As much as the parade in front of the cameras continues, in actual law courts, where lawyers can be disbarred for bringing frivolous suits, or prosecuted for contempt of court, the claims wither and die.

Surely it is evident now that the ongoing legal battles are merely to keep open avenues of funding from the meek?

It’s the usual stuff. Make the conspiracies so large and far-reaching that the whole world has had a hand in this fraud. So when the inevitable failures in the courts happen – first that’s not our court cases, next thing will be the US legal system is in on the fraud too, what do you expect?

Dunno what’s going to come of today’s meeting with state leaders at the WH.

‘President Trump on Thursday accelerated his efforts to interfere in the nation’s electoral process, taking the extraordinary step of reaching out directly to Republican state legislators from Michigan and inviting them to the White House on Friday for discussions as the state prepares to certify President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. the winner there.’

The GOP tweeting this is amazing IMO. They’re all in, not just keeping quiet?

"We will not be intimidated…We are going to clean this mess up now. President Trump won by a landslide. We are going to prove it. And we are going to reclaim the United States of America for the people who vote for freedom."—Sidney Powell pic.twitter.com/8KCEOGuL7w

— GOP (@GOP) November 19, 2020

I feel they are now stepping over the line.  With the recounts and further Judges dismissals the desperation has been revealed and thwarted, it really is time to say goodbye.

But who’s going to do anything about it?  It’s appears the US is powerless to present another 8 weeks or so of this farce playing out in front of the world.

I feel they are now stepping over the line.

Understatement of the decade!

Poor old USA. Brought low by just one failed businessman.

As the death toll goes over 250,000.

You know, all those folk saying this is just grandstanding, that come 20thJan the US will have a new president..?

im really not certain that Trump has any intention of stepping aside

At least some of his appointees are prepared to uphold the law:

Republicans lost their final lawsuit in Georgia as a court rejected their effort to block the results’ certification, which is due to happen on Friday. The judge who dismissed the case was appointed by Mr Trump last year.

Looks like Trump is going to try and strongarm the State legislators to install faithless electors but:

Mr Trump has invited Michigan’s Republican lawmakers to the White House on Friday, hinting at a possible change in tactics.

But one of the Michigan lawmakers going to the White House, Mike Shirkey, said earlier this week that the legislature appointing electors was “not going to happen”.

The Guardian have an interesting take:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/22/us-voting-machine-private-companies-voter-registration

Poor old USA. Brought low by just one failed businessman.

He’s like the spoiled,angry fat kid being told to leave the sweet shop.

Imagine the mess he is going to leave the Whitehouse in.

5thElephant -did you read the part where the democrats tried to ban foreign ownership of voting machine companies and the republicans blocked it? Legislation that would have stopped the foreign ownership they are now complaining about.

Weird thing for the Dems to do if they were planning to use it for massive fraud.

I don’t doubt the system needs better regulation. Republicans don’t like regulation though. And what foreign power wouldn’t want this shitshow of a presidency to continue?

Try to employ some critical thinking sometime, it’s quite handy.

im really not certain that Trump has any intention of stepping aside

In the highly unlikely event that he succeeds in not having Biden certified as the winner, that still doesn’t make Trump president because his term will have expired.

Guiliani has worn out his human suit and needs a new host, urgently.

His side burns actually looked like they had melted! Is it a wig or is he a bot?

Regarding this hair dye thing I absolutely despise the attention the media give to shaming these things and ultimately drowning out the purpose of the message (think Milliband bacon sandwich). We’re human and we all have the capacity to make mistakes

However.

When the people / subjects in question thrive on the perpetuation of lies in the media fill your boots people. Any more pics and stories focusing on how absolutely ridiculous this **** nugget, his orange shitgibbon boss and their army of desperate hanger-oners can portray themselves?

Poor old USA. Brought low by just one failed businessman.

Nope. He is a symptom not the cause.

Regarding this hair dye thing I absolutely despise the attention the media give to shaming these things and ultimately drowning out the purpose of the message (think Milliband bacon sandwich). We’re human and we all have the capacity to make mistakes

When an ordinary person does something silly and is publicly humiliated out of all proportion, I am sympathetic. Rudy Giuliani is different. He has reduced himself to a joke through his own stupidity. He’s the head clown of a team of clowns who just keep throwing pies in their own faces every chance they get. The runny hair dye was just the icing on the cake of one of the strangest press conferences that any supposedly serious political figure has made. How can you expect people not to ridicule him after that cluster****?

However

I’d still prefer they remain classy. Let ‘it’ speak for itself. A picture is worth more than a headline/comment in that situation. The content of the Giuliani story would (IMO) be better for focusing solely on what he’s saying and doing. Although political satire has an illustrious history it’s hardly enjoying a golden age in this orange age 😡

‘The media’ is it’s own worst enemy in a race to the bottom to compete (someone else will if we don’t!)

Since the explosion of internet ‘channels’ that race became a hyper-accelerating pretzel-shaped arse that eats itself while scowling at other arses. Now everyone eats arse-flavoured pretzels because that’s what’s on the menu and that’s what gets legs under tables.

the public gets wants what the public wants gets

Scrub that. Try again:

the public wants gets what the public gets wants

Nope. (Defers to Mencken)

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

Poor old USA. Brought low by just one failed businessman.

I don’t think this is true, it’s far more dangerous than that – a despot can’t exist in a vacuum. Trump is a sore loser, sure, but this farce has been allowed to play out by everyone around him and in the Republican Party at large.

The shame on every single GOP congressperson / senator who hasn’t condemned Trump’s actions is a stain that ought to live with them for the rest of their political career. And yet, presumably every one of those people have made a cynical political decision that this is the path that will lead to future power (perhaps not in Jan 2021), but 2024 and beyond.

They do not fear democratic accountability which is the most worrying feature here.

Regarding this hair dye thing I absolutely despise the attention the media give to shaming these things

Agree, but when a campaign is so heavily invested in constructing the ‘optics’ of a story with such a complete disregard for truth, it’s an interesting visual with obvious metaphor.

Regarding this hair dye thing I absolutely despise the attention the media give to shaming these things

Yup,I feel bad that my first thought was Zorg (Gary Oldman) in The 5th Element.

As ransos says he will not be President come the 20th. A President can only do 4 years unless elected for a second term but that isn’t going to happen for trump.

I’m pretty sure there are a few military commanders willing to go in and drag him out.

As for Guiliani press conference, CNN wouldn’t air it as it was so full of bullshit.

You know, all those folk saying this is just grandstanding, that come 20thJan the US will have a new president..?

im really not certain that Trump has any intention of stepping aside

The more I see of this, the more I start to think he’s being forced to make his power grab / attempt to create an autocracy 4 years sooner than he expected.  Given the desperation to cling to power come-what-may, if he’d have got a second term I suspect those 4 years would be spent trying to create an absolute power base in the GOP, further control the media agenda and break the constitution to enable a third term (and beyond).

Inviting the Michigan lawmakers into the WH to either charm, berate, or threaten them (or possibly all three in the space of five minutes) is a clear sign of his intent, and desperation.

It’s the longest of long shots. He has to do it in Michigan, and a few other states, to stand a chance.

Regarding this hair dye thing I absolutely despise the attention the media give to shaming these things

One of the best defences the UK had against the attempts to set up populist Nazi movements in the 1930s was ridicule. Oswald Moseley was endlessly mocked. Mercilessly taking the piss out of ridiculous figures like Giuliani is another form of resistance, and can be combined with genuine outrage to the autocracy he’s trying to launch.

I’m pretty sure there are a few military commanders willing to go in and drag him out.

And there are probably a few willing to dig in and defend him.

If he does pull off a bad faith “victory”, which IMO is still possible, then for the military to act against him would still be a coup, even if justifiable.

It’s the longest of long shots.

I think its not so long a shot, still not the most probable outcome but I would give him a 20% chance of pulling it off at the moment.

As ransos says he will not be President come the 20th. A President can only do 4 years unless elected for a second term but that isn’t going to happen for trump.

This is actually what Trump’s team are basing their strategy on. The point is that the President is elected by the electoral college, so Biden hasn’t technically been elected President yet. The electoral college is appointed by the states according to state laws, not federal laws. Any commonsensical understanding of the state laws regarding appointment of the electoral college makes it very clear that Biden has won and the electoral college vote is just a formality, but it is technically possible for the electoral college to vote for Trump. The Trump team are a bit deluded if they think that is a real possibility, but that is their strategy.

Yup,I feel bad that my first thought was Zorg (Gary Oldman) in The 5th Element.

Ah I’d forgotten that. I was thinking Dirk Bogarde in Death in Venice.

Greatest streaks of all time:

Wayne Gretzky. 51-game scoring streak, 1983-1984

Joe DiMaggio. 56-game hitting streak, 1941

Rudy Giuliani. 3 (and counting) mind-numbingly public humiliations, November 2020 pic.twitter.com/h0cKmEWBS5

— ElElegante101 (@skolanach) November 20, 2020

Is that Danny Devito’s Penguin staring out of the lower right shot?

I think its not so long a shot, still not the most probable outcome but I would give him a 20% chance of pulling it off at the moment

based on what?

The one thing Rudy said yesterday I was interested in was claims of overvotes – up to 300%?? That’s not something you can hide when they check the vote tally. Are they making that up too?

An interesting take on trump’s invitation to Michigan’s legislative leaders accepting trump’s invitation to meet at the WH.
martinhutch, you should add direct bribery to your list of trump’s possible approaches.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/11/19/michigan-legislators-trump-meeting-438538

I think its not so long a shot, still not the most probable outcome but I would give him a 20% chance of pulling it off at the moment

I would give him a zero percent chance of pulling it off. He needs to flip 37 electoral college votes, which is or four states. Some of those states have Democratic governors or secretaries of state, etc. so it just isn’t going to happen because of that. On top of that, Republicans don’t mind putting on a show of fighting to impress their base, but actually making a serious attempt at stealing the Electoral College would be a catastrophe for the Republican Party, on top of what it did to the country. They would lose any claim to be a serious political party and they would lose any hope of ever getting moderate voters to support them again. They can’t afford to back down publicly, but winning would be even worse, so they want the courts to shut it down so that they can pretend they fought it to the bitter end.

The one thing Rudy said yesterday I was interested in was claims of overvotes – up to 300%?? That’s not something you can hide when they check the vote tally. Are they making that up too?

In all seriousness, it’s much safer to assume that everything Rudy says is just made up than to believe that any of it is true. The most charitable explanation I can give him is that he’s old and confused and has picked up conspiracy theories off the internet without realizing that they’re bogus. More likely, he just doesn’t care because he thinks he one of the good guys and the end justifies the means, etc.

Again, The Onion has played a blinder with Rudy…

https://politics.theonion.com/your-honor-i-m-ready-to-present-says-giuliani-pulli-1845716203

The one thing Rudy said yesterday I was interested in was claims of overvotes – up to 300%?? That’s not something you can hide when they check the vote tally. Are they making that up too?

Yes.

They are shameless.

During lockdown I started following Trump on Twitter. He spouts absolute shit. Completely false statements with no evidence to back them up.

A big lie (German: große Lüge) is a propaganda technique. The expression was coined by Adolf Hitler, when he dictated his 1925 book Mein Kampf, about the use of a lie so “colossal” that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously”. Hitler believed the technique was used by Jews to blame Germany’s loss in World War I on German general Erich Ludendorff, who was a prominent nationalist and antisemitic political leader in the Weimar Republic.

The one thing Rudy said yesterday I was interested in was claims of overvotes – up to 300%?? That’s not something you can hide when they check the vote tally. Are they making that up too?

In all seriousness, it’s much safer to assume that everything Rudy says is just made up than to believe that any of it is true. The most charitable explanation I can give him is that he’s old and confused and has picked up conspiracy theories off the internet without realizing that they’re bogus. More likely, he just doesn’t care because he thinks he one of the good guys and the end justifies the means, etc.

Well, Trump did tell everyone to vote twice I guess, test the system. Just checked – an overvote seems to mean multiple votes by one person detected – doesn’t mean they were accepted.

The overvotes think is debunked here but I still don’t really understand it.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/19/politics/giuliani-trump-legal-team-press-briefing-fact-check/index.html

.@RudyGiuliani Rudy, you better damn well tell everyone you didn’t get that creosote here!

Four Seasons creosote: dry to the touch in 30 minutes! pic.twitter.com/eQuzYyN7na

— Four Seasons Total Landscaping (@TotalSeasons) November 19, 2020

I think the overvotes thing is just that voters don’t always cast their votes in the place where they are registered. This means that it’s possible that some precincts record more votes than registered voters, but others will have less. Obviously, the statewide vote must not exceed the number of registered voters, but that’s not the issue here.

“One of the reasons why the Republicans did not certify in Wayne County, Michigan, was because the over-vote was so high,” Giuliani claimed. He added, “what I’m describing to you is a massive fraud.”
Facts First: This is false.
What Giuliani called an over-vote is often referred to as an imbalance where the number of ballots tabulated does not equal the number of people signed in to vote at a specific polling location.
Past elections in Michigan with larger imbalances have been certified without issue, including in 2016 when Trump won the state, according the Michigan Secretary of State.
“They certified the vote in 2016 with 80% of Detroit precincts out of balance. And yet today, 42% were out of balance and yet it didn’t get certified, so clearly there is no valid point here,” Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said.
Benson told CNN it’s “quite common” for precincts to be out of balance but “it doesn’t indicate there’s any malfeasance,” adding “it’s more of a bookkeeping, clerical issue.”
There are many reasons a precinct could be out of balance and have a discrepancy between the number of ballots cast and the number of people registered into the poll book, according to Chris Thomas who served as a senior adviser to the Detroit City Clerk. Thomas, who has built a decades-long career serving both Republican and Democratic Secretaries of State, told CNN that in general, through his many years of experience, an imbalance should be viewed as clerical mistakes and not fraud.

The shame on every single GOP congressperson / senator who hasn’t condemned Trump’s actions is a stain that ought to live with them for the rest of their political career. And yet, presumably every one of those people have made a cynical political decision that this is the path that will lead to future power (perhaps not in Jan 2021), but 2024 and beyond.

They do not fear democratic accountability which is the most worrying feature here

The underlying issue is politics are now so polarised in the US that, if you want a chance of holding political office, you’re either a Democrat or a far right Republican. Trump’s base is massive and no moderate Republican wants to risk alienating them – I doubt they will even post January 20th as this mess is going to carry on for years.

At this point I don’t see any amount of evidence convincing Trump’s base of the reality of what he is so a moderate Republican Senator/Congressman (especially if their seat is up for grabs in the mid-terms) isn’t going to say anything against him as they’ll lose their seat.

OMG. Trump's lawyers filed an affidavit claiming statistical irregularities proving election fraud because they *confused Michigan for Minnesota*

They thought "MI" = Minnesota (it's MN), and then compared a bunch of results in Minnesota to Michigan population statistics. https://t.co/nu9FMgSuqY

— Isaac Saul (@Ike_Saul) November 20, 2020

7/ This rank incompetence is not a surprise to anyone familiar with these lawsuits. It’s why the Trump team has been losing case after case — cases have little to nothing to do with real evidence. The gang that couldn’t sue straight. https://t.co/mT5xr0eGoO

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) November 20, 2020