Daizy cn haz laptap?
Worrywarts, no worries. Handwringers, unwring your hands. Naysayers, say us no Nays. Uncle Mokurai is here to talk you off the cliff. Yes, the ganefs are going to try to steal the election. But we are on it, for an astoundingly large value of We, The People. And I brought along my lovely dog of days past, Shasta Daisy Belle, since I changed my avatar a few days ago.
We cannot ignore the threat that Trump poses to our democracy and a peaceful transition of power. This government belongs to #WeThePeople.
Not long ago, I wrote a comment in response to a Doom and Gloom Diary, featuring the Transition Integrity Project.
A bipartisan group secretly gathered to game out a contested Trump-Biden election. It wasn’t pretty
Using a role-playing game that is a fixture of military and national security planning, the group envisioned a dark 11 weeks between Election Day and Inauguration Day, one in which Trump and his Republican allies used every apparatus of government — the Postal Service, state lawmakers, the Justice Department, federal agents, and the military — to hold onto power, and Democrats took to the courts and the streets to try to stop it.
They played using the so-called Chatham House Rules — in which participants can discuss what was said, but not who was there; some participants were willing to be named. They included Republicans Trey Grayson, the former Kentucky secretary of state, and conservative commentator Bill Kristol, as well as Democrats Leah Daughtry, who was CEO of the 2008 and 2016 Democratic National Convention Committees, former White House ethics czar Norm Eisen, and progressive Democratic strategist Adam Jentleson. Retired Army Colonel Larry Wilkerson, a Republican and former chief of staff to Colin Powell, participated in the games as an observer.
They prepared a report to provide to some people in politics. The Boston Globe got to see part of it.
I wrote
They probably can't rig the election, but they can claim that it was rigged, and try to foment violence.
The ByeDon campaign has hired more than 600 election lawyers to be ready to file suit against anything and everything that the Maladministration or any of the states can come up with.
Biden Campaign Deploys 600 Lawyers So Trump Can’t ‘Steal This Election’
Protest demonstrations are on hair-trigger alert.
Facepalms at the ready.
Yes...even Khan
Insanity Break, aka Give Them Enough Rope to Shoot Themselves in Each Others' Feet
What? That wasn't bad enough?
The National Review: On Kamala Harris
Joe Biden has named his 2020 running mate: authoritarianism.
American prosecutors wield awesome and terrible powers that lend themselves easily to abuse, and Senator Kamala Harris, formerly the attorney general of California, is an enthusiastic abuser of them.
QAnon Supporter Who Made Bigoted Videos Wins Ga. Primary, Likely Heading To Congress
A Georgia Republican who has said that Muslims do not belong in government and expressed her belief in the baseless conspiracy theory called QAnon has won her primary runoff and is all but certain to win a seat in the House of Representatives in November.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, a construction executive, won 57% of the vote in Georgia's heavily-Republican 14th Congressional District, handily defeating neurosurgeon John Cowan, who had pitched himself as, "All of the conservative, none of the embarrassment."
President Trump congratulated Greene on Wednesday morning, calling her a "future Republican Star" who is "strong on everything."
Returning to Reality
The general who wins the battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought. The general who loses makes but few calculations beforehand.
Sunzi, The Art of War
We know that this loser ganef only ever makes one calculation, in his terminally greedy gut. None of his cadre of grifters, haters, and sycophants can overcome that.
Let Facts be Submitted to the Candid Part of the World
The Good News group of course knows better than to join the doomster chorus, but it is as well to bring the latest facts together from time to time.
I continued:
We saw that going on in President Obama's eulogy for John Lewis at Ebenezer Baptist Church.
Grokking Trumpists: We are Not Helpless before These Losers
There are those in power who are doing their darndest to discourage people from voting.
Too many of our citizens believe their vote won’t make a difference, or they buy into the cynicism that, by the way, is the central strategy of voter suppression, to make you discouraged, to stop believing in your own power.
Indeed, don't you believe them. I wrote
John Lewis was never helpless. He passed the test, enduring all, and persevering to the last moment, when he left a message for all of us.
Together, you can redeem the soul of the nation
Amen, Brother.
And we note that Biden has explicitly taken up that challenge.
Others will bring the latest polls (Thanks, hpg) and music (Thanks, all of you) and history (Thanks, WineRev) and possibly an annex (Thanks MrMuni) and much more. I will have some goodities and niceties of my own down below.
Threats, Real and Imagined
Trump
- Uses emergency powers to cancel the election—There are no such powers. We had elections at the height of the Civil War, although of course the Rebel states opted out. The Union went to a lot of trouble to allow soldiers to vote, even pausing the military campaign in Georgia.
- Calls in the military to “oversee” voting—No, they're not, and he can't make them.
- Tries to mess up the Electoral College with two slates from states with Democratic majorities but Republican Governors or Legislatures to deny Joe an EC majority. That would, they hope, throw the election into the House, where the vote is by states, and Rs reckon that they could get a 26-24 victory. Until we flip two more state delegations. Also, the new Congress would get to decide which slates were valid. Anyway, never mind that. Run up the score.
- Challenges election results in swing states in court.—Would Roberts follow the 2000 precedent, which the Court at that time claimed was not a precedent? But first they have to prevail in lower courts, which have a pretty good record of laughing utterly bogus Trumpish legal arguments out of court. States have plenary power under the Constitution to decide how to choose Electors. In any case, this depends on the election being close enough to screw up.
The view from the naysayers.
- Claims massive voter fraud in vote by mail—There has never been any, as the public well knows, and neither the courts nor Congress will buy it. There has been voter fraud fraud, of course. Rs like Chris Kobach get caught at it all the time.
- Refuses to vacate the White House—At the moment when Joe takes the Oath of Office, the Secret Service works for him. He won't have to tell them to put Thing0's stuff out on the lawn, and call a moving van to take it to his hotel up the street.
- Launches a Second Civil War after being turfed out—Yes, yes, the South Will Rise Again, Second Amendment Remedies, Commie Nazi Tyranny!!!! Do you remember the actual Second Civil War? The last time these cowards came out in force? Nor do I.
The Russians
- Convince young voters to go for Kanye West—LOLOLOL West is by no means Jill Stein, and neither Joe nor Kamala can be painted as Corrupt "But her e-mails" Hillary.
- Dig up real dirt on Joe—Nope. The dirt is that Ron Johnson, Chuck Grassley, and Devin Nunes are the Three Stooges taking Russian propaganda by way of a Ukrainian politician.
- Hack voting machines—No, not really. They hacked into a few registration databases last time, but there is no evidence that they changed anything. In real life, we have thousands of voting systems in thousands of counties, and there is no effective point of attack. Also, the machines are not on the Internet.
The Post Office
Mail your ballot ASAP.
Or don't mail it at all. Take it to a drop box, if possible.
And if it comes to it, crawl over broken glass.
mabon wrote
The 34-state figure is according to the Sierra Club. This excerpt is from an email they sent out this morning:
This July, Trump's new postmaster general -- a major donor with no postal experience -- ordered mail carriers to slow down delivery and avoid overtime by leaving mail behind at distribution facilities near the end of their shift. In just a few weeks, this move has created "days-long backlogs of mail across the country."3
34 states require that any mailed ballot be received (not just postmarked) by Election Day in order to be counted.4
Any delay in mail delivery is a disaster-in-waiting as the election approaches -- we urgently need your senators to fully fund and defend the Postal Service!
4. "VOPP: Table 11: Receipt and Postmark Deadlines for Absentee Ballots," National Conference of State Legislatures, July 31, 2020.
And that email came BEFORE Postmaster LeKilljoy’s latest gambit last night. [Firing all of USPS top management.]
I added their link for footnote 4. That link also has the state-by-state deadline info, in a more succinct format.
Finally, I refer you to this diary from Kossack ConcernedCitizen68 regarding another alternative to mailing: Ballot Drop-Boxes.
Conclusion
So. That's all of the prospective shenanigans I have heard about. They make me laugh.
Anybody got any more?
Go get ‘em, fearless Kossacks!!
Further Reading
David Plouffe, A Citizen's Guide to Beating Donald Trump, and The Audacity to Win: How Obama Won and How We Can Beat the Party of Limbaugh, Beck, and Palin
Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class, Illustrated Edition, by Ian Haney López
Music
It's somebody's birthday, right? Here you go.
Flowers
Shasta Daisies
Beasties
Weirdness
Science!
Penguin poop spotted from space ups the tally of emperor penguin colonies
Eight new spots include the first reported offshore breeding sites for the largest penguins
‘Exotic’ lightning crackles across Jupiter’s cloud tops
The flashes of light could form thanks to ammonia antifreeze
This is the first known particle with four of the same kind of quark
Physicists think they have detected the first conglomerate of four quarks incorporating more than two of the same kind. This tetraquark contains four quarks of the charm variety: two charm quarks and their antimatter counterparts, called anticharm quarks, researchers report online at arXiv.org on June 30.
Quarks — fundamental building blocks of matter — typically make up three-quark particles, like protons and neutrons, or quark-antiquark pairs, like pions and kaons. Physicists have observed some more exotic quark quartets (SN: 4/11/14) and even quintets (SN: 7/14/15). But the new four-quark particle, dubbed X(6900), is the first four-quark particle with all of the same type. Since charm quarks and their anticharm counterparts are among the heaviest types of quarks, it is also the first tetraquark to include more than two heavy quarks.
A barrier to colliding particles called muons has been smashed
But colliders that bang protons together, such as the LHC, have a major drawback: Protons are made up of smaller particles called quarks, each of which carries only a fraction of the proton’s energy. That means each particle crash has less oomph. Collisions of fundamental particles like muons, which aren’t made of smaller particles, don’t have that problem.
Some colliders skirt that proton problem by smashing together electrons and their antimatter opposites, positrons. But those machines also have a drawback: electrons and positrons lose energy circling around an accelerator ring by spewing X-rays. Those rays, known as synchrotron radiation, are less important for heavier particles like muons, which are about 200 times as massive as electrons, allowing muons to reach higher energies.
But colliding muons is no simple feat. To create muons, scientists slam a beam of protons into a target, creating other particles that decay and produce muons. Those muons emerge with a variety of different energies and directions. To use the particles in a collider, they must be cooled, or shepherded into an orderly formation, just as cooling a gas reduces the haphazard motion of its atoms.
Muons last about 2 microseconds, roughly the time it takes light to travel 2,000 feet. So the muons have to be created, processed into beams, accelerated, and collided in that tiny interval.
Spikking Ganefs
Now, where have I heard that story lately?
Will Elder - The Mad Cartoonists
Contains the entire Ganefs story from Mad Magazine #1, jam-packed with sight gags.
But Wait, There's More!
Walter Einenkel
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Vote in Person—Early:
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Take your ballot to a drop box:
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Take your ballot to an election office or similar polling location:
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Organizing ballot collection and delivery within your community:
Have at it, Kossacks.