Snippets From a Deranged Transition

Jan. 20 cannot come soon enough. Maybe on the 21st, things will start to get better. Maybe.

Crackpots in Michigan

The Washington Post writes:

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson had just finished wrapping string lights around her home’s portico on Saturday evening and was about to watch “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” with her 4-year-old son when a crowd of protesters marched up carrying American flags and guns.

About two dozen protesters chanted “Stop the Steal” and accused Benson, a Democrat and Michigan’s chief election officer, of ignoring widespread voter fraud — an echo of President Trump’s continued unfounded claims as he seeks to overturn the results of the election that President-elect Joe Biden won.

“She’s decided to completely ignore all of the credible, credible, fraudulent evidence that has been continually pointed out,” demonstrator Genevieve Peters said of Benson, as she live-streamed the protest in Detroit on Facebook. “We’re out here in front of the secretary of state’s house and we want her to know we will continue to be here.” 

Vitriolic rhetoric has led bipartisan leaders to warn that Trump’s baseless attacks on the election are endangering election officials’ lives. Multiple Michigan officials have reported being threatened and harassed over the election results, as have officials in Georgia, Arizona, Vermont, Kentucky, Minnesota and Colorado.

Spreading the Joy (and panic!) in Arizona

WaPo writes:

For more than 10 hours last Monday, President Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, convened in a Phoenix hotel ballroom with more than a dozen current and future Arizona Republican lawmakers to hear testimony from people who supposedly witnessed election fraud.

Giuliani and other attendees were shown maskless and not social distancing, and the Arizona Republican Party tweeted an image of Giuliani and lawmakers flouting guidelines to restrict transmission of the novel coronavirus.

That defiance of public health advice came to a head on Sunday when Trump announced on Twitter that Giuliani had contracted the coronavirus. Hours later, legislative staff in Arizona’s Capitol abruptly announced a week-long closure of the state Senate and House starting on Monday. 

The next day, Giuliani held a private meeting with Arizona’s GOP leadership, including state Senate Majority Leader Rick Gray, Senate President Karen Fann, House Speaker Rusty Bowers and House Majority Leader Warren Petersen, according to a tweet from state Sen. Vince Leach, who also attended the meeting. Leach posted an image of himself with his arm around Giuliani with neither wearing a mask. (😊 for the selfie!)

Unhinged . . . . jaw 😱

Nursing home high jinks

WaPo writes:

Last month, more than 300 people packed into a wedding near rural Ritzville, Wash., defying state restrictions. Authorities later traced more than a dozen coronavirus cases and two outbreaks to the ceremony — and warned that the fallout would likely get worse.

Now, health officials say the wedding also included some guests whose job is caring for among the most vulnerable to coronavirus: nursing-home residents. And at least six residents have now died of covid-19 at two nursing homes where staffers tested positive for the virus after attending the wedding, the local department announced in a Thursday news release.

The Grant County Health District said that it hasn’t yet definitively linked those deaths to the wedding, but the department now intends to do full contact tracing on the staffers who tested positive after attending the event, spokeswoman Theresa Adkinson told The Washington Post in an email statement late Sunday.  

Health experts have long warned of the risk that “superspreader” events pose to the elderly and those with underlying conditions even if they don’t participate in the mass gatherings themselves. In August, a wedding in a small Maine town with about 65 guests sparked an outbreak resulting in nearly 200 infections. Six residents of an assisted-living facility who did not attend the party died of covid-19 complications after being infected in the outbreak, the state’s CDC director later announced.

Who is the sheep here?

Two Views on the Senate Filibuster

Comity and courtesy in the US congress

The New York Times writes about two senators, democratic Tom Udall (NM) and republican Lamar Alexander (TN), who are retiring from the senate at the end of this year. They have opposite views about keeping or getting rid of the filibuster as a means to fix the broken US senate. The NYT writes on their different rationales:

“It would basically destroy the Senate,” Mr. Alexander, a three-term senator, said in an interview, crediting the procedural weapon with forcing compromise. “It would be a second House of Representatives. The freight train of the people would run through every two years depending on whatever the fever was.” 

Mr. Alexander said he found it particularly odd that Democrats wanted to abolish a tactic that has served them so well as the minority party. 

“They have used it to their enormous advantage over the last six years,” he said. “They have been protected.” 

“Our founders would have been outraged at the idea that the Senate should be run as a supermajority institution,” said Mr. Udall, who is departing after two Senate terms. “Let’s focus on rules that allow the majority to move forward. At the end of the day, 51 votes. That is what works for the American people. And it has accountability built into it.” 

He said he feared for the next four years as he sees Republicans digging in against the incoming administration as they did against President Barack Obama beginning in 2009. 

“I am already worried about what I see, and us not coming together around this new president and his team and not giving him a chance to succeed,” said Mr. Udall, who has been mentioned as a contender to be interior secretary or to fill another post in the Biden administration, a prospect he said he would welcome.

So, what should be done? Should the filibuster stay, should it go or should something else be done?
My guess is that nothing will be done about it because the GOP will retain a majority in the senate. If that happens, there will be at least another two more years, probably four, of broken congress, GOP obstructionism and legislative gridlock. 

The GOP will be no more in any mood to compromise with any democratic president or congressperson  in 2021 than it was under essentially all eight years of Obama's time in office and has been since the dems won the House in the 2018 elections.

Kumbaya, my Lord, kumbaya
Oh, Lord, kumbaya

Good people on both sides calmly discussing the filibuster

What Some Judges Say About Fraudulent Election Fraud Lawsuits

Wisconsin

In refusing to hear another of the baseless lawsuits, conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn of the Wisconsin Supreme Court commented: “It can be easy to blithely move on to the next case with a petition so obviously lacking, but this is sobering. The relief being sought by the petitioners is the most dramatic invocation of judicial power I have ever seen. Judicial acquiescence to such entreaties built on so flimsy a foundation would do indelible damage to every future election. . . . This is a dangerous path we are being asked to tread.”

In that lawsuit, the court refused to hear a lawsuit filed by a conservative group that sought to invalidate the election in Wisconsin.

Nevada

Judge James T. Russell of the Nevada District Court in Carson City wrote that the campaign “did not prove under any standard of proof that illegal votes were cast and counted, or legal votes were not counted at all, due to voter fraud, nor in an amount equal to or greater than” Biden’s margin of victory, about 33,600 votes. Russell dismissed witness declarations the campaign submitted, describing them as “self-serving statements of little or no evidentiary value” and said the campaign’s expert testimony “was of little to no value.” 

By contrast, the T**** campaign lawyer Jesse R. Binnall said the Nevada election had been “stolen” and he claimed a “robust body of evidence” supported his conclusion. It is beyond me that lawyers making such obviously false statements to the court are not sanctioned for lying and wasting the court’s time. The Nevada Republican Party said it will appeal this baseless case to the state’s highest court.

Arizona

Judge Randall Warner of the Maricopa County Superior Court ruled Friday that he found “no misconduct, no fraud and no effect on the outcome of the election.” The lawsuit was filed by the Arizona Republican Party and its chairwoman, Kelli Ward. Ward is expected to appeal the ruling.

BREAKING: President Trump gives UPDATE on voter fraud claims

 Dec 2, 2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sqbl0L8XlXI

Worth 26 minutes of your time to understand just how fraudulent the U.S. election was.