POTUS/General Election Thread 2020 + Aftermath

[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.

[ReluctantSamurai]

This could probably go in any of several threads, but I'll put it here.

My views on Donald Trump is certainly no secret. The man disgusts me, and I've been a Trump-basher here for a long time. However, in this case, I'm going to say I actually agree with him, regardless of his true intentions [looks around for a thunderbolt to come and strike me dead]:

https://www.businessinsider.com/lose...checks-2020-12

President Donald Trump on Tuesday night launched a surprise push to hike the stimulus checks in the COVID-19 relief package to $2,000 per person from $600.

Trump released a video criticizing the $900 billion coronavirus relief package that congressional lawmakers passed on Monday and demanding they increase the checks.

Democrats certainly showed how little they care for the American people (looking at you, Nancy Pelosi), when they rejected an earlier Trump aid package worth $1.8 trillion, saying it was unacceptable (and in fairness, there were some questionable items included in that bill), and instead, settled for a fraction of that in the latest proposal (of which almost half is unused money from the CARES ACT).

When one considers that the average back rent due by Americans amounts to about $5,400, that nearly 8 million Americans have fallen into poverty over the last 5 months, and there are nearly 50 million people with inadequate food supplies, a $600/person one-time check, an 11 week extension for unemployment, and a $300 unemployment benefits extension, is nowhere near enough.

There is certainly not an ounce of concern for people by Trump in demanding more money, but at this point, people desperately need the help, so who cares? GET THE MONEY OUT THERE!

And then there's this twit:

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/...on-his-way-out

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) this week claimed that President Trump is “trying to burn this country down on his way out” of office by not supporting the new coronavirus stimulus and government funding bill passed by Congress on Monday.

In an appearance on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show Tuesday night, Klobuchar responded to the president’s remarks shared on Twitter earlier in the day, in which he called the $2.3 trillion package that includes stimulus checks of $600 to Americans “a disgrace,” adding that the payments should be increased to $2,000.

The Minnesota senator and former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate told Maddow that Trump’s failure to support the bill “is an attack on every American.”
“People who are struggling to get by right now, out of work, whose unemployment, the unemployment is going to basically end the day after Christmas if this doesn’t pass, people who are out of work, people who need the help,” she added.

So let me get this straight Amy, you'd rather send out a paltry $600 instead of a more robust $2000 (still inadequate, but more than triple what's in the current bill), and call the inclusion of $2000 instead of $600 "an attack on every American"?? Oh, BTW, you are worth around $2,000,000, so I doubt you understand what "struggling to get by" actually means

We will see how effective the Democrats will be in exploiting the GOP on this issue. I expect more spinelessness, and I feel sorry for those who could benefit from this. But perhaps they will surprise me and actually grow some cohonees.....