Updates: Tracking The Unresolved 2020 Races

538’s overview

CNN’s election map

UPDATE:

1. Biden has won Arizona and Georgia.

2. Trump has won Alaska and North Carolina

The final electoral count is 306-232.

Several recounts will happen, but the margins are all far greater than the largest amount ever shifted by a recount.

The lawsuits will not change any results. They are all either lacking in merit or so insignificant as to have no impact on the result.

I’m sure you are well aware that all eyes and everyone’s remaining dollars will get poured into Georgia, where control of the Senate is at stake. Everyone in Georgia is likely to remain as annoyed with their fellow Georgians as we all have been with each other for months, and everyone in the state will be miserable except the TV, radio, print and billboard salesmen, all of whom stand to earn record commissions from the expected deluge of political ads.

117 thoughts on “Updates: Tracking The Unresolved 2020 Races

  1. Crowd Strike 2 is in the offing fer shur.
    Totally off topic. Alex Smith of the WTFs was amazing. Before a dumb D penalty cost the Whats the chance to go into OT.

  2. Well, Trump has now kinda-sorta conceded by tweeting out “HE WON BECAUSE THE ELECTION WAS RIGGED”, the HE presumably being Biden, unless Trump decides to change his mind again. He followed it with some boilerplate BS about observers not being allowed and radical left software companies, which I did not know was a thing, probably because it isn’t.

  3. Well we all know TRUMP OPPOSED IT FROM DAY ONE!!!!!! VERY VERY BAD!!! BUSH HURT GOD!!!!
    How could we possibly fail to appreciate our very own very stable genius? Bunch of ingrates we are.

  4. Rachel Maddow? I’m going need more than that. I’d be interested in reading it though. I’ve always wondered exactly what the fuck Cheney and his Oil Bidness crowd thought they were going to get out of it. The Regime Change folks had it all wrong but at least I could see what they were trying to do.
    While we’re talking about LBJ one can also mention that his refusal to honestly fund a simultaneous major war and major domestic program led to inflation it took the fiscal equivalent of a small nuclear device to control.
    Of course a major hat off for his skill and gutsiness with the Civil Rights legislation. Passed largely on Republican votes I might add. The unflattering portrayal of him in the Selma movie was criminally bad history.

      1. Well, would have been rampant due to the Iraq War that he insisted on. It’s like the old definition for a diplomat – an expert at solving problems that wouldn’t exist without diplomats.

    1. My understanding is that Cheney and his clique felt that the price of oil had been spiked by the embargo on Iraqi oil, and that ending the embargo was the only way to get the price of oil down. This would accelerate the growth of the the US economy in particular, and assist in Bush the Younger’s re-election.

      Of course, it required getting rid of Saddam Hussein, and as Bill Deecee points out, he was proving irritatingly durable. No problem; just fake up a lot of lies about weapons of mass destruction. People would be so happy with the instant, zero-cost victory and the good economy, nobody would care about the lies afterward. Success is its own justification, after all.

      There were other people who supported it for other reasons, of course. I still remember the phrase “igniting a firestorm of democracy in the Middle East.”

      You are right about LBJ and inflation, and I should have included that in his failures. It was a VERY bad thing in a variety of ways, and took a major recession (under Reagan) to get under control.

    2. I’m sure a major part of Cheney’s calculus was the shitload of money his pals at Halliburton were making and would make from nation-building.

    3. Civil passed with mostly Democratic votes. There were only 32 Republicans in the Senate at the time.

      1. Civil rights, blah.

        Of course, the Republicans did nominate the only non Southern Senator who voted against the Civil Rights act in 1964. In the course of history, that had a major impact.

        1. And precisely zero relevance to the passage of the Civil Rights Bill. It wasn’t exactly nomination by acclamation either.

          1. That certainly wasn’t the interpretation from millions of people at the time.

            I agree that Goldwater wasn’t the first choice of most Republicans at that time, but it is still a fact: the Republican Party nominated for President the only non Southern U.S Senator to vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

      2. Check the percentages. If the Republicans had gone against it it wouldn’t have had a prayer seeing that Democrat votes against were 31% against in the Senate and 37% in the House. I said largely, not mostly.

        1. Well, 31% in the Senate was not enough to maintain the filibuster and there is no filibuster in the House.

          1. Bill’s interpretation is correct. The Republicans were needed to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Bill. Going strictly by party lines, a greater percentage of Republicans supported it.

            (1) The Democrats could not have passed the act on their own. Although they controlled 67 seats, 23 of those were Dixiecrats, so there were really only 44 liberal, Democratic senators.

            (2) The Democrats actually showed less support than the Republicans in the Senate. (It was supported by 69% of Democratic senators, and 79% of Republicans.)

            The true Democrats voted 44-0 for the bill. The Dixiecrats voted 2-21 against the bill. That left the D tally at 46-21. (Al Gore’s dad voted against it, by the way.)

            The Republicans voted 27-6 for the bill.

          2. Scoopy, I dispute your assessment of the parties at that time, especially the Republican Party.

            You are engaging in a logical fallacy similar to the Historian’s fallacy, that of looking at past events through the lens of current events. In 1964 the political parties were nowhere near as ideologically aligned as they are today. There were many liberal Republicans primarily in the Northeast (and Westcoast like Mark Hatfield of Oregon and Dan Evans of Washington.) in addition to there being many southern conservative Democrats. The Republican Senator from New York, Jacob Javits, for instance, was among the most liberal of all Senators from either party. Similarly, Earl Hutto, a Democratic Representative from the Florida Panhandle, was possibly the most conservative of all House members.

            Belonging to either political party back then was as much based on family history as it was ideology. A good example of this less ideological era was George H W Bush. In 1964, he ran for the U.S Senate in Texas against Democrat Ralph Yarborough (the other Southern Senator who voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act) as a Goldwater Conservative. In 1966 and 1968 Bush ran for the U.S House (and won) as an establishment country-club Republican, pro civil rights, pro ERA and ‘pro Planned Parenthood Republican. (He actually ran against civil rights in 1966 but voted for it once in Congress.) Then, in 1970, when Lloyd Bentsen defeated Ralph Yarborough in the Democratic Primary, Bush again running for the U.S Senate, ran against Bentsen from the left.

          3. I would not dispute that broadly speaking the Republican Party was more right leaning within a fairly narrow ideological framework for either parties.

            Certainly there were extremist Republican fringe factions like the John Birch Society, but the mainstream conservative leaning Republicans at that time were the likes of Republican House Minority Leader Everett Dirksen. He engineered the compromise on the Fair Housing Act of 1968, with Republicans being generally aligned behind the concept of private property rights insisting that owners of single homes be allowed to discriminate however they wanted when selling their private property. This dispute is immortalized in the Simon and Garfunkel song “Silent Night/7 O’Clock News.”

            What led to the general political alignment on ideological grounds was the ‘Reagan Revolution’ in 1980. But what led to that leading to an ideological political alignment in my opinion was three things on social issues:
            1.Barry Goldwater being the Republican nominee in 1964. Goldwater was clearly the forerunner to Ronald Reagan.

            2.Roe V Wade which made the split on social issues much starker.

            3.The emergence of the ‘moral majority’ which was founded in 1979. I don’t know that the ‘moral majority’ brought out many people to vote who hadn’t previously voted, but it got many people to vote based on their religious convictions. In the 1976 election, most Southern Evangelicals voted for Jimmy Carter, but in 1980, a large number of them switched their support to Reagan. The main reason Jimmy Carter won only 6 states and 49 electoral college votes in 1980 despite losing the popular vote by ‘only’ around 9.5%, is because he lost 7 southern states by less than 1.5% of the vote.

          4. As a minor point. John Tower was a Republican. He apparently had been a Democrat but switched to the Republican Party before he was ever elected and worked for Eisenhower’s reelection in 1956. In 1961, he was the first Republican elected to the U.S Senate since Reconstruction when he won the special election to replace Lyndon Johnson who had just been elected Vice President.

            You might be thinking of James Hightower, the liberal Democrat from Texas, who was the Texas Commissioner of Agriculture from 1983-1991.

          5. You’re right, it was Ralph Yarborough who was the southern Democrat who voted “yea.” He and Tower served together in the Senate.

            Actually I also had Tower confused with John Connally, who was the Democratic governor from Texas, not a senator. He was the one who became the head of Democrats for Nixon, and later took a cabinet appointment from the tricky one. (He was a co-victim in the JFK assassination, which is now his major claim to fame.)

  5. Excuse me guys. But any number of Democrats and Republicans, especially at the time, thought not and still don’t think so. Stupidity and gullibility are not generally considered criminal offenses.
    The only figures liable for impeachment might have been Cheney and Rumsfeld (Rummy was lusting to try out that Shock and Awe malarkey). I think Bush himself actually believed that WMD crap, largely provided to him through Cheney, for sometime. Powell was suspicious but was being a good soldier, maybe too good (I actually know this from someone – a Democrat – who knows Powell from way back – fellow young officers in Nam).
    Of course if the idiotic Saddam had not been posturing for his locals in not agreeing to inspections it all probably doesn’t happen. Man did have incredible staying power though. Dictators generally don’t survive after ginning up one disastrous war; he had ginned up two (Iran and Kuwait) before the third did him in.
    Hell, they had me for about a week or so, which is about the time reports started filtering out about the dubiousness of the supposed shipments of uranium from Central Africa (Mali?) to Iraq. My BS detector started going off at that point.
    The only President who without a doubt lied us into a major war in my lifetime was that guy who said he would never send American boys to do the job Asian boys should be doing. Not a Republican as I recall.

    1. I am sure you are right, Bill. The real point is the contrast between all the fake Republican outrage at Clinton’s trivial offense, and the complete acceptance of Bush the Younger plunging us into a needless war based on lies. Apparently, according to Rachel Maddow’s research, to further Cheney’s quest for cheap oil to invigorate the economy of the Western world. (Ever read about what a disaster Cheney was as CEO of Halliburton?)

      I have to admit they also had me for a while, when people like Colin Powell and Tony Blair signed on.

      And yes, LBJ jammed us deep into Vietnam for domestic political reasons, to his great and everlasting disgrace. At least he also got the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act through, at great political cost, and tried to address many of America’s problems with the War on Poverty.

      What’s Bush the Younger’s equivalent? No Child Left Behind? Wow. Oh, and the Patriot Act and the Homeland Security Department. Well, there goes his domestic achievements. And let’s not forget Karl Rove and his hard-on to privatize Social Security – right before the mortgage bubble burst.

    2. Maybe you should have been reading the McClatchy reporting on WMD. That reporting made it very clear that the WMD stuff was pure diction as opposed to the crap being reported by the NYT (e.g. see the infamous Judith Miller…mouthpiece for Cheney) and WaPo who did no actual reporting but sat on their fat asses and relied on phone calls from their “high level” sources. For example, McClatchey reported early on that the aluminum tubes were totally unsuitable for centrifuges and were very likely to be used in Iraq’s missile program.

      1. McClatchy wasn’t reporting squat. But Knight Ridder -owner of my former local paper the Akron Freakin’ (actually Beacon) Journal -was. MCCl bought them several years later. Hey if I’d been fucking Nostradamus I would have been reading their stuff. Of course, you were reading it every day in 2002/3, right?

        1. I was reading their shoe leather reporting…and hence was opposed to the Iraq War right from the start. I recall being in a college cafeteria at the very start of the shock and awe expressing my opposition and was told by the American next to me to whisper so that other people couldn’t overhear my “unpatriotic” comments.

    3. I’ve always wondered whether W actually believed the WMD story.

      The other mystery to me about the Iraq situation is whether anyone in the intelligence community actually believed the Niger yellowcake story, which was easily disproved by spending five minutes (or less) on Google. Now the CIA employs plenty of geniuses. Those lower lever research grunts must have known those documents were fake, and they must have known on day one, so their analysis must have been overridden.

      But at what point and by whom?

      Surprisingly, nobody has ever come forward with the story.

  6. Michael McChesney said: “My reply to Roger’s comment about Clinton’s impeachment was accidently posted above in case anyone is interested.”

    Why is this written in the passive voice? Didn’t you do the posting? Don’t you believe in taking personal responsibility? Or are you trying to say your handler posted it? Is this some kind of cry for help?

    1. But, I’ll bet anything that McM doesn’t believe that George W Bush should have been impeached/convicted for lying the United States into the Iraq War.

      1. Of course not, Adam. Why would any Republican think that? I bet he can explain why, too. At excruciating length.

  7. Cons frequently erroneously use the phrase Trump derangement syndrome.

    Once Trump is no longer king his sheep, lemmings, sycophants, toadies may begin suffering Trump withdrawal symptoms. 😮 Hopefully Obama Care can pull them through their misery! 😛

    As always, no charge for my pedestrian psychoanalysis. 🙂

    Yielding back the balance of my time …

  8. Michael McCheney said: Remember, this whole sub thread of ad hominem bashing of the GOP generally and yours truly specifically….”

    A word about logic and ad hominem arguments: An ad hominem argument is a logical fallacy, in which the validity of an argument is attacked by saying that the person making the argument is a bad person.

    A valid argument is one which, given true premises, always reaches a true conclusion.

    I have not claimed that Michael McChesney’s arguments are invalid. Rather, I have stated that the premises on which they are based are untrue, and that he is a bad person because he uses false premises to support an evil institution. Those are personal attacks, not ad hominem arguments, and in my opinion, McM richly deserves them.

    However, I have been angry lately, especially at the latest antics of President Trump, and the way the Republican Party either fails to oppose him in any way, or outright supports him. It is therefore possible that I have been wrong about McM and have been unfair, or at least rude.

    I stand ready for someone to demonstrate this to me. Not McM himself, of course, because he is still, somehow, a Republican, despite wishing to give the appearance of being both intelligent and a decent human being. One cannot be both in 2020.

    I will not address the concept of making ad hominem attacks against a political party. The Republican Party is composed of bad or deluded people, and my attacks on them are because of that fact. They are bad people if, for no other reason, than that they support a bad person, Donald Trump, in his ravaging of the United States.

    1. For what it’s worth this is my take on McM.

      Adam Smith wrote about how (from The Atlantic):
      due to a quirk of human nature, people generally find it easier to sympathize with joy than with sorrow, or at least with what they perceive to be joy and sorrow.

      As a result, Smith held, people sympathize more fully and readily with the rich than the poor: “the rich man glories in his riches, because … they naturally draw upon him the attention of the world,” while “the poor man goes out and comes in unheeded, and when in the midst of a crowd is in the same obscurity as if shut up in his own hovel.” Not only are people far more likely to notice the rich than the poor, according to Smith, but they are also far more likely to approve of them, to admire them, and to emulate them; indeed, he devoted an entire chapter of The Theory of Moral Sentiments to demonstrating that this is the case.

      What’s more, Smith saw this distortion of people’s sympathies as having profound consequences: It undermines both morality and happiness. First, morality. Smith saw the widespread admiration of the rich as morally problematic because he did not believe that the rich in fact tend to be terribly admirable people. On the contrary, he portrayed the “superior stations” of society as suffused with “vice and folly,” “presumption and vanity,” “flattery and falsehood,” “proud ambition and ostentatious avidity.” In Smith’s view, the reason why the rich generally do not behave admirably is, ironically, that they are widely admired anyway (on account of their wealth). In other words, the rich are not somehow innately vicious people. Rather, their affluence puts them in a position in which they do not have to behave morally in order to earn the esteem of others, most of whom are dazzled and enchanted by their riches.

      1. McM frequently recounts his joy at being a member of the Federalist Society, as we know, a group comprised largely of elite and elitist right wing lawyers.

        You can see his approval of the wealthy elites with his fawning descriptions of Amy Coney Barrett.

        McM is just an average person who favors wealth and power for the reasons that Adam Smith pointed out why many non wealthy and powerful people favor the wealthy and the powerful.

        Then, since he believes the wealthy and powerful people are inherently virtuous, it’s impossible for him to believe that what they tell him is false.

    2. Adam, you are failing to make me think I have wronged McM. I am sad. Or rather, I think I will be sad at some date in the future when the Republican Party has again become a powerful force for the good of the American people.

  9. Trump’s day today:
    -GA called for Biden
    -Lost lawsuit to throw out votes in Detroit
    -Lost lawsuit blocking ballots arriving after Election Day in PA
    -Withdrew lawsuit challenging ballots in AZ
    -Lost Electoral College 306-232 & popular vote by 5.4 million

  10. Actually for Michael:
    Get the sleep dirt out of your eyes. The “Republican” Party is going somewhere – right into the dustbin of history. By the end of this decade to boot.
    Why? Because it is not the Republican Party anymore. It is the Trump Party. And as long as “The Base” buys in, the Trump Party is not going anywhere and there is no one in the Party who can or would even try to mount a serious challenge to the Orange Buffoon. A collective survey of voters in various Congressional and local primaries this year found that loyalty to Trump was considered the most important thing to these voters. That’s not about to change.
    Will the Trump Party last? Well, its sole leader is an obese 74-year old with a bad diet and bad health habits. There is no designated successor or even anyone with an independent power position, although the “Base” might opt for Jr. and his shrieking gargoyle girlfriend.
    The Republican Party right now is the political equivalent of Nitta Yoshisada, the Japanese samurai of the 1300s most famous for cutting off his own head.

    1. I agree with everything Bill Deecee says here, and wish I had said it myself. I only worry that he is wrong about the GOP fading away, because the oligarchs who use it to advance their interest have so much invested in it, and so much ability to keep on lying to the gullible, ignorant people who make up its rank and file.

      Having said that, there is an interesting post about the surviving Koch brother here.

      1. Just read it after having gotten off a post in response to the latest crap from the odious Kimberly Strassel. Well.. he was always known as the nicer of the two. But I’d be a little more impressed if he would make some actual amends for having fueled the movement which destroyed my former party and helping us lose 10 to 20 years in dealing with climate change. “Libertarian” in general never impresses me, whether it’s Rand Paul or our very own local specimen.
        Btw, Nitta-san may not have been the only samurai who cut off his own head. But the other one supposedly did it while on horseback. I have trouble imagining the mechanics. There is a great drawing of it in one of Stephen Turnbull’s Japanese history books. Nitta is well attested.

        1. I can see what you mean by “odious”, Bill, When I Googled her, one of the top results was a Twitter post by her dated 22 hours ago: “My latest: The fix was in long before any of the vote counters got started.”

          She seems like a fine addition to any right wing conspiracy theory nut group. This is the kind of person who is just plain bad for the nation.

  11. Folks at DoD might not agree with you on the disinterested in using any power part. He had one mean ass “someone is going to pay for this” look going at Arlington yesterday. Maybe it was just about being dragged into another thing honoring those suckers and losers.

    1. The look was probably also “it’s raining lightly and it will mess my hair” and “I know it’s an umbrella thing but my wife is on the arm of a Marine while I walk alone. Oh the optics! Won’t somebody think of the optics!! And I suck and everyone is happy I lost.”

  12. There is no realistic option. But can we assume that Trump is going to be convinced of that? I’m still holding my breath until his lardass is out the door.

    1. I rather have him dejected on Twitter and rambling about nonsense and disinterested in using any power, than being motivated to destroy what he can in the last two months to be honest. He can spend the last two months on his golf course for all I care, it’s money well spent rather than him going on a destructive rampage.

  13. There’s no option for Trump here to do a ‘coup’. He’s trying to just throw a shitstorm of material at courts regardless of how ridiculous it is to delay the certification of the vote past the time limit of the state to certify, or up to the electoral college vote to say the states hasn’t decided. Except virtually every court motion in these frivolous filings has been denied. Any small ones that do get through are about making a very small amount of votes segmented from the rest *in case* they are found to be invalid later. This amount doesn’t change anything in overturning the margin of victory by Biden in any state.

    So with that said, what about faithless electors? Well, many states, including Arizona, Nevada, and Michigan have faithless elector laws to if the elector does not cast a vote for certified winner – they simply nullify the vote, and the elector is replaced.

    So what about contested states who also don’t have this law, and try to change the electors? From The Guardian:

    “Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Nevada all have Democratic governors who would refuse to approve a set of Trump electors with the popular vote clearly showing Biden winning their state. Instead, they would submit the electors Biden is entitled to as the winner of the popular vote.”

    And even then somehow if all hell broke lose and the electors were contested and overruled by the governor, and it blew past the final deadline and went to Congress, and there was doubt on the electoral backing of the states – the courts THEN would likely block Congress arbitrarily selecting a states ‘true’ intentions and side with the vote count or the governor’s elector findings.

    And if it goes past all that? Well then the House and Senate would fight over it back and forth all the way up until January 20th – in which either way, Trump and Pence’s term would expire and Nancy Pelosi would be President as third in succession.

    None of these options at any turn result in a win for Trump. He want to frivolously sue himself out of his own failure, and leech off the system, similarly to what he’s done his entire life.

    1. Thank, Indy. I hope using Republican state legislatures to appoint Trump electors is not possible, and I am glad you say it is not.

      Of course, being legal has never been of great concern to Trump, and lately the Republicans don’t seem to care much either. A coup is NEVER strictly legal.

      1. An article on CNN went into more detail on the current situation. It seems like Trump is deservedly dejected as much as defiant, so I can’t see this effort going longer.

        The House GOP leader said he wasn’t sure if Biden would be President January 20th. Most of them fall in line with the ‘within the rights’ range of comments on what he’s doing. Apparently Trump, as usual, has them by the balls and they’re afraid if they strictly oppose him and say too much, then his base won’t turn out for the Georgia Senate runoff and get no help from Trump.

        The funny thing is, this is going to continue to be the case even when Trump is OUT of office. His cult is more loyal to him than the Republican party at this point, and if Trump somehow does try to start campaigning for 2024 at some point (if his health habits and crimes haven’t caught up by then) then they’re by the balls again having to compete with him without pissing him off. Or even out of office, not pissing him off because he might go make his own third party and split the base.

        You make a deal with the devil, then eventually the bill comes due. Republicans sold their soul to Trump and his cult, now they’re always on risk of him turning on them and taking his cult voters with him.

  14. The most benign possibility is that this is just another Big Grift by the Trumpster, buying time so he can bilk his suckers/losers out of donations which ostensibly go to court challenges but in reality are going to his PACs and the Trump Organization.

  15. My understanding isn’t that Trump is looking to win a recount, he’s looking to have those the elections in the States of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin declared invalid because of fraud.

    Then the State legislatures would seat electors loyal to Trump.

    “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress; but no Senator or Representative, or person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States shall be appointed an Elector.”

    1. I see that as a possibility. Since there is no fraud, the fight can’t be won in the courts, but the maneuver you describe is completely legal and would effectively bypass the courts, since there would be no obligation to prove fraud, or even to allege it. The legislatures would simply declare that it was their will to send those electors, as is their constitutional right.

      And it would certainly mean immediate civil war in the streets, which would ultimately be decided by which side the military would support. (That makes Trump’s recent moves at the Pentagon, in conjunction with denying Biden’s people their transition needs, seem darkly ominous. Esper in particular had steadfastly opposed using the American military against American civilians.) If that false elector slate happens, it would be a dark and ugly time for America, and an opportunity for all our enemies to move against us. It would turn the Shining City on the Hill into a third-rate junta, like the Argentina of the Northern Hemisphere.

      1. I don’t think Trump has the guts for this. As I said before, he has been careful to avoid being directly responsible for bloodshed.

        But under Trump, every day is Anything Can Happen Day.

          1. All respect to the Sage of New Berlin, but this kind of talked went around four years ago and Trump still got in. This time there’s not even the “but look at the popular vote” bullet point to argue.

          2. Yes, Nature Mom, but Hilary and Democrats played by the rules. Trump is a desperate criminal, and his supporters are nut cases, fools, and fanatics.

            I should have said that New Berlin is an outer suburb of Milwaukee, just so people know this is not some backwoods yahoo.

    2. Sorry if I am being obtuse but how would this work in light of (1) the Chiafalo decision from this past summer and (2) 48 states have “winner take all” allocations of electoral votes?

    1. It is Mitch McConnell’s dream that one day, when lawsuits like this are filed by Republicans, the judges will rubber-stamp them “A-OK! You win everything!”

  16. Losers quite possibly morphing into traitors. The only logical way to explain the stuff going on with the Pentagon right now is an attempted restructuring to more readily accommodate a coup.
    The so-called Leadership of the Republican Party should adopt a flag showing a chocolate éclair in honor of their collective backbone.

    1. Yes, that is what I am concerned about too, Bill. Two considerations give me hope: 1) Trump is gutless, and has always been careful to avoid responsibility for bloodshed, and B) the officers and men of the armed forces tend to be real patriots, not the faux-patriots of the Republican leadership and the Trump Administration.

      Also, who wants to lay down their life for Trump except idiots and crackpots? Those guys can do some killing, but they can’t overthrow a country.

      1. Those losers and “tough guys” are in some cases individually packing enough heat to rip up a surprised platoon.
        Second Amendment Rights you know.
        Local stuff could get scary. Thugs always use the background of general disorder to settle specific scores.
        These people worry a cousin of mine who used to command a division. So they worry me a bit too.

        1. Definitely a reason to be concerned. One should not dismiss it out of hand…Trump may be looking for a pretext to use the Sedition Act.

          1. Like he was this last summer.
            Netherlands huh? The place I was trying to travel to this year, like very year since 2007, before Trump rendered the US virus non grata.
            Yes, you guys got the full treatment complete with mass starvation at the end which might have been avoided if Montgomery had understood the concept of Scheldt Estuary.

  17. I never understood the appellation “Sleepy” for Biden, I can think of some not flattering descriptors but sleepy just doesn’t seem right. You want to hear sleepy listen to Trump try to talk about anything serious for half a minute, nothing but a slurred tired drone.

  18. This is the last Veterans Day or Memorial Day General Bonespurs gets to desecrate. I’m going to raise a big glass to that one this evening.

  19. Excluding California, Joe Biden has now pulled ahead of Trump in the non-California popular vote. Biden is also ahead in the non California electoral college vote. You now have to add in New York to have Trump ahead in the ‘non coastal elite’ vote.

    I’ve always found the coastal elite trope to be amusing or odd, because it means that a homeless person in San Francisco is somehow elite while the Koch brothers of Kansas are ‘just regular folks.’

  20. 1.I don’t think it makes sense at this time for Nancy Pelosi to go. She has the experience and the knowledge to govern and has demonstrated the capacity to hold her caucus together. However, I certainly think it makes sense for her to also spend these two years transitioning the House leadership to a new group. Preferably it wouldn’t be just her leaving but also Steny Hoyer and Jim Clyburn.

    Nancy Pelosi will certainly not leave if Steny Hoyer is still around and could run for Democratic leader whether in the majority or the minority. Though they have been in the leadership together for years, apparently they hate each other.

    2.Scoopy wrote: “5. Republicans continue to make gains in the House. The Dems will hold on to a majority, but it will be their slimmest edge in two decades.”

    I’m not sure this is correct. Since 1994 the Democrats have only been in the majority for now 8 years. In 2006 and 2008 and 2018 and 2020. This is their slimmest edge, certainly, but is 14 years really two decades? You may mean this is the smallest edge for either party since the Republicans had a majority in the House of 222-213 (including independents Bernie Sanders for the Democrats and Virgil Goode for the Republicans) in 2000.

    This is also the 3rd time in 4 elections that a President of a different party coming in has seen their party lose seats in the House. In 2000, the Republicans had a net loss of 1 seat and in 2016 the Republicans had a net loss of 6 seats. Only when Obama came in in 2008 did the Democrats gain House seats.

    1. Oh, that was from 538. So, Nate Silver was the one who considers 14 years to be two decades.

      Interestingly, in the 34th Congressional district in California which has been declared for the Democratic incumbent, Jimmy Gomez, who defeated narrowly defeated a fellow Democrat, according to Politico, Jimmy Gomez is the front-runner to be chosen by Biden as Trade Representative.

    2. Hoyer definitely needs to go. Hoyer has a dinosaur mentality that makes Pelosi look positively “New Age.”

    3. I think it’s clear what I (and Nate, I guess, but I shouldn’t speak for him) wrote. In the last 20 years, there has been no time when the Democrats held the House by a slimmer margin. I guess I could have said seven decades, but that seems like ancient history. (When was the last time they held the House with an edge of fewer than 20 seats? WW2?)

      1. Oh probably. I thought the more interesting thing was the closeness of the House, and not which party was in the majority at the time.

  21. time for Nancy to be put out to pasture along with Schumer…there is clearly a Democratic messaging failure at the Congressional level.

    1. Mostly agree, but it’s not just a failure to get the word out, the actual vision has to be better too. You can’t just run and govern on “we aren’t Nazis.”

      1. In fairness, it’s difficult to “govern” when the party controlling the Senate absolutely refuses to do so themselves. And it’s about to get worse if they retain control after the GA special elections.

      2. seeing what the Nazis did invading my country in Europe, I would say that is actually a pretty good message.

    2. My college age self would probably be surprised to see me write this, but I think one of the biggest problems in our country today are the lack of moderates of both parties in Congress. I have no idea how many Democrats that Republicans would describe as moderates are left in the House. But with the majority being so slim it would be at least theoretically possible for the GOP caucus to throw it’s support to a moderate Democrat in order to remove Nancy Pelosi as Speaker. That is unlikely to happen as moderate Democrats probably wouldn’t go along with such a plan and there are probably far too many Republicans that would refuse as well. Part of the reason they may refuse is because they prefer running against Pelosi. She is easier to demonize in fundraising letters and TV ads.

      I don’t really know how we can get back to a point where Democrats and Republicans can learn to compromise again. I can say I will start voting for the candidate most likely to work across the aisle in GOP primaries, but I live in the Bronx. I have no idea if or when my vote will ever matter again. Last year, when I was looking for an apartment to buy, I had decided if I ended up living in AOC’s district I was going to register as a Democrat to vote against her in a primary. Maybe I should do that anyway. But I’ve been a registered Republican for almost 35 years and considered myself one even longer than that. It would be tough, but maybe I should anyway.

      1. Ah, the old “both sides” ploy

        The fact is there are plenty of Democrat moderates. Two of them just were elected President and Vice President. The entire slate of Democrats with the exception of Bernie Sanders and Marianne Williamson were moderates.

        There are almost no Republican moderates. Anyone who is unwilling to stand up to Trump in public is a coward, not a moderate.

        1. Nancy Pelosi is a cautious and practical pragmatist. She is the very definition of both a moderate and a centrist.

      2. Ditto what fwald said. The whole Democratic Party is center, even center right by any normal standard. It’s not as far left as Richard Nixon was while President! The Republican Party, on the other hand, has deliberately driven out moderate politicians in favor of extremist idiots, Randians, and oligarchy lovers. Those are pretty much all the same things, now that I think of it.

        1. PS – I think that what McM’s college-age self would be surprised at would be what an intellectually dishonest hypocrite he has become. Or, to be generous, how intellectually blinkered he has become.

          Unless he’s always been this way, of course.

      3. I said I didn’t know how many Democrats REPUBLICANS would consider moderates are left in Congress. You could also ask it the other way. How many Republicans are in Congress that DEMOCRATS would consider moderates? I have no interest in arguing over whether it is the GOP or Democrats that are more moderate or more extreme. The answer to that question depends on where you are on the political spectrum. My point was that we need more Senators and Representatives of both parties that can work together. Joe Manchin and Susan Collins aren’t enough.

        1. If you haven’t noticed by now that every Republican at least publicly says that everybody to the left of them is either a socialist or a communist, you’re even more ridiculous than I had previously thought.

          1. I tried to read McM’s latest glass of balloon juice. Yes, the REPUBLICANS need to be decent and honestly bi-partisan. The Democrats have been that way for the last 40 years. If he thinks different, he is delusional or simply lying.

            Actually, the Republican Party is done. It stands for nothing but oligarchy and appealing to racism, homophobia, and other forms of xenophobia to get enough votes to enable oligarch.

            How anyone can have lived through the last four years, seen what ACTUALLY HAPPENED, and still think the Republicans are a legitimate political party that has the interests of the American people are heart is beyond understanding. You have to have closed your mind to all truth, or think that “Atlas Shrugged” is brilliant and utterly true for that.

            But I guess McM wants to hear more lies from the Right forever.

          2. President elect Biden received the most votes in U.S. history, but President Trump received the second most. The difference in the popular vote was less than 3.5%. In other words nearly half the country voted for the Republican for president. That means almost by definition a significant percentage of Republicans are in the mainstream. But I understand. We disagree politically, so I am either stupid or venal. Nearly half the country voted for Donald Trump, so nearly half the country is racist and/or too stupid to know what is in their best interest. Here’s the thing. If you really can’t understand why Republicans, conservatives, and/or libertarians believe what they believe and vote the way they vote than either you don’t want to understand them or you aren’t as smart as you think you are. Studies have been done that measure conservatives ability to understand the motivations of liberals and vice-versa. The studies have shown conservatives are significantly better at understanding liberals than liberals are at understanding conservatives.

            Would you like to know why so so many conservatives support Trump? In part, because the things that Trump is accused of for the most part differ only in degree from what every Republican nominee is accused of. The Republicans finally nominated someone that actually was many of those things. It was almost a Democratic Party cried wolf situation. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not just that. There is all kind of tribalism involved as well as a desire to enact certain policies. But this hyper-partisanship is not healthy for this country. But if we are going to learn to cooperate and compromise again, it would really be helpful if we understood why the other side believes the things they believe. Or maybe try asking why they think they believe what they believe.

          3. Oh dear god, more hot air from a guy who thinks the Republicans are peachy and there are extremists on both sides. Got tell it to someone who cares. Anyone who cannot see how rotten the Republicans are is either rotten or deluded himself.

            A lot people voted against Lincoln and wanted to preserve slavery in 1860. They were wrong. Get a grip on reality.

          4. 1.Studies have been done that measure conservatives ability to understand the motivations of liberals and vice-versa. The studies have shown conservatives are significantly better at understanding liberals than liberals are at understanding conservatives.

            These studies are now a bit dated, but you left out the reason why liberals couldn’t understand the motivations of conservatives. It was because, as you’ve acknowledged, that conservative have few consistent views, but change their positions based on which party held the White House.

            A Republican and not just the politicians, was for government fiscal deficits when a Republican was President, but against them when a Democrat was President. A Republican was for raising interest rates to prevent hyper inflation when a Democrat was President, but was for lowering interest rates to prevent a recession when a Republican was President.

            It’s not a surprise that people who have more consistent views would be confused by the motivations of people who have few consistent views. There is now a realization from liberals that the primary motivation of conservatives is to ‘own the libs’ and that it’s nothing more than that, as juvenile as it is.

          5. ” In other words nearly half the country voted for the Republican for president. That means almost by definition a significant percentage of Republicans are in the mainstream.”

            This comes down to a distinction between the concept of ‘a centrist’, and the concept of a ‘moderate.’

            There is no clear agreement of which is which, but the distinction is generally acknowledged. One, and I use the term ‘centrist’ for this, is a person who tries to listen to all the valid sides of an argument and tries to encompass as many different points of these valid views in their positions. Looking at facts and evidence are essential in the positions of a ‘centrist.’ Obviously, sometimes, it’s not possible to accommodate two leading sides on an issue and a stark choice has to be made. Most of the time, however, it is possible to encompass various valid positions of an argument and arrive at a ‘centrist’ outcome. In economics, the concepts of Pareto Optimality and the Nash Equilibrium are directly related to finding ‘centrist’ solutions.

            A ‘moderate’ on the other hand, is somebody who tries to find a middle ground between any two points of view, no matter how extreme both of those points may be or how little relation to facts and evidence those points of view may have.

            So, in regards to the initial argument presented: the Nazis received 40% of the vote in 1933. By the initial argument, a fair percentage of people who voted Nazi must also have been mainstream and some of the ideas of the Nazis was mainstream.

            To a moderate, the Holocaust would be considered extreme, but putting Jews in the Ghettos would be a ‘moderate’ response to the ‘Jewish’ problem.

            Also, if Michael has any problem with this analogy, he again needs to get it through his thick head that even ‘moderate’ Republicans refer to every Democrat and every Democratic proposal as either ‘socialist’ or ‘communist.’

          6. If they can’t be seen or heard, McM. what’s your proof that they exist? Gravitational pull?

            Ooh, I know, you should call them the Silent Majority!!! That always works!

          7. Roger, that PA Supreme Court ruling got you upset tonight? Wait until it is ruled that the decision to allow late ballots to be counted is overturned, just warning you its coming.

            So your upset I acknowledge that there are non radical liberals? Not all are bad, but the radical left scared the shit out of me personally.

          8. Just for the sake of conversation I’m going to throw it out there that Biden is in violation of the Logan act with his declaration that he has been discussing his plans post inauguration with actual foreign leaders.

            Not a single state has certified their election results, given this Biden is no more a representative of the US than you or I at this moment and not president elect.

            I personally believe the Logan act is unconditional but that doesn’t defend the fact that he is in violation of the very act that he recommended pinning on Gen Flynn.

          9. In regards to midwest Conservative, those are all segregated ballots, meaning they haven’t been counted yet, while waiting for the court challenges. Since Biden is ahead by 55,588 votes in Pennsylvania, it’s Trump who needs to find additional votes to be counted, not Biden.

            It also says something about Republicans that they are (or were) cheering for the valid votes of Americans to not have their votes counted due to their ballots arriving a few days late, mostly through no fault of their own, but that’s a different story.

          10. I disagree with the idea that Clinton’s impeachment was a travesty. I never particularly cared about Clinton being unfaithful to his wife. I figured that was between him and Hillary. The Paula Jones lawsuit was financed by Clinton’s political enemies. But the Supreme Court decided unanimously that he would have to answer questions in a deposition. He did and he lied under oath. There are apparently arguments that his answers were misleading but technically correct. While Clinton was never prosecuted for perjury and obstruction of justice anywhere but in Congress. His conduct was apparently serious enough for him to be disbarred. People can disagree about whether what he did was serious enough to warrant impeachment. But the arguments are in no way one sided enough that I think it is appropriate to describe the impeachment as a travesty. I remember watching George Stephanopoulos commenting on TV when the news broke that Monica Lewinsky had DNA evidence. His first reaction was that Clinton would have to resign. He apparently thought it was pretty serious at the beginning.

            Many people argued that all Clinton did was lie about sex and everyone does that. I graduated from law school in 1998. My first job as a lawyer was working for a small firm that practiced employment law, including sexual harassment cases. That gave me a certain perspective. While many people, including members of Congress, thought it was wrong to make Clinton answer questions about past sexual relationships. To the best of my knowledge, not one member of Congress ever proposed a law that would shield defendants in sexual harassment law suits from having to answer such questions. If the president shouldn’t have to answer questions about their sexual history, than corporate executives shouldn’t have to either. But I believe they should. Not long after the impeachment, I was speaking to a witness in an age discrimination suit against a bank. This person was a witness to a statement made by the bank president that basically proved our case. He admitted to me that he had heard the man make the statement and he had said exactly what our client said he said. But he told me he wouldn’t testify. I told him I could subpoena him. He said “I’ll lie.” I told him that would be perjury and he said words to the effect of that’s no big deal after all the president did it. I believe both plaintiffs and defendants have a right to honest testimony of witnesses. What Bill Clinton did made it harder for me to get that for my client and I am sure it made it harder for many lawyers’ clients.

            Given the current occupant of the White House this may sound silly, but remember I voted against the Cheeto twice (3 times if you count the New York primary). Since the president is responsible for making sure our laws are faithfully executed, I think it is entirely appropriate to hold him or her to a higher standard, not a lower one. You may disagree with me on that. But again, the argument against is not so compelling that it is fair to call the impeachment a travesty. But we can agree to disagree about that.

          11. Michael McChesney said: “I disagree with the idea that Clinton’s impeachment was a travesty.”

            Well, you are wrong. Deal with it.

            It was a travesty because 1) the Ken Starr investigation was a travesty, a tremendous effort to find something, anything, that could be used against Clinton. That is inherently wrong, and if you don’t think so, you are wrong again. (BTW, try to imagine what such an investigation would have turned up against Trump. It is a concept greater than infinity.)

            Second, what he was impeached for was utterly trivial and unrelated to his functions as President. And if you don’t agree with that, and can still support the Republican Party, go fuck yourself.

            My God, have you actually SEEN the videos comparing what Lindsey Graham said during the Clinton impeachment and the Trump impeachment?

            You are living in denial, and devoting all your intelligence to that effort. That is why your posts are so long-winded; it takes a lot of words to justify the unjustifiable.

          12. Roger you are wrong. Go fuck yourself.

            Hey you are right, that is much less long winded!!! But I really don’t know what the point of substituting ad hominem attacks for discussion is. Maybe it is just that you only want to hear from people that agree with you and the ad hominem attacks are a way to drive away folks that disagree? If you are 100% sure you are 100% correct about everything that may be understandable, but sad. Because no one is right about everything. During the Lewinsky scandal all I heard from Democrats were defenses of Clinton. Some feminist, I forget who, said every woman should be willing to give Clinton oral sex. Of course, since the Me Too movement, Clinton is a sexual predator. I think it is useful to listen to contrary opinions. Well usually. I think it is a waste of time if the opinion is “you are wrong, go fuck yourself.”

        2. I have never said everything with the Republican Party is “peachy.” As it happens the last Republican I voted for in a presidential election was John McCain. Now the only reason I didn’t vote for Romney was because I had to take an unexpected trip to CA the Saturday before election day in 2012. But speaking of Romney, has he called every Democrat in Congress a socialist or communist? Has Susan Collins?

          No party that could nominate Donald Trump is peachy. I voted against him twice. Trump has the right to file his law suits, but they aren’t going to go anywhere. Certainly not enough of them will succeed to reverse Biden’s victory. In a little over 2 months, Trump will have vacated the White House. But Trump isn’t the only problem with the GOP. Congressional Republicans have been to scared of losing primaries if they are seen as insufficiently loyal to Trump. But even before Trump, you had Eric Cantor losing a primary because he was apparently to willing to make deals with Democrats. On the other side, you had Joe Crowley being defeated in a primary by AOC. These kind of things are not going to help Democrats and Republicans learn to compromise again.

          I hope the GOP can recover from Trump by 2024 and nominate someone with principals. My first choice right now is probably Nikki Haley. But I wouldn’t call my self super optimistic on that front. Still, I can hope. Just like I can hope the Mets will win the World Series next year. But even if the GOP wins the presidency and control of the House and Senate in 4 years, that will not mean I will support everything they do. Remember, this whole sub thread of ad hominem bashing of the GOP generally and yours truly specifically, started when I called for more moderate Republicans to be elected. I would think that alone might lead someone to believe I am not all that happy with all of the Republicans in office currently.

          1. Not sure about Susan Collins, she might be the lone exception, but, yes Romney did call President Obama a socialist.

            In his 2010 book, “No Apology,” Romney warned that Obama was moving America in the direction of European-style socialism.

            And on the campaign trail:
            “What President Obama is, is a big-spending liberal,” he continued. “He takes his political inspiration from Europe and from the socialist democrats in Europe. “

          2. Saying Obama is a “big-spending liberal” that takes inspiration from European socialist democrats is not the same thing as calling Obama a socialist. There is a world of difference between saying a politician is moving us in the direction of European-style socialism and saying that politician is a socialist. But even if I accepted your characterization, has Romney made a habit of saying similar things about other Democrats? I believe the accusation was “every Republican at least publicly says that everybody to the left of them is either a socialist or a communist.” Is Obama the only Democrat to the left of Romney?

            I don’t think I have ever made categorical statements about every Democrat. That’s probably because both the Democratic and Republican parties are coalitions of people with different ideologies. There are pro-life Democrats and pro-choice Republicans. My parents were both registered Democrats that usually voted for Republicans for president. The Republican Party contains fundamentalist Christians and atheists as well as people of most if not all faiths. I know for a fact there is at least one registered Republican that is a pro-life agnostic/atheist.

            The Republican party is not finished. It has existed for over 160 years and is not going anywhere. The Democrats may have won the presidency, but there will be another Republican in the White House, probably in the next 8 years, almost certainly in the next 12. If the electorate decides the GOP is too conservative, a more moderate candidate will be nominated. That is what the Democrats did after 3 straight GOP victories. That is how our political system works. No party will be in control forever.

          3. The Republican Party has been obviously vile since the travesty of the impeachment of President Clinton a quarter of a century ago. I would like to say it hit bottom under President Trump, but one of many, many things the past four years have taught us is that there is not bottom with the Republican Party.

            In short, it is an evil institution, kept in power by lies and the ignorance and gullibility of the people it has duped into voting for it.

            As such, anyone who supports it and its “recovery” is supporting an evil thing. There is not point in reforming it. The only point to retaining it is to retain the support of those dupes, since forming a new party would involve getting them to believe a new set of lies (since any conservative party would require them to vote against their own interests). This would reveal the old set of lies as lies. I assume that would not go well.

            So that is why I attack the Republican Party and Michael McChesney personally. He is someone who cannot see that the continuation of the Republican Party, after what it did under Trump is a foul thing and a stain on American history. It survives, as I said, only because of the lies it tells the public.

            IMO, the Republican Party as it once was died no later than 1988. Since then, it has been the Oligarchical Party, and inimical to the interests of the American people. McC does not see that, presumably because he does not want to change ideas he developed in college, or recognize how much the “GOP” has changed since then.

          4. “MidCon…crawl back into Trump’ s ass. That’s where you belong.”

            So nice let’s say it twice!

            “MidCon…crawl back into Trump’ s ass. That’s where you belong.”

            ok, thrice …

          5. My reply to Roger’s comment about Clinton’s impeachment was accidently posted above in case anyone is interested.

          6. “Mitt Romney slaps ‘socialist’ agenda of Democratic presidential candidates — and Donald Trump’s character”

            From the article itself, I actually agree with most of what Romney said, but the point here is he had to make sure to get the ‘socialist’ word in.

          7. “Socialist” is the argument Republican politicians use when they haven’t got an actual argument. Their have trained their base to have a Pavlovian response to it.

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