A recount in Wisconsin’s largest county demanded by President Donald Trump’s election campaign ended on Friday with the president-elect, Joe Biden, gaining votes.
After the recount in Milwaukee county, Biden made a net gain of 132 votes, out of nearly 460,000 cast. Overall, the Democrat gained 257 votes to Trump’s 125.
Making America Ill Again:
In his Thanksgiving proclamation, President Trump encouraged Americans to gather and give thanks.
'I encourage all Americans to gather, in homes and places of worship, to offer a prayer of thanks to God for our many blessings,' he said in a statement.
Trump's urging Americans to gather for the holiday comes as daily deaths from COVID-19 in the United States have surpassed 2,100 for the first since May as millions of Americans continue to ignore CDC travel guidance and dire warnings from health experts that Thanksgiving could be the 'mother of all superspreader events'.
From Adrienne's corner:
Today the sight of the majority of people all masked up at the Dollar Store, Wallyworld, and Ace Hardware signaled to me that they would gladly climb into a boxcar if ordered to do so. Don't be those people!
That's right: in the crazy world of American anti-maskers, those actually willing to wear a mask (and thereby comply with the Gubmint's guidance on Covid masks) are to be compared with Holocaust Jews boarding the boxcars! A more disgusting 'analogy' has rarely been concocted...
Then we have a Far Right Catholic anti-mask/anti-lockdown nutjob by the name of Michael Matt cackling on about human guinea pigs and... transhumanism. Look up 'Davos'. , apparently:
Bonkers!
Edit: Michael Matt has form in the 'transhumanism' issue (cough!)
It is Giuliani — and not Biden — who has had a long-running, cozy relationship with the authoritarian system that has created the worst refugee crisis in our region’s recent history
Throughout his campaign and presidency, Donald Trump used the crisis in Venezuela for his own political ambitions fairly regularly — but the way his team is now using it to try to reverse an election is the most ironic development yet.
“You couldn’t possibly believe that the company owning this election machinery was an ally of Hugo Chavez, is an ally of Nicolas Maduro, and an ally of George Soros. What do we have to do to get you to the truth?” pondered Giuliani during yet another infamous press conference last week.
As an unidentified brown liquid dropped down his face, Giuliani added that votes in Michigan were “being counted in Germany, by a Venezuelan company. Owned by people who are allies of Maduro, and Chavez.”
Fellow lawyer Sidney Powell — who was announced as a member of the Trump team last week, then abandoned — doubled down, claiming to have evidence that “this came from Venezuela, from Nicolas Maduro, from Hugo Chavez, from Cuba, and from China which has significant interests in Venezuela.”
Powell added even more unlikely details to her story during a Newsmax interview, where she claimed Chavez got the voter technology from the CIA and bribed Georgia’s Republican governor Brian Kemp. This accusation apparently was too wild even for the Trump team, who tried pretending Powell was never a part of the presidential official legal team after the train-wreck interview.
Never mind that Chavez and subsequently Maduro have spent their time in power denouncing alleged CIA plots to overthrow them. No, according to Trump’s legal team, chavistas were working with one of their sworn enemies this whole time, all to defeat Trump.
The idea that Chavez, from the grave, somehow stole an election from Trump when Trump has been saying for years that only he can overthrow the Venezuelan regime is quite something in itself.
But it’s even more ironic when we look at the facts, because it is Giuliani who has had a long-running, cozy relationship with the authoritarian system that has created the worst refugee crisis the region has seen in recent history.
In fact, the disgraced former NYC mayor was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to lobby for Chavez in 2007 when the strongman was still alive.
As was widely reported at the time, Giuliani’s law firm, Bracewell and Giuliani, was hired by the Hugo Chavez government to lobby on behalf of Citgo Petroleum Corp., the US subsidiary of Venezuela’s oil company PDVSA (Petroleos de Venezuela) — and Chavez’s biggest cash cow.
And Giuliani’s work with the regime didn’t stop there. In recent years, he has been a go-to lawyer for corrupt Venezuelans linked to chavismo and looking to escape international money-laundering charges or sanctions.
Giuliani has been helping those who defrauded Venezuela out — all while being the lawyer of the US president who has presented himself as “tough” on chavismo and Castro-communism.
He represented Alejandro Betancourt López in a Justice Department investigation into alleged money laundering in Florida. Betancourt Lopez is know as one of Venezuela’s “boli-burgueses,” those who became part of the country’s new bourgeoisie thanks to the “socialist” Bolivarian revolution.
Betancourt López was an uncharged co-conspirator in a case accusing several Venezuelan businesses, including Betancourt’s cousin, of stealing as much as $1.2 billion from PDVSA and laundering the funds through Florida real estate, as reported by the Washington Post.
He is well-known among Venezuelans as one of the biggest beneficieries of chavista corruption. His company, Derwick Associates, is alleged to have paid bribes to the regime to get contracts to build power plants. Of course, the nation’s electrical system is completely run-down today, and most Venezuelans live with interrupted service or none at all.
Giuliani argued, on Betancourt’s behalf, that the tycoon shouldn’t face criminal charges for laundering money in Florida.
And before doing so, Giuliani already had a relationship with Betancourt, having stayed at his estate in Madrid as Giuliani worked to get dirt on Ukrainian-linked corruption and Joe Biden, per Trump’s request.
Interestingly enough, Giuliani was even wearing chavista ally Betancourt’s Spain-based brand of eyeglasses, Hawkers, as he went on about a chavista conspiracy to rig the US election against Trump last week.
Things get even more odd: According to the AP’s Joshua Goodman, a former bodyguard of Hugo Chavez would be the witness in his case against Smartmatic.
In the lawsuit Giuliani presented in Georgia, an affidavit testifying against Smartmatic appears to be from Captain Leamsy Salazar. Salazar is an ex-Marine who worked security for Chavez and fled to the US after his death in, accusing the regime’s number two — Diosdado Cabello — of drug-trafficking as he did so.
In the affidavit, the witness claims to have been present when votes were rigged using Smartmatic machines during the Venezuelan presidential election of 2013. But claims of vote-rigging during these elections have been debunked by witnesses and experts. In fact, there is no proof of chavista vote-rigging in Venezuela until 2017, when Smartmatic itself rang the alarm that Maduro’s regime did manipulate about one million votes for the national constituency assembly elections.
Additionally, unlike Trump’s team has been claiming, Smartmatic does not own or even have any connection with Dominion Voting Systems, the more widely used system in US elections.
As Trump’s presidency crumbles in an embarrassing array of conspiracy theories and sketchy characters, he and Giuliani make a mockery of Venezuelan tragedy in the process. Unfortunately, many will now associate that tragedy with Trump’s grotesque attempt to stay in power no matter the cost, much like the chavistas he claims to so strongly oppose.
Rage against the voting machines and floofy dresses on right-wing radio
THE MONDAY AFTER Joe Biden was projected as the winner of the 2020 presidential election was a dismal one for the right-wing talk show circuit. Rush Limbaugh, the venerated elder of the realm, sounded dejected. The president needed to appoint an “election czar,” he intoned repeatedly. Then he reminded viewers that the coming week was a “treatment week” for him. Not only had the election been lost, one of the most legendary conservative talk show hosts in the country was going to be out of commission as he coped with his advanced case of lung cancer.
The bad news kept coming. On The Dan Bongino Show, the host—a former NYPD officer and Secret Service agent—bellowed that the result should not be accepted by his listeners. More militant than Limbaugh, who was still interested in evidence that he hoped an election czar would produce, Bongino wanted to keep the Trump base riled up with his “No Surrender” tagline. On Monday, he outlined the “path to victory,” which depended in part on the Arizona count flipping the state for Trump. “We don’t owe the quitter caucus squat,” he said. There is nothing to concede. Donate to Trump’s campaign and legal funds, he urged. On Tuesday, Bongino made mention of his on his own cancer treatment. He needed to have a port installed in his neck for the administration of chemotherapy for his lymphoma; he would record the show prior to his early morning surgery anyway.
Together they set a macabre mood (with an uncomfortable smattering of Shakespearean symbolisms) for the first days of post-Trump talk shows. It was also surprising to hear how little of the Sturm und Drang material they had to activate the base. Perhaps my expectations had been overblown or perhaps the fact that I had never had the stomach to actually listen to either Bongino or Limbaugh erased the context that I needed to truly understand their individual forms of disseminating ire. Despite all of this, the relative reserve was startling. After all, Trump was broadcasting his victory in all caps from his official Twitter account and his talk-show trolls did not seem to be echoing the certainty he had won in quite such explicit terms.
Since those first days of devastated hopes, the lot of them have come up with a playlist for keeping things going when nothing is going right for you. Dan Bongino’s conspiracy of choice has been the theft of the election through technology. On the show that aired on Friday, November 13, Bongino tried to bolster the conspiracy theory around the foreign ownership of Dominion Voting Systems. Dominion had deleted 2.7 million votes nationwide, he alleged, 941,000 of which were erased altogether and 435,000 switched from Trump to Biden. It was a shot in the dark, but listeners clinging to hope for a second Trump presidency could take it and use it to affirm their belief the election had been stolen. They hadn’t lost; they had been cheated. That there was no credible source for the rumors of election fraud was, of course, entirely irrelevant.
The conservative talk show game is like the Trump presidency, an entertainment enterprise. It follows, then, that the single swansong of a “stolen” election can only be played once every hour. The other material that is being added to the mix is revealing to the extent that it shows how the four horsemen of the Trump base (I’m thinking Limbaugh, Bongino, Ben Shapiro, and Mark Levin) expect to keep their base simmering in rage for the long four years ahead.
It follows that beyond coddling the dying embers of widespread electoral fraud via machines or mysterious foreign servers or dead people voting, they’ve returned to the long tried and always true. Two weeks after the election Ben Shapiro turned to “the attack on masculinity” instead of the election, devoting nearly the whole show to Vogue magazine’s depiction of Harry Styles in a dress. “Anyone who pretends that it is not a referendum for men to don floofy dresses is treating you like a full-on idiot,” Shapiro tweeted angrily, going on to add that the whole point of the shoot was an effort by the left to “feminize masculinity.” On his podcast/radio show, Shapiro insisted that the shoot was a means to delegitimize the structure of American families and of men as providers for their families. The bruised egos of male Trump supporters left in the lurch after truck rallies and boat parades were thus petted and preened by the ennobling assurance that they remained the real men of America despite all of the left’s attempts (with Vogue magazine at the ramparts) to put them in dresses.
The same day Shapiro raved about dresses, radio host Mark Levin turned to talking about the American Revolution and the colonialists’ refusal to pay taxes to the British and their decision to sink the tea that the British wanted them to drink. The subsequently passed Coercive Acts, through which the British used to force payment for restitution for the sunk tea, had contemporary parallels. On November 12, Levin had intoned with solemnity that “we’ve mayors that are cancelling Thanksgiving” or that “you will not meet in your own homes in groups greater than ten” or “you will not go to church.” Trump (who later cancelled his own Thanksgiving trip to Mar-a-Lago) had fallen a few rungs in the lineup (he reappears as the show goes on), his place surrendered thus to the War on Thanksgiving. The media, that beloved fallback omnipresent enemy, Levin declared, had joined in with the tyrants. The right had capitulated too much; demands for hand washing and masks and social distancing were superfluous; the reprieve would not come from them but from “true” science. That “true” science was the science supported by Donald Trump.
Levin’s “Thanksgiving as resistance” and “mask-wearing as capitulation” are terribly dangerous prescriptions but not new ones. For the entire duration of the Covid-19 pandemic, these purveyors of right-wing talk show garbage have painted common-sense health regulations as a politically inflected denial of individual liberty. In the aftermath of a lost election whose actual overturning is at best improbable, throwing oneself in the path of Covid-19 is now an even more ennobled performance of resistance against the tyranny of newly elected leaders, even if it does mean dying oneself.
The cabal of talk show hosts that so unnervingly mesmerizes too many Americans is threading a thin line. They want to keep their listeners fuming and listening without, in literal terms, prescribing actual overthrow and violent rebellion. The latter would be bad for business, for the revenue streams attached to their shows. The post-election content repeats old rants: the left has a paramilitary wing (Black Lives Matter and Antifa); the left has wolfpacks (says Levin) that attack ordinary citizens; the left wants men to be feminized (says Shapiro); the left is waging a War on Thanksgiving (says Levin). All of this drivel is disseminated via the nouns and adjectives of an appropriated vocabulary of “evidence” and “facts” and “true” science and with vehement attestations that “(insert name of talk show host) is not actually a proponent of conspiracy theories.”
The incontinent blather of these men is the best proof of what some have long suspected. Trumpism has no substantive content; there is no ideology or even a particular policy agenda beyond the hodgepodge of sundry grievances. Valor, by this playbook, is the performative rebellion of “owning the libs,” even if that means dancing in one’s own excrement or courting a deadly virus. The riddle of the matter is why such a formless, limp and parasitic agenda appeals to over 73 million Americans. Rage is undoubtedly satisfying, its inherent ability to shift blame for one’s own condition onto someone, anyone else, is magnetic.
If the Democratic coalition wants to win again in four years, they may have to consider some directed dissections of this otherwise untouched realm of disinformation and decrepitude. The obvious antidotes, invocations of facts and figures and truth, have not worked. But orchestrated pressure campaigns against the sponsors of these #MAGA shows may do the job. In my ten long days of immersion in the distorted universe of #MAGA talk, I did learn that the one thing these men fear more than any electoral loss is the loss of the money that keeps them pouring hatred into the ears of their pissed off listeners. #MAGA is over; a new president has won; it is time that some chemotherapy was administered to the stubborn tumors still devoted to killing the good cells, the healthy cells, the cells we want to keep.
A brave post by an American Conservative ('silverfiddle')
The first clue President Trump's efforts to overturn the election were not serious was when he appointed stumblebum Rudy Giuliani to head up the effort. Everything that boob involves himself in is quickly reduced to a farcical shambles.
Rudy drools on himself in the courtroom and makes Biden look like the picture of youthful mental clarity, and judges all over the US are throwing out lawsuits left and right, but Team Trump continues to bang the drum on rightwing cable and talk radio. Is this a money grab of some kind, keeping the campaign going? I have my own suspicions...
They can yammer on all day about voting machines and mathematical algorithms, but until they bring the proof in a court of law, its all BS. It's time to pack up the circus tent, send Rudy off to rehab, and have the president deliver a gracious concession speech.
To my fellow Donald Trump voters, I urge you to turn it off, tune it out and drop the bullshitters from your life. Donald Trump did great things and showed the GOP how to win, but its time for him to go. And not return.
Disagree? Bring Evidence. Not Hannity blather, not talk radio talking points or news conference video. Evidence that can be presented to a judge in a court of law.
Source: AOW.
