jeremy Horpedahl pointed out, South Dakota (pop. 885,000) has about 25 percent more covid-19 deaths than South Korea (pop. 51 million). On the current trajectory, the United States will lose more lives by March 1 — roughly 440,000 — than the number of Americans who died in all of World War II.
Yet instead of providing leadership in a time of crisis, Trump prefers to golf, nurse his grudges and try to overturn the results of the election. The Post reports that “the president has not attended a coronavirus task force meeting in ‘at least five months,’” “is no longer regularly briefed on the pandemic by his team of doctors,” “rarely reads the daily virus reports” prepared by his staff and “has all but ceased to actively manage the deadly pandemic.”
Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, asked Trump to call for reducing in-person dining in restaurants and bars. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, asked him to stress the importance of mask-wearing and to let health officials work with the Biden transition team. Trump has simply ignored these urgently needed requests.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/16/trump-fights-keep-job-he-shows-no-interest-performing/
The longer Republicans cower to Trump, the more damage they do to democracy
Opinion by Editorial Board
IN AN ordinary time, none of these comments from Republican officials would be noteworthy. “I expect Joe Biden to be the next president of the United States,” Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson said Sunday. President Trump has every right to challenge the results in court, said Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, but “Joe Biden is the president-elect.” In Michigan, state Sen. Ruth Johnson said that “I don’t believe that enough votes are in question in Michigan to change the outcome, so I think we need to move forward.” In Georgia, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said, “People are just going to have to accept the results. .?.?. I’m a Republican. I believe in fair and secure elections.”
Unfortunately, the Republican Party’s national leadership now stands squarely against fair and secure elections — or accepting results, for that matter. Both Georgia GOP senators competing in runoff elections Jan. 5 called for Mr. Raffensperger’s resignation, while offering absolutely no evidence of misconduct. Mr.?Trump called him a “RINO” (Republican in Name Only) — because he competently oversaw an election that Mr.?Trump lost. Mr. Trump also threatened Mr. DeWine on Monday, suggesting he would stymie the governor’s 2022 reelection.
Republican so-called leaders in Congress continue to quail before this bullying, indulging Mr. Trump’s toxic lies about a stolen election. Privately they speak of the president as though he were a petulant toddler who can’t face the hard truth all at once; or they argue that so many voters are suspicious of the results that Mr. Trump should have time to challenge them, unsuccessfully, in court. But why are so many people suspicious in the first place? Because Mr. Trump has been sowing doubt about the nation’s democratic institutions since before the election, and his enablers excuse and amplify his lies. As Mr. Trump has lost case after case in court since Election Day, his claims that the vote was rigged have only gotten more brazen.
Every day that Republicans dignify Mr.?Trump’s sore-loser tantrum, the notion that the election was stolen gets further entrenched among his supporters. The only plausible outcome, as they well understand, is that a large portion of the electorate will view President-elect Joe Biden — and the nation’s electoral system — as illegitimate.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-longer-republicans-cower-to-trump-the-more-damage-they-do-to-democracy/2020/11/16/2ac4e96c-282d-11eb-9b14-ad872157ebc9_story.html
Talented Dog!
Abolish the electoral college
Opinion by Editorial Board
OUR COLUMNIST Marc A. Thiessen noted last week that President Trump had come very close to winning reelection. “A flip of just some 73,700 votes in those three states [Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia] and Trump would be making plans for a second term — and we would all be taking about a ‘red wave,’?” he wrote.
Mr. Thiessen’s point was that Mr.?Trump’s near miss makes him a viable candidate in 2024. We draw a different lesson: It is alarming that a candidate came so close to winning while polling more than 5 million fewer votes than his opponent nationwide. The electoral college, whatever virtues it may have had for the Founding Fathers, is no longer tenable for American democracy.
We write this with full awareness of the challenges of adopting a new system, with respect for many of the people who continue to argue against a switch, and with awareness that any change may have unintended consequences. Right now, our presidential elections are conducted by 51 separate authorities, each with its own rules on registration, mail-in balloting and more. Each state counts its own ballots, and each decides when recounts are needed. All of that would have to change if the president were chosen based on the national vote count. Additionally, electoral college math induces candidates to pay attention to voters in some small states who might otherwise be ignored.
But why should Iowa’s biofuel lobby get more of a hearing than, say, California’s artichoke lobby? Small states already have disproportionate clout in our government because of the Senate, in which Wyoming’s fewer than 600,000?residents have as much representation as California’s 39.5 million. We see no particular reason voters in purple states such as Wisconsin should be valued more than voters in red states such as Mississippi or blue states such as Washington.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/abolish-the-electoral-college/2020/11/15/c40367d8-2441-11eb-a688-5298ad5d580a_story.html
Giuliani Arrives in Ukraine to Look for More Votes
KYIV (The Borowitz Report)—Now the mastermind of Donald J. Trump’s post-election strategy, Rudolph Giuliani, has travelled to Ukraine in search of more votes for his client.
Speaking to reporters at the Kyiv airport, a highly animated Giuliani said that he expected to return to the United States with “bags full of votes” for Trump.
“Joe Biden is leading Trump by about sixty thousand votes in Pennsylvania,” the former mayor of New York said. “The population of Ukraine is forty-three million! You think I can’t find sixty thousand votes in this country? Get out of here! Get out of here!”
Giuliani added that he was confident that his quest for votes would be a success because “every time I go to Ukraine, I come away smellin’ like a rose!”
Concluding his remarks, he said that he would later announce the results of his mission at Kyiv Hilton Total Landscaping.
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/giuliani-arrives-in-ukraine-to-look-for-more-votes
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