Friday, November 06, 2020

Nearly There


~ Clayton P. Carroll II

59 comments:

  1. And Now...

    ⭐️ BIDEN ⭐️ leads by:

    Pennsylvania: 5587
    Georgia: 1097

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    1. ...which is to say:

      🌟 Biden is First! 🌟

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  2. 🌈 In the popular vote
    Biden/Harris are ahead of DT/Pence
    by 4,054,056 votes. ⭐️

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    1. A good day to have doughnuts for breakfast.

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  3. Important Clue:
    Secret Service has been dramatically increased around Biden.

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  4. From The Guardiian:
    Georgia secretary of state confirms there will be a recount

    Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, has confirmed there will be a recount in the state.

    “There will be a recount in Georgia,” Raffensberger said in Atlanta, promising transparency in the process.

    Given how close the presidential race is in Georgia, it was expected that the state would conduct a recount.

    As of now, Joe Biden leads Donald Trump by just 1,579 votes in Georgia, representing a virtual tie.

    The recount will also have huge implications for control of the US Senate. As of now, Republican incumbent David Perdue’s vote share in his race has dipped below 50%, which would force a January runoff.

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    1. The Dems should be buying up TV and radio advertising on a grand scale in Georgia for the Senate campaigns.

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    2. Per NYT: In Georgia, another 5,000 votes are expected by late morning or early afternoon from Gwinnett County, a Democratic-leaning Atlanta suburb, according to a spokesman.

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  5. A cold front is passing through here; some chance of rain this evening and the next couple of days. Definitely cooler.

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    1. After about a hundred yards we decided not to continue our walk this morning; the wind was kicking up a lot of dust.

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  6. Biden Will Address the Nation Tonight
    November 6, 2020 at 12:29 pm EST By Taegan Goddard

    Joe Biden is expected to address the nation during prime time this evening, the Wall Street Journal reports. Sen. Kamala Harris is also expected to speak tonight.

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  7. STEVE SCHMIDT’S MESSAGE TO TRUMP:
    “There will be no more Trumps in the White House. There will be no Trumps on Air Force One or Marine One.
    The idiot children and presidential in-laws will be stripped of their power and authority. Trump will lose the presidential seal. The American people decide our elections.
    Joe Biden will restore honor, dignity, decency and competence to the presidency at the stroke of noon on Jan. 20, 2021. Don’t let Trump’s absurdist spin and lies cause panic. Stay calm. Count the votes.
    When the counting is done, it will be the end of Trump’s cancerous term.
    Donald Trump, what you did last night was unpardonable. You have lost. You will go. The trappings of power will be stripped from you. The American people have rejected you. The states that elected you in 2016 have fired you. Your fate is sealed.
    The counting goes on, and it is getting darker by the moment for you. There is no legal basis for your absurd claims and legal actions. You will keep getting laughed out of court. It’s almost over.
    Close your eyes, Donald Trump. Now say President Joe Biden to yourself three times.
    This isn’t going to look that close. You have done such damage to this country. Your crooked and inept family has desecrated the White House. History will brutally judge you. Loser.
    It suits you.”
    Steve Schmidt

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  8. OHIO; COVID cases 240,178 and 5,494 deaths.

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  9. Turns out when they towed my car they didn’t use the tow hook, but instead severed my brake line!
    Looks like I won’t have my Mini back until Monday now.

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    1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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    2. The tow truck driver probably isn't going to do that again. . .

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  10. That blue band across the middle of California is Fresno County. [Click] Biden 53% to Trump 45%. That’s a change, as memory serves me. The City of Fresno goes Democratic sometimes, but the whole county? That’s unusual.

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  11. 🌟Biden/Harris🌟
    now ahead by:
    PA: 14,541
    GA: 4,263 !

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  12. The internet is weird. I am still getting the occasional email that says "Today(or tomorrow) is Election Day."

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  13. I just responded positively, albeit not magnanimously, to an appeal by Stacy Abrams for a contribution to the Warnock & Ossoff campaigns.

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  14. By Michael Gold, NYT:

    With the nation’s focus elsewhere, North Carolina is still collecting, counting and too close to call.

    Election officials in North Carolina, where both the presidential race and one of the most critical Senate contests in the country have remained too close to call, said on Friday that about 31,000 eligible mail ballots had arrived since Election Day.

    Just 4,300 ballots were going to be considered by county election officials on Friday, the state’s board of elections said in a statement, but most will have to wait until next week.

    The attention now is primarily on Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada, with former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. leading in all three. But leading up to Election Day, a victory in North Carolina was seen as crucial to President Trump’s re-election hopes. With most of the votes tabulated in the state, he is currently ahead by around 76,000 votes, or 1.4 percentage points.

    In the Senate race, Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican, is up by more than 96,000 over his Democratic challenger, Cal Cunningham.

    It is not clear exactly how many ballots remain outstanding in North Carolina because the state accepts mail ballots until Nov. 12, as long as they are postmarked by Election Day.

    The state’s board of elections said that so far, 99,000 voters who had requested a mail ballot had not yet returned one or cast a vote during the state’s early voting period. Some of those voters may have cast a ballot in-person on Election Day, and others may not have voted.

    North Carolina also had around 40,700 provisional ballots that needed to be processed and verified, the state elections board said.

    Democrats had hoped that Mr. Biden could take North Carolina, where a Republican presidential candidate has won in nine of the past 10 elections. (The exception was in 2008, when Mr. Biden was on the ticket as Barack Obama’s running mate.)

    Results so far show Mr. Trump faring better than he did in 2016 in the poorest counties and those with large Black populations, but worse in more affluent counties and those with more college-educated people. Overall, his showing is not quite as strong as it was four years ago, when he won the state by 3.7 percentage points.

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  15. The Supreme Court will extinguish health-care hysteria [Click] George Will thinks the Supreme Court will change the Affordable Care Act little if at all.

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  16. Paul Waldman: If Joe Biden wins, he must play hardball against GOP obstruction. Here’s how. [Click]

    Joe Biden is poised to become president-elect, and it now appears control of the Senate will come down to the two seats in Georgia, both of which will be decided in a January runoff. While it’s possible that Democrats will win both and bring the chamber to a 50-50 tie (which would be broken by a Vice President Harris), it won’t be easy.

    Which is why Republicans are now beginning to think about just how completely they want to obstruct Biden’s presidency if they retain control of the Senate. The likely answer is: “More than anyone could have imagined.”

    That obstruction could be unprecedented — not just blocking all significant legislation, not just launching endless bogus investigations, and not even just refusing to allow Biden to fill any judicial vacancies, on the Supreme Court or any other court. Most radically of all, Senate GOP leaders could even refuse to allow the new president to appoint a Cabinet.

    Continued:

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  17. But at least one Republican senator wants everyone to know that he wouldn’t do that — or maybe not, anyway:

    “When it comes to finding common ground, I will do that,” [Sen. Lindsey O.] Graham told reporters. “The vice president deserves a Cabinet. I’ll give him my input about who I could vote for as secretary of state, attorney general. . . . There may be some people that I just can’t vote for because I think they’re unqualified or too extreme.”

    So generous of him! Having spent the last four years as one of the most shameless Trump lickspittles in Washington, Graham (S.C.) will now move to become the “moderate” Republican that Democrats can deal with. But don’t be fooled: If there’s a way to undermine and hamstring Biden, Graham and all the other Republicans will find it and use it.

    But this might not be as bad as it looks. In fact, in this area, Republican obstruction could be a gift to Biden.

    Continued:

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  18. Here’s some context. Only nine times in U.S. history has the Senate rejected a president’s nominee for a Cabinet position. It has only happened once in the last 60 years, when the 1989 nomination of former senator John Tower (R-Tex.) to become defense secretary was voted down on the grounds that he was a heavy drinker. (Tower denied the charge, but pledged to let no more alcohol pass his lips if he was confirmed; it didn’t help.)

    In 17 other cases, a nominee was withdrawn before a vote could be taken because of some controversy or other. But like judicial nominations, Cabinet choices used to be confirmed without much regard to ideology, so long as they were reasonably qualified and not beset by scandal.

    But, of course, things don’t work that way anymore. We saw this in 2017, when the collection of (mostly) incompetents and grifters Trump nominated to fill his Cabinet received an unusual amount of opposition from Democratic senators.

    It was essentially a free pass for Democrats to make a statement with no practical effect: They could vote no, demonstrating opposition to Trump while knowing that since Republicans had the majority, his picks would still get confirmed.

    But in January, we are likely to have a president taking office with a Senate controlled by the other party. The last president who faced that situation was George H.W. Bush, and apart from Tower, all his nominees were confirmed by unanimous or near-unanimous votes.

    That will not be the case for Biden. The question he’ll confront is how far Republicans are willing to go to deprive him of the aides he needs to run the government.

    Continued:

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  19. They may not yet know themselves. But I’d say that they will string Biden along for as long as possible, telling him they’ll vote to confirm nominees if only he gives them the right ones. How about some centrist Democrats? Well . . . no. Too liberal. How about moderate Republicans? Mmm . . . no, still too liberal. How about different moderate Republicans? Well . . . we’ll think about it. It could drag on for months.
    The key question is whether Biden allows them to pull him into that briar patch. Because he has an alternative: He could say, “Confirm my picks, or I’m going to use the Vacancies Act to fill those positions, and you’ll have nothing to say about it.”

    The Vacancies Act sets out the rules for presidents to fill open positions, and as Jeff Hauser of the Revolving Door Project argues, it will give Biden all the power he needs.
    “Every president had relied on a version of the Vacancies Act to run the government,” Hauser told me. That’s because it permits the president to take any official who has been confirmed to another position, or any high-ranking and established civil servant already in the government, and use them to fill vacancies.

    Continued:

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  20. Presidents routinely use the act this way at various levels, Hauser said, adding that this could be used to fill Cabinet slots. That person can then hire deputies, and the government would operate perfectly well.

    It does mean, however, that because they’d have to be drawn from within the government, the acting secretaries would be civil servants instead of the ex-politicians or business leaders who often get those jobs. What if, instead of wrangling over the nomination of some hospital corporation CEO to be secretary of health and human services, Biden just gave Anthony S. Fauci the job?

    That’s not to mention that the president can, with the cooperation of the House speaker, declare Congress in recess and then make recess appointments. The very prospect of Biden playing that kind of hardball might make Republicans step back from giving him too much trouble regarding his Cabinet nominations.

    As Hauser put it: “Joe Biden does not need to make Mitch McConnell co-president." Now, Biden just needs to realize it.
    ------------------------
    Good Lord, I sure hope so.

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    1. Somebody needs to have a serious "Come to Jesus" talk with McConnell. He has been drunk on power for the last 12 years at least and he probably believes he IS the President.

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    2. I was once on a union organizing committee in an absolutely dreadful and prolonged action to get recognition and a contract. Ultimately the only thing management refrained from was physical violence, and we were not certain they would even draw the line there. When it came time to negotiate the contract, I remember one piece of advice in particular from the union field agent: Never threaten. If you say "If you don't do A, then we will do B" you hand the initiative to the other side; if you are going to do something, do it. That leaves you in control. And it can knock them back on their heels. In my opinion, it would do Mitch a world of good for Biden to give him a complete list of nominees for government positions, wait for ten business days, on the eleventh day to recess Congress for ten days and make the appointments. That would be a salutary shock, I think. Rather like Saul on the road to Damascus. Maybe use the Vacancies Act for some cases to boot, either before or after making the recess appointments.

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    3. My story is not quite complete. If you threaten, the other side gains control because they have the choice and ability to call your bluff. If, for instance, a public demonstration materializes on the sidewalk without a threat, and while negotiations are in progress, they will be disconcerted.

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  21. Oh, I just looked at the clock and realized it is nearly an hour past the announced time for Harris and Biden to address the nation.

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    1. He is going to speak soon. They were waiting on results from Allegheny County PA.

      Biden is now ahead 27,130 !!

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  22. The Election That Broke the Republican Party [Click] By lashing themselves to the president’s desperate conspiracies of fraud, GOP officials have undermined their own legitimacy. I hadn’t realize how insanely intense and dangerous the GOP’s election fraud claims have been. This gives a pretty strong description of it, and in politico.com at that.

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  23. Three little notes from The Guardian’s live feed: [Click]

    Trump backers tricked into joining ‘Gay Communists for Socialism’ on Facebook (Would you believe 80,000 of them?)

    A state of emergency has been declared in Miami-Dade county, as Tropical Depression Eta heads toward Florida.

    Biden’s address now set for 10:30 PM ET

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  24. Former Wall Street cop Gary Gensler to join Biden transition [Click] “a former Obama administration official best known for cracking down on Wall Street banks”

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    1. Must be soon--they have cleared space for the video at the top of the feed.

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    2. Oh, it's been under way for a few minutes.

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    3. Biden fumbled the words a little, but the words were so very good.

      My only complaint is that Biden wants to unite a divided country...and work with everyone in a bipartisan way. Will Democrats NEVER learn that the Republicans do not care to play well with others?

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  26. "Unknown" is listener using Safari. (I keep forgetting!)

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  27. Alan, puddle asked me today to tell you that she is SOOOOO grateful for all that you post! Especially for someone on Dial-up, your efforts help greatly to streamline. We are both appreciative of your selections, too!

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    1. You all are more than welcome; it is therapeutic for me.

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    2. Maybe it's about time for some Hogwarts therapy.

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  28. OK, it looks like NC and Alaska are pretty much certain for Trump.

    Biden ahead by 4,020 in Georgia, by 28,877 in Pennsylvania, and by 22,657 in Nevada.
    Votes left to count: GA, NC, PA about 1% each; NV 13% and AK 50% (won’t be counted for some time yet, probably because of delays in delivery of ballot boxes to counting center(s).

    Currently Biden has 264 electoral votes, Trump 214. If everything goes as projected above, Biden wins 306 electoral votes, and Trump wins 232.

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    2. 306 electoral votes would be more than the number received by Nixon (301), JFK (303), Trump (304), and Truman (303).

      It was exceeded by Obama (332, 365), Clinton (370, 379), LBJ (486), Reagan (486, 489), Nixon (520).

      So, not record-setting, but quite respectable. May it be so.

      Reference: Wikipedia. [Click]

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  29. White House chief of staff Mark Meadows has tested positive for the novel coronavirus, Bloomberg reports.

    Dreadful fellow that I am, I am not consumed by sympathy.

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  30. How liquid air could help keep the lights on [Click] I had read about the pilot plant a while back. I haven’t heard anything for a while about the small industrial scale plant to take carbon dioxide directly from the air and turn it into liquid motor fuel with existing technology and equipment, and also (depending on the availability of necessary minerals) turn it into a cement-like material that can be used in construction.

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  31. 🌟Biden/Harris🌟
    now ahead by:
    PA: 28,833 / GA: 4,430
    NV: 22,657 / AZ: 29,861

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