ProgressVirginia reported Tuesday afternoon that the Virginia Senate’s Privileges and Elections Committee killed Sen. Charles “Bill” Carrico Sr.’s electoral college-rigging bill, despite an offer by Carrico to amend the bill to award electors in proportion to the state’s popular vote. The vote was 11-4 against the bill, although it will not be official until the close of the committee meeting.
MAGA world is up in arms right now, accusing Mitch McConnell of engineering a "coup" because he is calling an election for Republican Senate leadership next week - with the expected goal of putting in a more moderate Republican as leader - versus a Trump loyalist.
Right now the top 3 names being circulated are John Cornyn, John Thune and Rick Scott. Rick Scott is absolutely the more MAGA aligned, far right, Trump loyalist candidate.. Thune and Cornyn are more "normal" Republicans. And that is why Carlson and MAGA-world are super angry.
The election is reportedly going to be held on Wednesday by secret ballot.
Here is Tucker's angry tweet:
What the hell is going on in the US Senate? Hours after Donald Trump wins the most conclusive mandate in 40 years, Mitch McConnell engineers a coup against his agenda by calling early leadership elections in the senate. Two of the three candidates hate Trump and what he ran on.…
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) November 9, 2024
Right wing conspiracy theorist and complete loon, Laura Loomer, chimed in:
It doesn't get much more pathetic and brazen than this, Rudy Giuliani whining on X and begging for more cash. Tomorrow, Giuliani will be back in court and most likely be held in contempt after not turning over his assets to Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss.
Source: New York Post
Rudy Giuliani made a bold accusation Saturday that the federal government is trying to starve him to pay out the Georgia election workers he defamed.
The disgraced ex-New York City mayor pleaded for pennies from the public by reigniting a months-old Give Send Go fundraiser to support his fight to reverse orders to hand over $148 million worth of assets.
“Wilkie Farr Law firm and Judge Liman are trying to inhibit me from making a living. They seized my measly checking account so I can’t buy food. Help me fight,” Giuliani whined on X.
The fundraiser — created on the Christian website over the summer by former Oklahoma Senate candidate Jackson Lahmeyer — has raised more than $96,100 of its $100,00 goal, and has racked up 250 “prayers.”
The cast members of Saturday Night Live with their first reaction to the presidential election... pretending to get on Trump's good side.
The cold open got underway with castmembers Bowen Yang, Heidi Gardner, Marcello Hernández, Ego Nwodim, Sarah Sherman, Kenan Thompson and Colin Jost speaking directly to the camera in a serious manner.
“On Tuesday, Americans went to the polls and elected Donald Trump to be the next president of the United States,” Yang says as Nwodim continues, “To many people, including many people watching this show right now, the results were shocking and even horrifying.”
“Donald Trump, who tried to forcibly overturn the results of the last election, was returned to office by an overwhelming majority,” Gardner says as Thompson adds, “This is the same Donald Trump who openly called for vengeance against his political enemies.”
Yang and Nwodim continue, “Now thanks to the Supreme Court, there are no guard rails, nothing to protect the people who are brave enough to speak out against him.”
The cast then had a sarcastic message directly for the former president. “And that is why we at SNL would like to say to Donald Trump: we’ve been with you all along,” Thompson says before Yang adds, “We have never wavered in our support of you, even when others doubted you.”
When The Felon returns to the White House, it looks like one member of the family will go missing: Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancée, Kimberly Guilfoyle.
The Daily Beast gave us the sad news. At the Trump Election Night celebration, Donald Trump Jr. seemed to be repeatedly trying to detach himself from her. “In a video of the moment, he can be seen switching his location onstage several times away from Guilfoyle before finally settling on turning his back to her.”
Actually, Don Jr. acting like he’s done with Guilfoyle was less of a surprise than the fact that Guilfoyle was there at all. We’ve known for a while that The Felon's son seemed quite involved with another woman. In September, The Daily Mail reported that Trump Jr.’s romance with “glamorous 'it girl' Bettina Anderson” is “the talk of Palm Beach.”
Trump's people already telling the Ukrainians they'll have to give up territory permanently, and probably also abandon any plans to join the European Union or NATO, all for some illusory "peace" that will have Russia try to take 100% of Ukraine in the not-so-distant future. And they're doing so in the most condescending manner possible, with this one, saying President Zelensky is the unserious one.
Source:BBC
A former adviser to President-elect Donald Trump says the incoming administration will focus on achieving peace in Ukraine rather than enabling the country to gain back territory occupied by Russia.
Bryan Lanza, who worked on Trump's 2024 presidential campaign, told the BBC the incoming administration would ask Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for his version of a "realistic vision for peace".
"And if President Zelensky comes to the table and says, well we can only have peace if we have Crimea, he shows to us that he's not serious," he said. "Crimea is gone."
A spokesperson for Trump distanced the incoming president from the remarks, saying Mr Lanza "does not speak for him".
Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula in 2014. Eight years later, it launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine and has occupied territory in the country's east.
The president-elect has consistently said his priority is to end the war and stem what he characterises as a drain on US resources, in the form of military aid to Ukraine.
Olivia Troye, a former aide to Mike Pence, revealed that Donald Trump's team aims to replace policy experts with "carnies at the Iowa State Fair."
During a Sunday panel discussion on MSNBC, Troye explained how the incoming Trump administration would use a policy known as Schedule F to replace policy experts serving in government positions.
"Yeah, it means anyone that's in a policy-related role that is working for the greater good of the country is going to be replaced by the people that they're recruiting," Troye said. "I mean, I would say the carnies that they've been recruiting at the Iowa State Fair because that's actually what they were doing, by the way."
"And that's not a lie," she continued. "I was born in Iowa. They were recruiting. But they were recruiting people and taking resumes at this thing."
Troye noted that the future Trump administration would put MAGA followers "in positions of power and replacing people who actually were there saying, hey, that's actually unlawful."
Team Trump has not submitted a legally required ethics plan, stating he will avoid conflicts of interest -- so the transition process hasn't moved forward.
Why anyone believes he'll follow it if he did is beyond me.
Mr. Trump’s transition team was required to submit the ethics plan by Oct. 1, according to the Presidential Transition Act.
While the transition team’s leadership has privately drafted an ethics code and a conflict-of-interest statement governing its staff, those documents do not include language, required under the law, that explains how Mr. Trump himself will address conflicts of interest during his presidency.
Since Mr. Trump created his transition team in August, it has refused to participate in the normal handoff process, which typically begins months before the election.
It has missed multiple deadlines for signing required agreements governing the process. That has prevented Mr. Trump’s transition team from participating in national security briefings or gaining access to federal agencies to begin the complicated work of preparing to take control of the government on Jan. 20, 2025.
Today I bring you "You Must Be out of Your Mind" by Magnetic Fields, which I find strangely comforting.
John Pavlovitz: What The Hell Just Happened, America?
alicublog: Friday ‘Round-the-Horn: People Just Get Uglier and I Have No Sense of Time Edition.
Crazy Eddie's Motie News: Company Man asks 'The Decline of TGI Fridays...What Happened?' A tale of the Retail Apocalypse.
Attention dinosaur nerds! "Bulletproof Beast": This Dinosaur's Armor Could Withstand a High-Speed Car Crash.
Round Up by driftglass of the Professional Left Podcast and Science Fiction University
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In the NBC video report above, titled, “Who is Susie Wiles, Trump’s White House Chief of Staff pick?” the “liberal media” outlet painted a glowing portrait of Wiles as, among other things, a “good listener.” She has definitely already proved herself that, though not in the way the NBC report meant.
C&L has already reported on Wiles’ conflict of interest as a tobacco lobbyist while running Trump’s 2024 campaign. Funny how that didn’t make it into NBC’s reporting.
But Wiles proved herself a “good listener” extraordinaire when she played an important role in Trump’s stolen classified documents indictment. Remember this? It’s from Page 3 of Smith’s classified documents indictment:
b. In August or September 2021, at The Bedminster Club, Trump showed a representative of his political action committee who did not possess a security clearance a classified map related to a military operation and told the representative that he should not be showing it to the representative and that the representative should not get too close.
That PAC representative was later identified by ABC News as Susie Wiles.
Welcome to Gilead. All the postmortems are really missing the point. The evangelicals did this.
This is your open thread for Sunday morning. Feel free to rant, scream or if you have positive things to say, go for it.
- Karoli
Peter Gabriel's voice has always had a unique and penetrating quality that seems to tap into the human condition. His 1986 record "So," is one of my top twenty records of all time. With the help of Kate Bush's voice, "Don't Give Up," is a song that reaches out to the hardships we face and has inspired me and helped me for many years.
There are several stories about how Gabriel was inspired to write “Don’t Give Up.” His wife at the time claimed to have shown him a newspaper story about a young mother’s suicide, and that was the main impetus for the song. Gabriel also mentioned Depression-era photographs as inspiring the notion of overcoming adversity. Some also claim Gabriel was undergoing his own dark period when he wrote the song.
I think it's apropos for us now.
In this proud land we grew up strong
We were wanted all along
I was taught to fight, taught to win
I never thought I could fail
No fight left or so it seems
I am a man whose dreams have all deserted
I've changed my face, I've changed my name
But no-one wants you when you lose
This week was rough. Donald Trump somehow convinced more than half the country that he was the better choice than the most qualified woman to ever run for the Presidency. Alas, they are about to find out how wrong they were.
After moving through the 5 stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) I have ended up in a 6th stage: Looking forward to schadenfreude. In English: I am ready to see his supporters realize how incredibly f*cked they are.
To help me laugh as these things unfold on a micro and macro scale, I have bookmarked a reddit page: https://www.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace
The page describes itself this way:
I never thought leopards would eat MY face
'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party. Revel in the schadenfreude anytime someone has a sad because they're suffering consequences from something they voted for or supported or wanted to impose on other people.
In the 5 days since the election there has been an avalanche of people ALREADY realizing how badly they f*cked up.
From tariffs, to parents realizing that their kids will lose their IEP's, to elderly people realizing they may lose their only source of money, Social Security. It has been crazy. And Trump isn't even in office for over 2 months!
It's stunning that in our gun-saturated country, firearms like AR-15s and AK-47s are covered under the 2nd Amendment, firearms that are mass shooters' favorite weapons. But what can we do? Protests don't seem to work. The March For Our Lives demonstration in Washington, DC, was massive. I was part of between 1.2 and 2 million people, making it one of the largest protests in American history.
Not much has happened since then, except for the Illinois assault weapons ban, but a Trump-appointed judge overturned that on Friday. Sigh.
HuffPost reports:
A federal judge overturned an Illinois assault weapons ban Friday, contending that the law enacted in response to the 2022 mass shooting at a Highland Park parade violated the Second Amendment in its entirety.
The 168-page ruling, by Donald Trump-appointee Stephen McGlynn, deals a sharp blow to reformers and marks the latest major court ruling to expand gun rights in the wake of the conservative-dominated U.S. Supreme Court's sweeping reinterpretation of the Second Amendment two years ago.
The decision boosts the likelihood that the Supreme Court will eventually weigh in on whether states can restrict the sale of semiautomatic rifles, such as AR-15s and AK-47s, without running afoul of the Constitution.
Indiana GOP Senator-Elect Jim Banks is all-in with Trump's plans for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, economic consequences be damned. Banks made an appearance this Friday on CNN's Inside Politics, and was asked by host Dana Bash how Trump's policy would actually be executed, and whether he believes all undocumented immigrants should be "kicked out of the country."
"It's my hope that we deport every single one of them that we can," Banks replied. "And it starts with deporting violent criminals who are in the United States, who came here illegally, who have committed violent crimes."
Banks also insisted that Republicans were going to "increase the penalties on businesses who hire illegals," and that many undocumented migrants would then "leave on their own."
Republicans have never gone after the businesses that rely on this labor, just the workers, so I'll believe that when I see it. After Banks told Bash they would have the votes to fund Trump's deportation plans, Bash asked him about how their plans would affect those with no criminal record, or children and those in mixed status families.
Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky—who infamously stole two Supreme Court seats and refused to convict Donald Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection—isn't leaving Congress.
But McConnell won't be Senate majority leader when the new GOP majority is sworn in in January, announcing in February that he was stepping down from the role when the new Congress is sworn in.
Republicans are now jockeying to replace him, with Sens. John Thune of South Dakota, John Cornyn of Texas, and Rick Scott of Florida all running for the role.
And the race is already getting ugly, with Scott working hardest to cozy up to Trump and his vile allies—including racist 9/11 truther Laura Loomer—in an effort to try to come out on top.
It’s an all-hands-on-deck situation for those of us not willing to turn our country over to J.D. Vance and Elon Musk Donald Trump.
Fortunately, at least three Democratic governors have concrete plans to keep out as much darkness as they are able. I previously wrote about Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker taking proactive steps to shore up abortion rights and other laws to protect his constituents. Plus, he has publicly warned Trump, “You come for my people, you come through me.”
Now NBC News has reported on five other governors also taking proactive measures and/or vowing to protect rights and freedoms. California Gavin Newsom and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul discussed their plans with NBC. Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy have vowed to take stands against Project 2025 Trump. I guarantee you there are or will be more to come.
The plans “offer both a repeat of how leaders of liberal states pushed back against Trump during his first term, as well as a snapshot of what the resistance to him from the left will look like this time around,” NBC reported.
Art Jipson, University of Dayton
A growing movement believes President-elect Donald Trump is fighting a spiritual war against demonic forces within the United States. Trump himself stated in his acceptance speech on Nov. 6, 2024, that the reason that “God spared my life” was to “restore America to greatness.”
I have studied various religious movements that seek to shape and control American society. One of these is the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, whose followers believe that they are waging a spiritual battle for control of the United States. NAR is an offshoot of Protestant Christian evangelicalism.
Given the sheer volume of racism, lies and misogyny that regularly comes out of Jesse Watters' pie hole, this latest comment should be a surprise to no one.
Watters weighed in on Trump's plans for mass deportations, consequences be damned, on this Friday's The Five, and apparently Watters believes the visuals of these people being hauled off and families being ripped apart is just going to be hysterical.
Watters also sounded a lot like Tucker Carlson with the ridiculous "daddy" remark about Trump.
WATTERS: And then deportation. They're going to lose the states on this because that is a federal issue, and there will be massive clashes because you're going to have cameras out there making sure that they capture the images of ICE coming along and taking these people away.
And they deserve to be taken away. Sometimes you have to do tough stuff.
But AOC is going to be there tying herself to migrants. It's going to be hysterical.
But sometimes dad has to do the tough thing. Doesn't make it always look great, but it's the right thing to do. And that's what we expect.
Ok folks. Time to get up and dust ourselves off. The election is over, but the fight is just beginning. We cannot watch this orange cretin wreck the country we love and endanger people we love.
Watch Eric Swalwell's message to Trump as he alpha liberal's Trump's orange A$$, ripping him to shreds. Reminding us who Trump is and putting our plight in perspective. Now is no time to let the flatulent fascist accrue power, but a time to take him on, every way we can.
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