GET OUT: US politics November 2020

Which case was it where the judge ordered them to also pay Pennsylvania's legal fees?

This photo accompanies a Politico story with the headline "'He's always had a plan': The inexorable rise of Jake Sullivan" and now I'm wondering exactly when he rose inexorably from his grave.

https://static.politico.com/e0/5b/445c30ef4f238b22a2bea3142976/ap20329686581196.jpg

ugh, i can see why he's gotten far in public life. when he enters a meeting room and pulls out paperwork everyone must just be like "let's get this done as quickly as possible, whatever sullivan wants. for fuck's sake that guy is a depressing ghoul - just do whatever he asks and get it over."

Lol, Sullivan was really creepy in Phantasm.

Look we all knew there would be some lizard people on the Biden team.

honestly, i'm roleplaying as a lizard wizard in my divinity: original sin 2 campaign right now, and i resent that comparison.

sullivan is a ghoul, undead. poison heals him, and healing spells hurt him

wrap sullivan up in a healing burrito and roll him down a hill imo. at the bottom, you'll find only an empty burrito

The burrito that defined a generation

some are starting to get worried pic.twitter.com/94WH9cCAm4

— Coping MAGA (@CopingMAGA) November 27, 2020

coping maga has been fun

Can somone explain the scott adams/sugar ray thing? I dont think I get it.

recount in the specified counties in Wisconsin is done. added 138 more votes to Biden's advantage.

lol...money well spent, what a grifter.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/27/politics/milwaukee-county-certifies-election-result/index.html

In which the chairwoman of the GOP tries to rally Georgia voters for the Senate. It doesn't go well:

McDaniel is being peppered with questions about the accusations about fraud.
One suggested that the voting machines counted votes that weren’t there.
McDaniel conceded- the audit did not show that.
Crowd did not like the response.

— Ryan Nobles (@ryanobles) November 28, 2020

Another person asks- “Why should we vote in this election when we know it’s already decided?”
McDaniel responded- “It’s not!”
(This btw.. is the GOP’s worst nightmare in Georgia).

— Ryan Nobles (@ryanobles) November 28, 2020

One person from the crowd yells out as McDaniel was speaking-

“Kemp is a crook!!”

(Brian Kemp is the GOP Governor and a committed Trump supporter)

— Ryan Nobles (@ryanobles) November 28, 2020

McDaniel is now pleading with the crowd to focus their energy on the Senate race and promises of they will worry about Election fraud issues “later”.

— Ryan Nobles (@ryanobles) November 28, 2020

As McDaniel wraps up her remarks she tells the crowd she will tell the President about how fired up the crowd was. The crowd erupts in a “Trump, Trump, Trump” chant.
Remember she was here in support of Perdue and Loeffler.

— Ryan Nobles (@ryanobles) November 28, 2020

Afterward- I asked @GOPChairwoman if the President’s consistent attacking of the election process could endanger voter turnout and hurt the GOP in the runoff.
She argued the passion for Trump will translate to Perdue and Loeffler.

— Ryan Nobles (@ryanobles) November 28, 2020

more of this please

can't wait until Joe Manchin gets to be the swing vote of the Democratic party

(GA will be nice but it's still uphill)

"are you not entertained?" us politics dystopiaville, ga

knock on wood please

they're gonna draw out the Senate runoffs too, right? with lawsuits?

Someone needs to un-disenfranchise these poor idiot voters.

I think people are forgetting about the etymology of “election”. Elect comes from ecto, which means “eternal lawsuit”

Can they file a lawsuit against the voices in their heads?

...but consider White women specifically. The 2016 exit polls told us that 52 percent of White women voted for Donald Trump. As with most exit polls, that number turned out to be not quite accurate: By August 2018, a Pew Research analysis estimated that the percentage of White women who voted for Trump in 2016 was actually closer to 47 percent, compared with 45 percent for Clinton. Still not great.

Fast forward to Election Day 2020: Exit polling indicates that Trump’s support had increased among White women, with some major polls putting it at 55 percent. Though we can again expect the eventual figure to be adjusted, the reality of Trump’s support is not likely to change. And that shouldn’t surprise anyone.

White women are not a swing voting bloc. In the past 18 presidential elections, they have repeatedly voted for the Republican candidate, breaking only for Lyndon B. Johnson and for Bill Clinton’s second term. As political scientist Jane Junn wrote in 2016, “The elephant in the room is white and female, and she has been standing there since 1952.”

This is because, as a political force, White female rage has long been better at enforcing patriarchal norms than dismantling them. Why? Quite frankly, White women benefit from the status quo, while change would require burning down that system and building a new one — one where they and their children might lose the shared superiority and protection they get by being attached to powerful White men.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/27/white-women-vote-republican-get-used-it-democrats/

White women benefit from the status quo, while change would require burning down that system and building a new one — one where they and their children might lose the shared superiority and protection they get by being attached to powerful White men.

That analysis identifies something real and worth talking about. Still, when the political split of white women is 47% vs. 45%, it is a bit hard to treat them as a voting bloc with a unified interest in maintaining the status quo, any more than they are a unified voting bloc in favor of smashing the patriarchy. I suspect that the category "white women" encompasses such a broad swath of interests and ideologies that it is a fairly blurry lens through which to evaluate bloc voting habits.

the Democratic Party should stop wasting so much time on the lost cause of suburban White moms

that seems unsupported by the rest of the essay. and the democratic party shouldn't be giving up on any group of voters right now.

Among other things, the author Lyz Lenz appears to believe that white women are uniformly married to powerful white men and have children by them, which seems objectively wrong.

that seems unsupported by the rest of the essay. and the democratic party shouldn't be giving up on any group of voters right now.

Allocation of resources, though. Desperately chasing after blocs of voters that have been Republican forever - Miami Cubans, white women, old rich whites - is a poor strategy when you’re bleeding support among the blocs that have won you elections in the past.

I'd attach an asterix to Miami Cubans: under 40 they're winnable.

Among other things, the author Lyz Lenz appears to believe that white women are uniformly married to powerful white men and have children by them, which seems objectively wrong.

Yes. Important omission.

Married white women skew Republican. The rest... don't.

White women are not a swing voting bloc.

If a population that's consistently close to 50-50 Dem/GOP isn't a swing voting bloc, what is?

those same CNN exit polls this essay is based on, whose numbers are almost definitely wrong, has white women as 32% of the electorate. I don't think it makes any sense to write off one third of all voters.

“Fast forward to Election Day 2020: Exit polling indicates that Trump’s support had increased among White women.” 1. Stop using this exit poll data 2. Trump did not do better by eight points with white women (her figure) AND nonwhite voters! That makes no sense! https://t.co/NnxFWR1upz

— Isaac Chotiner (@IChotiner) November 28, 2020

Writing off is a bad way to phrase it. You don’t actively thumb your nose at them, but you shouldn’t let fear of white women govern messaging about police or social justice or X. They’re welcome to come along if they’d like.

Yeah I'd agree with that. It's an important discussion but the essay just seems really poorly argued.

i feel like we know that standardized ethnic categories developed for the broadcast era are not just reductive but actively misleading. i can accept that columnists are this dumb, but surely campaign staff are not?

Thinking about groups a relatively coherent is a useful way to allocate resources (in the absence of better options).

But often articles like that miss the essential fact that a vote is a vote. An white woman’s vote for a democrat is not worth more or less depending on how the demographic group she belongs to votes.

Anyway

The PA Supreme Court dismisses the case brought by U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly that sought to overturn last year’s law creating no-excuse mail voting and to throw out those mail ballots cast in this election.

This is the case the Commonwealth Court had earlier blocked certification in. pic.twitter.com/nO7Glvu46Y

— Jonathan Lai 🙊 賴柏羽 (@Elaijuh) November 28, 2020

They successfully cleared a path to the US Supreme Court! Victory is closer than ever!

Hahah oh the gems here

“The strategy was, ‘Anyone who is willing to go out and say, ‘They stole it,’ roll them out. Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell. Send Ric Grenell out West. Send Matt Schlapp somewhere. Just roll everybody up who is willing to do it into a clown car.” https://t.co/gSt6GctCtm

— Sarah Longwell (@SarahLongwell25) November 29, 2020

just occurred to me that “trust the plan” is pretty much the same message as every doomsday cult ever

Anyone able to C&P choice bits of that?

The facts were indisputable: President Trump had lost.

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

One might even say he's... increasingly isolated. Anyway.

However cleareyed Trump’s aides may have been about his loss to President-elect Joe Biden, many of them nonetheless indulged their boss and encouraged him to keep fighting with legal appeals. They were “happy to scratch his itch,” this adviser said. “If he thinks he won, it’s like, ‘Shh . . . we won’t tell him.’"...

The 20 days between the election on Nov. 3 and the greenlighting of Biden’s transition exemplified some of the hallmarks of life in Trump’s White House: a government paralyzed by the president’s fragile emotional state; advisers nourishing his fables; expletive-laden feuds between factions of aides and advisers; and a pernicious blurring of truth and fantasy...

Trump empowered loyalists who were willing to tell him what he wanted to hear — that he would have won in a landslide had the election not been rigged and stolen — and then to sacrifice their reputations by waging a campaign in courtrooms and in the media to convince the public of that delusion.

...The Venezuelan tale was too fantastical even for Trump, a man predisposed to conspiracy theories who for years has feverishly spread fiction. Advisers described the president as unsure about the latest gambit — made worse by the fact that what looked like black hair dye mixed with sweat had formed a trail dripping down both sides of Giuliani’s face during the news conference. Trump thought the presentation made him “look like a joke,” according to one campaign official who discussed it with him...

Ultimately, it was the late count of mail-in ballots that erased Trump’s early leads in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and other battleground states and propelled Biden to victory. As Trump watched his margins shrink and then reverse, he became enraged, and he saw a conspiracy at play.

“You really have to understand Trump’s psychology,” said Anthony Scaramucci, a longtime Trump associate and former White House communications director who is now estranged from the president. “The classic symptoms of an outsider is, there has to be a conspiracy. It’s not my shortcomings, but there’s a cabal against me. That’s why he’s prone to these conspiracy theories.”...

On the afternoon of Nov. 13, a Friday, Trump called Giuliani from the Oval Office while other advisers were present, including Vice President Pence; White House counsel Pat Cipollone; Johnny McEntee, the director of presidential personnel; and Clark.

Giuliani, who was on speakerphone, told the president that he could win and that his other advisers were lying to him about his chances. Clark called Giuliani an expletive and said he was feeding the president bad information. The meeting ended without a clear path, according to people familiar with the discussion.

The next day, a Saturday, Trump tweeted out that Giuliani, Ellis, Powell and others were now in charge of his legal strategy. Ellis startled aides by entering the campaign’s Arlington headquarters and instructing staffers that they must now listen to her and Giuliani.

“They came in one day and were like, ‘We have the president’s direct order. Don’t take an order if it doesn’t come from us,’ ” a senior administration official recalled.

Clark and Miller pushed back, the official said. Ellis threatened to call Trump, to which Miller replied, “Sure, let’s do this,” said a campaign adviser.

It was a fiery altercation, not unlike the many that had played out over the past four years in the corridors of the West Wing. The outcome was that Giuliani and Ellis, as well as Powell — the “elite strike force,” as they dubbed themselves — became the faces of the president’s increasingly unrealistic attempts to subvert democracy.

It goes on in this vein. Most of this is a recap of things that have been widely reported.

good morning!

White House counsel Pat Cipollone; Johnny McEntee, the director of presidential personnel; and Clark.

Pretty sure I've got relations called McEntee.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiIGGDeN7D0

Trump was, in the telling of one close adviser, like “Mad King George, muttering, ‘I won. I won. I won.’ ”

I've been moderately fascinated for years (since we've been forced to care) by Trump's adherence to Norman Vincent Peale and "The Power of Positive Thinking." Peale was famously the pastor of the New York City church that Trump attended when he was a kid, which is to say, the last time he ever went to church. That must have left some sort of a mark on his addled mind, and definitely instilled an ethos in this most empty of vessels. An empty ethos, for sure, but an ethos all the same, and for sure a lifetime of failing upwards and thwarting criminal prosecution must really have ratified that ethos.

This was a good reminder/primer from NPR:

President Trump has long been a champion of what's been called positive thinking — the power to make things that you want to see happen actually happen.

"Affirm it, believe it, visualize it, and it will actualize itself." Such mantras have characterized much of the Trump story from his childhood when he first absorbed it from the man who first spoke it, Norman Vincent Peale.

Peale was a minister and author much admired by Trump's father. His most famous book, The Power of Positive Thinking, sold millions of copies in multiple languages and helped spawn a self-help movement and industry that has flourished ever since.

The Trumps attended Peale's Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and Peale officiated at the first of Donald Trump's three marriage ceremonies.

It has been argued that Trump stands as the single most successful practitioner to date of Peale's philosophy. Surely his careers as a builder and businessman, TV reality show star and media-dominating politician seemed to prove what Peale preached: "What the mind can conceive and believe, and the heart desire, you can achieve."

Emulating Peale's ferocious focus on attitude probably helped Trump plow ahead when his presidential prospects seemed hopeless just weeks before Election Day in 2016. The candidate appeared behind in polls and a now-infamous audio recording revealed his toxic comments about women.

But "there are no hopeless situations," Peale had counseled, "only people who take hopeless attitudes."

Obstacles, Peale taught, should never be a deterrent: "You will find they haven't half the strength you think they have."

Until this year, it is possible Trump took this literally. Arguably, he was getting away with it far more often than not.

He seemed to have been experimenting with this parallel universe approach all his life. It was not just the ups and downs of his business and personal life. It was his dogged insistence that there had only been ups and never any downs. He seemed to be demonstrating that an individual truly could ignore obstacles, defy norms and scoff at official rules and still succeed.

Impeachment? What impeachment?

Even impeachment was not a wall that stopped him but rather a hurdle he managed to clear — with the help of his party in the Senate.

Still, never is a long time, and the year 2020 has ultimately brought greater challenges than impeachment.

Our present moment compounds the coronavirus pandemic, ensuing quarantines and economic strains and the moral crisis prompted by the nationally witnessed killing of George Floyd by police. For months, Trump has tried to deny or minimize the gravity of all of these events. Yet they loom as large as ever — and perhaps larger.

In an insightful Politico essay in October 2017, political analyst Michael Kruse found Peale's imprint on every phase of Trump's career. But near the end, Kruse noted that Trump's success story remained unfinished, like a study in which some results have yet to be counted.

"From a scientific perspective," Kruse wrote, "Trump is an incomplete experiment."

Kruse then quoted the self-help author Mitch Horowitz, who called Trump's story an example of what, in at least the short run, "you can attain through self-help, through self-assertion and people's willingness to believe what they think that they see."

To which Kruse added: "Trump's version of his own reality, some insist, ultimately will crash against something more real."

And that something might well be the COVID-19 crisis and the sequence of events that has followed.

interesting, didn't know about that connection

Kinda explains Scott Adams’ fascination with him too. I remember he had a book in the 90s (back when he was relatively sane) where the final chapter was all about how if you wrote down your goals 15 times a day the universe would magically bend to your will.

i think that was talked about in "the dream," a podcast about pyramid schemes and MLMs, but i may be mixing up sources. i mean i know peale was, but may be forgetting where i learned of trump family's association with it. great podcast, though.

Sounds like the typical MLM/cult pitch - if it’s not working, you aren’t trying hard enough!