GET OUT: US politics November 2020

Going great

Trump: I said I’d like to file, to the lawyers, I’d like to file one nice big beautiful lawsuit talking about this and many other things with tremendous proof pic.twitter.com/YA3Acedf28

— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) November 29, 2020

Well, what does he even need the useless lawyers for? Sounds like he knows what he's talking about, he should probably just draw up that big beautiful lawsuit himself.

gargantuan, colossal proof

"Look at the election you have coming up [in Georgia] right now. You're using the same garbage machinery, Dominion" -- Trump demoralizes Republicans by suggesting their votes don't matter because the upcoming Senate runoffs in Georgia are rigged pic.twitter.com/aYM6KcGaos

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 29, 2020

no...don’t...stop

it's hilarious because one of the reasons the GOP leadership entertained his delusions was because they thought he would help campaign in GA.

Remind me again, what dimension of chess is it when you do an interview with the 'news' network you've told your followers over and over to stop watching?

great, keep it coming.
Hope he has some effect.
Any other senators who've had his greatest recent gift about to drop out of the senate, oh please do.

Is it disenfranchisement when you dissuade voters from showing up for your theoretical allies?

Remind me again, what dimension of chess is it when you do an interview with the 'news' network you've told your followers over and over to stop watching?

https://dobermann.wymark.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/imported-media/images/1563743436.jpg

My goodness, there's a real possibility that Donald Trump will be instrumental in handing the senate over to the dems. Can't wait to see the array of GOP reactions once they realize they've welded themselves inside the train they were so gleefully running off a cliff.

I mean, the whole reason there is a runoff election is because it was a really close race, right? So there was always a chance. Some hypothesized that the reason Biden did as well as he did in GA was strictly because (enough) people hated Trump, but it looks like those other races were squeakers, too. The question is then whether lingering support for Trump will do the opposite, and rather than drive out Dems to vote, counterproductively convince his base *not* to vote, which yeah, would be wonderful. Certainly Trump seemed to be successful enough convincing his flock to be wary of mail-in votes, let's hope he keeps that negative momentum going.

I wonder how much money they’ll have to pay him to come down to Georgia and the campaign for these two assholes and convince the rubes it’s not fixed against them

This description of Joe McCarthy in Fredrik Logevall’s JFK biography, when you take out the name McCarthy, is just...wow. pic.twitter.com/y9owEbgNfF

— Bianna Golodryga (@biannagolodryga) November 29, 2020

More... pic.twitter.com/S6Qh4kLDfH

— Bianna Golodryga (@biannagolodryga) November 29, 2020

Warnock vs Loeffler is bc the nov 3rd vote for that seat was a “jungle” primary

Ossoff vs Perdue is because neither hit 50%

JiC u know there is a direct line connecting McCarthy to both Trump and Stone, right?

My guess is warnock and Perdue will win

i've lost count now but do we need both to win, or only one to win to tie (and then Harris is tiebreaker vote)?

Both

to get to 50/50 + Harris

Wow can’t believe a generic description of a demagogue also describes another demagogue

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-moves-to-strip-job-protections-from-white-house-budget-analysts-as-he-races-to-transform-civil-service/2020/11/27/d04f6eba-2e69-11eb-96c2-aac3f162215d_story.html

ripping out the phone lines and putting glue in the keyboards as they prepare to depart, as expected.

Hammer party, surely he must ramp it up.
No self control like

JiC u know there is a direct line connecting McCarthy to both Trump and Stone, right?

Yep, but I suspect that's probably just a strange coincidence, as Cohn did not make McCarthy or Trump the lunatics they are, imo, he was his own enabling kind of sociopath, hovering around them (and others) like flies on shit.

it's a bit more direct than that
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/09/19/roy-cohn-donald-trump-documentary-228144
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTrHL7Vo_SQ

For a while every Biden news cycle is going to be like the Trump Tweet Curse: there will be a Trump news cycle from several years ago that matches the current cycle exactly, except every right-wing pundit is going to have precisely the opposite take as they had back then

— Quinta Jurecic (@qjurecic) November 29, 2020

Omigod like Joe just bust his foot playing with his dog.
God they'll have to rethink and give the election to t now that he's ill innit.
Yeah like.

I fear the next 4 years we're going to have a shadow Trump presidency. He'll be tweeting at his 'friendly' foreign powers (Poland, Russia, Turkey, Israel, Hungary, etc.) to ignore Biden because 'I'll be back in 2025', and they'll do their best to torpedo any worthwhile Biden foreign policy. Meanwhile most Republicans will treat Biden as illegitimate, spout Trump's rantings throughout the term, and probably refuse to even turn up at the inauguration, SOTU, etc. It's going to be bad.

Or, Trump will tweet to all his old cronies and they will all go "Go away, loserboy!

Mnuchin moving 455 billion of unspent covid stimulus money into a fund that the new administration cannot use without congressional approval, on the grounds that markets have stabilised.

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 own this book and I remember getting to this part and going "wait, is this serious" for a good long while before shaking my head and putting it away forever

Yeah me too — and then years later he made this "who me?" article trying to pass the bullshit off as "I was just saying you should write down your goals to help you focus on them" in a most trolling egregious way that, in hindsight, clearly showed what was to come from him

I used to be on his mailing list and he spent a lot of time responding to people who were actual physicists who wrote him to disprove his idiotic "new theory of gravity" claiming that he actually knew more about science than they did and how gravity is just a THEORY and therefore you can't actually debunk it and his ideas are JUST AS VALID as anyone else's and yeah it really pointed the direction to where he was going

is there a Dilbert character that resembles Adam’s’ personality?

So about those rallies:

As the 2020 campaign wound down, President Donald Trump held rallies across the country to fire up his supporters and get them out to vote. Many saw the rallies as a sign of big enthusiasm for Trump, but the data suggest the visits did not produce the desired impact for the president.

Comparing Trump campaign stops over the last two weeks of the race to election results shows that in the overwhelming majority of cases, Trump underperformed his 2016 margins in the counties he visited, in some cases by large amounts.

There were 30 Trump campaign stops in that period, according to an NBC News tally, in states from Arizona to Nebraska to Pennsylvania. In five counties that Trump visited he saw better results than he did in 2016, but in the remaining 25 his margins of victory got smaller, his margin of defeat grew or the county flipped Democratic

that's the funny part, I think everyone imagines when they read the strip that he saw himself as Dilbert but he really sees himself as Dogbert. and actually resembles the pointy-haired boss more than either.

iirc there was a garbageman character who was secretly the smartest man in the universe and I remember thinking "I really hope this isn't supposed to be a stand-in for Scott Adams" and what do you know it actually was

Yeah, I used to subscribe to his mailing list. He used one of my ideas for one of his weekend strips.

SA was kooky in the 90s too. He claimed that since the Dilberito was the perfect food, your body would recognize it and only want to eat Dilberitos for the rest of time.

anybody fired by t now could conceivably be rehired by Biden. I mean if there was any redemption for anybody still around to be fired like.

I don't think I'm ready to wade into the Biden thread, but I'm really feeling disheartened today by all the people who seem to be very demonstrative in completely writing off the Biden presidency already instead of, y'know, making plans to continue pushing him. Like, no, I'm still not a fan and I'm really skeptical about him making any significantly progressive moves, but at the same time, after what we've been through for the last four years, it's hard to me to see people so ready to just wash their hands of the next four years.

Yeah I don't touch the Biden threads, but Antony Blinken is a warmonger. We're in for bad times.

so i guess you love bombing Iraqi children, is that it jon

Blinken is absolutely terrible, for sure, but I don't think burying our heads in the sand to wait out the next four years is the answer either.

I don't know who's planning on burying their head in the sand, or really what that would mean here, but pressuring the Biden admin against war has to start now. Blinken's alleged Francophilia, a much touted "feature" over here, doesn't encourage me, since I can see Europe gladly joining a war against Iran and/or Syria (and/or Turkey? au revoir OTAN)

Some good and bad in his record but Bernie’s FP advisor said Blinken was a good choice.

Biden campaigned on rejoining JCPOA and his cabinet will be full of people who supported that diplomacy.

Biden campaigned on rejoining JCPOA and his cabinet will be full of people who supported that diplomacy.

Fwiw the "head in the sand" isn't aimed at anyone around here, just a general vibe I'm seeing from a lot of folks on Twitter who say they are focusing on getting someone more progressive in line for 2024. Which, yes, but there's some other work to be done in the meantime too.

genuinely recommend logging off of twitter

I don't think I'm ready to wade into the Biden thread, but I'm really feeling disheartened today by all the people who seem to be very demonstrative in completely writing off the Biden presidency already instead of, y'know, making plans to continue pushing him.

I expressed a similar sentiment in the Democratic (Party) Direction thread this morning. I sense a divide between people (like me) who place some measure of hope (however small) in the presidency as a means to advance meaningful change and those who find it hopeless so long as the administration is made up of members of the "political establishment."
(I suspect this is partially a matter of different lessons being drawn from the Obama presidency.)