US Elections 2020

Started by dsanchez, August 29, 2020, 00:34:10

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SueC

SueC is time travelling

Ulrich

In case anyone wondered why a certain someone keeps telling the fairytale of "I won"... (the reason is very simple: money - of course)!

Quote from: undefinedNach mehr als 50 juristischen Niederlagen - davon zwei vor dem Supreme Court - dürfte auch dem republikanischen Noch-Präsidenten mittlerweile klar sein, dass das Wahlergebnis nicht mehr zu kippen ist - sollte er je daran geglaubt haben.

Warum Trump dennoch weiter stur bleiben dürfte, verrät ein Blick aufs Geld.

Trumps Team bittet um finanzielle Unterstützung
"Das ist vielleicht die wichtigste E-Mail, die ich Dir je geschickt habe", heißt es in einer der vielen Nachrichten, die Trumps Wahlkampfteam seit Wochen an Unterstützer schickt. Schnell wird klar, worum es geht: "Ich brauche DEINE HILFE." Schon fünf Dollar könnten den Kampf für die Rechtmäßigkeit der Wahl unterstützen, bei der es "gewaltige Unregelmäßigkeiten" gegeben habe.

Dass der Demokrat Biden die Wahl gewonnen hat, ist spätestens seit dem 7. November klar. Mittlerweile haben alle Bundesstaaten die Ergebnisse zertifiziert. Trump stellt sich trotzdem weiterhin als Opfer massiven Betrugs und als rechtmäßiger Sieger dar, ohne dafür je einen einzigen überzeugenden Beweis geliefert zu haben.

Die Appelle an die Unterstützer ziehen: In dem Monat nach der Wahl am 3. November haben Trump und seine Republikanische Partei nach Angaben von Trumps Wahlkampfteam mehr als 200 Millionen US-Dollar an Spenden eingesammelt. Das Geld ging demnach unter anderem bei den politischen Organisationen "Trump Victory" (Sieg Trumps) und "Save America" (Rettet Amerika) ein. Die Aufrufe suggerieren, dass alle Spenden in den juristischen Kampf gegen das Wahlergebnis fließen.

Weit gefehlt: Das Trump-Lager wendete nur einen Bruchteil der Spenden für die wenig erfolgreichen Anstrengungen auf, das Wahlergebnis zu Gunsten von Trump zu kippen, also für Klagen oder Neuauszählungen.

Wie aus einer Auflistung bei der für die Wahlkampffinanzierung zuständigen Behörde FEC hervorgeht, waren es bis zum 23. November weniger als 10 Millionen US-Dollar. Drei Millionen Dollar kostete allein eine teilweise Neuauszählung der Stimmen im Bundesstaat Wisconsin, bei der Trump keine Stimme hinzugewann.

Auf Trumps offizieller Wahlkampfseite erfährt der Spender im Kleingedruckten, dass 25 Prozent des Geldes an die Republikanische Partei geht und 75 Prozent an die kürzlich gegründete Organisation "Save America". Nur, wenn ein Spender mehr als 5000 US-Dollar gibt, geht die Spende auf ein Konto, das ausdrücklich für Kosten im Zusammenhang mit der Anfechtung der Wahl vorgesehen ist.

Trump habe seine Kleinstspender betrogen, sagt dazu Brendan Fischer vom Campaign Legal Center der Justiznachrichten-Plattform "Law and Crime". Das Campaign Legal Center setzt sich unter anderem für striktere Gesetze zur Wahlkampffinanzierung ein.

"Trumps trügerische und irreführende Behauptungen über eine manipulierte Wahl waren großartig, um Spenden zu sammeln, und sowohl Trump als auch die Republikanische Partei haben von diesem Spendensammeln profitiert." Es sei also ganz klar im Interesse Trumps und seiner Partei, damit weiterzumachen, bilanziert er.

https://www.gmx.net/magazine/politik/us-praesident-donald-trump/trumps-maer-wahlbetrug-geldstroeme-35351122
The holy city breathed like a dying man...

dsanchez

Postcards from the Capitol:




2023.11.22 Lima
2023.11.27 Montevideo

SueC

Quote"Always interesting to see how white protestors can encounter so little resistance and breach the capitol with the vice-president there, while black protestors would be lying dead in front of the capitol building right now," wrote the writer Roxane Gay.

"White privilege is on display like never before in the US Capitol," tweeted the author and scholar Ibram X Kendi.

Others pointed to the stark contrast between law enforcement's response to the mob at the Capitol versus their treatment of protesters against police brutality.

"Peaceful protestors got pepper sprayed so Trump could hold a Bible upside for a photo in front of a church," tweeted Shannon Sharper, a former American football player, referring to an incident that took place over the summer in the midst of protests following the police killing of George Floyd.

"Thinking about all the protestors who got their eyes shot out by rubber bullets this summer for doing things like 'walking'," said the journalist Libby Watson. Dozens of people who were peacefully protesting for racial justice, along with some journalists who were covering the events, have sustained serious injuries from rubber bullets and teargas that were used by police to disperse crowds.

"Appears the 'looting/shooting' rule does not apply to everyone," wrote the Atlantic writer Adam Serwer in reply to a picture of an insurgent walking away with a podium, referring to Trump's tweet in May telling racial justice protesters that "when the looting starts, the shooting starts".

The New Yorker writer Jelani Cobb said the aggressiveness of the police in Ferguson, Missouri, following the police killing of Michael Brown compared with officers' response to the mob at the Capitol was "effing astounding".

from https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/06/us-capitol-trump-mob-police-protesters


QuoteI call it a coup attempt because, though I assume it will not prevent the Biden presidency, it certainly intended to, and is part of a campaign to delegitimize and thereby weaken the incoming administration. It was a long time coming, building up for years with white rage, especially white male rage fueled by everyone from Trump himself to the National Rifle Association, Fox News and the various rightwing pundits, the Republican party, the various faces of white supremacy, and the far-right groups such as the Proud Boys. It is a rage against the fact that other people might be equal under the law, that women and people of color might also govern as power begins to be distributed more equally, the same rage that attempted to delegitimize a black president with birtherism and obstruction. It is a rage against equality.

... The kind of violence we saw on Capitol Hill is authoritarian, a way to try to force other people to submit to the will of the perpetrators. This violence comes from the white men who were long the only people with power in this country imagining themselves as marginalized and oppressed outsiders because others might also have power and a voice. We saw these kind of men last summer, when they invaded the Michigan capital while carrying semiautomatic rifles and saw them again when a handful of them were arrested for a plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. We saw them in racist shootings from the Texas border to a Pennsylvania synagogue.

This coup attempt was built by the more and more uninhibited ideology of violence we have seen again and again, in the mass shootings that became a norm in 21st-century America, the fetishization of guns and gun rights that made the killing machines and the death they inflict far more common, so that death by gun recently overtook death by car as a leading American way to die.

As I write, I hear a Republican leader on TV say "Remember we are the party of law and order," and, of course, the riot going on in the Capitol is technically lawless, but "law and order" as a rightwing slogan means that they are the law and they impose their version of order. Authoritarianism is always an ideology of inequality: I make the rules, you follow them, I change them at will and punish those who don't obey, or, if I feel like it, those who do because I can. Frank Wilhoit once said: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition ... There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." They are demonstrating that nothing binds them and that they expect to have whatever they want. Entitlement is too demure a word for this.

from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/06/trump-mob-storm-capitol-washington-coup-attempt


QuoteAnd you wake, flick on The Washington Post, and see a horned protester in American flag body paint heading a mob forcing their way into the marble halls of the US Congress.

God damn it, history actually happened. Protesters lolling in the Senate president's chair, after the chamber was evacuated, rifling through people's desks. Extraordinary scenes.

Here it is, what popular culture has been dreaming of in a thousand crappy movies and comic books: the moment when the US government loses its imperial unitary power all at once, and becomes as one with the tin-pot countries in whose capitals it had fomented coups that looked exactly like this one, ragged militias in the shining set of power. Someone seize the airport and the television station!

Whether you call it a coup or not — it appears to be both a ham-fisted version of one and a simulation of it at the same time — it surely marks the conclusion of America's rhetorical power, its capacity to project global dominance and legitimate authority.

Could one imagine this happening in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing? My god, there wouldn't even be a wet spot left where the protesters had been.

This sudden loss of global power projection comes not because the storming represents a planned assault on state power — although it opens an opportunity for a real civil war within the branches of government — but because it doesn't, because it has occurred through a mix of lassitude and poor planning, and the habitual soft policing of right-wing events.

Had it been a Black Lives Matter protest, the Capitol would have been ringed with steel, troops with fixed bayonets several deep, as it was during the march on the Pentagon and other Vietnam protests.

from https://www.crikey.com.au/2021/01/07/capitol-siege-america-collapses/


Good news though:  The Republicans won't be controlling the senate.
SueC is time travelling

Ulrich

Quote from: dsanchez on January 07, 2021, 00:17:57Postcards from the Capitol

Nice that these idiots deliver photographic "proof" of their trespassing, will make it easier for the state attorney. :cool
The holy city breathed like a dying man...

SueC

I can't see the postcard!
SueC is time travelling

Ulrich

Quote from: SueC on January 07, 2021, 11:42:21I can't see the postcard!

They're only in dsanchez' post, I saw no point in leaving them within the quote.
The holy city breathed like a dying man...

SueC

No, I mean I can't see anything in David's post except text! :)

...and all my JavaScript is on...

...maybe it's a region thing...
SueC is time travelling

Ulrich

Well I guess your machine is automatically blocking pics of self-important idiots... :evil:

(You're not missing much, just some blokes in the Capitol, who don't seem to know what to do there now, except take a few pics and selfies.)

Quote from: SueC on January 07, 2021, 05:21:58Good news though:  The Republicans won't be controlling the senate.

Yep, with a majority in parliament(s), Biden and his Democrats might be able to change some things which went wrong.  :cool
The holy city breathed like a dying man...

SueC

Quote from: Ulrich on January 07, 2021, 14:15:41Well I guess your machine is automatically blocking pics of self-important idiots... :evil:

ROFL  :lol:

That's got to be it!

Quote from: Ulrich on January 07, 2021, 14:15:41(You're not missing much, just some blokes in the Capitol, who don't seem to know what to do there now, except take a few pics and selfies.)

Saw that in the Guardian - and they smashed windows and furniture and threw people's work papers all over the floor and sat at desks with their boots up on people's work spaces like the oafs they are.  :evil:

What do you call 1,000 conspiracy theorists at the bottom of the ocean?  ...a good start.  :P
SueC is time travelling

Ulrich

Quote from: SueC on January 07, 2021, 15:04:47Saw that in the Guardian - and they smashed windows and furniture and threw people's work papers all over the floor and sat at desks with their boots up on people's work spaces

These were exactly the photos posted (I guess the "postcard" comment was ironic), seen 1 or 2 you've seen them all.  :P
The holy city breathed like a dying man...

SueC



from https://www.crikey.com.au/

Some interesting articles there today:

QuoteHypocritical rats abandon the Trump Titanic, but it's all too little too late

Trump loyalists are abandoning him after the violence in Washington, but let's not pretend there's anything heroic about their actions.

Talk about rats fleeing a sinking ship.

Actually, the exodus in Washington after the storming of the Capitol yesterday is more reminiscent of the heady days of the French Revolution or the fall of the Nazis, where collaborators switched sides just as their necks looked vulnerable...

from https://www.crikey.com.au/2021/01/08/trump-allies-hypocrites/


QuoteWashington mayhem divides the nation as poll shows support for protest

Condemnation for the US Capitol riots came swiftly from abroad, but inside the country it's another matter entirely.

The storming and brief occupation of the US Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump has attracted more or less universal condemnation from the media and political establishment (however equivocal, lukewarm, or clearly sympathetic some of it it may be) — unless you count Trump himself (or Miranda Devine). But how is this playing with Trump's base in the red states?

Certainly, as CNN walked around the riots yesterday, many protesters expressed pride and excitement at what was happening. Bear in mind, this wasn't the types dressed as Vikings or those wearing clothes branded with "Camp Auschwitz". CNN's focus was largely on calm, polite middle-aged folk.

In Alabama — a state which was home to one of the four rioters who died, this person apparently of a heart attack — a group of returning protestors denied that the riots represented an attempted coup, but told the media "this is only the beginning"...

According to YouGov polling, 68% of Republicans don't see the storming of the Capitol building as a threat to democracy (as opposed to 93% of Democrats and 55% of independents who do). Indeed, 45% of the Republicans surveyed actively support it.

In both of the above polls, the overall majority of those questioned condemned the riots and believed Joe Biden won fairly. But yesterday illustrated what the portion who don't are capable of, and what kind of resistance they are likely to face.

...and an astute reader comment:

QuoteThe trouble with all those 'threat to democracy' articles I'm reading is the premise: that the USA is a democracy. Start with simple voter suppression and disenfranchisement; move on to the pervasive influence – no, let's call it control – of the military-industrial-corporate-financial complex, including its corrupt buying off of most US politicians; then look at the MSM propaganda machine and the depredations of benignly misnamed 'social media'; finishing off with the general ignorance of the poorly educated populace, and what do you have? Democracy?

from https://www.crikey.com.au/2021/01/08/us-capitol-washington-riot-reaction/


QuoteTrump as a gonzo Jefferson taps into the deep well of American resistance

Again and again, we think Trump is finished. Will this time be any different?

Throughout the political career of President Donald Trump, the mainstream — and that is most of us — have repeatedly declared him finished with each fresh outrage.

This goes all the way back to the presidential campaign, and the Access Hollywood tape. Remember that? Trump caught on tape saying he could get away with groping women. It seemed unimaginable that his campaign could continue. But it did...

When the ragtag army of far-rightists invaded the Capitol yesterday — a mix of delusional MAGA-head Trump worshippers and ideological fascists who regard him as a useful buffoon — and Trump gave them a peekabo endorsement, everyone was in agreement that that was it, it's over, dust off the 25th amendment, re-impeach, etc.

And then that evening the Republicans trooped back in and nearly 150 of them voted to reject certification of an election in which there is no evidence of statistically significant electoral fraud. Simultaneously, a YouGov poll was released showing that 45% of Republicans, and 20%-plus of the whole country thought the Capitol invasion was justified.

One suspects that such support is a mix of hard-right fervour about an election stolen by "woke communists", and a touch of Jeffersonian anarchy, the belief that the whole system needs a real shake up now and again...

from https://www.crikey.com.au/2021/01/08/trump-gonza-jefferson/
SueC is time travelling

Ulrich

QuoteTrump loyalists are abandoning him after the violence in Washington, but let's not pretend there's anything heroic about their actions.

Very true. Same goes for Trump himself, under pressure he now condemns the attack...

QuoteHouse Speaker Nancy Pelosi urged Vice-President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th amendment to the Constitution to declare the president unfit for office.

Alternatively, she vowed to initiate the process to impeach the president.

Under pressure, Donald Trump finally condemned the "heinous attack".
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55583264
The holy city breathed like a dying man...

dsanchez

XD

2023.11.22 Lima
2023.11.27 Montevideo

SueC

SueC is time travelling