btbg

For those of you who insist that there was no fraud in this e******n and that Trump is behaving badly explain this.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trumps-job-approval-rating-rises-after-e******n-despite-c***d-surge-poll/ar-BB1bkHBb?li=BBnb7Kz

For those of you who don't click on links and read, Trump's approval rating is now at 51 percent since the e******n. Explain how that can be if the majority of America v**ed against him and you are right that Trump needs to concede?

smf85 Loc: Freeport, IL

Poll sample size way too small for that or any other conclusion.

rmalarz Loc: Tempe, Arizona

Here's what people miss in these polls. One has to assume that 50% of the people will not like whoever is in office. So if someone has a poll that says anywhere close to that 50% they are keeping the die-hards happy. If above, a few of the possible fence-sitters are liking what's going on. If below, the person isn't even pleasing his base.
--Bob

btbg

Won't argue that point, but with the media and the left screaming about Trump refusing to concede to get greater than 50 percent on any poll would tend to destroy the lefts narrative. That is what the point was about the post. If Trump really only got 48 percent of the v**e and if there really was no fraud then everyone who v**ed against him in the e******n should be outraged and none of them should be saying they approve of Trump as president, but according to the poll that is not what is happening.

Any poll showing him with greater than 50 percent approval rating, which is something he hasn't had his entire presidency would seem to indicate that he had enough support to win a f**r e******n.

rmalarz Loc: Tempe, Arizona

I agree. That's the mystery. I'd be more comfortable with the e******n results, with any e******n results, if I knew they were honest, if I knew the law was equally applied across the board.
--Bob

smf85 Loc: Freeport, IL

Removed.

Bill 45

Approval rating and $1.50 will buy you the morning paper. I could give dam if Moron the First concede or not. Come noon on Jan.21 he off to the trash can of history.

smf85 Loc: Freeport, IL

Poll sample size is way too small for that conclusion. Hillary repeatedly made that mistake in 2016, remember what the polls said vs the e******n results? Without specific knowledge of the polls methodology calculating the base margin error I get around a 5 to 10 point error range for that poll size.

The law was applied consistent with our federal system. If there was a systemic problem then no evidence of that was shown in 30+ suits. I am sure that if there were any evidence of major fraud the courts and legislatures in the states would have been shown it and acted on it. As to the states that changed things without legislative approval - I’m positive that the e******n board had the legal discretion to make the changes. Again, I’m sure that someone would have made a complaint about it that would have been heard. Penn. is a case in point - a judge held that changing the mail in rules was outside the authority of the e******n board and thus invalidated the late arriving v**es. All the other complaints were dismissed due to lack of evidence of a justiciable issue.

A point about discretion - it might not arise from the e******n law in the state. It could easily have risen from the health code - the ones that created the department of health and its inspectors. Their discretion is generally extremely broad and traditionally the given vast latitude to bureaus in issuing and implementing health dept. rules. But only in narrowly construed health related issues. The religious majority in the Supreme Court reversal of NYS regulations notwithstanding.

thom w Loc: San Jose, CA

SCOTUS puzzles me. Wouldn't you think that someone who is friendly to Christianity would be against things that may serve to eliminate a large number of them from the gene pool?

cwp3420

You’re thinking is warped, troll. Trump energized people. He was exciting to see. You’re side couldn’t put Biden out to see because he put people into a coma watching him. They also couldn’t let him take questions from anyone, including the press. Pedo Joe was, and is, a loose cannon, and they never knew what he would say, like when he gave an interview and threw African-Americans under the bus. And now, we have a senile old p*******e running the country with a genuine whore ready to take over after Pelosi invokes the 25th and gets him kicked out of office.

smf85 Loc: Freeport, IL

I think that her philosophy is more toward bringing religious institutions out from under any secular authority. It’s a stretch for the no establishment clause, especially if you an original or textual meaning jurist.

I’m not against her v****g according to her faith. Her catholic tradition has rigorous moral teachings. I don’t have to agree with them to respect them.

So what do I think? Using the whole garment argument that the Pope uses: the ACA will get upheld (possibly with limitations) Roe overturned, Griswald overturned, and a very strong bias against the death penalty.

thom w Loc: San Jose, CA

Automobile wrecks excite people as well, but they aren't really good for you.

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/trump-fox-news-randy-quaid-giuliani-b1761138.html?utm_source=taboola&utm_medium=Feed

Conservative insiders say Republican politicians aren’t scared of Trump now — they’re scared of his supporters
'It's hard for them to put this back in the bottle — it’s like they have fully opened Pandora's box’
Days before her unceremonious Sunday evening defenestration from Donald Trump’s “elite strike force” legal team, attorney Sidney Powell vowed to “release the Kraken” by filing a massive lawsuit alleging that news organizations, social media companies, and other “Silicon Valley” people had somehow conspired to perpetrate a massive amount of fraud during the e******n.

Powell invoked the silly catchphrase from the 1981 film The Clash of the Titans during an appearance on Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs’ nightly program to describe the sheer scale of the unfounded conspiracy theory she was then (and is still) promoting.

Two days after Powell became too much for even Trump attorney Rudolph Giuliani to stomach, her erstwhile teammates’ legal efforts have been for naught. Michigan’s Board of Canvassers has handed President-elect Joe Biden their state’s 16 e*******l v**es by certifying his 154,188-v**e winning margin, a Pennsylvania judge has thrown out the Trump team’s attempt to prevent Biden’s win there from being certified, and while the 45th President maintains that he “CONCEDE[S] NOTHING,” the formal t***sition process which will end with Biden supplanting him in the Oval Office has officially begun.

Yet even as Powell’s television histrionics have become the stuff of Twitter legend and fodder for endless ridicule in elite legal circles, veterans of the Republican Party are sounding alarms about a different kraken being unleashed by Trump’s continuous refusal to acknowledge the results of the 2020 e******n. A large chunk of the Republican base that could turn against any Republicans who acknowledge reality is becoming larger by the day.
The President himself alluded to it during a spree of defiant tweets and retweets on Tuesday by sharing a bizarre tweet from actor Randy Quaid, in which the Oscar nominee wrote that it was “time to make [One America News] and Newsmax rich”.

In an accompanying video, the actor claimed that the only difference between the 2016 e******n (which T***p w*n) and the 2020 e******n (which he lost) was how the reliably conservative Fox News channel conducted itself. The Murdoch-owned network has earned Trump’s ire for booking prominent Democrats as guests and for occasionally debunking some of his pet conspiracy theories or confirming negative stories reported by other outlets. But since the network’s decision desk (correctly) projected that Biden would win Arizona’s e*******l v**es on the night of November 3rd, Trump has pushed his fans to abandon the top-ranked channel for the two more sycophantic, far less fact-based upstarts, both of which frequently promote unfounded conspiracy theories and have declined to acknowledge Biden’s win.

Matthew Sheffield, a former conservative activist who helped found the anti-media website Newsbusters, said Trump’s push for his followers to abandon Fox and the refusal of many Republicans to acknowledge Biden’s win (or acknowledge that the win was accomplished without fraud) are both leading indicators of how detached from reality and addicted to misinformation the GOP base has become.

Trump’s hold on the GOP is so strong “because he knows how to stoke the fires of rage that have been lit by talk radio better than anyone else,” Sheffield said.
Sheffield explained that unlike previous Republican presidents who largely ignored the fringe figures who populate conservative opinion programming, Trump not only took his cues from such personalities — including Fox hosts Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and others — but actively promoted them and brought them into mainstream GOP discourse.

“People like Alex Jones had always had millions of listeners and followers, but Trump brought them into the big tent, and [his supporters] started listening to them,” he said, adding that Trump tapped into a Republican conspiratorial underbelly that had been present since the mid-20th century, but had always been kept at arm’s length by previous GOP presidents.
This embrace of the fringe, he said, has created a truly dangerous situation for American democracy no matter what happens to Trump himself. That’s because it has turned the Republican base into addicts who will seek out a disinformation fix anywhere they can find it if they can’t have their own beliefs confirmed by mainstream sources.

“The inmates have gradually taken over the asylum, and now they're running the place and the guy who opened the last cell door lock — Trump — can’t do anything about them,” he said. “It's hard for them to put this back in the bottle — it’s like they have fully opened Pandora's box.”

Another conservative media veteran, Illinois Tea Party Congressman-turned-radio host Joe Walsh, said the rush by Trump supporters to abandon Fox and his former colleagues’ reluctance to acknowledge the reality of Trump’s democratic loss shows something important: Republican politicians’ silence in the face of Trump’s abuses of power was less about fear of mean tweets than fear of the e*****rate.

“It's been that way from the beginning — I had Republican House members tell me three years ago: ‘I don't give a flying f**k about Trump, I just don't want to cross his v**ers’ — they have never been afraid of Trump or his tweets,” he said. In his opinion, Trump’s base will continue to believe wh**ever lie he settles on to explain his loss, and that lie will become Republican dogma because any GOP hopeful will not be able to risk crossing him by acknowledging reality.

And the same goes for his ex-colleagues in the conservative media space, Walsh explained.

“Sean Hannity is like any United States Senator — Ron Johnson does what he does because he doesn’t want to lose Trump’s v**ers, and Hannity does the same thing because he doesn’t want to lose Trump’s listeners — it’s the same pool of people,” he said.

Another Republican ex-congressman, Carlos Curbelo of Florida, said many of his former colleagues have tried treating the Trump presidency the way Floridians treat a hurricane: “We put up our shutters and shelter in place until the storm passes.”

Most Republicans, he said, are hoping that the “storm” of Trump’s defeat and his exit from Washington passes as quickly as possible. They will at least privately acknowledge what is happening; publicly, however, it may be a different matter.

“There is a base of v**ers out there that are very responsive to and very protective of the President, and that base is part of the Republican coalition, so it's a careful — sometimes impossible — balancing act,” he said.

Still, Curbelo posited that just like members of a doomsday cult after its predicted end-of-the-world date has come and gone, reality will catch up to Trump supporters eventually if their leaders do their job.

“Sometimes people talk about our leaders as if they're helpless, because they're just having to deal with a society that is, in many ways, intoxicated. But that's precisely what leaders are for: to level with people and share the t***h in a sincere way,” he said. “But in many ways, this has been driven by demagogues… who have led each side to believe that the other side is the enemy and if the other side comes to power, all is lost. That's a very intoxicating approach to politics, and we're reaping the results where a lot of people actually believe Donald Trump has won the e******n, even though he clearly didn’t.”

Sheffield — who cut his teeth in the conservative movement and its accompanying ecosystem before abandoning it for mainstream journalism — said it’s not just political leaders who need to bring the right back to reality. It’s also the donors and media moguls who fund the entire disinformation ecosystem that Trump harnessed and later unshackled — such as Charles Koch and Rupert Murdoch — who need to “pull the plug on the old fanaticism machine” before an unhinged GOP base takes the country down a dark path.

“The conservative billionaire elites, they built a golem for themselves,” he said, referring to the anthropomorphic monster of Jewish mythology. “And now the golem is turning on them because Trump removed the last shackles that had held it down, and it's coming to destroy everything,” he said. “Not just them, but the whole country.”

cwp3420

[quote=thom w]Automobile wrecks excite people as well, but they aren't really good for you.

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/trump-fox-news-randy-quaid-giuliani-b1761138.html?utm_source=taboola&utm_medium=Feed

Conservative insiders say Republican politicians aren’t scared of Trump now — they’re scared of his supporters
'It's hard for them to put this back in the bottle — it’s like they have fully opened Pandora's box’
Days before her unceremonious Sunday evening defenestration from Donald Trump’s “elite strike force” legal team, attorney Sidney Powell vowed to “release the Kraken” by filing a massive lawsuit alleging that news organizations, social media companies, and other “Silicon Valley” people had somehow conspired to perpetrate a massive amount of fraud during the e******n.

Powell invoked the silly catchphrase from the 1981 film The Clash of the Titans during an appearance on Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs’ nightly program to describe the sheer scale of the unfounded conspiracy theory she was then (and is still) promoting.

Two days after Powell became too much for even Trump attorney Rudolph Giuliani to stomach, her erstwhile teammates’ legal efforts have been for naught. Michigan’s Board of Canvassers has handed President-elect Joe Biden their state’s 16 e*******l v**es by certifying his 154,188-v**e winning margin, a Pennsylvania judge has thrown out the Trump team’s attempt to prevent Biden’s win there from being certified, and while the 45th President maintains that he “CONCEDE[S] NOTHING,” the formal t***sition process which will end with Biden supplanting him in the Oval Office has officially begun.

Yet even as Powell’s television histrionics have become the stuff of Twitter legend and fodder for endless ridicule in elite legal circles, veterans of the Republican Party are sounding alarms about a different kraken being unleashed by Trump’s continuous refusal to acknowledge the results of the 2020 e******n. A large chunk of the Republican base that could turn against any Republicans who acknowledge reality is becoming larger by the day.
The President himself alluded to it during a spree of defiant tweets and retweets on Tuesday by sharing a bizarre tweet from actor Randy Quaid, in which the Oscar nominee wrote that it was “time to make [One America News] and Newsmax rich”.

In an accompanying video, the actor claimed that the only difference between the 2016 e******n (which T***p w*n) and the 2020 e******n (which he lost) was how the reliably conservative Fox News channel conducted itself. The Murdoch-owned network has earned Trump’s ire for booking prominent Democrats as guests and for occasionally debunking some of his pet conspiracy theories or confirming negative stories reported by other outlets. But since the network’s decision desk (correctly) projected that Biden would win Arizona’s e*******l v**es on the night of November 3rd, Trump has pushed his fans to abandon the top-ranked channel for the two more sycophantic, far less fact-based upstarts, both of which frequently promote unfounded conspiracy theories and have declined to acknowledge Biden’s win.

Matthew Sheffield, a former conservative activist who helped found the anti-media website Newsbusters, said Trump’s push for his followers to abandon Fox and the refusal of many Republicans to acknowledge Biden’s win (or acknowledge that the win was accomplished without fraud) are both leading indicators of how detached from reality and addicted to misinformation the GOP base has become.

Trump’s hold on the GOP is so strong “because he knows how to stoke the fires of rage that have been lit by talk radio better than anyone else,” Sheffield said.
Sheffield explained that unlike previous Republican presidents who largely ignored the fringe figures who populate conservative opinion programming, Trump not only took his cues from such personalities — including Fox hosts Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and others — but actively promoted them and brought them into mainstream GOP discourse.

“People like Alex Jones had always had millions of listeners and followers, but Trump brought them into the big tent, and [his supporters] started listening to them,” he said, adding that Trump tapped into a Republican conspiratorial underbelly that had been present since the mid-20th century, but had always been kept at arm’s length by previous GOP presidents.
This embrace of the fringe, he said, has created a truly dangerous situation for American democracy no matter what happens to Trump himself. That’s because it has turned the Republican base into addicts who will seek out a disinformation fix anywhere they can find it if they can’t have their own beliefs confirmed by mainstream sources.

“The inmates have gradually taken over the asylum, and now they're running the place and the guy who opened the last cell door lock — Trump — can’t do anything about them,” he said. “It's hard for them to put this back in the bottle — it’s like they have fully opened Pandora's box.”

Another conservative media veteran, Illinois Tea Party Congressman-turned-radio host Joe Walsh, said the rush by Trump supporters to abandon Fox and his former colleagues’ reluctance to acknowledge the reality of Trump’s democratic loss shows something important: Republican politicians’ silence in the face of Trump’s abuses of power was less about fear of mean tweets than fear of the e*****rate.

“It's been that way from the beginning — I had Republican House members tell me three years ago: ‘I don't give a flying f**k about Trump, I just don't want to cross his v**ers’ — they have never been afraid of Trump or his tweets,” he said. In his opinion, Trump’s base will continue to believe wh**ever lie he settles on to explain his loss, and that lie will become Republican dogma because any GOP hopeful will not be able to risk crossing him by acknowledging reality.

And the same goes for his ex-colleagues in the conservative media space, Walsh explained.

“Sean Hannity is like any United States Senator — Ron Johnson does what he does because he doesn’t want to lose Trump’s v**ers, and Hannity does the same thing because he doesn’t want to lose Trump’s listeners — it’s the same pool of people,” he said.

Another Republican ex-congressman, Carlos Curbelo of Florida, said many of his former colleagues have tried treating the Trump presidency the way Floridians treat a hurricane: “We put up our shutters and shelter in place until the storm passes.”

Most Republicans, he said, are hoping that the “storm” of Trump’s defeat and his exit from Washington passes as quickly as possible. They will at least privately acknowledge what is happening; publicly, however, it may be a different matter.

“There is a base of v**ers out there that are very responsive to and very protective of the President, and that base is part of the Republican coalition, so it's a careful — sometimes impossible — balancing act,” he said.

Still, Curbelo posited that just like members of a doomsday cult after its predicted end-of-the-world date has come and gone, reality will catch up to Trump supporters eventually if their leaders do their job.

“Sometimes people talk about our leaders as if they're helpless, because they're just having to deal with a society that is, in many ways, intoxicated. But that's precisely what leaders are for: to level with people and share the t***h in a sincere way,” he said. “But in many ways, this has been driven by demagogues… who have led each side to believe that the other side is the enemy and if the other side comes to power, all is lost. That's a very intoxicating approach to politics, and we're reaping the results where a lot of people actually believe Donald Trump has won the e******n, even though he clearly didn’t.”

Sheffield — who cut his teeth in the conservative movement and its accompanying ecosystem before abandoning it for mainstream journalism — said it’s not just political leaders who need to bring the right back to reality. It’s also the donors and media moguls who fund the entire disinformation ecosystem that Trump harnessed and later unshackled — such as Charles Koch and Rupert Murdoch — who need to “pull the plug on the old fanaticism machine” before an unhinged GOP base takes the country down a dark path.

“The conservative billionaire elites, they built a golem for themselves,” he said, referring to the anthropomorphic monster of Jewish mythology. “And now the golem is turning on them because Trump removed the last shackles that had held it down, and it's coming to destroy everything,” he said. “Not just them, but the whole country.”[/quote]

I figured you would need someone else to answer it for you. Deep thinking doesn’t seem to be your strong suit. Hang on, Thommie. More federal lawsuits were filed last night in Minnesota and Georgia.

soba1 Loc: Somewhere In So Ca

Ouch

cwp3420

Sometimes t***h is difficult to hear!