Georgia Senate run-off Election analysis:
My sense is Perdue and Loeffler could have survived any 2 of these 3: being unimpressive candidates, GA shifting purple, and Trump being a maniac.

The most recent predecessors — most notably the 2008 election where a Democrat who came off the coat-tails of Obama to a 3 or 5 point loss and then was swamped utterly in the run-off — the very white waspy Democrat making a fool of himself in the run-off by doing a get out the vote effort standing next to some popular hip hop artists — tells the tale of number two in this list. I have no clue how to mark the first item on this list — the current political landscape is politically aligned and soul-crushingly homogenous — we see it in that there are six, count em SIX — three from each party– senators representing states carried by the other party on the presidential ticket.

Item three is where anyone focuses. I sighed deeply as I went ahead and read the — dishonest — explainer on the “stolen election” at the American Conservative magazine — probably, for anything worthwhile the comments section is what should be read, but nonetheless I wanted to guage a “what the hell is the claim”. A few specific claims I suppose yoy can go hunt if you have the time float in a general mass of easy to refute suppositions. Biden underperformed in the cities, you see, and over-performed in the suburbs.
Part of this has something to do with the continuing antics of the Spanish Civil War re-enactors. If we must place the two sides on an equivalence, the antifa forces storming the city central and the black lives matterers taken to shining lights in peoples’ houses at nights — alienate some in the city, with enough distance in suburbia to stick by the social justice trappings coming with ” black lives matter”.

The Republicans would have won these run-offs had Trump behaved even half-way as McCain and Palin did in 2008 — of course, they had reason to campaign for the Republican senator in sane and sensical manner that Trump maybe didn’t — being Republicans after all. The message was putting a check on the incoming Democratic administration, stopping a sixty seat Democratic Senate. Surely a message transferable to this fifty seat Senate.
The problem becomes one where Trump would not allow anyone in the suburbs to think about anything but Trump. Nowhere to pivot from still needing to vote to repudiate this faction of Spanish Civil War re-enactors looming there, about to strike on the day after the election on behalf of Trump.

This is how it is Marat
this is how she sees your revolution
they have a toothache/and think their teeth should be pulled
one man’s shoes pinch/while another man’s shoes fit comfortably
their soup is burnt/they shout for better soup!
a man finds his wife too skinny/he wants a plumper one
a woman finds her husband too short/she wants a taller one
a poet runs out of verse and desperately grasps for new images
for hours the angler casts his line/why aren’t the fish biting?
and so they join The Revolution
thinking The Revolution
will give them EVERYTHING
a fish
a poem
a new wife
a new husband
a new pair of shoes
and the best soup in the world
and so they storm all of the citadels
and there they are
and everything is just the same
no fish biting
verses botched
shoes pinching
a worn and stinking partner in bed
and the soup?
BURNT

From The Persecution and Assassination of Jean Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates at the Asylum at Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.

The equivalence argument gets bizarre at times… As though it doesn’t reflect back and by definition. And then you get to tbe politicians on behalf of the anarchists on the left side of the Spanish Civil War re-enactment… Not quite there as opposed to wrapped behind Trump. Note Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s recent rhetorical ploy in claiming a Republican budgetry bill was… “Defunding the police”.

Well (from comments)

Hopefully it will turn out as an empty show, with incels compensating for something by parading with their guns in the DC Capitol as earlier in the year they did in State Capitols at Trump’s urging (#LiberateVirginia, #LiberateMichigan, etc). But it only takes a single crazy man with a semiautomatic weapon to turn this into a mass shooting, so it feels like playing Russian roulette. Very irresponsible, and shame on Trump’s enablers for fueling this too, they should have known better.
What is going on in Trump’s mind, declaring martial law as Flynn was urging ? For this to be a Reichstag Fire, there should be some plausible way to frame Antifa or BLM for it, but crowds wearing MAGA hats make this framing rather difficult.

Predictably it is out there.

“In any other conceivable moment in US history, this tape would result in the leadership of both parties demanding the immediate resignation of the President of the United States,” Carl Bernstein.

Yeah, he oughta be impeached again.

Comments… The “Whataboutitism”…

Actually, the only thing worse then is when conservatives act like it. If we don’t like what Trump is doing, then we should link it to the fact that in 2000, 2016, and to a lesser extent 2004 we saw the same attacks on the integrity of our elections and electoral process (with calls to alter the Constitution no less), though miraculously in 2008 and 2012 and now in 2020 everything is hunky-dory. We shouldn’t parrot the same outrageous claims being made.

Barbara Boxer was not taken seriously and last I checkef Hillary Clinton conceded.

Hawley’s gambit is a step toward undercutting and therefore, maybe, at some point eliminating the EC. Basically Hawley and Trump are asking Congress to treat certified electoral votes as mere suggestions that can easily be set aside. On that principle, any losing party in any state can hereafter do what Republicans are doing this time: appoint a bunch of people who will sign a paper calling themselves “electors” and send that in to Congress as an alternate slate. Congress can then just dump the certified votes if it wishes to. The logical upshot is that we don’t really need to hold elections and collect popular votes in the first place, we can go with our feeling or sense of the “mood” of a given state. Does it seem like Trump should be popular in Georgia? Well then, let’s just go ahead and say he won it. Because otherwise the Trump voters there will “feel” that their “voices weren’t heard,” as Hawley puts it.

It gets worse. There’s no surprise in the fact that the GOP might want to nullify the people’s votes, which is what Trump and his enablers spent much of November and the first half of December trying to do. But now they’ve gone on to trying to nullify the Electoral College votes as well. This would amount to amending the Constitution sub silentio to allow Congress to appoint presidents as it wishes. We wouldn’t really need any presidential election at all, in the same way that a parliamentary system typically has no election for prime mininster, just for legislative seats. Of course, there would still be a danger that Democrats might win control of Congress from time to time and appoint Democratic presidents. That problem could be solved by creating a kind of executive council that controlled the Congress and appointed its own members. Perhaps a good name for such a council would be the “Politburo.”

Wasn’t this how Rome moved from a Republic?

Nothing….but nothing has stopped the Democrats from systematically seeking to delegitimize the election of every Republican victory since 2000. Nothing stopped the Democrats from seeking to stop, dispute, block, overturn, remove, or deny the legitimacy of George W. Bush’s victories – either in 2000, when Gore took things all the way to the Supreme Court; (Trump tried to doso, with even less success) nor in 2004, when Democrats objected to electoral college certification. Certainly nothing stopped the Democrats and their allies in 2016 (and every day since) from throwing everything including the kitchen sink at Trump.. (Not sure what that means. Just about everyone I know in the thicket of ” Resistance” accepted the reality, with shades of perspective on “what it means”. To quite a few it seemed to provide them with an elitist glee, confirmation on the rottenness of a part of the public — ” Amerika”, as it wete.

Look at Bin Laden. Gets a few crazies on a plane to cause a disaster and the US subsequently pisses away more than a decade and like $8 trillion chasing his specter around the Middle East. If history identifies one person responsible for bringing down the American empire more than any other, my vote is on him.
Look at Putin in 2016. Sticks his finger in Hillary’s eye for meddling herself in Russian elections by hacking a few emails, most Democrats subsequently treat Trump as illegitimate and tainted and now Republicans think turnaround is fair play and are openly throwing doubt on Biden’s win. With a very small act the entire American political system is starting to wobble… this is the sort of thing Washington has wanted for 20 years in Russia, and Putin entirely turned the tables. By hacking emails.

I need to find the quote from Fiona Hill ultimately down playing any Russian role in the election of Trump — he captured a zeitgiest and everone has to grapple with his four year’s legitimacy.

some more

I’m just so sick of all of them. Every politician in every party. “Humble servants of the American people” MY ASS. I’ve barely made it through the pandemic without landing in inpatient psych (just wait two more weeks!!!!!) and I don’t want to raise my kid in any more chaos than he’s already experienced, but at this point, the whole stupid “grand experiment in democracy” just needs to burn to the ground. We suck. America sucks. And the people who run America, they especially suck. If I was allowed into the Schengen Zone I think I’d just pack our bags and move us into some abandoned stone cottage in the middle of nowhere Central Europe and stay off the grid forever, but I’m barely allowed outside my own front door at this point, so….screw them all.. All righty then.

It’s likely simpler than all this. He sees that there is a sizeable number of Americans who want someone to get in and fight. They’re tired of Republicans who charge forth with white flags waving. They also have little patience for those who live rather high on the hog saying ‘We have to accept that our best days are behind us and things will be dim in the future … excuse me, but I have to catch my next flight to the next exotic location or party with the upper crust.’
They want someone who will stand up, even if it’s a lost cause like this. I have no doubt that the election was not stolen or rigged. Gamed? Yes. But stolen in the sense of ‘truck load of ballots taken from voting booths’? No. Nonetheless, the recent conservative leadership strategy or rolling over and playing … Media biases justify any counter-move at all?

Trump is constitutionally incapable of accepting responsibility for losing the election. The media did not make him boorishly call Stormy Daniels “horse face” on Twitter and say countless other eyebrow raising and cringeworthy things until the people just got exhausted with him. The American people want a president who acts like one. He was elected on contingency, given a chance with hopes that he would grow into the position. He blew it, and has done plenty since November to confirm the soundness of his collective rejection.. Odd to select that one somewhat forgettable Stormy Daniels offense, but the case works despite itself.

Yeah, in many ways it’s the logical endpoint of the years of prattling on Fox News and elsewhere about “Real Americans”, and the clear obverse to that concept… that Democrats or liberals or ” coastal elies” or

Heh. Maybe. But it’s also the case that the Democratic Party operates on the principle that only its constituents are true members of the polity. You really think the bluebloods in Seattle have any interest in sharing power with the wheat farmers of the Palouse? Pfft.

There is no actual ‘authoritarianism’ coming from anywhere on the right except Trump’s tweets which are a clown show to rile up the base and make them feel like they’re owning the libs for real this time. His actual governance was less authoritarian than Obama’s, a point made clearly by notorious alt-right hater Glenn Greenwald. Liberals firmly control every institution in this country except elected offices which are a more evenly mixed bag. These institutions as a whole are far more influential than the government (even if it was competent and not eternally gridlocked) in terms of changing American society and culture. The more salient delusion here is liberals who don’t see how thoroughly they’ve won and use Trump as an eternally-looming Leon Trotsky figure to justify the next step in the Great Purge.
Return to normalcy the lesser of two weevils.

The once exciting “race to the bottom” nfc east race ceased to be all that interesting. The Giants beat the Seahawks and the “Football Team” beat the Steelers, meaning the division was coming up with victories over good teams. The promise of the “nfc east as a joke” race was in shaving as close to them beating only themselves and the Bengals as could be, and in having multiple division last place teams besting them all.

As it were, the division is about to finish with a record of 23 – 40 – 1. Not really any drop-off from last season’s 24 – 40. Both are better than the NFC West of 2008, of a 22 – 42 record (if an unlikely superbowl appearance). And the 2014 NFC South — another one of the losing record division winners — comes in at 22 – 41 – 1. The 2008 afc west gets to 23 – 41. On that score, they are not the worst division ever, and so no longer interesting.

I suppose the only real way we can break new ground is with the strange possibility of the Giants getting in at 6 – 10 — that will happen if they beat the Cowboys and the Eagles beat the Football Team. I guess not likely, given the Eagles have declared they are benching players galore — though then again the Football Team has qb questions. The most likel outcome does get us that curiosity of a now successful team to cheer on in the playoffs… With a… Minimalist name, very avante garde.

I suppose one can always find antecedents, if not equivalencies or degrees, toward actions made by the President.  Or at least many of them.  At the moment we see Trump “tearing apart the Republican Party” (as the reporting analysis goes) in tweet-storms about his Republican leaders not backing him up, for not moving along with the overturning of Biden’s election.

The new territory is the move of the Overton Window — we now have a stop block of a Democratic House if all pressure points slide apart, but where does this take us in a hypothetical split election (1996, 2012… 1988…)?

But the more pendantic issue of a President moving against those in his party he feels did not go to the mat for him or back him… Well, see thle Clintons’ primary campaigning in (post 2010 census) 2012 based on who pledged their support in the 2008 primary against Obama. I suppose the stakes of what loyalty demands gets more extreme, but it is still just an id factor.

Go over to the website for Alex Jones’s media — where they war against information as apparently they are leaving prisonplanet to rot — and here is the poll they throw at you.

What Message Will You Bring Home To Family This Christmas?
Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself.
Joe Biden is a Chicom puppet and China is taking control of America.
Trump won the election – BIG TIME!
Covid is a pretext to lock us down permanently and steal our civil liberties.

I suppose it may be connected to their linking of a bbc article on “how to talk to your conspiracy theorist relative” — ends with a rye link to a bbc article regarding Epstein which supposes their line on Pedophiles controlling pizza jointsand Trump is exposing it any day now –no explanation how.

Nowhere linked is the story that we do have this handful of voter frauds, single digit accounts and Trump votes. To be fair (more fair than deserved), it wouldn’t negate the widespread deep state and RINO coordinated claim, though it does go to something I note in twitterland and bottom half of the Internet line when commenters state “I am sure there are, in this vast country and large vote load, cases of vote fraud” to a Trumpist belief that “goalpost is being moved”. Scratch your head at this willful skewering …

but then again..

How does this argue against the need for masks? Disgusting! Woman Uses Face Mask to Pick Up Dog Poop — Before Putting It Back on Face. I suppose everyone ought agree you ought not do that, but the behaviorial problem comes in the dual use, and return to first use after that second usage.

And a Bush era Jones woulda been right there with just who Trump has pardoned. Today I guess you should go to Kurt Nimmo.

Sarah Palin is in Georgia, repeating Donald Trump on the campaign trail, for the two Republican senators. The pedigree for the two politicos is interesting enough: Palin, I see, appeared in one of the big (pre Covid) Reality tv show moments of the year: revealed as a singer on the masked celebrity singing show — and, I guess, rapping at that.

Trump has probably proven to be too culturally toxic and divisive to slide into such a post political career, though that may just be due to him having been four years in power.

On the Senate races in Georgia, it is worth pointing out that were the Democrats to win — the total results of the election now align in total, up and down the ballot to… Very narrow Biden win, House seats not falling beyond a few points of the presidential contest, and Senate races only doing so in Maine and Montana, and Maine being the only US Senate race result that differed from the top line. The calling out from Trump dead enders about a supposed split not adding up fails on the quickest of looksees.

I suppose the next story comes in seeing where the two partoes campaign — the Republicans everywhere but Atlanta”; the Democrats — probably still weighing how close they need to dip to the Alabama border with dog saturated ads. Then again, the tale of Lyndon Johnson’s campaign on behalf of John Kennedy had the Johnsons “daring to go to the real South of Savvanah” … not just urban Atlanta

I guess the word “one-in-a-quadrillion” was trending last week. More accurately, you have to add “to the fourth power” — the supposed chances of votes coming in to Biden before some Biden counties were counted but after Trump counties were counted. It is a curious figure to be sure, more in keeping for an “Intelligent Design” argument or maybe just a theist on the chances ererything could come together to create Intelligent life. Very arbitrary, you may as well say a kazillion — but then to put a stanp of emphasis… Kazillion… To the Fourth Power.
Why fourth power and not, say, tenth? I guess the numbers just don’t add up.

Trump: The greatest pollsters, the real pollsters, not the ones that had us down 17 points in Wisconsin when we actually won, or the ones that had us down four or five points in Florida, and we won by many points, or had us even, and down in Texas, and we won by a lot, not those pollsters, but real pollsters. Pollsters that are fair, and honest said, “We can’t understand a thing like this. It’s never happened before. You led the country to victory, and you were the only one that was lost. It’s not possible.”
There was one outlier of a poll in Wisconsin no one took seriously, but apparently off by 16 and a half points, as opposed to what Trump imagines — just enough voters against him to do some good attack dogging? Trump had his own pollsters. I assume so did Biden — pollsters always ready to pour cold water on any 17 point lead in Wisconsin.

Now we sit with the bizarre spectacle of a religious uprising under the banner of Trump sponsored by my pillow dot com, featuring … Noted religious authority Alex Jones, Brick Man — so named because he wears a suit of brick pattern, and—

A black Protestant clergyman holding a shofar at a rally to support Donald Trump. That was NOT on my 2020 scorecard. He screamed about fighting witches and Marxism. “The Jericho walls must come down!” he repeated. Then he blew a shofar as a MyPillow ad aired on the right half of the screen.

Tell me that would happen, and I would not be surprised. Tell me it would be publicized and well nigh endorsed with a quick wave by the President — now that is something new.

Now we await the “alternate electors”, who all come in and overthrow the Supreme Court, that has Trump tweeting ” We have only began to fight”. And Biden having to rush in for a quintillionth press speech after another formality in the process brings him a win — with murmurs on how Pence’s sign off in Congress effects his political future against the Trump Jericho hordes.

169,989 of 170,228 precincts – 99 percent

1. x-Joe Biden, Dem 81,282,903 – 51 percent
2. Donald Trump, GOP 74,223,030 – 47 percent
3. Jo Jorgensen, Lib 1,865,858 – 1 percent
4. Howie Hawkins, Grn 399,112 – 0 percent
5. Roque De La Fuente, ALP 88,170 – 0 percent
6. Gloria La Riva, PSL 84,078 – 0 percent
7. Kanye West, Ind 66,364 – 0 percent
8. Don Blankenship, CST 59,924 – 0 percent
9. Brock Pierce, PEC 49,552 – 0 percent
10. Brian Carroll, ASP 23,669 – 0 percent
11. None of these candidates, NPD 14,079 – 0 percent
12. Alyson Kennedy, SWP 6,791 – 0 percent
13. Bill Hammons, Uty 6,647 – 0 percent
14. Jerome Segal, BdR 5,949 – 0 percent
15. Dario Hunter, Prg 5,367 – 0 percent
16. Jade Simmons, Oth 5,280 – 0 percent
17. Phil Collins, Ind 4,834 – 0 percent
18. Joe McHugh, Una 2,843 – 0 percent
19. Jesse Ventura, Grn 2,673 – 0 percent
20. Mark Charles, Una 2,011 – 0 percent
21. Sheila Tittle, CST 1,806 – 0 percent
22. C.L. Gammon, Ind 1,475 – 0 percent
23. J.R. Myers, Oth 1,372 – 0 percent
24. H. Brooke Paige, Ind 1,175 – 0 percent
25. President Boddie, Oth 1,125 – 0 percent
26. Christopher LaFontaine, Ind 856 – 0 percent
26. Kyle Kopitke, IAP 815 – 0 percent
27. Tom Hoefling, Oth 668 – 0 percent
28. Ricki King, Oth 546 – 0 percent
29. Princess Jacob-Fambro, Una 495 – 0 percent
30. Blake Huber, AVP 409 – 0 percent
31. Richard Duncan, Ind 213 – 0 percent
32. Joseph Kishore, SEP 196 – 0 percent
33. Jordan Scott, Una 175 – 0 percent
34. Gary Swing, Oth 141 – 0 percent
35. Keith McCormic, Oth 126 – 0 percent
36. Zachary Scalf, Ind 29 – 0 percent

The Legend of Taysom Hill met the Legend of Kendall Hilton to produce, apparently, the worst professional football game since the 1920s.

And Hilton goes down into lore — that time during the once in a century pandemic the league forced the benching of all four qbs on the Denver Broncos’ roster forcing the team to pluck out … Whoever on the team has played any quarterbacking since high school.

If the league had a sense of humor they would have forced the Broncos to a sign up of Colin Kaepernick. (Apparently not allowed, the league was punishing the Broncos… Though, that would be why they would force them to sign him.

Results:
November 28, 2020, all four Broncos quarterbacks were ruled ineligible to play against the New Orleans Saints the following day due to COVID-19 pandemic protocols, so Hinton was elevated to the active roster as an emergency quarterback option for the team. Hinton subsequently completed one pass out of nine attempts for 13 yards, two interceptions, and a 0.0 passer rating as the Broncos lost 31–3.

Or: maybe:
It sounded like it would be fun, like when the Colts famously had to plug in running back Tom Matte at QB in the 1960s. But I worried it would be a slog and an embarrassment, and that is what that game was. It was one of the NFL’s worst moments. They’ll be writing about this decision forever

Well, he does to take a spot in one of these lists, though probably will get referenced more along the lines of Edie Gaedel.