StupidiNews!

• NFL legend Joe Montana reportedly fought off a woman in his home who was trying to kidnap his grandchild, according to Malibu police.
• Former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale has turned himself into Fort Lauderdale police after barricading himself inside his home Sunday and threatening self-harm with firearms.
• A federal judge has granted a temporary stay on a Trump executive order to block US downloads of the TikTok social media app, but further Commerce Department restrictions are still scheduled for Nov. 12.
• G-20 international leaders say they are now ready to accept a virtual summit instead of a world meeting of leaders in person in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia later this year.
• Boston police say a Massachusetts man has died after consuming large quantities of black licorice, the plant naturally contains a toxic chemical called glycyrrhizin that can be fatal in large doses.

Last Call For Biden, His Time Con't

The latest CBS battleground poll of Georgia and both Carolinas (and yes, all three are legit battleground states with four Senate races to boot) has good news for Biden-Harris and Team Blue.

Voters say the Supreme Court vacancy has added to the already high stakes of the presidential election.

In the battlegrounds of Georgia and North Carolina, most say it makes the election feel even more important — it's one more factor in an election in which most voters from both parties think their culture and way of life are at stake.

President Trump's voters here think the Democrats want society to change too fast, and Joe Biden's voters think Republicans want to go back to the past. The court fight may not be changing votes, since most were already locked in, but many describe it as adding even more motivation to the race. Both sides are about equally likely to say they'll vote (and some already have). In two contests that will turn almost entirely on turnout, that's essential.

And as important as the Supreme Court is, voters tell us it is just one of the major topics on their minds. Issues of race continue to split voters in these fast-growing, changing Southern states, and views on the protests are a major factor, too. The Black voters who make up sizable shares of the electorate here voice agreement with the Black Lives Matter movement, as do White Democrats, but the president's supporters say too much attention is being paid to discrimination against Black people today.

And it all adds up to a razor-thin horse race: Georgia remains a toss-up, with Mr. Trump up just a point; it favored Biden by a point this summer. North Carolina sees Biden up two; he had a four-point edge this summer.

In each state the president has consolidated support, maintains leads with non-college White voters and men, and is seen as better on the economy. Biden's support remains steady, bolstered by performing well with women and Black voters, and by improving on Democrats' 2016 performance among White women with college degrees.

It's a pattern across all the states we've been polling of late as we head into the first debate: Biden has not added to the big leads he had all summer, and things show a general, if slight, tightening toward the president's way overall.

Mr. Trump is up comfortably in neighboring South Carolina, but that state offers some real Senate drama of its own.

 

Biden winning either NC or Georgia would be the end of the Trump campaign, and both sides know it. Frankly, Biden being within a point in Georgia is the sword of Damocles hanging over Trump's orange head. 

And here's the thing: if Biden wins Michigan, PA, and Wisconsin, all states where he has a much larger margin than in NC, he wins the electoral college even if Trump runs the table on the actual tossups.

Keep in mind as of this week, the actual tossups are all states Trump won in 2016 too: NC, GA, FL, OH, Iowa, and Arizona.  Biden is set to win without any of those states, and yet he could take one or all six. Biden's lead in the national polls remains right at seven points, where it's been since mid-March, give or take a point.

And just past those six states? Texas. Biden's lead in PA is about the same as Trump's in the Lone Star State, 52-47 for Biden in PA, and 51-48% Trump in Texas, respectively.

I know I keep having Post-traumatic voter syndrome flashbacks to 2016, but the fact is with five weeks to go, Biden remains in a commanding position.

We have to make it happen. Get those votes in early.

The Race To Replace, Con't

Huckleberry Graham said on FOX News State TV last night that the regime's rubber stamp court pick, Amy Coney Barrett, will be confirmed by the Senate Judiciary by October 22, leaving Mitch McConnell the ultimate October surprise, a week to hold a full Senate confirmation floor vote before the election.

 

Republican and Democratic leaders reacted largely along party lines to President Donald Trump's nomination on Saturday of a conservative federal judge to fill the seat left by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Overwhelmingly, Republicans called Amy Coney Barrett a well-qualified candidate and pushed for a confirmation in the upcoming weeks. Democrats continued to criticize the timing, with some outright saying they wouldn't meet with the nominee.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., confirmed that the hearings would begin on Monday, Oct. 12 with opening statements from Barrett and members of the Judiciary Committee. The next two days would be reserved for questioning from the committee. Testimony from those who know Barrett and legal experts would either come following questioning on Wednesday or on Thursday.

In an interview with Fox News Saturday night, Graham said, "I expect the nominee will be challenged and that's appropriate to challenge the nominee. If they treat Judge Barrett like they did Justice [Brett] Kavanaugh it's going to blow up in their face big time."

Graham said he hopes to move Barrett out of committee by Oct. 26 -- just eight days before Election Day.

 

Americans overwhelmingly believe that the seat should be filled after the election by the winner. 

A clear majority of voters believes the winner of the presidential election should fill the Supreme Court seat left open by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, according to a national poll conducted by The New York Times and Siena College, a sign of the political peril President Trump and Senate Republicans are courting by attempting to rush through an appointment before the end of the campaign.

In a survey of likely voters taken in the week leading up to Mr. Trump’s nomination on Saturday of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the high court, 56 percent said they preferred to have the election act as a sort of referendum on the vacancy. Only 41 percent said they wanted Mr. Trump to choose a justice before November.

More striking, the voters Mr. Trump and endangered Senate Republicans must reclaim to close the gap in the polls are even more opposed to a hasty pick: 62 percent of women, 63 percent of independents and 60 percent of college-educated white voters said they wanted the winner of the campaign to fill the seat.

 

Democrats aren't completely helpless to stop the nomination before the election, but there's only so much they can do.

Interviews with more than a dozen Democratic senators revealed broad support for disrupting the Supreme Court confirmation process, even if the strategy yields some collateral damage. Yet Democrats facing tough reelections and those who typically spurn delay tactics overwhelmingly support the hardball campaign, potentially putting them at increased risk of losing their seats.

“We know that the votes are not there [to block the nominee], but you do what you can to call attention to it,” said Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.), the most vulnerable Democratic incumbent who could be pulled off the campaign trail as a result. “The issue is that this is a power grab.”

“We can’t do business as usual in a situation that’s so extraordinary where the Republicans are breaking their word to rush a nominee so they can kill the Affordable Care Act,” added Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.). “We can’t just say, oh, yeah, that’s normal. Sorry.”

The goal, senators and aides say, is to highlight what Democrats see as hypocrisy and a blatant abuse of power on the part of McConnell (R-Ky.), who blocked President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee in 2016 but is pressing forward with the goal of confirming President Donald Trump’s pick, Amy Coney Barrett, before Election Day. McConnell only needs a simple majority after Republicans eliminated the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees in 2017. And if Democrats can prevent Barrett from being seated on the court before Nov. 10, she likely wouldn’t be able to rule on the Trump administration’s effort to invalidate Obamacare.

Democratic senators were quick to justify the retaliation effort, which is only getting started with less than 40 days until the Nov. 3 election.

“Process is everything,” said Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.). “So if you’re going to use the process to try to steal an election, then we’re going to use the process to try to do everything for that not to happen.”

 

Dems are saying "We're trying to save Obamacare and millions of people here." It's a good plan. It won't keep Barrett off the court before January, but it could save the ACA for now.

 

It's a gamble. Dems have to win control of the Senate and Biden has to win as well, and we have to defeat whatever measures the Trump regime will take to outright steal the election.

 

We'll all need to be ready, starting with early voting.

Sunday Long Read: Riders On The Storm

With climate change causing more tornadoes and more intense storms that can do as much or more damage than a twister itself, storm chasing is turning into big business -- and a big tourism draw for extreme outdoors thrillseekers. Writer Linda Logan travels to the tornado hunter capital of the US, Tulsa, Oklahoma, for this week's Sunday Long Read.

I've been hooked on tornadoes since I was a kid. I used to dream I was lying in my backyard as a black funnel cloud passed silently—and safely—over me. A shrink later told me the dream represented “safe danger,” but I never understood half of what he said, including that. As I grew older, I became a climate dilettante. I read about global warming and the coming ice age, wondered why barometric pressure affected dogs, and drew cloud charts in my daily planner. I saw Twister, of course. And I kept having that dream.

I wanted to see a real storm for myself, but there was the business of finishing grad school and raising kids. So I back-burnered tornadoes for decades and nearly forgot about them. Then, last winter, I saw a blurb in a travel magazine about stormchasing tours. I thought only Hollywood actors or meteorology nerds were allowed to chase tornadoes. But for $2,300 a week, I could, too. I justified it to my now adult children, saying that if I died, at least it would be while doing something incredibly cool.

And I did. Not die—do something cool.

I decided to book the Mayhem 1 tour with Extreme Chase Tours, one of some 20 stormchasing outfits in the country, which promises a 90 percent chance of seeing a tornado over the course of six days. Not only was the company vetted by the review site StormChasingUSA, it had fewer people per van and was relatively affordable compared with others (many run $2,500 and up). All trips are based out of Tulsa, Oklahoma, the epicenter of Tornado Alley, a swath of land that runs from central Texas to South Dakota and spawns many of the approximately 1,200 events each year.

While I knew Oklahoma and the southern plains were likely to produce tornadoes in May and early June, a period when cold fronts from the Arctic that haven’t been weakened on their way south meet the warm air from the Gulf of Mexico, I still had to manage my expectations—there are never guarantees when it comes to weather. But after arriving at my motel in Tulsa last summer and turning on the Weather Channel, it reported a tornado near the town of Buffalo, a little over three hours west, around 6:30 P.M. I was optimistic.

The next morning, I met owner and operator Lanny Dean: think Michael Moore with the baseball cap turned backwards. A tuft of hair sprouted through what my daughters call the “ponytail hole.” He’s a big, affable man in his mid-forties and was wearing a T-shirt with “Outlaw Chasers” printed on the front. (The back read “Show Me or Blow Me.”) With him was a guy named Mike, a forty-something out of San Antonio and my fellow chaser. Mike had already been on ten chasing tours, many of them with Dean. There was supposed to be another couple with us, but they bailed at the last minute.

Dean was seven years old and sitting in the back seat of the family car when he first saw a twisting, funnel-shaped black cloud skitter across the Texas landscape, plucking boards off the side of a barn. “Shit, yes, it terrified me,” he said. “It was the most scary, awe-inspiring thing I’ve ever seen. It’s what hooked me.”

The fear turned into fascination. At Missouri State, he did some undergraduate work in atmospheric science (“a kick-ass field,” he said) and ended up with a Bachelor of Science in electronic engineering telecommunication. He later became a severe-weather reporter and photographer and starred in TruTV’s Tornado Hunters. Since launching his guiding company in 1999, he’s seen 581 tornadoes and 13 major hurricanes up close and has held hail the size of a softball in his hand. He’s a frequent video contributor to Good Morning America. His 2008 Dodge Grand Caravan has some 300,000 miles on it. The van’s been battered and busted, it’s sloshed through the kind of deep mud puddles you only see in car commercials, and has a shattered side mirror. But it’s clean, well-maintained, and Dean only smokes at gas stops. Between this van and his previous chase vehicle, he figures he’s driven 700,000 miles since he started as a guide. He’d been thinking of springing for a new rig.

Mike rode shotgun. A Lenovo computer was mounted to the passenger-side dashboard and a monitor to the back of its seat, so I could see what they were looking at. After Mike pulled up RadarScope, a weather app used by everyone from meteorologists to emergency responders, he and Dean started chatting about base reflectivity, super-res velocity, something called CAPE, and rear-flank downdraft. Dean eyed me in the rearview mirror, saying, “You’re gonna hear a lot of verbiage. You’re not gonna understand it, but I’ll keep yakking until you do.”

“It’s a good chase day,” he told us. “There’s a mess of convection near Gotebo, so we’re busting south.” We hauled out of Tulsa and soon passed Oklahoma City. “We’re going to play the dry line”—a separation between the warm, humid air from the Gulf and the hot, dry air from the desert Southwest—“and go for broke.” In other words, a flurry of movement driven by a rising air mass was a promising enough indicator for a superstorm that Dean felt the three-hour drive to Gotebo was worth it.

A few hours later, a mass of red dots appeared on the monitor. “Those are other chasers,” Mike explained.

“And those are just the guys with their beacons on,” Dean added. “For every dot you see, there are probably five to ten other guys like me who’ve turned their icons off.” If you click on a dot, the chaser’s name and phone number pops up. Since Dean’s a professional stormchaser, if his icon is on, chasers will start chasing him, like bikers drafting off the lead cyclist during the Tour de France.

Anyone can call themselves a chaser. There’s no licensing or certification required, just enough gall to get close to a storm and enough brains to know when to retreat. Equipment helps, but having a cell phone with a couple of apps like Dark Sky and RadarScope and tuning into the NOAA Weather Radio station will do. Stormchasing started catching on after the movie Twister came out in 1996. (Dean hated it. “Nobody—nobody—drives through a cornfield,” he said. “They just don’t.”) Spurred by its success, a handful of stormchaser shows further helped capture people’s imaginations, while the development of new technology, such as GPS units made for civilian use, made it possible for others to do it themselves. Since then it’s not only become a popular pastime among meteorologists, researchers, and photographers but adrenaline junkies who treat it as an obsessive quest, on a par with eclipse chasers and high pointers. According to Dean, the addiction is very real—77 percent of his guests are repeat customers.

Dean’s safety and expertise are among the reasons many chasers return to chase with him rather than attempt to head out on their own. And those are good reasons when it comes to this activity—according to the Congressional Research Service, tornadoes are one of the main causes of property destruction in the U.S., second only to hurricanes, which also wreak significant havoc, as we recently witnessed when Hurricane Laura made landfall. Despite this, records of stormchasing incidents show that weather-related fatalities are low compared to the risk posed by other chasers. In 2019, the community website Stormtrack reported that 12 of the 15 known stormchasing-related deaths were the result of car collisions.

I remember watching Storm Chasers on Discovery Channel some 10 years ago, and that's as close as I ever want to get to an actual tornado. Besides, I've been through a couple of hurricanes and a blizzard or two, and frankly it's not as fun as you might think.

Sadly, we're going to see a lot more tornadoes to chase in the future thanks to climate change. Disaster tourism shouldn't be a growth industry, but here we are.

 

Last Call For Retribution Execution, Con't

Steve M. has this all sorted out. Like the egomaniacal Bond villain he is, Trump has happily given away his evil plan ahead for the next two months because he believes that nobody can possibly stop him.

 

We're assuming that the likely outcome is a Biden win that's obvious to all objective observers. But in a Trump/Fox/QAnon world, objective reality has no meaning to roughly 40% of the population. It's also likely that Biden will win (if he does win) by less than the current 7-point margin the polls are showing for him, because of Republican vote suppression, incorrectly submitted mail ballots, and the usual problem Democrats have persuading many people who don't like Republicans that they need to vote Democratic to keep Republicans out of office.

So I'm expecting a Biden win by about 4 points nationwide, with the states that put him over the top being very close. And that's where Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Kevin McCarthy, and the rest of the GOP "establishment" come in. They've accepted -- or openly endorsed -- nearly everything Trump has done to degrade our country. "Establishment" Republicans were yelling "Voter fraud!" long before Trump was, back in the Bush years. Why should we assume that they'll abandon Trump when he's making the same claim after the election?

After the election, Trump won't be saying he lost but won't leave -- he'll be saying he won, and in all likelihood McConnell, Graham, and others will be saying the same thing. Fox News and the New York Post and The Federalist and The Washington Post's Marc Thiessen and Hugh Hewitt will be saying the same thing. Trump will find lawyers who will file court briefs saying the same thing. And some judges will agree -- maybe even Supreme Court justices.

In other words, Trump won't try to reject the election outcome. He'll attempt to change it. And we'll have to fight more than just Trump if we don't want this effort to succeed.

 

Nancy LeTourneau also lays out Trump's plan for November.  There's a distinct reason why Trump wants to appoint a justice now.

 

All of these efforts have one thing in common: they are designed to cast doubt in the public’s mind about the legitimacy of the election. It is yet another example of how Trump and his enablers have become “merchants of doubt.” When using that descriptor to explain how Republicans were attempting to spread lies about Biden’s’ involvement in Ukraine, this is how journalist Paul Waldman described the origins of that strategy (emphasis mine):

In 1969, a memo written at the Brown & Williamson tobacco company explained how they and their colleagues in the industry could push back against the growing public perception that their products were giving people cancer. It wasn’t necessary to disprove the scientific consensus, the author wrote, only to inject a sufficient amount of doubt into public debate so it would be seen as an unresolved controversy with two sides.

There is no unresolved controversy about the validity of mail-in ballots. But by injecting doubt into the public discourse, the merchants of doubt are attempting to create a level of chaos, unlike anything we’ve ever seen in a presidential election. That is precisely what Trump is counting on.

 

Trump wants there to be enough chaos doubt that he can say "Well the only fair thing to do is to throw the election to a 6-3 conservative Supreme Court."  He will be assisted by Republicans at the national level and in the states that are going to be disputed.

He will also be assisted by the media covering Trump rallies in these states. He will encourage massive demonstrations by his armed supporters, assisted by local law enforcement and by state Republicans, to "liberate" these states from "Democrat voting fraud". We've seen this same play 20 years ago, and it worked then.

There's a very good chance it will work again. Only this time, it'll be the last free election we'll have.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

A federal judge in Montana has ordered the removal of acting Bureau of Land Management head William Pendley and is forcing him to step down, as he has been in the position for over a year without any Senate confirmation.

 

Chief District Judge Brian Morris of the US District Court of Montana ruled that Pendley has served unlawfully for 424 days, in response to a lawsuit brought by Democratic Montana Gov. Steve Bullock and the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation. 

Morris additionally ruled Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt cannot pick another person to run the Bureau of Land Management as its acting head because that person must be appointed by the President and Senate-confirmed. 

The judge gave both sides of the case 10 days to file briefs about which of Pendley's orders must be vacated. 

"Pendley has served and continues to serve unlawfully as the Acting BLM Director," Morris wrote in his opinion. "His ascent to Acting BLM Director did not follow any of the permissible paths set forth by the U.S. Constitution or the (Federal Vacancies Reform Act). Pendley has not been nominated by the President and has not been confirmed by the Senate to serve as BLM Director." 

He added, "Secretary Bernhardt lacked the authority to appoint Pendley as an Acting BLM Director under the FVRA. Pendley unlawfully took the temporary position beyond the 210-day maximum allowed by the FVRA. Pendley unlawfully served as Acting BLM Director after the President submitted his permanent appointment to the Senate for confirmation -- another violation of the FVRA. And Pendley unlawfully serves as Acting BLM Director today, under color of the Succession Memo." 

Pendley was nominated to be the permanent director of the agency in July but the Trump administration withdrew his nomination in September after a series of controversial statements -- including saying that climate change is not real and falsely saying that there was no credible evidence of a hole in the ozone layer -- were made public by CNN's KFile.

 

Good for Bullock to stick it to this climate denier asshole. 

Having said that, the Trump regime plans an immediate appeal that will take months if not years, and Pendley will remain at the post because the law in America means whatever five Supreme Court justices says it means. Either Pendley gets the boot in a Biden administration, or he'll continue to serve well into Trump's second term.

Of course if the latter happens, there won't be much federal land to manage, will there?

Florida Goes Viral, Con't

Florida led the nation this week in COVID-19 deaths, but Gov. Ron DeSantis has now completely reopened restaurants, bars, and all other businesses, saying that local governments would have to justify any further measures as the pandemic is apparently "over" just in time for early voting to start.

 

Gov. Ron DeSantis on Friday signed an executive order lifting all remaining statewide coronavirus-related restrictions on businesses in Florida, including bars and restaurants.

The executive order rolls back nearly every measure in Florida put in place to combat the spread of the coronavirus and puts the state into the last phase of its reopening plan.

The order immediately allows all businesses that had been shut down due to the pandemic to reopen, and it guarantees restaurants can operate at a minimum of 50 percent capacity.

Under the order, announced Friday in a news conference in downtown St. Petersburg, municipalities must justify any local restrictions of restaurant capacity between 50 and 100 percent. It does not force municipalities to increase capacity in bars beyond 50 percent, DeSantis said, though cities and counties are free to do so.

“(Restaurants) have worked as hard as anybody to create safe environments," said DeSantis, who spoke to reporters Friday afternoon from an empty ballroom inside the Birchwood restaurant on Beach Drive NE. "The idea that government dictating this is better than them making decisions so that their customers have confidence, I think is misplaced.”

DeSantis said the order allows local governments to have some “reasonable regulations” but said it’s time for businesses to be reopening.

“You can’t say ‘no’ after six months and just have people twisting in the wind,” he said.

DeSantis made the announcement surrounded by local business owners and other public officials, who cheered the news.

“Florida’s hospitality industry has been decimated by COVID-19,” Carol Dover, president and chief executive officer of the Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association, said later in a statement. “We look forward to welcoming back our wonderful guests and to reopening the Sunshine State.”

But some other restaurant owners are circumspect about the idea of adding more tables following the order.

“The most important thing for us is for our staff and our guests to continue to feel safe," said restaurateur Richard Gonzmart, whose Columbia Restaurant Group owns The Columbia, Ulele and Goody Goody. "We are evaluating each of our restaurants and will add some tables and seats, but not anything close to 100 percent capacity at this time.”

Tom DeGeorge, owner of Ybor City’s Crowbar, also said he’d reopen at his own pace.

“I certainly am not going to sit there and open my doors 1,000 percent,” DeGeorge said. “I’m probably going to do exactly what I was going to do when I felt comfortable doing it and not worry about the government and what they told me.”

Jeff Gigante, co-founder of Forbici Modern Italian in Hyde Park Village, said the restaurant plans to maintain its protocols, meaning 50 percent capacity inside and full capacity outside. But his restaurant has a large interior space, so he understands why other establishments might want to increase their capacity.

“Smaller places that choose to bump it up to 75 or 100 percent will get no judgment from us,” he said. “I understand how hard this has been even to break even and not lose money."

 

So as flu season gets underway just in time for the election, expect a massive jump in Florida's cases and deaths as we head into October and November. Gotta die for Trump and the economy, right, Florida retirees?

7,000,000 cases and counting.

The Race To Replace, Con't

With Justice Ginsburg lying in state at the Capitol on Friday, and a week since her death, Trump is wasting no time nominating another terrible right-wing lunatic for her seat, a 6-3 conservative majority that could end civil rights, women's right's, abortion, and LGBTQ+ equality in a matter of months, and end the Affordable Care Act in a matter of weeks.

 

President Donald Trump intends to choose Amy Coney Barrett to be the new Supreme Court justice, according to multiple senior Republican sources with knowledge of the process. 

In conversations with some senior Republican allies on the Hill, the White House is indicating that Barrett, a federal appellate judge and Notre Dame law professor, is the intended nominee, multiple sources said. 

All sources cautioned that until it is announced by the President, there is always the possibility that Trump makes a last-minute change but the expectation is Barrett is the choice. He is scheduled to make the announcement on Saturday afternoon. 

A former law clerk to the late right-wing beacon Justice Antonin Scalia, Barrett would tilt the balance of power on the court further to the right, possibly ahead of a consequential case on health care to be argued the week after Election Day. If her Senate confirmation is successful before the November election, the appointment would mark Trump's third Supreme Court pick in one presidential term, cementing a conservative stronghold in the court for a generation. 

She has been the leading choice throughout the week, since Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. She is the only potential nominee known to have met with the President in person, according to two of the sources. One source said Trump was familiar with Barrett already and he met with her since she was a top contender the last time there was a Supreme Court vacancy, when the President chose Justice Brett Kavanaugh instead. 

Barrett was seen at her South Bend, Indiana, home on Friday. It was not clear if Barrett had been told she is the choice. Often that is done as late as possible to maintain secrecy around the announcement. 

"The machinery is in motion," one of the sources said.

 

She is as bad as you believe she is, as Elie Mystal informs us.

Barrett’s elevation to this position has been a long time coming. Her nomination has been made with one issue in mind: abortion. The conservative men who have been attacking a woman’s right to choose for a generation have long pined for a woman to do the final work of denying women their right to their own bodies. They’ve said so: Ramesh Ponnuru, longtime editor at National Review and fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, has written: “The main reason I favor Barrett, though, is the obvious one: She’s a woman…. If Roe v. Wade is ever overturned—as I certainly hope it will be, as it is an unjust decision with no plausible basis in the Constitution—it would be better if it were not done by only male justices, with every female justice in dissent.”

Barrett will not disappoint conservatives when it comes to abortion. While other jurists hoping to sit on the Supreme Court have at least attempted to be coy with their opposition to Roe v. Wade, Barrett has not. She has said that abortion is “always immoral.” She has said that Roe creates a framework of “abortion on demand” (a patently false claim given that Roe explicitly created a fetal viability standard after which the state was allowed to limit women’s fundamental rights). Barrett has put herself on the record against abortion rights generally, and Roe specifically, more than any person I can think of nominated for the Supreme Court after that 1973 decision.

Over the next few weeks, Barrett and her moderate Republican defenders will likely try to tell people that she’s been lying all this time. They’ll try to tell us that she hasn’t already made up her mind about abortion, that she respects 50 years of Supreme Court precedent, that she’s not being elevated to the Supreme Court just because she’s a woman who happens to hate a woman’s right to choose.

But no matter how hard Barrett tries to obfuscate her position in the coming days, hard-right conservatives know that her elevation to the court is a reliable vote against women’s rights. Why are they so sure about her legal views? Because Barrett herself has argued that she cannot and, more important, should not enforce secular laws that go against her religious beliefs.

If you read one thing about how Amy Coney Barrett’s religion would affect her ability to serve as a Supreme Court justice, read her own words. She addressed that matter in an article for the Marquette Law Review titled: “Catholic Judges in Capital Cases.” There, Barrett argued that Catholic judges should recuse themselves from cases that involve the death penalty. She argued that the Catholic Church’s moral stance against the death penalty might make it impossible for Catholic judges to dispense the impartial justice citizens are entitled to. Here’s part of the abstract for the whole long article:

Although the legal system has a solution for this dilemma by allowing the recusal of judges whose convictions keep them from doing their job, Catholic judges will want to sit whenever possible without acting immorally. However, litigants and the general public are entitled to impartial justice, which may be something a judge who is heedful of ecclesiastical pronouncements cannot dispense. Therefore, the authors argue, we need to know whether judges are legally disqualified from hearing cases that their consciences would let them decide. While mere identification of a judge as Catholic is not sufficient reason for recusal under federal law, the authors suggest that the moral impossibility of enforcing capital punishment in such cases as sentencing, enforcing jury recommendations, and affirming are in fact reasons for not participating.

This article is, frankly, a refreshing dose of truth of the sort most aspiring Supreme Court justices assiduously avoid. Barrett is straight-up explaining that her own religious biases may prevent her, or a judge like her, from upholding secular law. It is rare to find a would-be justice who is willing to admit that their personal convictions shape how they see the law, because they get trashed by the opposition party for such admissions, even though we all know that a judge’s personal beliefs and lived experiences must impact how they apply the law.

 

And there's every reason to believe Barrett will be confirmed within weeks, with a quick Senate Judiciary vote and a floor vote.

President Donald Trump’s Saturday announcement of his Supreme Court pick will spark a lightning-quick confirmation attempt by Senate Republicans that now seems almost certain to occur before the election. After Trump’s reveal, Senate Judiciary Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is expected to quickly lay out a hearing schedule for October, and the nominee will begin meeting with individual senators next week, according to senators and aides.

Provided no surprising information is unearthed that upends the nomination, Republicans and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are set to make history: Never has a Supreme Court justice been confirmed so close to a presidential election. Other than two dissenting GOP senators, no one thus far in the 53-member conference is arguing to wait for a lame duck session — let alone the next Congress — to hold a confirmation vote. McConnell only needs a simple majority.

“There’s not much of a margin for error. But we don’t have much error,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.). “We have our [party] meetings and no one has ever gotten up and made the case for why we should do this after the election.”

“There’s going to be plenty of time, plenty of time for both the nominee and the committee for questions, plenty of time to vote. I’m not worried about the timing,” added Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), who serves on the Judiciary Committee. “I’m obviously not Mitch McConnell, but I think we’ll have a vote before the election."

 

So, unless Chuck Schumer is willing to go full scorched earth, Barrett will be confirmed before the Senate adjourns for the election campaign on October 9.

 

The Supreme Court is expected to hear arguments on the Affordable Care Act on November 10.

The battle begins.

Last Call For That Other Joe's Problem Child

The Joe in this case is former Gore veep pick and "Independent" Sen, Joe Lieberman, and his son Matt is currently running as the spoiler in the upcoming Georgia Senate special runoff election, primed to split the Democratic vote with candidate Raphael Warnock, and handing the race over to two Republicans.

 

U.S. Senate candidate Matt Lieberman is under intense pressure to drop out of the race by fellow Democrats using a deeply personal argument: They say he’s poised to spoil the party’s chances at a victory in Georgia, much in the same way a long-shot contender hobbled his father’s bid for vice president.

Worried that Lieberman could siphon votes in a messy special election from Raphael Warnock, the party establishment’s favorite, they’re drawing parallels between his campaign and that of Ralph Nader, a Green Party candidate whom Democrats blamed for costing Al Gore and Joe Lieberman the 2000 election by taking votes from them in Florida.

“Were it not for Ralph Nader, Joe Lieberman could have been the first Jewish vice president and likely the first Jewish president,” said Michael Rosenzweig, a leader of a group of Jewish Democrats in Georgia aiming to push Lieberman out of the race.

Rosenzweig added that while Matt Lieberman is well respected in local circles, “we believe that he doesn’t have a realistic chance of winning this thing."

"He does have a chance of knocking Warnock out of the runoff, though, which will be very troubling,” Rosenzweig said.

Lieberman, a former principal of the Atlanta Jewish Academy, has roundly rejected talk of quitting the race, saying he has as much shot as Warnock to defeat Republican U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler. But a series of polls out this week suggest that’s not the case.

Each poll shows Lieberman hovering around 10% of the vote while Warnock, pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, has roughly double his support and is running neck-and-neck with Loeffler and Republican US. Rep. Doug Collins in the special election.

Those very same polls have become part of Lieberman’s reasoning for staying in the race.

“Either I’m in a statistical dead heat with Warnock or I’m sufficiently far behind not to be a threat,” Lieberman said in an interview. “Those are the two possibilities going forward. And if I end up at 10%, I pose no threat whatsoever to Warnock advancing. If I’m at 20%, I’m every bit as strong as he is.”

Despite Warnock’s rise, Democrats are increasingly expressing concerns that Lieberman’s presence in the contest will take just enough votes away from Warnock to allow the two Republicans to squeeze ahead, depriving the party of a shot in a January runoff between the top two finishers.

 

It gets worse for Lieberman though as today Barack Obama endorsed Warnock along with a slate of other Democratic candidates, and Lieberman's response was to trash Obama in a state like Georgia with a large number of Black voters for supporting a Black candidate.

 

And all the endorsements from current US senators who have also endorsed everyone else Chuck Schumer has asked them to.

— Matt Lieberman (@LiebermanForGa) September 25, 2020

 

That response puts Lieberman square in the jackass dudebro category, and he needs to go.

 

Now.

Retribution Execution, Con't

When the Trump regime canceled a State Department award ceremony for Finnish journalist Jessikka Aro last year because of her criticism of Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo chalked it all up to a clerical oversight and that he had never seen the list of awardees. Turns out that was a huge lie on multiple levels.

 

The Trump administration rescinded an award recognizing the work of a journalist from Finland last year after discovering she had criticized President Trump in social media posts, then gave a false explanation for withdrawing the honor, according to a report by the State Department’s internal watchdog.

The report tracks how the discovery of the journalist’s remarks worried senior U.S. officials and prompted a decision to withdraw the honor to avoid a possible public relations debacle.

The report’s release is likely to worsen tensions between the department’s leadership and the inspector general’s office, which has undergone several shake-ups following the firing of Inspector General Steve Linick in the spring at the request of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

“The Inspector General’s report is another somber example of how fear and partisanship have permeated our nation’s foreign policy and diplomacy under the Trump administration,” said Sen. Robert Menendez, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who along with seven other senators requested the investigation.

According to the report, the journalist, Jessikka Aro, was selected for the State Department’s International Women of Courage Awards for her reporting on Russian propaganda activities dating back to 2014. Aro endured death threats and cyber attacks for her work, which helped expose Russian troll factories.

After she was informed of her selection and offered flight options, State Department interns discovered her Facebook and Twitter posts, including one from September 2018 in which she noted that “Trump constantly labels journalists as ‘enemy’ and ‘fake news,’” said the report. In another tweet she noted that Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin would meet in Helsinki where “Finnish people can protest them both. Sweet.”

According to meeting notes obtained by the IG, senior U.S. officials argued that Aro’s invitation should be withdrawn, including the acting director of the Office of Global Women’s Issues. The director’s concerns included the possibility that the “media could highlight the tweets and Facebook posts during the ceremony,” which could cause “potential embarrassment to the Department, particularly given the involvement of the Secretary and the First Lady [Melania Trump].”

After the State Department withdrew Aro’s invitation and the story became public in a report by Foreign Policy, the department’s press office told reporters that Aro had been “incorrectly notified” that “she’d been selected as a finalist. This was an error. This was a mistake.”

The department also told Congress that Aro “ultimately was not selected to receive the award, due to the highly competitive selection of candidates.”

But the IG ultimately found that the decision to give her the award was not a mistake and was included in a memo approved by Pompeo.

It also noted that the decision to withdraw the award was due to the discovery of the social media posts despite public claims otherwise. “Every person OIG interviewed in connection with this matter acknowledged” that had her social media posts not been flagged, “Ms. Aro would have received the IWOC Award,” the report said.

 

The bigger issue is that Aro helped to reveal Putin's internet troll farms and paid a heavy price for it as they targeted her with a global disinformation campaign.  She was able to get justice for the right-wing Finnish online attackers.

When the State Department realized they were about to piss off Putin in a bad way, they yanked the award. Then they lied about it.

Now they've been caught in the lie. Pompeo should resign, of course, but he won't.

The Country Goes Viral, Con't

 With 205,000 dead now over six months as we head into flu season, the COVID-19 pandemic in America is nowhere near over and all indications are it will be catastrophically worse over the next six months.

The coronavirus is surging once again across the U.S., with cases rising in 22 states over the past week.

The big picture: There isn't one big event or sudden occurrence that explains this increase. We simply have never done a very good job containing the virus, despite losing 200,000 lives in just the past six months, and this is what that persistent failure looks like.

By the numbers: The U.S. is now averaging roughly 43,000 new cases per day, a 16% increase from a week ago.The biggest increases are largely concentrated in the West and Midwest, though Maine and New Jersey also saw their new infections tick up over the past week. Seven states — Arizona, Colorado, Minnesota, Montana, Texas, Utah and Wyoming — saw their daily infections rise by at least 60% over the past week. Testing was up by almost 22% over the same period. The U.S. is now conducting about 860,000 coronavirus tests per day.

What's next: There's every reason to believe the next several months will be a particularly high-risk period. Colder weather will cause people to move indoors, where the virus spreads more easily. People will travel and see friends and family over the holidays. Mask adherence is already only so-so. And flu season will set in at the same time. The best way to manage that risk is to enter into it with a low number of cases. The NIH's Anthony Fauci has said cases should ideally be below 10,000 per day heading into the fall. But we haven't been able to consistently keep them under 40,000.

The bottom line: The U.S. is racing toward a vaccine, and doctors are getting better at treating the virus. But Americans, overall, are pretty bad at doing the simple things necessary to contain the virus, save lives and make us all safer.

 

Letting 205,000 people die was a choice the regime made.  Letting them continue to do so is a choice we have to make in six weeks.

StupidiNews!

• House Democrats are planning on another COVID-19 relief bill clocking in at $2.2 trillion, smaller than the $3.2 trillion passed in May's HEROES Act, to restart negotiations with Republicans.
• European Union officials are warning that COVID-19 cases are increasing after a summer of relative calm, France,Spain, Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary are all seeing thousands of daily cases.
• The deposition of Homeland Security department whistleblower Brian Murphy has been moved until next week as DHS lawyers delayed security clearances for Murphy's legal team.
• Donald Trump says now that he will give all Medicare seniors a $200 prescription drug gift card as the election looms less than six weeks away.
• Amazon is entering the streaming game service race next month with Amazon Luna, Google's offering, Google Stadia, was brutally panned for poor service and limited selection.
  

Last Call For Swinging For The Fences

Cook Political Report has introduced their "Swingometer" page, allow you to tinker with turnout levels for various demographic groups. Based on 2016 numbers, and without the 6% third-party vote, Joe Biden wins comfortably 307-231.

But it doesn't take much for Biden to lose if everything else remains the same from 2016.

For example, if all that changes from 2016 is white non-college voter turnout goes from 55% to 60%, Biden wins the popular vote by more than 3 million, but loses in a 306-232 electoral college rout that mirrors the 2016 map. Trump would win PA, MI, WI, and FL all by less than 1% again.

Even worse would be just a 4-point shift in the Black vote, with Trump going from 8% to 12%. Biden would win the popular vote by more than four million, but lose 276-262 as Biden would only pick up PA and WI, but Trump would keep FL, MI, and AZ. The same thing happens if Biden still gets 92% of the Black vote, but Black turnout is suppressed from 57% to 52%. A combination of a 10% Trump Black vote and a 2% drop in Black turnout also leads to electoral loss for Biden. It doesn't take much for Trump to win, folks.

Having said all that however, if Biden's share of white college voters goes up just three points from 54% in 2016 to 57%, he wins Georgia, NC, and Florida and he rolls Trump 350-188. Same happens if he does 3 points better with non-college white voters, going to 34% from 31%. If he does both, same electoral margin, but he wins the popular vote by almost 12 million. If Biden does five points better with white voters, he takes Texas and Ohio too.

The polls though have Biden regularly doing much better with white voters overall. This bodes really, really well for the blowout scenarios where Biden gets 350 or more electoral votes, where Trump simply can't dispute the loss anymore. Biden is doing much better than Clinton did in 2016, full stop.

And if Trump is doing well enough to tie overall with white voters?

Trump gets evaporated like a snowball on the sun.

Lowering The Barr, Con't

Attorney General Bill Barr and his flunky, US Attorney John Durham, are going after the Clinton Foundation in direct retaliation for New York's investigation into the Trump Organization's charity fraud.

From the beginning, John H. Durham’s inquiry into the Russia investigation has been politically charged. President Trump promoted it as certain to uncover a “deep state” plot against him, Attorney General William P. Barr rebuked the investigators under scrutiny, and he and Mr. Durham publicly second-guessed an independent inspector general and traveled the globe to chase down conspiracy theories.

It turns out that Mr. Durham also focused attention on certain political enemies of Mr. Trump: the Clintons.

Mr. Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut assigned by Mr. Barr to review the Russia inquiry, has sought documents and interviews about how federal law enforcement officials handled an investigation around the same time into allegations of political corruption at the Clinton Foundation, according to people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Durham’s team members have suggested to others that they are comparing the two investigations as well as examining whether investigators in the Russia inquiry flouted laws or policies. It was not clear whether Mr. Durham’s investigators were similarly looking for violations in the Clinton Foundation investigation, nor whether the comparison would be included or play a major role in the outcome of Mr. Durham’s inquiry.

The approach is highly unusual, according to people briefed on the investigation. Though the suspected crimes themselves are not comparable — one involves a possible conspiracy between a presidential campaign and a foreign adversary to interfere in an election, and the other involves potential bribery and corruption — and largely included different teams of investigators and prosecutors, Mr. Durham’s efforts suggest the scope of his review is broader than previously known.

Mr. Durham’s focus on the Clinton Foundation inquiry comes as concerns deepen among Democrats and some former Justice Department officials that his investigation is being weaponized politically to help Mr. Trump. Congressional Democrats last week called on the department’s inspector general to investigate whether Mr. Durham’s review was free from political influence after his top aide abruptly resigned, reportedly over concerns that the team’s findings would be prematurely released before the election in November.

The Clinton Foundation investigation began about five years ago, under the Obama administration, and stalled in part because some former career law enforcement officials viewed the case as too weak to issue subpoenas. Ultimately, prosecutors in Arkansas secured a subpoena for the charity in early 2018. To date, the case has not resulted in criminal charges.

Some former law enforcement officials declined to talk to Mr. Durham’s team about the foundation investigation because they felt the nature of his inquiry was highly unusual, according to people familiar with the investigation. Mr. Durham’s staff members sought information about the debate over the subpoenas that the F.B.I. tried to obtain in 2016 and have also approached current agents about the matter, but it is not clear what they told investigators.

A spokesman for Mr. Durham declined to comment.

“The Clinton Foundation has regularly been subjected to baseless, politically motivated allegations, and time after time these allegations have been proven false,” the foundation said in a statement.

 

If you want to know why we're learning about this now, it's because yesterday a New York judge told Eric Trump that he has to comply with a subpoena in the NY state case against the Trump Organization by October 7.  Eric Trump had arrogantly said he wouldn't comply until after the election.

The Clinton Foundation inquiry story coming this close to the subpoena ruling is definitely a warning shot, fired by a regime that believes they can get New York to drop the case if the Clintons tell state AG Tisha James to do so, because that's how the regime thinks things work.

The Worst-Case Scenario, Con't

The very real fear in six weeks is not that Donald Trump will have to be escorted from the White House grounds on January 20th after Trump losing, it's that Trump escorts Biden from the White House grounds on January 20th after Biden wins.

The interregnum allots 35 days for the count and its attendant lawsuits to be resolved. On the 36th day, December 8, an important deadline arrives.

At this stage, the actual tabulation of the vote becomes less salient to the outcome. That sounds as though it can’t be right, but it is: The combatants, especially Trump, will now shift their attention to the appointment of presidential electors.

December 8 is known as the “safe harbor” deadline for appointing the 538 men and women who make up the Electoral College. The electors do not meet until six days later, December 14, but each state must appoint them by the safe-harbor date to guarantee that Congress will accept their credentials. The controlling statute says that if “any controversy or contest” remains after that, then Congress will decide which electors, if any, may cast the state’s ballots for president.

We are accustomed to choosing electors by popular vote, but nothing in the Constitution says it has to be that way. Article II provides that each state shall appoint electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” Since the late 19th century, every state has ceded the decision to its voters. Even so, the Supreme Court affirmed in Bush v. Gore that a state “can take back the power to appoint electors.” How and when a state might do so has not been tested for well over a century.

Trump may test this. According to sources in the Republican Party at the state and national levels, the Trump campaign is discussing contingency plans to bypass election results and appoint loyal electors in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority. With a justification based on claims of rampant fraud, Trump would ask state legislators to set aside the popular vote and exercise their power to choose a slate of electors directly. The longer Trump succeeds in keeping the vote count in doubt, the more pressure legislators will feel to act before the safe-harbor deadline expires.

To a modern democratic sensibility, discarding the popular vote for partisan gain looks uncomfortably like a coup, whatever license may be found for it in law. Would Republicans find that position disturbing enough to resist? Would they cede the election before resorting to such a ploy? Trump’s base would exact a high price for that betrayal, and by this point party officials would be invested in a narrative of fraud.

The Trump-campaign legal adviser I spoke with told me the push to appoint electors would be framed in terms of protecting the people’s will. Once committed to the position that the overtime count has been rigged, the adviser said, state lawmakers will want to judge for themselves what the voters intended.

“The state legislatures will say, ‘All right, we’ve been given this constitutional power. We don’t think the results of our own state are accurate, so here’s our slate of electors that we think properly reflect the results of our state,’ ” the adviser said. Democrats, he added, have exposed themselves to this stratagem by creating the conditions for a lengthy overtime.

“If you have this notion,” the adviser said, “that ballots can come in for I don’t know how many days—in some states a week, 10 days—then that onslaught of ballots just gets pushed back and pushed back and pushed back. So pick your poison. Is it worse to have electors named by legislators or to have votes received by Election Day?”

When The Atlantic asked the Trump campaign about plans to circumvent the vote and appoint loyal electors, and about other strategies discussed in the article, the deputy national press secretary did not directly address the questions. “It’s outrageous that President Trump and his team are being villainized for upholding the rule of law and transparently fighting for a free and fair election,” Thea McDonald said in an email. “The mainstream media are giving the Democrats a free pass for their attempts to completely uproot the system and throw our election into chaos.” Trump is fighting for a trustworthy election, she wrote, “and any argument otherwise is a conspiracy theory intended to muddy the waters.”

In Pennsylvania, three Republican leaders told me they had already discussed the direct appointment of electors among themselves, and one said he had discussed it with Trump’s national campaign.

“I’ve mentioned it to them, and I hope they’re thinking about it too,” Lawrence Tabas, the Pennsylvania Republican Party’s chairman, told me. “I just don’t think this is the right time for me to be discussing those strategies and approaches, but [direct appointment of electors] is one of the options. It is one of the available legal options set forth in the Constitution.” He added that everyone’s preference is to get a swift and accurate count. “If the process, though, is flawed, and has significant flaws, our public may lose faith and confidence” in the election’s integrity.

Jake Corman, the state’s Senate majority leader, preferred to change the subject, emphasizing that he hoped a clean vote count would produce a final tally on Election Night. “The longer it goes on, the more opinions and the more theories and the more conspiracies [are] created,” he told me. If controversy persists as the safe-harbor date nears, he allowed, the legislature will have no choice but to appoint electors. “We don’t want to go down that road, but we understand where the law takes us, and we’ll follow the law.”

Republicans control both legislative chambers in the six most closely contested battleground states. Of those, Arizona and Florida have Republican governors, too. In Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, the governors are Democrats.

Foley, the Ohio State election scholar, has mapped the ripple effects if Republican legislators were to appoint Trump electors in defiance of the vote in states like Pennsylvania and Michigan. The Democratic governors would respond by certifying the official count, a routine exercise of their authority, and they would argue that legislators could not lawfully choose different electors after the vote had taken place. Their “certificates of ascertainment,” dispatched to the National Archives, would say that their states had appointed electors committed to Biden. Each competing set of electors would have the imprimatur of one branch of state government.

In Arizona, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who oversees elections, is a Democrat. She could assert her own power to certify the voting results and forward a slate of Biden electors. Even in Florida, which has unified Republican rule, electors pledged to Biden could meet and certify their own votes in hope of triggering a “controversy or contest” that would leave their state’s outcome to Congress. Much the same thing almost happened during the Florida recount battle of 2000. Republican Governor Jeb Bush certified electors for his brother, George W. Bush, on November 26 of that year, while litigation of the recount was still under way. Gore’s chief lawyer, Ronald Klain, responded by booking a room in the old Florida capitol building for Democratic electors to cast rival ballots for Gore. Only Gore’s concession, five days before the Electoral College vote, mooted that plan.

In any of these scenarios, the Electoral College would convene on December 14 without a consensus on who had legitimate claims to cast the deciding votes.

 

And there's your nightmare scenario. Republican legislatures in all six battleground states appointing electors loyal to Trump, with Democratic governors in four of those six states certifying election results that clearly show a Biden win.

It would be a coup with neither side having 270 electoral votes, or, Trump claiming that his slate of electors gives him the electoral college results in order to claim victory.

So who breaks the logjam, the voters, or the electors?

The Supreme Court would decide and this is why they want someone confirmed before the election so that they can be the fifth vote for Trump holding on to power.

He will never concede, folks. If he concedes, he goes to prison for life. He knows this.

President Donald Trump refused Wednesday to commit to a peaceful transition of power if he loses the 2020 election to Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

“Well, we’ll have to see what happens. You know that. I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots. And the ballots are a disaster,” Trump said at a news conference at the White House. It appeared Trump was referring to mail-in ballots, which he has repeatedly condemned, without evidence, as susceptible to massive fraud.

The president had been asked by a reporter if he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power, “win, lose or draw.”

When the reporter noted that “people are rioting,” Trump replied: “Get rid of the ballots, and you’ll have a very – you’ll have a very peaceful – there won’t be a transfer, frankly, there’ll be a continuation.”

“The ballots are out of control,” Trump said, adding, “The Democrats know it better than anybody else.”

The Biden campaign issued the following statement in response to Trump declining to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he were to lose the election: “The American people will decide this election. And the United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House.”

Minutes later, the president abruptly left the briefing room, telling the press, “I have to leave to take an emergency phone call.”

The White House did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for details on Trump’s departure.

 

America is not prepared for this.

Trump is openly saying that he believes it will not be necessary to make a peaceful transition of power to Joe Biden, because he believes there's no way Joe Biden can win without "fraudulent mail ballots", that is, DOnald Trump is openly telling us that he thinks there are only two outcomes of the election, Trump wins the election, or Joe Biden cheated and that Trump will rely on the Supreme Court to rule him the victor.

There will be no transfer of power because it cannot happen in Trump's mind, therefore asking if Trump will commit to a peaceful transition if he loses is irrelevant.

That it may shatter the country into open conflict is a bonus for him.