G.S.A authorizes the transition process

“Emily Murphy, the administrator of the General Services Administration, on Monday formally designated Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the apparent winner of the presidential election, providing federal funds and resources to begin a transition and authorizing his advisers to begin coordinating with Trump administration officials.”

24 thoughts on “G.S.A authorizes the transition process

  1. Neither here nor there, but historian Jon Meacham mentioned a couple yrs ago the founding fathers would have probably been surprised someone like Trump hadn’t happened sooner in American history. 😮

    “As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” ~ H.L. Mencken

    TBF Mencken was probably talking about Warren G. Harding 🙂

    and so it goes …

    1. Mencken may also have been thinking of William Randolph Hearst and/or Henry Ford, both of whom were populist demagogues similar to Trump and both of whom tried running for President.

    2. US “Democracy” has gotten more and more removed from the people as the number of Representatives was frozen at 435 as the US population increased. Each Representative represents an increasing number of people. This also distorts the State representation as each state, no matter how small, gets at least one Representative.

      As this trend continues, expect democracy to fade away more and more..

    3. Mencken’s full article is quite brilliant and cynical, as he was wont to be. Talk about speaking truth to power! I am always dazzled by Mencken’s insights as well as his prose. It seems that he had a crystal ball and the communication skills to convey what he saw in there. How is he not on Mt. Rushmore? After Lincoln and Washington, he may be the greatest of all Americans. (With apologies to the great scientists who have made life worth living.)

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  2. Anyone that’s been paying attention knows that the GOP is scrambling with Trump’s blessing, guidance and encouragement to set a bunch of his lackeys (aka appointees) in power before he goes. While they still have the power to do so. This was reported these last few weeks.

    HE isn’t going softly into the wind, he is going to sow whatever discord and chaos he can to disrupt Biden for as long as he can even without being in power, and do it legally (as far as that goes).

    He will leave his mark with his appointees in key positions around the government, you already see what Emily Murphy did to disrupt things as far as she could and how much she turned a blind eye to the corrupt dealings at Trump International D.C. And delayed the transition.

    The GOP is working every angle they can. McConnell, Graham – every one of them is doing his bidding right now to get any and all of this done before the holidays and the inauguration under the pretext that this is work they’ve been trying to do for years and all of a sudden needed to be completed this session before the GA vote was done and they possibly lost power and Trump was out of office.

    Imagine that.

    He’s not going to play 18 rounds and call it a day folks. He still has more of America to wreck before he is done for the day….

    1. I mean, that’s fine (not really, but you know what I mean) if they appoint lackeys because appointed lackeys can just as easily become fired lackeys after 12:00 EST on January 20th, 2021.

    2. Yes over in Twitter hell his patriots are rallying to stop paying taxes until Trump is rightfully declared the winner. I’m sure he will also do some comically juvenile things clog all the toilets before he leaves.

  3. Thank Baby Jesus. A few more rounds of golf, a few more silly illiterate tweets, run a Stanley Steemer around the White House and we’re rid of this incompetent prick.

  4. “Our case STRONGLY continues, we will keep up the good fight, and I believe we will prevail!” Mr. Trump wrote. “Nevertheless, in the best interest of our Country, I am recommending that Emily and her team do what needs to be done with regard to initial protocols, and have told my team to do the same.”

    Ms. Murphy refuted Mr. Trump’s assertion that he directed her to make the decision, saying in her letter that “I came to my decision independently, based on the law and available facts.”

  5. It’s about damn time. Him and his cult are going to have to find something else to do with their lives besides trying to be horrible and cause problems for others because they have nothing better to do with their lives than be insane racists.

    His legal cases are done for, the states are certifying, and he’s just going to go out with a whimper spending the next two months playing golf until the Biden administration takes over. He’s spent nearly a year of his term playing golf, and more than that on his stupid klan rallies, so he can fuck off for eternity and go sell whatever racket he has next to his stupid cult.

    1. I am afraid that Trump, like the right wing media, will spend his time peddling lies to keep his base whipped up into a rage, because apparently there is a lot of money in that. The recent election shows the appalling number of Americans who have opted to believe the lies.

      I mean, apparently, these people have lives and earn a living; this is what they chose to believe in, and how they vote, and some of them are talking about fighting for it

      See the second and fourth paragraphs below the first photograph, in particular.

      1. I was just “conversing” with someone on the WSJ who was yammering about going to the 4th box. Soap, ballot, jury, ammo.

        1. That’s how people who don’t know what being in the middle of a war is like talk their way into a civil war. I blame the NRA with all their stupid talk about using their guns to preserve their right to own guns for a lot of that.

    2. My prediction is that Donald Trump will remain the most important and influential man in American politics. I don’t see him starting up a media company, as many have suggested. That requires business skill and a work ethic, and Trump has neither. He may lend his name to some shows or even some networks, but there’s no way he has the savvy to run a business. What, then? The only kind of “work” he has ever enjoyed consists of his stint on The Apprentice and his Klan rallies. I think he will continue to do that sort of thing, and will figure out how to profit from it. People will pay to license his name, and I’m pretty sure his cultists will pay to see his insult comedy shows, buy his merchandise, and chant his favorite chants. Trump can continue to preach his white supremacist gospel until he dies.

      We have some hope in that Trump is old and obese, so he may not last long, but there are others to pick up his slack. His oldest son is one example, Devin Nunes is another. They may not have Trump’s charisma (thank heaven), but are very similar to Trump in every bad way I can think of. Even without Trump’s magic touch, either Junior or Nunes could lead the pack by elevating Trump to sainthood and preaching the gospel of Saint Donald.

      Meanwhile, the effin’ Democrats will destroy themselves with internecine squabbling, as usual, because they are a party with varying factions and not a cult with blind obedience to a single leader. Today’s left is about ideas (that they rarely agree on), while the right is about personality and frankly, they don’t really care about ideas. As we’ve noted here many times before, the Trump cultists are currently voting against their own class and economic interests, and against better health and education for their own children.

      As a result, the right will remain organized and unified while the left falls into fractious disputes and chaos.

      As I see it that will only end when the left produces their own messiah – the younger version of Bernie, whoever that may turn out to be. (AOC??)

      And I don’t see that as a good thing because good governance requires gathering and interpreting facts, and facts are the enemies of the left as well as the right. The correct and nuanced interpretation of facts results in many shades of gray, but ideologues want everything to be black or white, and they resist compromise.

      We have started a cycle. We elected our first minority president. Predictably enough, we then elected a blatant racist. Reeling back in horror, we then rejected extreme ideology and elected an anodyne. I don’t see that as the end of the cycle, but the beginning, like the quiet before the storm. Biden’s presidency may be relatively uneventful, but there will be greater turmoil ahead. History has sown the wind, and we will reap the whirlwind in the next two decades. In some future time, the extremists will get pushed back into the fringes and new parties will form in the center in kind of a European model, but that is a long way off. I will not live to see it. But I may live to see an autocrat in power, and possibly even a civil war.

      (And I surely hope that I am wrong.)

      1. I think we’re going to find out in the next four years whether loyalty to Trump can be handed on through primogeniture. Let’s say the Orange Buffoon does make an early announcement that he’s running again, completely freezing every other potential candidate in place. Then let’s say he croaks in Spring 24, after anointing Jr. as his picked successor. Jr. inherits the organization, the PAC money, probably RNC backing, and the Twitter account. To a lot of worshippers any opposition to him would be treason to the memory of the OB. Mind you, Jr. is dumb enough to fuck it all up anyway. He almost certainly loses the election but maybe then we get a replay of the post-election crap we’ve just been going through.
        Or maybe we get a civil war if we haven’t gotten one after this election. Or maybe Jr. has had a really bad accident at the hands of another member of his family.
        And a two-party system with one party largely lobotomized and the other one with deep distrust between two wings. Great times we live in. And a virus too.
        Hell my personal goals are pretty much to survive and see the GF across the Atlantic before the middle of next year (last time we were together was Jan. 17). And crank away on the future Pulitzer winner if I’m not too distracted by the other stuff..

      2. Here’s my hot take: Roy Cohn is the most evil MF in recent US history. You can draw a direct line from McCarthy to Trump through him.

        1. Well, yeah. Cohn worked for McCarthy (Cohn’s relationship with a handsome young man named Schine is said to have led directly to the Army-McCarthy hearings after the Army would not conform to Cohn’s wishes regarding Schine). And Donald Trump considered Cohn to be his mentor, which is something like having Iago or Professor Moriarty for a mentor.

        2. On the national level, the Republican Party and Trump are synonymous. There is no distinction between them. The party made the decision to become one with Trump when the Republican Senators decided not to even LOOK at the evidence during Trump’s impeachment trial. And by always supporting him in all ways. And by supporting his frantic efforts to deny the results of the 2020 election. And on and on and on.

          What future this gives the Republican Party I cannot get. The fearsome strength it displayed in 2020 makes me fear the worst, as I said in a comment above.

      3. well, disorganization is an old Democratic trait…

        “I am not a member of any organized political party — I am a Democrat. ”

        ― Will Rogers

      4. I think very much that UncleScoopy is right. The wealthy and powerful of this country have sowed the wind with 40 years of right wing media calling reality a lie and fabricating a false reality. Trump is just the beginning of the whirlwind we will reap.

        Nothing can persuade the people who believe in the false reality that they are wrong. At even the slightest repudiation by the media sources that helped create it, like Fox News and Facebook, they simply find new sources that tell them what they want to hear, like Parler OAN and Newsmax.

        With the fading of organized mainstream religion, much of America has joined a cult, a cult of the right. Some combine this with a second cult, fanatical evangelical “Christianity”. People have a deep need to be special, and I guess joining these cults make them feel that way.

        I hope we can ride this out somehow, but that seems very much like wishful thinking.

      5. There is certainly a significant block of registered Republicans that love Trump because they like how he is always fighting the Dems or whatever. But as I wrote elsewhere, I don’t think Trump ever won the majority of votes in any primary. After he was nominated and especially after he won the election, his favorability rating among Republicans was very high. But I think (or maybe I just hope) that a large part of that high rating can be chalked up to tribalism. A Republican voter being polled might have felt that if he said he didn’t like Trump he would be giving aid and comfort to the enemy (ie Democrats). Once he had the nomination, the choice was support Trump or help Democrats. If (or maybe I should say when) he runs in 2024, Republican voters will have the opportunity to choose a new standard bearer. I am hoping that if you take the voters that never liked Trump but lied to pollsters and add the voters that did like Trump but have enough functioning brain cells to realize Trump’s high negatives mean he would probably lose the general election (again), there will be enough primary voters to choose someone else. There are also Republicans that were open about not liking Trump.

        If all else fails, I will have to hope Cyrus Vance convicts Trump and puts him behind bars where he would find it hard to hold a rally.

      6. Not to worry in less than 100 yrs the earth will be unlivable because of climate change ~ temps rising 2, 3 degrees.

        btw, Nostradamus predicted the world will end 3797, but what he didn’t mention ~ the only living creatures at that time will be cockroaches, scorpions! 😮

        So party like it’s 1899 er 1999 er never mind …

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