Trump Kicking and Screaming Transition Thread

And now he's recanting his recantation... possibly because he was planning to take the money and disappear.

These are the folks who Trump is using to defend his ludicrous claims of election fraud.

Loudon.

Watching these clowns, I've been having flashbacks to spring, 1968. Vietnam protests in full swing, even in my obscure, largely conservative all-girls' college. Okay, there were about a dozen of us in a population of 350+, but we were extremely active. Posters, fliers, performance art before it even had a name. Faculty tolerated us as long as we reserved the main lounge ahead of time for our poetry readings and didn't deface property. People would gather and watch. Did we change any minds? At least some people learned things they hadn't known before.

It was primarily a teachers' college, and there were two divisions - Early Childhood (which had its own brand-new fancy-schmancy building across the street from the old Vanderbilt mansions the original college had been built around in 1916) and the rest of us who intended to teach at the middle- and high school level (until the jobs dried up just before we graduated, but I digress).

It was legend that the Early Childhood types were mostly marking time until their boyfriends/fiancés got out of the Service so they could drop out, get married, move to the suburbs, and start churning out the next generation of good little Catholics.

Most of us shuffled around in skirts-n-shirts (jeans weren't allowed until junior year), just ordinary college kid clothes. The Early Childhood types dressed as if they had job interviews on Wall Street later that day. I've always wondered how you get fingerpaint out of a good wool suit, but anyway.

The Early Childhood types were, to a woman, "My country, right or wrong!" Fine, whatever. Just don't get up in my face about it. One day the dozen-or-so hippie peaceniks were going around campus putting up announcements for our upcoming antiwar poetry reading (not our own poetry, but the masters - I got to do the "Tarpaper Morgue at Chalons-sur-Marne" scene from Dos Passos's USA). Purple mimeograph ink, cranked out by hand in our "spare time" (most of us were carrying a full course load and working part-time as well).

I watched one little Early Childhood type tottering around in her high heels determinedly tearing down every announcement we'd put up. Did I want to rip her face off? Honestly, yes. But I hadn't hit anyone since I punched Fat Vinnie in the fifth grade (he punched me first). I just laughed.

Censorship, in her tiny mind, was the solution to a war being fought by young men not old enough to vote. Always wondered what happened to her. I'm now watching her spiritual descendants throwing themselves on the floor and howling "No fair, No Fair, NO FAIR!!!!"

All of this has happened before...

It's not possible to take over the whole system in a day or two. Those two months are very much the least time required. They already lost a week now and there won't be much cooperation even after the GSA finally calls it and the electors do their thing on Dec 14th.

Only good thing about this is that Biden already knows the ins and outs of the job.

I wonder. They don't call his followers "Cult 45" for nothing. But when he's out of power, will they want to go to rallies just because? Will it be different for him when he's a loser?

And currently he has been able to arrange to hold these rallies either on the public's dime as president or on his campaign's money. Once he is an ex-president, we won't foot the bills for that. I tend to doubt that big money contributors will pay for it. Will followers pay out of their own pocket to attend these rallies?

Thats the difference between those systems. In Canada or the UK, the foundation aka all the career officials carry the state. Look at Belgium. They didn't have a government for a year or two and still, the country worked like normal. In the US, it wouldn't.

Even knowing the fundamentals as Biden does, it would take a minimum of a month to transition logistically for a couple reasons:

1. There are undoubtedly numerous details have changed in just the relatively small time since Biden was VP that his administration should probably try to account for.

2. The logistics of interviewing people, sorting through candidates, offering jobs and giving them time to make it to DC so as to hit the ground running likely takes at least a month.

Loudoun?

Datacenter Alley?

The tech corridor of the greater DMV?

In several of the past few years, the richest county in America?

Who do you work for, Verizon or Amazon? Google? Salesforce?

I don’t work in tech.

Goddamn you make it easy...

Sadly he doesn't realise it, then holds grudges against the people who give him enough respect to be honest with him.

Elect better candidates

I'll grant you that Trump exploited how much of our system is based assuming all parties are acting on good faith but this isn't one of those things that needs to go because he chooses to be a manbaby.

If anything, our feckless Congress and/or Senate should invoke the 25th amendment to remove him out of office and let Pence take over for the next two months. Pence is morally loathesome but I'm sure he's been the one running behind the scenes anyway.

If Pence had been president for the last four years, our Coronavirus response still wouldn't have been great, but we wouldn't have this bizarre death cult that thinks taking any kind of health precaution is two steps removed from worshiping Satan.

On a tangent to that, this was a comment I saw on a friend's FB post, and it just says so much about how much righties value life:


I linked her the same article on Wendell Potter I posted in this or another thread after a few go-arounds on how people need to "earn" their health and she didn't comment for some reason.

I love it when they just run off.

Way back in March when the first horde of "I can't wear a mask because I can't breathe!" snowflakes started popping up (why are they always "friends of friends"?) one woman was going on about how she has asthma and something wrong with her heart and she has to go to doctors' appointments and to buy groceries for her kid in 95-degree heat and, like an idiot, I'm trying to reason with her about the dangers of COVID to someone with preexisting conditions.

She came back with "If the Lord wants to take me, I have made my peace and I'm ready," then disappeared.

I for about an hour before I realized: No, seriously. Anyone with two serious chronic illnesses and a child would be on disability, her doctors would take telecalls, and she'd have someone else to do the shopping for her. And someone with a child wouldn't be waiting for "the Lord" to take her.

Man, did I fall for that one!

You'd be surprised. I had one idiot Navy sailor who claimed wearing masks gave her pluresy (spelling incorrect). Yeah, I'm sure chain smoking half a pack a day had nothing to do with that. Right.

I don’t think Pence would have thrown out the Obama pandemic plan.

You’re talking about a guy who thought the appropriate response to an outbreak of HIV in his state was prayer.

Yabbut HIV only killed the queers and both the darkies in the state, but COVID killed real Americans! /s

Yeah but he wouldn't have owned the Libs as much.

Yea, the only time they 'value life' is when they are trying to control womens' reproductive rights. After that, let's have all the war, executions and pandemics we can!

Pure bigotry, as always with modern 'conservatives' (we really need a new word for the screaming loonies many of them have become)

State Department is preventing Biden from accessing messages from foreign leaders

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/11/politics/state-department-biden-messages/index.html

Newsmax is running an op-ed that Trump should retire early and leave the transition to Pence. This is owned by Trump's personal friend Chris Rudy. Perhaps Trump's exit strategy?

I'd put in the link, but it's Newsmax, so fuck 'em.

Karl Rove wrote an op-ed in the WSJ that the election won't be overturned, and it's time for Trump to accept that. WSJ of course owned by Murdoch.

Linky? See above.

Republican senator says Trump has until tomorrow to start giving Biden security briefings.

It's about time one of them got a pair ...







.... of boots.

Wouldn’t that be one last Trump-style troll?. Wait until Biden has all of this Biden 46 stuff made and then resign making Biden 47.
Something tells me the Biden camp wouldn’t mind very much.

I'd feel better about it if:

1) he'd admitted Biden likely won.

and

2) didn't look as ineffectual as a voice of reason as Mitch in Rambo: First Blood, Part I

So, Trumpists here... I wonder. Is a little tax break really worth seeing the country burn? Because with the recent surprising shifts in key DoD positions it sure looks as if he wants to make sure the military is on his side. You know, should there be some kind of conflict or something.

Of course I trust the generals to do the right thing and shoot those bootlickers in the face if push comes to shove.