November 20, 2020

Last Gasps of a Dying Campaign

November 20, 2020 at 7:53 am EST By Taegan Goddard

“President Trump and his allies are taking increasingly frantic steps to subvert the results of the 2020 election, including summoning state legislators to the White House as part of a longshot bid to overturn Joe Biden’s victory,” the AP reports.

“Among other last-ditch tactics: personally calling local election officials who are trying to rescind their certification votes in Michigan, suggesting in a legal challenge that Pennsylvania set aside the popular vote there and pressuring county officials in Arizona to delay certifying vote tallies.”

“Election law experts see it as the last, dying gasps of the Trump campaign and say Biden is certain to walk into the Oval Office come January. But there is great concern that Trump’s effort is doing real damage to public faith in the integrity of U.S. elections.”

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https://politicalwire.com/2020/11/20/last-gasps-of-a-dying-campaign/

November 19, 2020

EXCLUSIVE: New Delays In Final Stage Of Census Could Foil Trump's Plan To Rig It

By Tierney Sneed|November 19, 2020 12:09 p.m.

The Census Bureau has identified issues in the data from the 2020 decennial census that will take an additional 20 days or so for it to fix, and thus delay the release of survey’s apportionment data until after President Trump leaves office, TPM has learned.


According to a person inside the Census Bureau, the additional time it will take to reprocess the data in question has pushed back the target date for release of the state population counts until Jan. 26 – Feb. 6.

That would mean President-elect Joe Biden will be in the White House when the Census Bureau delivers to him the numbers for him to transmit to Congress for the purposes of determining how many House seats each state will get for the next decade.

President Trump had been seeking to exclude undocumented immigrants from that count, with a policy that several lower courts have deemed illegal in rulings Trump is hoping the Supreme Court will overturn. Excluding undocumented immigrants from that count would decrease the House seats given to immigrant-rich states like California, and increase the representation for whiter, more Republican parts of the country.

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https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trump-delay-census-apportionment

November 19, 2020

CDC recommends against Thanksgiving travel amid surge of coronavirus cases

Source: Washington Post


By Brittany Shammas
November 19, 2020 at 2:00 p.m. EST

PLEASE NOTE

The Washington Post is providing this important information about the coronavirus for free. For more free coverage of the coronavirus pandemic, sign up for our Coronavirus Updates newsletter where all stories are free to read.

With Thanksgiving a week away and coronavirus cases exploding across the country, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday recommended against traveling or gathering for the holiday, urging Americans to consider celebrating in their own households instead.

In the agency’s first news briefing in months, officials said they were alarmed to see 1 million new cases reported across the United States within the past week. As the nation’s death toll since the start of the pandemic reached 250,000, officials spoke of the risks in stark terms, warning that as friends and relatives get together over the holidays, they could inadvertently bring the deadly disease with them. Tragedy could follow, they said.

“At the individual household level, what’s at stake is basically the increased chance of one of your loved ones becoming sick and then being hospitalized and dying,” said Henry Walke, the CDC’s covid-19 incident manager.

Beyond that, he said, holiday-related infections could spread through communities, reaching other vulnerable individuals and accelerating the already dire outbreak

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/11/19/cdc-thanksgiving-travel-covid/

November 19, 2020

Pat Robertson prays for Satan to stop making people believe Joe Biden won the election

"In the name of Jesus, I bind the spirit of delusion that has come across our land... I still think Trump’s gonna ultimately win.”

By Alex Bollinger Thursday, November 19, 2020

Televangelist Pat Robertson is praying that the U.S. prayed for God to end “the spirit of delusion” that is making people think that Joe Biden won the election.

“In the name of Jesus, I bind the spirit of delusion that has come across our land,” he said on The 700 Club. “We will not surrender our nation. We will not give up this great country.”

“And Satan, you cannot have it, in the name of Jesus,” he continued, implying that Biden is being made president by the devil. “I believe God has heard” his prayers, he said. “And I’m asking everybody in this audience to pray.”

“It isn’t over yet. And I do not think, again, He wants to turn this nation over to socialism and Bernie Sanders and oh- AOC and those people are pure socialist and they want to take over control of everything.”

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https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2020/11/pat-robertson-prays-satan-stop-making-people-believe-joe-biden-won-election/

November 19, 2020

Trump Reached Out To GOP Canvassers Before They Flip-Flopped On Wayne County Ballots

By Cristina Cabrera|November 19, 2020 8:51 a.m.

President Donald Trump contacted the Republican officials on Michigan’s Wayne County Board of Canvassers before they backpedaled yet again on certifying the county’s election results, which includes votes from the majority Black city of Detroit, according to the Associated Press.


On Wednesday night, GOP canvassers Monica Palmer and William Hartmann filed affidavits seeking to “rescind” their votes certifying the election from the day before.

“I rescind my prior vote to certify Wayne County elections. I fully believe the Wayne County vote should not be certified,” Monica Palmer, one of the two GOP members of the four-person board, wrote in her affidavit.

Palmer and Hartmann asserted that they had expected Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to honor the board’s resolution that she audit the votes in exchange for the two Republicans agreeing to certify the election.

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https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/mi-gop-county-officials-now-seeking-to-rescind-their-votes-to-certify-election

November 19, 2020

GOP Sen After Trump Fires DHS Official: 'I Don't Even Know What's Normal Anymore'

By Cristina Cabrera|November 18, 2020 2:36 p.m.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) — who’s dutifully condoned President Donald Trump’s corrupt antics like the rest of the GOP for the past four years — is baffled by the chaos that’s emerged for some inexplicable reason in recent weeks.


After President Donald Trump fired Chris Krebs, the top cybersecurity official at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the GOP senator gently rebuked Trump on Wednesday, then puzzled over the tumultuous state of affairs.

“It’s the President’s prerogative, but I think it just adds to the confusion and chaos,” Cornyn told reporters, per Politico. “And I’m sure I’m not the only one that would like some return to a little bit more of a…I don’t even know what’s normal anymore.”

“We’ll call it the next normal,” he added. “It’s not the new normal, it’s the next normal.”

Like his GOP colleagues, Cornyn has allowed Trump to get away with virtually everything his entire presidency, including the Ukraine scandal that led to the President’s impeachment and his disastrous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/gop-senator-cornyn-trump-fires-dhs-official-dont-know-whats-normal-anymore

November 19, 2020

Sex, Lies, And Regret: Giancarlo Granda Reels From Eight Years With The Falwells

The onetime Miami pool attendant who says he had an affair with Becki Falwell as her husband Jerry watched gives his most detailed account yet of eight years with the evangelical couple.

By Josh Kovensky | November 17, 2020 12:20 p.m.

Giancarlo Granda first noticed that something was off about Becki Falwell while in bed with her.

It was around three or four in the morning, Granda recalls, when he woke up and noticed Becki staring at him without blinking.

It’s what he’d later come to call “the look” — something that, eight years later, still creeps him out.

But Granda is neither squeamish nor skittish. And nor was he, as a 21 year old, primed to let something a little odd like Becki’s “dark, black eyes” fixating on him in the night give him pause.

After all, he was waking up at Cheeca Lodge, an exclusive resort on the Florida Keys’s Islamorada, just weeks after having first met Becki poolside at Miami’s glitzy Fontainebleau hotel.

more
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/feature/sex-lies-and-regret-giancarlo-granda-reels-from-eight-years-with-the-falwells

November 19, 2020

Rudy Giuliani is a mess - By Robin Givhan

By Robin Givhan
Senior critic-at-large
November 18, 2020 at 7:20 p.m. EST

To be clear, Rudy Giuliani was never America’s mayor. That nickname was a bit of media gloss that was spread so thickly and indiscriminately that Giuliani had no trouble dining out on it for years. Many Americans lapped it up, too.

President Trump has been like a steady stream of acid on that veneer. And now Giuliani is a raw, smoldering mess.

His return to federal court as a practicing attorney, for the first time in nearly three decades, would not be the worst of Giuliani’s water-carrying for Trump, but it was, perhaps, the saddest. It was so small and petty. He was in Pennsylvania court Tuesday not to tell a convoluted tale of international intrigue about shadowy figures and powerful people skulking around in Ukraine. His story of malfeasance was closer to home and it was simply mean. Giuliani argued that a vast swathe of perfectly reasonable, good-hearted Americans masterminded a huge scheme that cheated Trump out of reelection. Giuliani couldn’t offer any evidence that this awful plot existed, but nevertheless he was sure it did and it just so happened to be centered in places like Philadelphia, Milwaukee and Detroit, which have substantial populations of Black and brown people.

As a culture, we like to believe that with age comes wisdom. The truth of it may be that age only makes people more obviously what they’ve always been. Freed of the urgent need to prove and define themselves for a future that’s yet to unfold, people can simply be. Giuliani, at 76, has revealed himself to be a man who believes that he can summon truth from falsehoods, bend the law to his will and conjure whatever reality suits him simply by speaking his hopes and dreams aloud.

-snip-

Robin Givhan
Robin Givhan is senior critic-at-large writing about politics, race and the arts. A 2006 Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism, Givhan has also worked at Newsweek/Daily Beast, Vogue magazine and the Detroit Free Press

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/11/18/rudy-giuliani-is-mess/

November 19, 2020

White House chief of staff 'can't guarantee' U.S. government will avert December shutdown

Congress, White House have until Dec. 11 to reach spending deal in middle of coronavirus pandemic

By Jeff Stein
November 18, 2020 at 2:20 p.m. EST

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said Wednesday that he “can’t guarantee” lawmakers will be able to reach a deal to avert a mid-December shutdown of the federal government.

Congress and the White House have until Dec. 11 to approve new spending legislation to prevent the federal government from shutting down in the middle of a pandemic and amid a surge in coronavirus cases. Meadows said he was hopeful an agreement would be reached but did not rule out that an impasse. There has already been two government shutdowns during President Trump’s four years in office, one lasting more than a month.

Lawmakers this week began negotiations on spending legislation that would fund the government and avert the shutdown, but key sticking points remain over international aid policy, public health spending and tribal health care, among other policy disagreements, according to Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), vice chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

If appropriators cannot reach agreement on legislation to fund federal agencies, Congress could approve a “continuing resolution” that would lock in existing spending levels with no change to existing policy. White House officials say they want to fund the government, but Trump’s erratic policy demands and negotiating style have for years upended negotiations with Congress, culminating in the longest-ever government shutdown in 2018 over his demands for a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2020/11/18/white-house-congress-shutdown-december/

November 19, 2020

The coronavirus pandemic is driving U.S. greenhouse gas emissions lowest level in three decades

The coronavirus pandemic is driving U.S. greenhouse gas emissions to their lowest level in three decades

The 9 percent fall has been partially offset by extreme forest fires

By Steven Mufson
November 19, 2020 at 7:32 a.m. EST

Greenhouse gases generated by the U.S. economy will slide 9.2 percent this year, tumbling to the lowest level in at least three decades, a new BloombergNEF study says.

Battered by the coronavirus pandemic, the stalled economy is projected to have generated 5.9 billion metric tons of emissions, about the same level as 1983, according to the private research organization.

As a result, the United States has been inadvertently pushed back on track to meet the commitments the Obama administration made at the Paris climate agreement in December 2015, despite the fact the Trump administration pulled the country out of the pact. Before 2020, the United States had fallen badly behind its targets under the accord.

Still, net emissions are expected to be 6.4 percent lower after taking into account the unusually extreme forest fires that swept the West Coast and Rocky Mountains earlier this year, pumping carbon dioxide and other pollution into the air and offsetting much of the drop in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/11/19/us-emissions-climate-bloombergnef/