I think what the president needs to do is, frankly, put his big boy pants on. He needs to acknowledge the fact that he lost.
And he needs to congratulate the winner, just as Jimmy Carter did, just as George H. W. Bush did, and frankly just as Al Gore did. And stop this and let us move forward as a country.
And that’s my feeling. I doubt he’ll listen to me but that’s it.
With a few thousand mail-in ballots left to count:
Mail in ballots so far having gone overwhelming for Biden.
Not definitely, no.
But the odds against are not dissimilar from getting hit by a drunk driver while standing in your driveway while every driver in your household is accounted for and you aren't expecting friends over.
Fox has called exactly one of these states—Michigan—and they’ve called it for Biden. It is difficult to see any rationale for these claims other than setting his supporters up to wrongly mistrust the real results.
It’s so wonderful that Republicans prevented ballots from being counted early and then when they are losing complain loudly about how somebody prevented ballots from being counted early.
It is not only history that has been decided and which will be revealed.
We will also have the same freedom citizens of the world, to varying degrees, have had from millennia past.
We read about those choices in text books, bibles, and family histories.
As the counting goes on, and the result is announced, the one ballot that will also count is the vote every individual will cast.
Each of us will choose the role we will play in that history.
It occurs to me that, if the worst comes to pass, what came to me four years ago will still apply, at least in my life.
Iron Knee at Political Irony provides aid and comfort to those who have the most to lose if Biden wins: Trump addicts of America, via SNL video. It’s funny and insightful. The 2½ minute investment is worth it.
Georgia Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler insists there is no issue on which she has ever disagreed with Donald Trump. So‑o‑o‑o, someone asks about the famous Access Hollywood tape, the one where he brags about kissing unwilling women and boasts that he can “grab them by the p‑‑‑y.” Gosh, says the innocent Senator, she is unfamiliar with any of that. So, naturally, Ant Farmer’s Almanac comes up with the perfect headline.
As we approach Tuesday, Max’s Dad observes the increasingly strange, frenetic gyrations of those whose surname is Trump, and concludes that desperation is a helluva drug.
The Hunter Biden scandal has been discredited. It turns out to have been made up by a blogger working at the Fulbright College Vietnam along with a fake intelligence firm. Still, News Corpse reports that Donald Trump is complaining bitterly that Twitter is not allowing the smear by its most prominent twit.
One month before a purported leak of files from Hunter Biden’s laptop, a fake “intelligence” document about him went viral on the right-wing internet, asserting an elaborate conspiracy theory involving former Vice President Joe Biden’s son and business in China.
The document, a 64-page composition that was later disseminated by close associates of President Donald Trump, appears to be the work of a fake “intelligence firm” called Typhoon Investigations, according to researchers and public documents.
The author of the document, a self-identified Swiss security analyst named Martin Aspen, is a fabricated identity, according to analysis by disinformation researchers, who also concluded that Aspen’s profile picture was created with an artificial intelligence face generator. The intelligence firm that Aspen lists as his previous employer said that no one by that name had ever worked for the company and that no one by that name lives in Switzerland, according to public records and social media searches.
One of the original posters of the document, a blogger and professor named Christopher Balding, took credit for writing parts of it when asked about it and said Aspen does not exist.
Eugene V. Debs, five time candidate of the Socialist Party of America, 1900‑1920 [Image from Wikipedia]
From Heather Cox Richardson in Letters from an American:
The same people who had bitterly and publicly complained about Black Americans participating in society as equal to whites began to argue that their problem with Black voting was not about race, but rather about class. They said that they objected to poor voters being able to elect leaders who promised to deliver services or public improvements, like schools and roads, that could be paid for only by taxes, levied on property holders.
In the South of the post-Civil War years, almost all property holders were white. They argued that Black voting amounted to a redistribution of wealth from hardworking white men to poor Black people. It was, they insisted, “socialism,” or, after workers in Paris created a Commune in 1871, “communism.”
This is the origin of the American obsession with “socialism,” more than 40 years before Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution.
Since that time, Americans have cried “socialism” whenever ordinary Americans try to use the government to level the economic playing field by calling for business regulation—which will cost tax dollars by requiring bureaucrats—or for schools and roads, or by asking for a basic social safety net. But the public funding of roads and education and health care is not the same thing as government taking over the means of production. Rather it is an attempt to prevent a small oligarchy from using the government to gather power to themselves, cutting off the access of ordinary Americans to resources, a chance to rise, and, ultimately, to equality before the law.
