POTUS/General Election Thread 2020 + Aftermath

[Montmorency]

Too many famous quips on this subject. Two of the best-known:

"Pro-lifers" believe that life begins at conception and ends at birth

Boy, these conservatives are really something, aren't they? They're all in favor of the unborn. They will do anything for the unborn. But once you're born, you're on your own. Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months. After that, they don't want to know about you. They don't want to hear from you. No nothing. No neonatal care, no day care, no head start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing. If you're preborn, you're fine; if you're preschool, you're f****d.

[ReluctantSamurai]

On the lighter side:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...p-trump-casino

One of Donald Trump’s former Atlantic City casinos will be blown up next month, and for the right amount of money, you could be the one to press the button that brings it down. The demolition of the former Trump Plaza casino will become a fundraiser to benefit the Boys & Girls Club of Atlantic City that the mayor hopes will raise in excess of $1m.

[Montmorency]

One of Donald Trump’s former Atlantic City casinos will be blown up next month

A fitting icon for our fallen world? We were kings once.

[ReluctantSamurai]

Can someone explain to me how there aren't additional charges of 'aiding & abetting in this?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/16/u...k-aguirre.html

A former Houston police captain, who the authorities said was investigating a voter fraud conspiracy theory for a conservative activist group, was arrested and charged with pointing his gun at an air-conditioner repairman he had pursued to try to uncover fraudulent ballots, prosecutors said Tuesday.

According to a police affidavit, Mr. Aguirre struck the repairman’s box truck with his sport utility vehicle on the morning of Oct. 19. When the man got out of his truck, Mr. Aguirre pointed a handgun at him, ordered him to get on the ground and pressed a knee into his back, it said.

Other people who arrived searched the repairman’s truck for ballots and, finding none, drove it away, the repairman said, according to the affidavit. The truck was found abandoned nearby.

Yep, two months late, but whatever....Now the 'aiding & abetting' part:

Mr. Aguirre had been hired by a conservative activist group, the Liberty Center for God & Country, to investigate claims of voter fraud, according to a statement from the office of Kim Ogg, the Harris County district attorney.

“He crossed the line from dirty politics to commission of a violent crime and we are lucky no one was killed,” Ms. Ogg said. “His alleged investigation was backward from the start — first alleging a crime had occurred and then trying to prove it happened.”

Perhaps there will be additional forthcoming charges that haven't been made public yet, but why is Liberty Center for God & Country not being charged?

The Liberty Center group that hired Mr. Aguirre had promoted the false narrative that mail-in ballots would be used to steal the election from President Trump. According to the district attorney’s office, the group paid $266,400 to Mr. Aguirre, and $211,400 of that was deposited into his account the day after his collision with the repairman’s truck.

This sounds like it could've come straight from Rudy Giuliani or The Kraaken:

Mr. Aguirre told Detective Varela that he and the Liberty Center had been investigating a ballot harvesting conspiracy, according to the affidavit, and that he and his friends had been surveilling the repairman’s home for four days.
The affidavit said that Mr. Aguirre claimed the repairman “has approximately seven hundred and fifty thousand fraudulent mail ballots and is using Hispanic children to sign the ballots because the children’s fingerprints would not appear in any databases.”

750,000 ballots signed by Hispanic children...

And the latest in GOP bullshit:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...=postr_story_1

A federal judge in Georgia rejected a lawsuit by the state’s two Republican senators seeking to change the mail-in ballot signature verification rules for their Jan. 5 runoff election, calling their worries about voter fraud “far too speculative.”

U.S. District Judge Eleanor L. Ross in Atlanta on Thursday granted the state’s motion to dismiss the suit brought by the Georgia Republican Party and the campaigns of Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, whose races will determine control of the U.S. Senate.


The GOP was seeking a court order that would force state election officials to have three people verify each signature and allow significantly more access to the canvassing process for partisan observers. But the state argued no such demands were made for in-person voting, even though verification of a state ID was open to just as much interpretation and error. The true motive, the state argued, was to vastly increase the rejection of mail-in ballots.

Jeezus, it never ends.

[Montmorency]

34% of eligible voters voted Biden in 2020. 31% voted Trump. 34% didn't vote for anyone. Roughly.

[ReluctantSamurai]

It would not surprise me if this is attempted:

https://www.vox.com/2020/12/20/22191...election-fraud

President Donald Trump asked key advisers about appointing a controversial lawyer formerly associated with his campaign as a special counsel charged with overseeing an investigation of alleged — and nonexistent — voter fraud, according to a report from the New York Times.

According to Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Trump held a meeting at the White House on Friday to weigh whether to name Powell as a special counsel to investigate his repeatedly debunked claims of mass voter fraud in last month’s presidential election.

It is not clear that Trump could actually appoint Powell — or anyone else — to investigate fraud as a special counsel in his remaining days in office.

[...] special counsels are usually appointed by the US attorney general, and that counsel would be supervised by the attorney general themselves. Trump could ask Barr to appoint Powell, but it is not clear that he would do so, and Barr is due to step down on Wednesday.

Should his Justice Department refuse to cooperate, Trump could name a special counsel without DOJ support. But that person would essentially be toothless, with no access to federal law enforcement resources, subpoena power, or the ability to set up a grand jury.

The other possibility is that Trump, in his final weeks in office, could fire Rosen and replace him with someone more likely to enact his wishes, although who that person could be is not immediately obvious.

All the talk about seizing voting machines, or enacting the Insurrection Act is simply a smokescreen for the obvious reason for such skullduggery:

And having a special counsel on election fraud would be a powerful legacy. The Biden administration would likely face pressure not to interfere in a special counsel investigation, even one led by a partisan actor like Powell, thus ensuring that debate over the legitimacy of the last election would continue at the federal level even once Trump is no longer in office.

If Trump can pull this off, we are guaranteed a media circus for who knows how long that continues to keep the MAGA base stirred up for months about "voter fraud" (and of course keeps the Save America money scam going), and will continue to give oxygen to the possibility of more violence from far-right groups.

[Hooahguy]

Well, at least Barr said he wont do that. But since hes leaving in a few days anyways, who knows what his temporary successor might do.