Election Day has finally arrived! At midnight last night Joe Biden won all 5 votes in Dixville Notch, NH. Is it a good omen? I hope so.
Biden jokes in Scranton, PA this morning: "We’re the first person I'm told to win [Dixville Notch, NH] unanimously, all 5 votes. So based on Trump’s notion, I’m going to declare victory right now. You know what I mean? They voted so it’s over."
Biden spent the past week talking about how we can restore the soul of America and get the pandemic under control. Trump spent his time at superspreader rallies complaining about how mean everyone is to him, sounding like what he is–a crazy old man completely out of touch with reality.
This morning on Fox and Friends, he attacked Fox News for putting clips of Obama and Biden on the air and he told the hosts that the U.S. is harder for him to deal with than Russia or North Korea.
Trump bizarrely claims that "the US" is harder to deal with than Russia or North Korea, as though America is a foreign country pic.twitter.com/XNtQagudrv
President Trump arrives at Election Day on Tuesday toggling between confidence and exasperation, bravado and grievance, and marinating in frustration that he is trailing Joseph R. Biden Jr., whom he considers an unworthy opponent.
“Man, it’s going to be embarrassing if I lose to this guy,” Mr. Trump has told advisers, a lament he has aired publicly as well. But in the off-camera version, Mr. Trump frequently exclaims, “This guy!” in reference to Mr. Biden, with a salty adjective separating the words.
Trailing in most polls, Mr. Trump has careened through a marathon series of rallies in the last week, trying to tear down Mr. Biden and energize his supporters, but also fixated on crowd size and targeting perceived enemies like the news media and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the federal government’s infectious disease expert whom he suggested on Sunday he might try to dismiss after the election.
At every turn, the president has railed that the voting system is rigged against him and has threatened to sue when the election is over, in an obvious bid to undermine an electoral process strained by the coronavirus pandemic. It is not clear, however, precisely what legal instruments Mr. Trump believes he has at his disposal.
He’s got nothing except his hopes that he can steal the election by suppressing votes or get his cronies on the Supreme Court to name him to winner.
His mad dash to the finish is a distillation of his four tumultuous years in office, a mix of resentment, combativeness and a penchant for viewing events through a prism all his own — and perhaps the hope that everything will work out for him in the end, the way it did four years ago when he surprised himself, his advisers and the world by winning the White House.
But by enclosing himself in the thin bubble of his own worldview, Mr. Trump may have further severed himself from the political realities of a country in crisis. And that, in turn, has helped enable Mr. Trump to wage a campaign offering no central message, no clear agenda for a second term and no answer to the woes of the pandemic.
Hello, everyone! As long as we are sharing our plans to announce that we’ve won things we haven’t won, I would like to announce now that I have won the entire 2024 Olympics. I was surprised, too, given that I do not do any sports, and the Olympics have not concluded — or even started — yet, but, well, there it is. You had better cover my announcement, because I think it is big news for one person to win the entire Olympics of 2024, the Summer Olympics, the better of the two Olympics!
It’s especially impressive when you consider that I am not an athlete! I used to run, but only when late for a train, and I don’t do that anymore. And yet it did not matter: I won the 2024 Olympics! Incredible! I won the pole vault and I won the gymnastics (floor and balance beam) and I also won all the events that Katie Ledecky usually wins, which should be impossible, but I guess it was not, because I must have believed in myself. A pretty inspiring story, I think, and big news. I hope America will hasten to get behind me and acknowledge my victory with various parades and jet flyovers and things of that nature.
Please stop saying I haven’t won the 2024 Olympics and we won’t know who won the 2024 Olympics until 2024, at the very earliest. This partisan sniping tears America apart! We all know that the realest, most important part of the Olympics has already happened: the part where it was announced and I decided I would like to have won it.
All the indications are pretty clear, now, before the races have concluded or even begun, that I am the clear winner in all the Olympic events. My shot-put performance was especially impressive! This overwhelming show of strength by me speaks for itself. Please don’t be distracted by the calls of the so-called athletes to “wait for the Olympics to begin, transpire and conclude before we declare a winner.” That would be divisive, the last thing we need right now, when we should all be rallying around me, the clear winner of events which, were they to have been won by someone else, would be illegitimate and thievish.
Late last night, Trump posted an embarrassing video of himself “dancing” at his superspreader events. Here’s the response from MeidasTouch:
Trump thinks his dancing to YMCA makes a fun campaign ad. He is dancing on the graves of those lost due to his malicious incompetence. Vote him out! pic.twitter.com/iFs8C7Fqr7
At rallies across the Midwest and Sun Belt swing states, President Donald Trump has been openly discussing murky schemes to prevent legitimate ballots from being counted, escalating threats to disenfranchise millions of American as the weeks-long voting season ends tonight and his pathway to reelection becomes increasingly narrow.
“The Election should end on Nov. 3, not weeks later!” the president said on Friday. He repeated the claim at an event in Dubuque, Iowa on Sunday, adding falsely, “That’s the way it’s been, and that’s the way it should be.”
Democrats have been clear in their condemnations of the president’s comments, which they consider the most worrisome of Trump’s four years in office, which were often marked by anti-democratic rhetoric….
But most Republicans, from critics to allies of Trump, have remained publicly silent. It’s not new for Trump’s party brethren to duck and cover when he says something troubling. But after five years of perfecting the art of explaining how they “didn’t see the tweet” — the much parodied talking point to which Republicans on Capitol Hill often resort — it is shocking but not surprising that they aren’t speaking up now, even when the integrity of America’s electoral system is under attack by their party’s leader….
Many Republicans insist they are disgusted by Trump’s threats, they just aren’t willing to say so publicly. Dozens of quietly anti-Trump members on Capitol Hill, or who left the Trump administration, usually in disgust, are willing to torch the president — but only under the cloak of anonymity.
“It’s despicable and un-American but not surprising,” said one senior Senate GOP aide. “They have never had any respect for the institutions of democracy that don’t benefit them. The beauty of federalism is that we leave it to the states to make their own rules and the idea that a president would overturn a state official’s decision to benefit them in an election is just kind of the antithesis of what Republicans used to believe in.”
It’s way too late for Republicans to redeem themselves now. They should all be voted out.
If news organizations declare Joe Biden the mathematical president-elect, he plans to address the nation as its new leader, even if President Trump continues to fight in court, advisers tell Axios.
Why it matters: Biden advisers learned the lesson of 2000, when Al Gore hung back while George W. Bush declared victory in that contested election, putting the Democrat on the defensive while Bush acted like the winner.
So if Biden is declared the winner, he’ll begin forming his government and looking presidential — and won’t yield to doubts Trump might try to sow.
Biden’s schedule for Tuesday includes a clue to this posture: He “will address the nation on Election Night in Wilmington, Delaware.”
Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon told reporters Monday that even if all the votes aren’t counted tonight, the campaign should have “a very good sense of where we’re headed”:
“We’re not really concerned about what Donald Trump says. … We’re going to use our data, our understanding of where this is headed, and make sure that the vice president is addressing the American people.”
To show momentum, Biden may begin transition announcements quickly, starting with senior staff appointments.
That way, core aides won’t have to worry about their own jobs, but will immediately be able to get to work.
At The New York Times, Peter Wehner writes that even if we can rid ourselves of Trump, we’ll be dealing with the people who bought into his insane conspiracy theories for a long time to come: Trump Lives in a Hall of Mirrors and He’s Got Plenty of Company.
If Donald Trump loses his re-election bid, there will be a lot of ruin to sort through. But his most damaging and enduring legacy may well turn out to be the promiscuous use of conspiracy theories that have defined both the man and his presidency.
The president’s cruelest policies, like intentionally separating children from their parents at the border, can at least be ended, although their devastating effects will reverberate for decades. It’s less clear what the half-life is for his conspiracy theorizing, which fundamentally distorts the way people think about politics, our country and reality itself.
There have been somany conspiracy theories it’s easy to forget some of them, and this list is hardly exhaustive, but it includes Mr. Trump claiming that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States and that Bill and Hillary Clinton were behind the death of their former aide Vince Foster; suggesting that Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the assassination of President John Kennedy and that MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough was involved in the death of a staff member nearly 20 years ago; retweeting claims that SEAL Team 6 didn’t kill Osama bin Laden in 2011; insisting that Ukraine was hiding Hillary Clinton’s missing emails and that Mr. Obama wiretapped Mr. Trump’s phones; and promoting QAnon, a far-right conspiracy theory that believes, as Kevin Roose put it in The Times, that “the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who are plotting against Mr. Trump while operating a global child sex-trafficking ring.”
There was a time when popularizing such crazed machinations would have caused one to be cast to the outer fringes of American politics; in the case of Mr. Trump, it helped elect him and has created a cultlike devotion among tens of millions of his supporters. And because of Mr. Trump, conspiracy theorizing is now a central feature of the Republican Party and American politics.
Maybe the polls are right, and Joe Biden is on course for a dominant 7 or 8 point win over Donald Trump. He could pick up a couple of decisive swing states that are supposed to finish counting votes on Tuesday night—North Carolina and Arizona, for instance—and short-circuit the president’s plan to first claim victory, then sue his way to a second term. There’s a chance that Democrats will eke out a Senate majority, too, so that they can actually govern come January, and deal properly with the deadly plague that’s reshaped our lives and crippled the economy. Perhaps there won’t be any violence at voting places, and people will be able to cast their ballots without getting hurt. Knock on wood.
But even if this election does bring an orderly end to the Trump era, do not for a second forget that absolutely everything about it, and the year that has led us to this point, has been utterly, incalculably insane, a 50-car pileup of reminders that we are a broken society with a broken political system that seems ever-more untenable, whether or not we are doomed to spend four more years with our addled president.
It is insane, for starters, that he even has a shot of pulling this race out. Nobody, least of all Trump, believes that he will win the popular vote. It is not even a discussion at this point. But we’re all trapped in a mad house erected upon the Electoral College, an anti-majoritarian barbarism that, according to conventional wisdom, now requires Democrats to win by at least 3 percent to have a shot at the White House and drives otherwise sensible Americans to spend sleepless nights and precious emotional energy freaking out over early voting patterns in Miami-Dade.
Other countries—the ones we like to think of as our peers, even if they see us more like a tragic, strung-out uncle these days—don’t do this to themselves. In normal, advanced presidential democracies, the candidate who gets the most votes actually wins. We’re the only one where the person who comes in second can still somehow end up in charge. There is nogoodargument for it, in this year of our collective misery 2020. It is nuts.
It is also pure lunacy that after four years of family separations, tax cuts for the rich, transparent corruption, and deadly ineptitude, more than 4 in 10 Americans are apparently ready for another round of Trump. We are literally living through one of the worst-case scenarios experts anticipated when he was first elected: A pandemic that has killed 231,000 Americans, thanksinnosmallpart to the White House’s botched response, and is set to ravage the country for months more, since Republican leaders seem to have mostly decided to let COVID rip and hope for the best. This a man who caught a deadly pathogen because he wanted to look tough and felt silly wearing a mask, turned a White House Rose Garden party into a superspreader event, and ended up dragging the country through a week of steroid-fueled psychodrama as doctors blasted him with experimental treatments to save his life, then somehow concluded that, hey, the disease wasn’t so bad after all. Since then, he’s moved on to talking openly about firing Dr. Anthony Fauci, the most trusted disease expert in America, after the election as payback for criticizing the administration’s response.
So the day of decision is finally here. I’m cautiously optimistic, but I’m not making any assumptions–not after what happened in 2016. If all goes well, we should have some idea who the winner late tonight. If Trump really does try to declare a premature victory or contest the results, I think the best response would be to mock him. He has been looking weak and whiny at his ridiculous rallies. He is clearly exhausted; maybe he’ll decide to take his ball and go home to one of his golf resorts and wallow in self-pity. I can only hope that’s how this ends.
How are you all doing? Please check in with us today. As Dakinikat wrote yesterday, we’ve been doing this together for a very long time now; we can help each other get through what’s coming–whatever it is. We’ll have a live blog up later tonight when the returns start coming in. Take care, I love you all!
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This week will probably be one of the strangest we’ve ever had in the country especially during our long cherished democratic and patriotic duty of voting and counting the votes. Most of us had to wait a long time to get our demographic to the polls but now we got it we gotta use it!
Federal authorities are expected to put back into place a “non-scalable” fence around the entire perimeter of the White House on Monday as law enforcement and other agencies prepare for possible protests surrounding the election, a source with knowledge of the matter confirmed to CNN.
The fence, the same type that was put up during protests this summer, will encompass the Ellipse and Lafayette Square. It will go down 15th Street to Constitution Avenue and then over to 17th Street. The fence will then run up to H Street and across by Lafayette, and then come down 15th Street, the source said.
NBC News was first to report the new fencing. A Secret Service spokeswoman declined to comment to CNN, saying the agency does not comment on security measures.
The extra layer of security marks the most high-profile example to date of authorities preparing for unrest following this year’s election, particularly if there is no clear winner come November 4.
Meanwhile, a Trumpist Rally in Georgia ended in the same clusterfuck as the ones in Omaha, Florida, Pennsylvania, and now Georgia!
Hours after the President departed for Florida, this was the scene in Georgia as people were left for hours waiting for buses to take them to their cars: pic.twitter.com/rx34hXSR2U
Both campaigns seriously have Georgia on their minds! I can’t imagine this is going to make any one very happy even if you’re a part of the death cult.
“The Polling” by William Hogarth (1755), scene 3 in his Humours of an Election series. While Hogarth’s goal is to mercilessly satire English politics, his painting also hints at the festive atmosphere of an actual 18th century Election Day. Credit: Sir John Soane’s Museum / The Yorck Project / Wikipedia.
Any one who has worked campaigns or been a candidate knows that yard signs basically disappear fast for a variety of reasons. My opponents husband was out daily taking down little yard signs and big road signs as fast as my wonderful team from the Firefighter’s union could put them up. It’s maddening; but this is the first I’ve heard of this, but I have to consider it’s Topeka, Kansas. “Man thought people were stealing Donald Trump signs; three shot”.
Three people were shot late Saturday in North Topeka after a man confronted people he thought had committed past thefts of signs promoting the campaign of Republican Presidential incumbent Donald Trump, a Topeka police supervisor said Sunday.
Police weren’t specifying who was thought to have shot whom or revealing the names, ages or genders of those who were wounded.
Officers responded about 11 p.m. to the scene in the 1300 block of N.W. Eugene, from which one person was taken by ambulance to a hospital with gunshot wounds that were considered potentially life-threatening, said police Lt. Joe Perry.
Eugene, which runs north and south, is located about a block west of N.W. Topeka Boulevard in the area involved.
Two other people later sought hospital treatment in Topeka after arriving by private vehicle after suffering from gunshot wounds, Perry said. The seriousness of their injuries wasn’t clear.
The names, ages and genders of those wounded weren’t available Sunday morning.
Meanwhile, armed hooligans in pickup trucks continue to terrorize their neighbors in cities throughout the country. Yesterday, groups of them stopped traffic on the Andrew Cuomo bridge in both NJ and NYC. Also, we learn that group in Richmond, Va circled like fucked up hick in hick up fucks around a confederate monument. This is basically the KKK trying to scare voters off. This is from the Richmond Times Dispatch: “Witnesses describe clash at Lee Circle between caravan of Trump supporters and a crowd of opponents.”
Tempers flared Sunday as a “Trump train” of cars tried to pass Lee Circle along Monument Avenue and clashed with opposing protesters, drawing a police presence that blocked off the area to traffic.
Witnesses said gunshots were fired during the encounter on Sunday afternoon two days before the presidential election, and one man showed a reporter a bullet hole in his car where it was parked on Monument Avenue near Lee Circle, which has been the site of racial justice protests for several months.
Several other witnesses said one or more of the supporters of President Donald Trump in the train of cars was spraying chemical irritants at an opposing crowd that was trying to block the cars from passing. One man said he narrowly avoided being run over by jumping onto the hood of a car. Another man said he ducked just in time as someone fired a gun at him from a truck, after someone else had pulled a Trump flag off one of the vehicles.
Richmond police said a woman reported at 4:18 p.m. that she had been pepper-sprayed by someone from one of the vehicles. A few minutes later, officers responded to Lee Circle to investigate a report of an unoccupied vehicle that had been struck once by gunfire.
Opinion | Benjamin L. Ginsberg: I’m a leading GOP election lawyer. The world should be ashamed of my party’s voter suppression tactics. – The Washington Post https://t.co/hHGC1zwbpK
“AMERICA’S WOMEN GET THE VOTE CALENDAR ILLUSTRATION” .Bernie Fuchs 1965 (Estimated)
President Trump has failed the test of leadership. His bid for reelection is foundering. And his only solution has been to launch an all-out, multimillion-dollar effort to disenfranchise voters — first by seeking to block state laws to ease voting during the pandemic, and now, in the final stages of the campaign, by challenging the ballots of individual voters unlikely to support him.
This is as un-American as it gets. It returns the Republican Party to the bad old days of “voter suppression” that landed it under a court order to stop such tactics — an order lifted before this election. It puts the party on the wrong side of demographic changes in this country that threaten to make the GOP a permanent minority.
These are painful words for me to write. I spent four decades in the Republican trenches, representing GOP presidential and congressional campaigns, working on Election Day operations, recounts, redistricting and other issues, including trying to lift the consent decree.
Nearly every Election Day since 1984 I’ve worked with Republican poll watchers, observers and lawyers to record and litigate any fraud or election irregularities discovered.
The truth is that over all those years Republicans found only isolated incidents of fraud. Proof of systematic fraud has become the Loch Ness Monster of the Republican Party. People have spent a lot of time looking for it, but it doesn’t exist.
As he confronts losing, Trump has devoted his campaign and the Republican Party to this myth of voter fraud. Absent being able to articulate a cogent plan for a second term or find an attack against Joe Biden that will stick, disenfranchising enough voters has become key to his reelection strategy.
President Trump has revealed his endgame in all its corrupt glory. If Trump is on track to losing once all the votes are counted, he will seek to invalidate as many ballots as possible, while asserting that counting outstanding ballots constitutes an effort to steal the election from him.
In reality, of course, it’s that very act — trying to thwart the full counting of ballots — which would actually constitute an effort to steal the election.
To be clear: Trump will declare that the election is being stolen from him to justify trying to steal it himself.
But this plot constitutes a bet on massive institutional failure by the news media to render that basic situation with total clarity. So I’d like to suggest how the media might avoid such a disastrous outcome.
One way entails flipping the script so great emphasis in election-night coverage is placed on the percentages of uncounted votes, as opposed to the percentages of counted ones.
First, an aside: Saying Trump has a plot to steal the election doesn’t mean he can’t win. Trump still can win, if there’s a very large polling error, or if he hangs on in Pennsylvania, where Joe Biden’s lead is not overwhelmingly solid, which opens up an inside path.
However, Trump himself has a contingency plan to steal the election if he is set to lose once all the votes are counted. It’s to prevent all the votes from getting counted.
I’m just glad there are some very clever lawyers watching what this snake in the grass does. I only hope that state level law enforcement does the same.
So many questions. 1. Why is a Trump caravan driving through a Black neighborhood near a polling station? Smells like voter intimidation. 2. Why are police escorting them, like they’re some sort of dignitaries? https://t.co/KcUL5WpbVs
So, I will get up to vote tomorrow. Wait for my farmer’s box to be delivered from the Farmer’s Market. Teach four hours. Then, I’m headed across the street to watch the returns with my neighbor Nancy. We will run a blog in the evening. Hopefully, my internet will hold because it’s been very dicey the last 5 or 6 days. I guess all cell phone towers here are being powered by generators and the local cable company has a lot of infrastructure damage. I think they got the city up and running and that voting places are up except for 3 which the city will power on generators. I vote at the fire station on the corner and its proximity is basically why I got my power back so quickly even though everything else is still hinky.
We can get through this. I want us to do it together. We are a community who cares and we are kind.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Georgia Please go blue!!!!! Get out there and vote my Georgia brothers and sisters and neighbors!!! Also a shout out to North Carolina! Texas and Arizona! Get us all out of this mess!!!
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
At every turn, the president has railed that the voting system is rigged against him and has threatened to sue when the election is over, in an obvious bid to undermine an electoral process strained by the coronavirus pandemic. It is not clear, however, precisely what legal instruments Mr. Trump believes he has at his disposal.
It’s especially impressive when you consider that I am not an athlete! I used to run, but only when late for a train, and I don’t do that anymore. And yet it did not matter: I won the 2024 Olympics! Incredible! I won the pole vault and I won the gymnastics (floor and balance beam) and I also won all the events that Katie Ledecky usually wins, which should be impossible, but I guess it was not, because I must have believed in myself. A pretty inspiring story, I think, and big news. I hope America will hasten to get behind me and acknowledge my victory with various parades and jet flyovers and things of that nature.
Many Republicans insist they are disgusted by Trump’s threats, they just aren’t willing to say so publicly. Dozens of quietly anti-Trump members on Capitol Hill, or who left the Trump administration, usually in disgust, are willing to torch the president — but only under the cloak of anonymity.
Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon told reporters Monday that even if all the votes aren’t counted tonight, the campaign should have “a very good sense of where we’re headed”:
There have been 
It is insane, for starters, that he even has a shot of pulling this race out. Nobody, least of all Trump, believes that he will win the popular vote. It is not even a discussion at this point. But we’re all trapped in a mad house erected upon the Electoral College, an anti-majoritarian barbarism that, according to conventional wisdom, now requires Democrats to win by at least 3 percent to have a shot at the White House and drives otherwise sensible Americans to spend sleepless nights and precious emotional energy freaking out over 
Here’s something new from the Plum Line and Greg Sargent: 
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