U.S. Presidential Election 2020

As predicted on here some time ago by many…

https://apple.news/ArUkW3ZjMRHKS6zoOFFIRbQ

You’ll have to summarise. Only Apple folk can open that link.

Mr Trump has specifically asked about the legal implications of giving himself a presidential pardon before leaving the White House, the New York Times reported, speaking with aides about the issue in the weeks since his electoral defeat.

The president has also reportedly considered issuing pardons to his family members, including Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr, as well as aides like Jared Kushner and his personal attorney, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. 

Apologies. From the Independent-

“ President Donald Trump has suggested to close aides he plans to pardon himself in the final days of his White House administration, according to a new report, amid calls for his removal from the Oval Office.”

when one considers that everything he says is falsifiable wrong I think the epithet ‘Stupid’ fits perfectly.

Post-truth culture/times. He who has the biggest influence/subscriber base/£££$$$💰BTC/memes ‘wins.’

Being falsifiably wrong is no longer a selector. Hasn’t been for some time. Trump didn’t invent grifting. Millions believe he is the anointed truth. Who is stupid? The happy grifter with a big pay cheque and millions of adoring fans who think they are The Truth ? Or the bitter if principled stickler who is complaining about the many lies and misinformation being peddled?

Fox News headline. (I wasn’t going to poison you with a link)

“Jamiroquai lead singer Jay Kay denies he was at Capitol riots after fans mistake him for man in horned helmet
The singer said that he was not ‘with all those freaks’

reports suggest Pence isn’t going to invoke 25th Amendment (as would cause more violence)

Northwind

He might be having some effects (I said at the time that I don’t think he’ll ever stop taking the steroids-

That’s the point I was trying to get across, I’ve personally been the recipient of various strong IV steroids over the years to try and calm down/regulate my multiple sclerosis and some of their unintentional side effects are startling, I often felt a sense of utter invincibility for weeks after having infusions to the point where I was taking increasingly foolish risks, on the bike mainly but also in daily life, my judgement of how well I could handle dangerous situations was seriously out of kilter with reality.

Trump has been ramping up the “bat shit craziness” since he left hospital and gawd knows what drugs he’s on at the moment.

Is it just me that thinks the press secretary is smoking hot?

Some more light reading about dTrump and his actions…

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/04/trumps-goal-was-never-proving-fraud-goal-was-making-trump-happy/

https://www.sacbee.com/opinion/editorials/article248319910.html

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/07/us/police-response-black-lives-matter-protest-us-capitol/

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/07/politics/trump-pence-riot/

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a35143809/trump-capitol-mob-threaten-american-republic/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/07/capitol-police-failure-trump-mob

Tpbiker Nope. Dead eyes and no soul

Not for me, it comes very easy to me to be mentally and physically disgusted be her and all that she is

This has got to be a parody, surely.

Wife of the guy who stole Nancy Pelosi’s podium just posted this to Facebook pic.twitter.com/mNyRYUgUZA

— blaire erskine (@blaireerskine) January 7, 2021

and this is my impression of the girl who got maced pic.twitter.com/9Lc6jvwi9r

— kylie brakeman (@deadeyebrakeman) January 7, 2021

“A snap YouGov poll found that 45 percent of Republicans approved of the storming of the Capitol; 43 percent opposed it.”

(From the NYT)

Of course they were only a tiny minority.

tpbiker, you need to get out more; she is pure poison and unattractive in every way.
Any pardons trump issues to family and close sycophants will be challenged and tested in the courts – repeatedly.
I’m still hoping he will take the hitler exit or revolver in the library.
How long before putin dishes the dirt as trump has now outlived his usefulness and doesn’t have a media platform.

If you write the word “lost” in a reply to Trump on Parler it gives you an Error and denies the comment. Not joking pic.twitter.com/X6hA3GENib

— Rory Albanese (@RoryAlbanese) January 7, 2021

Okay but the trolling is very good right now too pic.twitter.com/5r90Itsylj

— ? is trying his best (@msupeach) January 8, 2021

Is it just me that thinks the press secretary is smoking hot?

Nope, not just you. But then I also think Melania is hot.

No idea how to just embed the 2nd clip, but that’s the one I wanted – y’know, for the lolz 🤗🤗

pic.twitter.com/zIbMnWYDjd

— Hub (@HubUnofficial) January 7, 2021

Donald Trump was annoyed by the violent siege on the Capitol Wednesday — which left several dead — because it looked “low class,” according to his adviser. “He doesn’t like low class things.”

— Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) January 8, 2021

They weren't protests. They were a mob engaged in sedition. It was unAmerican and wrong. Might want to double check if Brad belongs to one of the hate groups involved before giving him a second chance. Because that would definitely reflect poorly on y'all pic.twitter.com/xihkNtLE0F

— Lois Beans (@LoisBeans) January 8, 2021

I did not know that textual autofellatio was possible but dang it some people had a dream https://t.co/Sr3aWC18Bo pic.twitter.com/iT3lBSU205

— Jane Coaston (@cjane87) January 8, 2021

Sheriff Javier Salazar said he fwd'd the photos to FBI and the woman, Lt. Roxanne Mathai, has been on leave since Oct., under investigation for a relationship with an inmate.

“My intent is that she never set foot in this building again,” Salazar said. https://t.co/Af9velz8JF

— Kolten Parker (@KoltenParker) January 7, 2021

Trumpets just sound like cult members to me. This on the beeb:

<p dir=”ltr”>It was just heart-breaking to watch what was going on and the behaviour of protesters is just not like the Trump people I’ve been around. If it did come from any conservatives, then I condemn it. There’s no excuse for violence.</p>
<p dir=”ltr”>It doesn’t change my support for Trump. The people that love Trump, that’s not going to change no matter if he gets a second term or not. It just means we’re going to hold out for 2024 and hope either he runs again or his kids do.</p>
<p dir=”ltr”>Our country is going to go downhill over the next four years if Biden does take office. I’m actually moving today out of the city into the suburbs of a Republican county because I am afraid of how Democratic counties will end up under a Biden presidency.</p>
<p dir=”ltr”>We’re going to catapult towards socialism and communism. I’m worried for the country’s future, but regardless of who takes office, we have a lot of healing to do. I hope we can all find our common humanity and embrace each other when this is all over, which is hopefully soon.</p>

<p dir=”ltr”>Lunatics.</p>

I’m actually moving today out of the city into the suburbs of a Republican county because I am afraid of how Democratic counties will end up under a Biden presidency.

Should raise the IQ of both groups.

The monster is eating Trump now.

I’ve deleted the link, since it’s a bit NSFW (for some reason these MAGA people can’t express themselves without using a potty mouth).

But they’re not happy that he’s thrown them under a bus.

I have been pondering the steroid suggestions. I suspect he may still be taking them and while that does not explain his behaviour it may well have made both the impulsiveness and rage / paranoia worse

Douglas Murray of the Spectator / Telegraph, mentioned here earlier, has broken cover: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2021/01/07/crowds-attract-strangest-folk-us/

Imagine for a moment that after the last UK election the Conservatives had clearly won but the Labour Party had refused to concede.

Imagine, furthermore, that the last time Labour won an election, senior Conservatives refused to accept that fact, claiming instead that foreign powers had installed the Labour government.

Play that scenario out and you get close to making sense of what the hell happened on Capitol Hill this week.

It has been plain for a number of cycles now that American democracy is close to broken, if not smashed apart. After the 2016 election, many US Democrats refused to accept that Donald Trump won legitimately. They spent four years trying – and failing – to prove it. Since November 2020, Trump himself has taken that tactic a step further by refusing to concede at all. America was already a powder-keg. But it was Trump who proved willing to run around handing out matches.

Those who stormed the Capitol on Wednesday were given a strong nod by the president. Trump has repeatedly insisted that the November election was stolen and that he won it.

As the weeks went on, he made the same claims, and every time they were looked into they fell apart. This was a point that Lindsay Graham, the South Carolina Republican senator, made from the floor on Wednesday.

The Supreme Court rejected Trump’s appeals to discount or overturn votes. As did authorities at state level. Polls suggested around nine out of 10 Trump voters believed he won the election. Trump not only refused to leave office, but bolted all the doors that would have allowed him a graceful or dignified exit from it.

And it was to avert this that Trump called on supporters to congregate in Washington. His rhetoric before the march on the Capitol will go down in history as a wildly reckless political speech. He told his supporters: “We will never give up. We will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft.”

He continued: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. And we’ll probably not be cheering for some of them. Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength.”

In pictures: Donald Trump supporters storm the U.S. Capitol Building
Imagine if someone had spoken like this in our own country. If at the height of Parliament’s Brexit stalemate before the last election, when Parliament appeared to be acting against the will of the people, a political figure in Britain had called on the public to march on Westminster and “show strength”, what might have happened? I am not certain the British scenario would have played out so very differently.

Because this is what happens when you raise a crowd. All sorts of people emerge: the strange, the sincere, the silly and the sinister.

It happened last summer when many peaceful Americans horrified by the actions of one Minnesotan policeman came out on to the streets of America under the banner Black Lives Matter. As they marched, they started to learn that not everybody had the same interests. Significant numbers were out to have fun. Others wanted to riot, loot, steal and burn. They sullied themselves and the movement they professed to care for. So it was on Wednesday.

Many non-Americans will marvel at the array of attention-seekers, eccentrics and ordinary-looking people who made up the crowd that pushed its way into the Capitol. Much attention will be paid to those people waving Confederate flags – the flag of the old South. And while some will try to insist that this shows that the protesters were all racists, the flag is seen by others as a symbol of state-rights over laws dictated by Washington.

Likewise there are those who claim that if BLM or Antifa had attempted to push their way into the Capitol, the number of people shot by authorities would be far higher. In reality, BLM-Antifa protesters have been allowed to assail state and federal buildings with impunity over the last year. So that divisive claim does not hold. Most likely, law-enforcement were stunned by flag-waving Americans pushing their way forwards in such numbers and rightly reluctant to open fire on a crowd.

In recent years, Britain has seen the fall-off of trust in our institutions but it is nothing compared to the distrust and hatred of Washington emanating from every corner of the US in recent years. People believe that Washington wants to take away everything they have: their money, their rights, their guns, their religion. Pushed to such a place, and encouraged to congregate, what did Trump imagine would happen?

This has been festering for years. Joe Biden’s job – indeed the job of Americans from both sides of the aisle – is not just to work out what has gone wrong, but to work together to try to make things right.

Douglas Murray is a British author and associate editor of The Spectator

It’s certainly an interesting one. As a very angry Remain voter, I do wonder if a more populist Remain leader could have whipped up support in a Trump style, and those marches might have turned ugly?

Imagine if the Leave vote had gone the other way and Farage had been whipping up his base in big marches on Parliament telling them that foreign powers had peddled lies and manipulated people via social media? As we’ve seen, takes only a small proportion of a disaffected minority to kick things off.

🙂

If at the height of Parliament’s Brexit stalemate before the last election, when Parliament appeared to be acting against the will of the people, a political figure in Britain had called on the public to march on Westminster and “show strength”, what might have happened?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/nigel-farage-brexit-rifle-pick-uk-eu-withdrawal-ukip-leader-liberal-democrat-a7741331.html%3famp

Like this?

And we had all the bollocks about the judiciary, “enemies of the people”. We’re getting the same prattle from the cabinet about activist lawyers. Exactly the same play book!

it’s stretching reality to blame the lefties again.

The democrats did concede.

But there were legitimate concerns about misinformation utilised by the winning side, the role of Comey and the timing of his public announcements, and Trump’s campaign did have contact with russian agents.

We should also remember that the conservatives culled any investigations into Russian interference in the brexit poll.

There is a big difference between what happened and the Spectator/Telegraph’s spin on what happened, which is just another “it was antifa in a fake moustache” blame piece .

It’s certainly an interesting one. As a very angry Remain voter, I do wonder if a more populist Remain leader could have whipped up support in a Trump style, and those marches might have turned ugly?

On here just a few days ago someone was claiming that was what we needed to have done here to get Johnson/Brexit out. I think we’re better than that, but it’s hard to argue that democracy’s not broken here too when its tools are money, corruption, and lies.

it’s hard to argue that democracy’s not broken here too when its tools are money, corruption, and lies.

And it’s not in the career politicians interests to fix it, of course….

In response to the ‘accusations ‘ of the democrats not accepting the result last time, the US intelligence agencies (that well known hotbed of committed antifa!) concluded that there was Russian interference in the election.

So the difference would be that one was at least based on some semblance of the facts.

Why a self-pardon attempt by Trump would probably make things worse.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/a-self-pardon-wont-save-trump/617592/

1. It would basically be admitting that there is something to investigate, so the Justice Department would be compelled politically to launch an investigation.

2. Waving a piece of paper at the Supreme Court instead of arguing on facts is unlikely to convince them.

The Supreme Court has suggested that accepting a pardon implies admitting the pardoned crime. And while some debate exists about the extent to which this is true, it is certainly the case that granting a pardon strongly implies that the president believes there is some crime that requires forgiveness. Gerald Ford would not have needed to pardon Richard Nixon had the latter not committed crimes, just as no previous or subsequent president needed to pardon his predecessor. Being both the grantee and the recipient of a pardon accentuates the guilt of the individual. Trump would effectively be announcing that he has engaged in acts that might expose him to criminal prosecution (thus alleging his own guilt); by then accepting the pardon, he would thus, to some degree, be admitting his own allegation. In pleading the pardon to the court, in other words, he would be boasting of his guilt.

So put yourself in the shoes of whomever you imagine the swing justices to be in facing such a case. They would confront a former president credibly accused of horrible things. He offers no defense, but rather asserts the claim that he can unilaterally nix an investigation or a prosecution by taking a position that defies the historic position of the branch he headed. Both the Department of Justice and the current president would be taking the opposite view. To grant him dismissal would allow every future president to negate every future criminal investigation of himself, and to give himself a get-out-of-jail-free card upon his exit from office.

I would be very surprised if there are five votes on the Supreme Court for this position.

I was hoping that one of the fixes to the US political system Biden could implement would be to end presidential/governer pardons.

Justice should be applied equally to everyone, no special dispensations for those who have a politicians ear. Not exactly a hard fix to sell.

I was hoping that one of the fixes to the US political system Biden could implement would be to end presidential/governer pardons.

It’s in the Constitution. That was deliberately designed to be difficult to change. The President cannot just change it, no matter how silly the pardon power is.

It’s in the Constitution.

After seeing what happened, I’m now much less impressed that Nicholas Cage was able to steal it.

Does anyone know how long a presidential pardon takes to go through and how easy it is to slow down? Ideally if Donny issues all these parsons and they get stuck in bureaucracy for say two weeks then Biden can then dispose of them.