2020 Election Results Part 7: Biden Starts Working While Trump Tries To Blow Up The World

[Dandruff]

2 hours ago, fraurosena said:

I'm willing to bet good money that they are franticly destroying as much evidence as they possibly can, and the Republicans are aiding and abetting Trump in doing so, because they are also heavily implicated themselves.

They've learned that - so far, anyway - it's only the complicit minions who get caught and go to jail.  Also, I imagine they'd prefer to avoid a situation where they may be called to testify.

[HerNameIsBuffy]

20 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Isn't it weird that I want to praise a republican for simply telling the truth? 

 

 

The bar is so low that anyone not metaphorically flinging their poo at us seems like a distinguished statesman.

[HerNameIsBuffy]

I know it's petty...and DJTJ will never want for money even if he never works again because Daddy grifts but this made me smile.

I'm a little annoyed Nate didn't take the shot that would really land with a Trump and that's "at least the SDNY isn't waiting to slap my dad with a criminal suit January 20th."

[GreyhoundFan]

Tammy is confused again:

 

[onekidanddone]

21 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Tammy is confused again:

 

Tell Taffy it is hard to be forgotten if nobody knows who you are in the first place 

[HerNameIsBuffy]

28 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Tammy is confused again:

 

When were they ever silent?  

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[justmy2cents]

4 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

 

That's what I was afraid would happen. Glad he's not playing along.

[fraurosena]

This should be career ending for Lindsey. It won’t be, because this is par for the course in the trumplican party. 

 

[47of74]

Where the hell is Georiga? 

Quote

Supporters of President Donald Trump faced ridicule Monday on Twitter after promoting a march to fight election results using a graphic containing two major blunders.

The name of the state, Georgia, was spelled “Georiga.” And the traditionally Republican red Southern state, which flipped blue in the 2020 presidential election for the first time in nearly two decades, was depicted in a color that the president might not find so appealing:

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[smittykins]

18 hours ago, HerNameIsBuffy said:

When were they ever silent?  

That’s what I find interesting about “The Silent Majority”—they never.shut.up.

[Cartmann99]

Latino voters who fled dictatorships demand four more years for Trump

Quote

Two years after Fidel Castro’s takeover of Cuba in 1959, Margarita De Castro was in trouble. 

The communist government was imposing its will across the island, and picketers demanded the young telephone operator face a firing squad after she was accused of setting fire to Havana’s largest department store. Terrified, she snuck out of her job at the telephone company where protesters were gathered and called her father, who paid $8,000 for someone to forge the date on her expired passport. She fetched some clothes and her diamond ring from an armoire in her home, kissed her newborn son goodbye and boarded a flight to Miami.

Alone and penniless, she began her life in the United States, working at a Miami Beach hotel, eventually becoming a banker and raising four sons on her own.

The 79-year-old refugee said her experience in Cuba drove her to become a Republican, voting for the GOP in almost every election since becoming a citizen in 1972. She never seriously felt that communism could follow her to the United States – until the 2020 presidential election.

"I feel like I am living what happened in my country 40 years ago," De Castro said. 

For many Americans, the idea of a presidential election devolving into a months-long battle for control of the nation may be unprecedented, but for many Latino supporters of President Donald Trump – many of whom escaped authoritarian regimes themselves – it raises old ghosts. There is no evidence of election fraud, but many fear covert socialists are in cahoots with the media in an attempt to rob a sitting U.S. president of power.

“People used to say Communism can’t happen in Cuba, and look how that turned out,” De Castro said on a recent afternoon as she played with her great-granddaughter in her home in West Miami, a working-class Cuban American enclave in South Florida where the majority of votes were cast for Trump. 

De Castro said her big fear is Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. "She's another AOC," she said referring to U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has described herself as a Democratic socialist. Harris has generally stopped short of embracing many of the policies championed by the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. 

Almost two weeks after the election, Trump is refusing to concede. Instead, he has continued to summon the support of his 73 million voters, soliciting “election defense funds” and mounting an aggressive legal campaign aimed at challenging the results in a handful of states where President-elect Joe Biden holds small but significant leads.

Trump and his supporters have pointed to ballots being cast by dead people, malfunctioning equipment and counting absentee ballots received after Election Day as evidence of their claims. The Department of Homeland Security, however, put out a statement Thursday calling the Nov. 3 election "the most secure in American history." 

In Florida, where Biden lost by 375,000 votes, Republicans succeeded in casting the former vice president as a “trojan horse for socialism," linking Biden to Ocasio-Cortez and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who was criticized during the Democratic primary for praising Cuba's communist literacy program. 

“When you have national Democratic leaders praising Fidel Castro’s indoctrination programs and hailing neo-Marxists as ‘the future of the party,’ it communicated to our community that the Democratic Party does not respect our values,” said Giancarlo Sopo, a Cuban American communication strategist on the Trump campaign. "We simply voted accordingly, as did many other Latinos – like Colombians and Peruvians – who want nothing to do with socialism and the progressive agenda.”

Now, with Trump refusing to accept the election results, many Latino Trump supporters said they feel they are replaying dark chapters of their history.

Trump supporters decry censorship 

Carolina Tejera, 44, a soap opera actress, was outraged watching TV channel after channel project Biden as the 46th president of the United States. It wasn’t only CNN and MSNBC that made her livid, Tejera said: “Fox News, too.”

The Venezuelan American flashed back to the moment radical populist Hugo Chavez first won the Venezuelan elections in 1998. The leftist leader relentlessly antagonized the United States while pushing his socialist agenda in the South American country during his 14 years in power.

“When Chavez first won all the channels were ecstatic – they celebrated it on air,” Tejera said. “Newscasters here seemed happier than the American people.” 

What really got under Tejera’s skin, however, was news networks' en masse decision to cut off Trump’s Nov. 5 live remarks after he wrongly claimed victory in the election. Trump also said there had been fraud in states that Biden carried by thousands of votes.  

USA TODAY was among the outlets that removed the video from its platforms. Editor-in-chief Nicole Carroll explained the reasoning behind the decision, saying the president's remarks were "undermining Americans’ confidence in the democratic process." Instead, USA TODAY published a comprehensive story on the president's speech.  

“That’s censorship. It’s the kind of thing you only see in socialist regimes,” said Tejera, who cast her first vote ever in a U.S. election for Trump in 2016. During the 2020 election cycle, she traveled across the country to almost a dozen Trump rallies.  

“If this country has been the target of terrorist attacks, presidential assassinations, why are people so shocked that there could be voter fraud,” Tejera wrote on her Instagram account, which has over 362,000 followers. The actress and model regularly shares her MAGA views and has recently taken to share purported electoral fraud memes, videos and commentary. 

Tejera and other GOP voters have also criticized social media platforms that have flagged the president's tweets as false. In February, Twitter announced it would begin labeling tweets as "manipulated media." Facebook said in May that while it would not perform fact-checking on paid ads, it would remove posts misleading people about the elections. Some of Trump's supporters, including Tejera, have also been targeted by these practices. 

Stephen Armas, a Cuban American recruiter for IT companies based in Colorado, said voters should be able to read anything freely and do their own research without interference, saying the "amount of censorship bestowed on Donald Trump is absolutely outrageous." 

"I never thought I would see this in the United States of America," said 31-year-old Armas.

He added: "As the son of Cuban immigrants I know all about a political party changing narrative, censoring and pushing their own agenda; and if you disagree, you're silenced."

Disinformation campaigns target Latino voters 

Long before Election Day, many Latino voters have received misinformation about the election that has shaped how they view Biden and Trump.

While social media platforms began flagging misleading posts in English earlier this year, a barrage of Spanish-language conspiracy theories targeted Latino voters across battleground states. Those posts went largely unnoticed and remained unflagged until late in the campaign cycle. Claims ranged from supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory movement trying to take down the president to groups burning down people's homes if they voted for Democratic candidates. 

Radio Caracol, a news station in South Florida, aired a 16-minute paid program in August telling listeners the country would "become a dictatorship run by Jews and Blacks" if Biden won the election. The station's executives later apologized.

The barrage of fake news intensified after Election Day, with posts about widespread fraud becoming more prevalent on social media channels and WhatsApp messaging groups. In the 24 hours following Election Day, disinformation in Spanish eclipsed interference with the Kremlin-backed Russian Internet Agency in 2016, the New York Times reported. 

Hosts from various Spanish-language AM radio stations in Miami said the president's allegations should be "thoroughly investigated" and opened up their phone lines, taking calls from Latino voters who largely backed up their concerns with misinformation they received or saw on social media.  

"Han hecho trampa," a caller said in Spanish. "They cheated."

"This is a function of the self-curated information silos," said Fernand Amandi, a Florida-based Democratic consultant and pollster. "They are watching television stations listening to radio programs, or going to internet sites which reinforce the fact that he [Trump] did win."

Andy Canales, chairman of Latino Texas PAC, which focuses on electing Latinos to public office in Texas, said he’s noticed widespread misinformation on the Spanish-language Facebook sites of his parents, who are naturalized citizens from El Salvador. Many Salvadorans fled to the United States as refugees from 1980 to1992 amid the Central American country's civil war between the military-led government and Marxist guerrillas. 

Videos touting Trump as “chosen by God” and allegations of widespread voter fraud are constant Facebook posts, Canales said. Canales said he and his friends, who also have immigrant parents, have struggled to counter the misinformation.

“It’s difficult to explain the Electoral College, the proliferation of votes, mail-in ballots … It’s difficult to explain all of that in Spanish,” he said. “We’re really struggling.”

Trump supporters warn of socialism in US

Although arguably less effective, Democrats also took a page out of the GOP book, casting Trump as a would-be caudillo, or strongman, likening him to Castro, Chavez and Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. One ad stated they were all "cut from the same cloth."

Many Cuban American Trump voters, meanwhile, seemed to disregard the fact that Trump hired an attorney in 2008 to register the Trump trademark in Cuba, as reported by the Miami Herald. For decades, the mere mention or attempt to do business in Cuba would have buried any presidential hopeful's attempt to reach the White House. 

“That was before he was president of the United States," said U.S. Army Col. Johnny De la Cruz, a top veteran of the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 and president of Assault Brigade 2506, the CIA-sponsored group of Cuban exiles that led the effort to overthrow the Cuban leader. "He did what any normal businessman would do."

Joseph Vitriol, a senior researcher at Stony Brook University in New York, said people who lived through autocratic regimes are more prone to hyper-vigilance. 

"In this heightened state, they perceive reality and look for cues of the places they fled," explained Vitriol.

Vitriol, a political psychologist who specializes in conspiracy theories and fake news, said the greater risk is misinformation over time. "It's a drip, drip, drip undermining institutions."

Socialism undertones are also playing out as a GOP strategy across all voting blocs, including the Senate runoff race in Georgia. Recently, a video resurfaced of Castro speaking at a church in New York during his 1995 trip to the United States. Georgia Democratic Senate candidate Raphael Warnock worked as the church's youth pastor at the time. 

In Miami, public support for the GOP shows no sign of calming down. On Wednesday "Cubans 4 Trump" have called for a "night of prayer for the nation."

Some Trump loyalists, however, have started to call for a smooth democratic transition - whether the president concedes or not. 

William Villar, a Cuban American Trump voter who came to the United States at the age of five, said he would back the election results as "a dutiful American," saying, "I'm not a Trump-lican, I am a Republican."

Villar, a 26-year-old navy veteran and Miami resident, said "whoever wants to follow Trump after fraud allegations are dismissed and proper investigations are conducted, want to follow a dictator like Chavez or Fidel."

"You can't stay in power just because you got elected," he said, "that's a dictatorship, not a democracy."

 

[HerNameIsBuffy]

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election-2020/trump-iran-strike-nuclear-site-attack-b1723987.html?utm_source=reddit.com

Per reddit 9 years ago today Trump tweeted about how he thought Obama would start a war with Iran in order to stay in office.  

Idk what they need to put in his Diet Coke to knock him out for the next two months, but someone had better be getting their ass to a pharmacy tout de suite.  

 

Court docket info for the Trump election lawsuits in Michigan for those interested.

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18619867/donald-j-trump-for-president-inc-v-jocelyn-benson/

[Howl]

3 hours ago, 47of74 said:

Where the hell is Georiga? 

I know it's wild and crazy to think this, but just possibly could this have originated in a Russian troll factory?

Edited November 17, 2020 by Howl

[GreyhoundFan]

"Biden names senior White House staff, including Jen O’Malley Dillon"

Quote

Biden announced the hiring of nine senior White House officials on Tuesday, a list that includes confidants who spearheaded his campaign.

Longtime aides Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti will step in as senior adviser and counselor to the president, respectively. Biden’s campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, will be deputy chief of staff. And his campaign’s general counsel, Dana Remus, will be counsel to the president, acting as Biden’s top attorney in the White House.

Rep. Cedric L. Richmond (D-La.), one of Biden’s most prominent African American allies, will leave Capitol Hill to become senior adviser to the president and director of the White House Office of Public Engagement.

Julie Chávez Rodríguez, a deputy campaign manager for Biden, will become director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. She has worked for Vice President-elect Harris and is the granddaughter of labor activist César Chávez.

Annie Tomasini will become director of Oval Office operations. She has been Biden’s traveling chief of staff.

“I am proud to announce additional members of my senior team who will help us build back better than before. America faces great challenges, and they bring diverse perspectives and a shared commitment to tackling these challenges and emerging on the other side a stronger, more united nation,” Biden said in a statement.

Soon-to-be first lady Jill Biden has also hired staff. Julissa Reynoso Pantaleon, a former ambassador to Uruguay, will be her chief of staff. Anthony Bernal, a top aide to Jill Biden during the campaign, will be her senior adviser in the White House.

The hires mark Joe Biden’s latest effort to staff his incoming team. Last week, he tapped longtime aide Ron Klain to be his White House chief of staff. Some of the newest round of people Biden is bringing into his administration also have deep ties to him.

Ricchetti was campaign chairman for Biden, and Donilon was chief strategist, playing a leading role in crafting many of Biden’s speeches.

O’Malley Dillon became Biden’s campaign manager earlier this year, stepping onboard as the team retooled after struggling in the early nominating contests. A veteran of Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection run, she managed former congressman Beto O’Rourke’s unsuccessful Democratic presidential bid in 2019.

Richmond was an early supporter of Biden and is said to be close to Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.). Clyburn’s support helped Biden win the South Carolina primary, a victory that eased his way to the nomination.

 

[HerNameIsBuffy]

2 minutes ago, Howl said:

I know it's wild and crazy to think this, but just possibly could this have originated in a Russian troll factory?

Could also be a homegrown American troll who can't type and doesn't proofread.

(said as a American' non-troll who can't type and rarely proofreads outside of work stuff.)

[Workingmom]

17 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index.

I hope some of the republicans open their eyes and try to work together with democrats to become a   real democracy again.

[Howl]

9 hours ago, fraurosena said:

This should be career ending for Lindsey. It won’t be, because this is par for the course in the trumplican party. 

Well, he just got re-elected, his career is safe for four years, which might be why he was tapped to make the phone call. 

Georgia is under the spotlight because the fate of the Senate hangs on two Georgia senate seats up for grabs.  Both Republican candidates are arguably both criminal scumbags vulnerable to a hugely motivated Democrat voter pool. 

That Georgia Secretary of State Brad would say anything at all is mind blowing; this could be the tip of the iceberg of a huge Republican black ops  to disqualify votes for both the presidential election and the two Senate races to come.  Raffensperger could not afford the legal exposure if he didn't say anything; he could also be an honest guy. 

Anyway, something is afoot, but Barr will cover for Lindsey because that's what he's there for.   Jury's still out on whether this has  Mitch McConnell's little paw prints all over it; right now I'm thinking not.  The call was coming from inside the (White) House. 

Edited November 17, 2020 by Howl

[47of74]

I've graduated from thinking voter suppression and electoral fraud should be punishable by life imprisonment to capital offenses that are eligible for the death penalty, not only for the perpetrator but every participant in a conspiracy and those that fail to report efforts to suppress votes or commit electoral fraud.  No matter what level.  Make the penalty so God-awful that no one will try to commit it for themselves or even want to take one for the team.  Name those things in the goddamn constitution as the very worst crimes one can commit, beyond even treason. 

I'm done with this hypocritical freedom bullshit when our own country does everything it can to take voices away from people. 

[thoughtful]

4 hours ago, 47of74 said:

Where the hell is Georiga? 

 

Could've been worse - could've been this:

Spoiler

 

[SassyPants]

46 minutes ago, Howl said:

Well, he just got re-elected, his career is safe for four years, which might be why he was tapped to make the phone call. 

Georgia is under the spotlight because the fate of the Senate hangs on two Georgia senate seats up for grabs.  Both Republican candidates are arguably both criminal scumbags vulnerable to a hugely motivated Democrat voter pool. 

That Georgia Secretary of State Brad would say anything at all is mind blowing; this could be the tip of the iceberg of a huge Republican black ops  to disqualify votes for both the presidential election and the two Senate races to come.  Raffensperger could not afford the legal exposure if he didn't say anything; he could also be an honest guy. 

Anyway, something is afoot, but Barr will cover for Lindsey because that's what he's there for.   Jury's still out on whether this has  Mitch McConnell's little paw prints all over it; right now I'm thinking not.  The call was coming from inside the (White) House. 

I remember reading after 2018 that there was massive voter suppression in GA that more or less prevented Abrams from securing the Gov’s race. I think the GA state legislature is corrupt as hell. I’ve been waiting to hear that GA is back in Trump’s column.

[HerNameIsBuffy]

37 minutes ago, 47of74 said:

Name those things in the goddamn constitution as the very worst crimes one can commit, beyond even treason. 

I agree both of those issues are horrible crimes against democracy and perpetrators should be severely punished once convicted.

However every day in this country there are children being sexually assaulted, murdered, beaten, and neglected.  Every 9 minutes someone is beaten by a domestic partner, and those are just the ones who reported it to law enforcement or medical personnel which is a tiny tip of the iceberg.  

Right now there are people living in actual slavery in the US due to sex trafficking.  

Every day 52 people are murdered in the US.  That's 361 families a week shattered by the loss of a loved one whose lives will never be the same.  

Every day 4658 are treated in ERs due to having been assaulted.  

Even amongst political crimes.  Politicians looking the other way when environmental issues are literally causing physical harm to the people they were elected to serve.  War crimes.  Using office for illegal personal gain.  Treason.  

I'm with you on wanting them punished severely and share your outrage, but I disagree with the hyperbole of the part I quoted.

 

 

Edited November 17, 2020 by HerNameIsBuffy

[47of74]

Hey @cartman99 did anyone get back to you with your People's Court request?

If not, here you go...