The US 2020 Presidential Election

[tbm3fan]

Is there anything that should have changed my mind? I gather there was a NY Times article about it, but I imagine it's behind a paywall. Nothing in DOR's CNN snippet convinces me to change my mind and I boycott CNN so I won't click on the link to see more.

I could actively research, but the last time I did that I had to dig through a massive pile of muck generated by the outrage machine to find the actual video. What's the point? And the actual news stories today are the COVID strain out of the UK and the CDC vaccine recommendations. The latter is pretty gosh-darn important considering a bunch of official CDC documentation and guidance looked like they were about to recommend letting grandma die.

Don't see anything to update my opinion and don't see any reason I should be looking to change my mind. I SHOULD look more into this new covid strain, but between the PVC Cement and the bleach, I don't think I'm going to form great opinions on that right now, and I'd rather form great opinions than bad opinions I have to later unmake.

Here, I'l do it for you since it seems very complicated for some.

The Lt. Gen. retweeted a petition calling for Trump to invoke martial law, suspend the Constitution, and hold a new election.

The petition was published by the Ohio-based non-profit group We the People Convention said "there was no peaceful way left to preserve our Union" following President-elect Joe Biden's Electoral College victory and urge Trump to use his extraordinary authority to avert a second civil war.

So he retweeted a petition from a group that one could possibly call traitors to the Constitution. I would say that means he agrees with the petition therefore aligning himself with that group.

See, that wasn't hard now was it?

[GVChamp]

GVChamp are you still of the opinion that Flynn never called for some form of martial law?

Is there anything that should have changed my mind? I gather there was a NY Times article about it, but I imagine it's behind a paywall. Nothing in DOR's CNN snippet convinces me to change my mind and I boycott CNN so I won't click on the link to see more.

I could actively research, but the last time I did that I had to dig through a massive pile of muck generated by the outrage machine to find the actual video. What's the point? And the actual news stories today are the COVID strain out of the UK and the CDC vaccine recommendations. The latter is pretty gosh-darn important considering a bunch of official CDC documentation and guidance looked like they were about to recommend letting grandma die.

Don't see anything to update my opinion and don't see any reason I should be looking to change my mind. I SHOULD look more into this new covid strain, but between the PVC Cement and the bleach, I don't think I'm going to form great opinions on that right now, and I'd rather form great opinions than bad opinions I have to later unmake.

[TopHatter]

Trump wants Supreme Court to overturn Pa. election results

WASHINGTON (AP) — Undeterred by dismissals and admonitions from judges, President Donald Trump's campaign continued with its unprecedented efforts to overturn the results of the Nov 3. election Sunday, saying it had filed a new petition with the Supreme Court.

The petition seeks to reverse a trio of Pennsylvania Supreme Court cases having to do with mail-in ballots and asks the court to reject voters' will and allow the Pennsylvania General Assembly to pick its own slate of electors.

While the prospect of the highest court in the land throwing out the results of a democratic election based on unfounded charges of voter fraud is extraordinary unlikely, it wouldn't change the outcome. President-elect Joe Biden would still be the winner even without Pennsylvania because of his wide margin of victory in the Electoral College.

“The petition seeks all appropriate remedies, including vacating the appointment of electors committed to Joseph Biden and allowing the Pennsylvania General Assembly to select their replacements," Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani said in a statement.

He is asking the court to move swiftly so it can rule before Congress meets on Jan. 6 to tally the vote of the Electoral College, which decisively confirmed Biden's win with 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232. But the justices are not scheduled to meet again, even privately, until Jan 8, two days after Congress counts votes.

Pennsylvania last month certified Biden as the winner of the state's 20 Electoral College votes after three weeks of vote counting and a string of failed legal challenges.

Trump’s campaign and his allies have now filed roughly 50 lawsuits alleging widespread voting fraud. Almost all have been dismissed or dropped because there is no evidence to support their allegations.

Trump has lost before judges of both political parties, including some he appointed. And some of his strongest rebukes have come from conservative Republicans. The Supreme Court has also refused to take up two cases — decisions that Trump has scorned.

The new case is at least the fourth involving Pennsylvania that Trump’s campaign or Republican allies have taken to the Supreme Court in a bid to overturn Biden’s victory in the state or at least reverse court decisions involving mail-in balloting. Many more cases were filed in state and federal courts. Roughly 10,000 mail-in ballots that arrived after polls closed but before a state court-ordered deadline remain in limbo, awaiting the highest court’s decision on whether they should be counted.

The Trump campaign’s filing Sunday appears to target three decisions of Pennsylvania’s Democratic-majority state Supreme Court.

In November, the state’s highest court upheld a Philadelphia judge’s ruling that state law only required election officials to allow partisan observers to be able to see mail-in ballots being processed, not stand close enough to election workers to see the writing on individual envelopes.

It also ruled that more than 8,300 mail-in ballots in Philadelphia that had been challenged by the Trump campaign because of minor technical errors — such as a voter’s failure to write their name, address or date on the outer ballot envelope — should be counted. In October, the court ruled unanimously that counties are prohibited from rejecting mail-in ballots simply because a voter’s signature does not resemble the signature on the person’s voter registration form.

The Pennsylvania Republican Party has a pending petition on the state's mail-in-ballot deadline in which the party specifically says in its appeal that it recognizes the issue will not affect the outcome of the 2020 election.

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[TopHatter]

Trump calls Bolton ‘one of the dumbest people in Washington’ after former aide decries talk of martial law
Donald Trump has reignited a longstanding feud with his former national security adviser, describing John Bolton as “one of the dumbest people in Washington” in a tweet after the president's ex-appointee lambasted him on television.

“What would Bolton, one of the dumbest people in Washington, know?” the president wrote in a tweet posted just after midnight on Sunday. “Wasn’t he the person who so stupidly said, on television, ‘Libyan solution’, when describing what the U.S. was going to do for North Korea?”

Mr Trump then added: “I’ve got plenty of other Bolton ‘stupid stories.’”

The president’s late-night tweets came after Mr Bolton appeared on CNN and decried comments made by Michael Flynn, another former national security adviser who Mr Trump pardoned after he pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his secret work for the Turkish government before joining the White House administration.

Flynn has suggested the president could enact martial law as part of a last-ditch effort to overturn the results of the 2020 elections, saying in a recent appearance on Newsmax that Mr Trump “could take military capabilities, and he could place those in states and basically rerun an election in each of those states” if he wanted to.

In reality, the president does not appear to have any remaining options in his undemocratic attempts to overturn his electoral defeat to President-elect Joe Biden. The Electoral College has confirmed Mr Biden’s victory after he received more votes than any winning candidate in the nation’s history, and flipped a number of crucial battleground states to the Democratic Party.

Mr Trump’s lawsuits have largely been discredited and debunked by state and federal judges, and there does not appear to be enough support in Congress and the Senate to challenge the vote in any meaningful way. Still, the president has raised over $200 million since Election Day while vowing to hold onto power.

And he reportedly met with Flynn on Friday in the Oval Office, according to the New York Times, which said the two men discussed the possibility of enacting martial law.

But the president was hitting out at the New York Times and his former adviser by Sunday, writing in another tweet: “Martial law = Fake News. Just more knowingly bad reporting!”

Mr Bolton described the comments as “appalling” in an interview with CNN on Saturday, adding: “There’s no other way to describe it. It’s unbelievable, almost certainly completely without precedent.”

“I don’t think he’s ever read the Constitution,” Mr Bolton said. “If he has, he clearly doesn’t understand it. And if he did understand it at one point, he’s forgotten it.”

The two have been at odds with each other ever since Mr Bolton left the administration in September 2019 and later wrote a book detailing his experiences in the White House. The president later filed a lawsuit against his former national security adviser demanding he stop publishing the book, which never happened.
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[TopHatter]

GVChamp are you still of the opinion that Flynn never called for some form of martial law?

[astralis]

standard Trumpian method -- state "some people are saying" -- insert something outrageous -- "but I'm not calling for that" to ensure CYA.

looks like Flynn imitated his master, and got his attention.

[DOR]

Flynn--


(CNN)President Donald Trump convened a heated meeting in the Oval Office on Friday, including lawyer Sidney Powell and her client, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, two people familiar with the matter said, describing a session that began as an impromptu gathering but devolved and eventually broke out into screaming matches at certain points as some of Trump's aides pushed back on Powell and Flynn's more outrageous suggestions about overturning the election.

Flynn had suggested earlier this week that Trump could invoke martial law as part of his efforts to overturn the election that he lost to President-elect Joe Biden -- an idea that arose again during the meeting in the Oval Office, one of the people said. It wasn't clear whether Trump endorsed the idea, but others in the room forcefully pushed back and shot it down.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/19/polit...law/index.html

[TopHatter]

Trump is just itching to declare martial law
Legal challenges are one thing, but Trump is clearly desperate to deploy the military to satisfy his own ends.

Some dangerous ideas about the role of the U.S. military in American civil society are finding an audience in President Donald Trump.

Both the New York Times and Axios report that the president on Friday welcomed retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s pardoned former national security adviser, to a meeting that, at one point, touched on the prospect of potentially using the military to somehow overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election that former Vice President Joe Biden decisively won.

The meeting came just days after Flynn appeared on the far-right news channel Newsmax to declare that Trump, in his role as commander-in-chief, could “take military capabilities, and he could place them in those [swing states], and basically re-run an election in each of those states.”

“These people out there talking about martial law like it’s something that we’ve never done. Martial law has been instituted 64 — 64 — times,” Flynn said. “So, I’m not calling for that, we have a Constitutional process … that has to be followed.”

According to New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, Trump on Friday “asked about Flynn’s suggestion of deploying the military, those briefed said,” only for the idea to be shot down by White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone.

Other topics discussed at the meeting included “an executive order to commandeer voting machines … and the specter of Sidney Powell, the conspiracy-spewing election lawyer, obtaining governmental power and a top-level security clearance,” according to Axios.

That Trump welcomed a noted conspiracy theorist like Flynn into his inner circle to discuss somehow overturning the results of the 2020 election is one thing. To actually ask about the prospect of deploying the military to “re-run” the elections themselves is another thing entirely.

“The fact that Mike Flynn continues to spread conspiracy theories and misrepresent the president’s legal authorities is a disgrace to the country and to the uniform he wore,” Jim Golby, a senior fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas-Austin, told Task & Purpose.

“Trump has tried to use the military for electoral benefit before — deploying troops to the border before the Congressional midterms and threatening to use the Insurrection Act this summer,” Golby said, referring to Trump-fed rumors of a ‘migrant caravan’ approaching America’s borders in late 2018. “But discussing these conspiracies in the Oval Office crosses a new line.”

Indeed, Trump’s push comes at a precarious (if not somewhat ridiculous) moment for civil-military affairs in the United States, one that’s been building since the president floated the prospect of invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 to quell nationwide protests this summer.

The idea that Trump might exploit the centuries-old law and send U.S. troops into American streets, combined with the president’s vocal refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power in the run-up to the 2020 election, had previously induced the Defense Department to reiterate its apolitical role in American elections.

“I believe deeply in the principle of an apolitical U.S. military,” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark A. Milley said in September. “In the event of a dispute over some aspect of the elections, by law, U.S. courts and the U.S. Congress are required to resolve any disputes, not the U.S. military. I foresee no role for the U.S. armed forces in this process.”

But Flynn’s calls for not-quite martial law also come amid a post-election reshuffling at the Pentagon — starting with the unceremonious departure Defense Secretary Mark Esper following his summertime break with Trump over the Insurrection Act — and the installation of pro-Trump loyalists there that has raised the specter of a military coup once more despite overwhelming evidence that the U.S. military would never be party to such a thing.

“Normally, retired military officers do not call on the president to throw out the Constitution and install a military junta to ensure that votes are counted in a way that guarantees the incumbent’s re-election,” as my colleague Jeff Schogol recently wrote. “But this is 2020: we’re one tweet away from soccer stadiums being used to hold political prisoners.”

All of this puts a tremendous strain on civil-military relations, one that, as Schogol notes, will give the incoming Biden administration even more reasons to mistrust the U.S. military when the transition formally comes to a conclusion on Jan. 20. And luckily, the norms are holding: On Friday, Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy and Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville reiterated in a joint statement that there “is no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of an American election.”

But the very fact that Trump welcomed Flynn into the White House and seriously entertained the prospect of military action should be alarming to both senior government officials and to average voters living at home. Legal challenges are one thing, but Trump is either desperate to deploy the military to satisfy his own ends or simply trying to see how far America will let him go — and it’s up to the military leaders to hold strong against those autocratic impulses, no matter what.

“The military won’t follow illegal orders and Trump won’t invoke martial law, but Trump even considering these crazy ideas legitimizes them and will increase calls for military involvement in elections,” as Golby told Task & Purpose. “That damage will last after Trump is gone and pressure for the military to play a bigger role in politics will continue to grow.”
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Fortunately the United States military isn't about to obey the unlawful orders of a spoiled brain-damaged child like Donald Trump. But as the article says, the damage he does will last long after he's gone.

[TopHatter]

My general feeling is that Flynn is off. TX cannot claim injury from PA's election so the Court should dismiss the case. Candidates are the injured parties and candidates have to file the charges, and the Trump campaign keeps getting its cases thrown out of court. In the public court, the Trump administration inflates their claims even more, but there is no evidence produced of widespread malfeasance. The Trump team's actions and rhetoric is unethical and anti-democratic.

WRT Flynn specifically, he's talking about stuff he knows next-to-nothing about, and even if he were, he lied about his work for Turkey and he lied about his Russian contacts: I don't trust anything he has to say anyways. He was treated unfairly by the FBI and an over-zealous judge, so his karmic balance is probably 0, but he should spend the rest of his life operating a coffee shop in Boise or whatever. He has no place in the national conversation about anything.

I don't think Flynn was treated unfairly and I think the judge did just fine, but everything else you've said is entirely fair, reasonable and accurate.

Unfortunately the vast majority of the GOP wants to continue pledging their allegiance to the cult of Donald Trump. And Trump himself is clearly sympatico with Flynn.

[GVChamp]

Out of curiosity, how do you feel about those assertions?

My general feeling is that Flynn is off. TX cannot claim injury from PA's election so the Court should dismiss the case. Candidates are the injured parties and candidates have to file the charges, and the Trump campaign keeps getting its cases thrown out of court. In the public court, the Trump administration inflates their claims even more, but there is no evidence produced of widespread malfeasance. The Trump team's actions and rhetoric is unethical and anti-democratic.

WRT Flynn specifically, he's talking about stuff he knows next-to-nothing about, and even if he were, he lied about his work for Turkey and he lied about his Russian contacts: I don't trust anything he has to say anyways. He was treated unfairly by the FBI and an over-zealous judge, so his karmic balance is probably 0, but he should spend the rest of his life operating a coffee shop in Boise or whatever. He has no place in the national conversation about anything.

[TopHatter]

Lou Dobbs Airs Stunning Fact-Check of His Own Election Conspiracies After Company Threatens Legal Action

Fox Business host Lou Dobbs has recently taken to raising questions about voting machine companies, which have been cast as complicit in the supposed grand conspiracy to steal the 2020 election from President Donald Trump.

One of those companies, Florida-based Smartmatic, responded to his comments and those of others with demands for retractions from Fox News, Newsmax, and OAN. In a lengthly demand letter threatening legal action, the company cited comments from Dobbs and others that falsely implied a nefarious link between Smartmatic and Dominion.

The letter cited wild speculative comments from Dobbs like, “The states, as you well know now, they have no ability to audit meaningfully the votes that are cast because the servers are somewhere else and are considered proprietary and they won’t touch them.” It also cited comments from Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani on Dobbs’ show, and fellow Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo.

Another wild Dobbs claim deemed false by Smartmatic: “Dominion has connections to UK based Smartmatic, a voting technology company established in 2000 that had ties to Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez.”

Well, in a stunning segment on Friday, Dobbs aired what amounted to a fact-check of the false and misleading claims he himself made.

Dobbs started the segment by saying, “There are lots of opinions about the integrity of the election, the irregularities of mail-in voting, of election voting machines and voting software. One of the companies is Smartmatic, and we reached out to one of the leading authorities on open source software for elections, Eddie Perez, for his insight and views.”

The show then cut to a segment featuring someone else asking Perez several direct questions debunking conspiracy theories about Smartmatic.

Perez — the Global Director of Technology Development & Open Standards for the Open Source Election Technology Institute — blunty said, “I have not seen any evidence that Smartmatic’s software was used to delete, change, alter anything related to vote tabulation.”

“Smartmatic says its software was never used outside of L.A. County in 2020. Do you know whether or not that’s true?” was one of the questions.

“That is my understanding,” Perez said.

He also made it clear that Smartmatic and Dominion are completely separate companies, and even more tellingly, he pushed back on the idea that there is a direct connection between Smartmatic and George Soros.

Perez debunked one of the more incendiary claims about votes supposedly being tabulated in foreign countries.

“In the United States the ballots that are cast in the United States are tabulated in the United States.”

As soon as the segment ended, the show went to break — sans commentary from Dobbs.
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[TopHatter]

...the Supreme Court is not looking at the merits of the cases and is only dismissing cases on technicalities and that we should expect more from the SC and the GOP.

Out of curiosity, how do you feel about those assertions?

[TopHatter]

Because I watched the actual Newsmax interview where he says "I am not calling for that." It is around the 3 minute mark.

Michael Flynn to Newsmax TV: Trump Has Options to Secure Integrity of 2020 Election | Newsmax.com

He says "we have a Constitutional process. We have a clear Constitutional process that has to be followed."

He then expresses frustration that the Supreme Court is not looking at the merits of the cases and is only dismissing cases on technicalities and that we should expect more from the SC and the GOP.

So, yes, he is lying out of both sides of his mouth. And therefore, no, it's not a blatant mischaracterization of Flynn's view, nor typical journalistic malpractice.

It's just quoting him verbatim. The same thing that enrages Trump and his followers, not coincidentally.

[GVChamp]

Because I watched the actual Newsmax interview where he says "I am not calling for that." It is around the 3 minute mark.

Michael Flynn to Newsmax TV: Trump Has Options to Secure Integrity of 2020 Election | Newsmax.com

He says "we have a Constitutional process. We have a clear Constitutional process that has to be followed."

He then expresses frustration that the Supreme Court is not looking at the merits of the cases and is only dismissing cases on technicalities and that we should expect more from the SC and the GOP.

[TopHatter]

That's because it is a blatant mischaracterization of Flynn's view. Typical journalistic malpractice.

He explicitly says he is NOT calling for martial law in his Newsmax interview.

I just have to ask: How did you pull this from what Flynn actually said and has been saying all along? The man has been hinting at, support and calling for martial law and using the military to overturn a free and fair election.

Where exactly (or even vaguely) is there a "blatant mischaracterization of Flynn's view"? I am seriously baffled at how you're able to come to that conclusion.