Tag Archives: 2020 election

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Now comes the wait … for the midterm blowout

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Elections, they say, have consequences and on Nov. 3 Americans are going to find out whether the 2026 midterm election produces the kind of consequence that many of us desire.

Accordingly, I am going to keep my powder dry with regard to the expected outcome.

Damn near every political pundit this side of Sam Rayburn thinks Democrats are going to regain control of the U.S. House. Getting control of the Senate today looks more hopeful than ever.

Texas has an upstart who has been making a good bit of noise as he campaigns for the seat held by GOP Sen. John Cornyn … who, by the way, lost his GOP primary race to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. State Rep. James Talarico could defeat Paxton in 30-something days. If Paxton pulls this one out and becomes the senator from Texas, well … we’re in deeper trouble than any of us are thinking at this moment.

Donald Trump has made a hash out of our representative democracy. His “handiwork” has trickled down many states’ ballots. For reasons that boggle my noggin, Trump continues to draw support from the MAGA cabal who keep endorsing his cockamamie notion that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. I have heard more than one MAGA nitwit blame President Obama for the 9/11 terrorist attack. Hmm. You and I know that Obama was still eight years away from being elected president when 9/11 occurred. So … how do you reason with idiots such as that?

I am likely to lapse into relative solitude prior to the midterm election. I remain hopeful we can get the electoral result our nation deserves. This MAGA madness has flat worn me out!

Donald Trump, national news

Trump is none of these things

Donald John Trump would have you believe a number of things about him that make many of us want to laugh out loud, such as …

  • He is the smartest man in human history.
  • He knows more about how to win wars than any of the decorated soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen under his command.
  • He keeps every promise he makes.
  • He was elected twice to the presidency in landslides.
  • The Iran war is done, that he is able to declare victory over the Islamic Republic in a war that he started for no apparent reason, or strategy to end it.

That’s five items, all of them are demonstrably false. What’s more, while he vowed to surround himself with the “best people,” he has instead hired a collection of clowns, BS artists and sycophants whose only qualification is that they pledge complete loyalty to the liar in chief.

He said the Iran war would be over in weeks. It’s now into its seventh month. Eighteen American service personnel have died, hundreds more have been injured.

Americans need to look inward at what we have done to the democracy we say we cherish. We elected someone who expresses admiration for the tyrants of this world. He contends he has “very strong relations” with Kim Jong Un, the murdererwho presides over North Korea. He has denigrated the intelligence work of our own network of spies, spooks and analysts. He continues to insist the 2020 election — which he lost to President Joe Biden — was stolen, even while lacking a shred of evidence to back up that ridiculous assertion.

Americans were sold a dose of snake oil from a known fraudster, a crook and a charlatan.

And guess what. Americans got fooled twice, in 2016 and in 2024. You know the saying: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

We had better start looking for ways to repair the damage we have inflicted on ourselves.

national news, political news

This POTUS takes job lightly

When the president of the United States spends hours each night sending out social media digs at political foes, or concentrates his anger at media reporters, or takes time to lament who’s to blame for a reflecting pool fiasco, or can’t complete construction of a billion-dollar ballroom where the East Wing once stood …

Well, you have a POTUS who cannot possibly be up to the job to which he was elected to do.

You have in Donald Trump an overfed showman who has started a war with Iran, backed an aggressor in the Kremlin for launching an illegal and immoral war against Ukraine and has alienated just about every valuable ally this nation has worked for decades to count on as a friend.

President Barack Obama recently said that a president who is serious about his job has — at minimum — perhaps 10 issues on his plate that require his undivided attention. And they have nothing to do with beautifying the White House.

It should be abundantly clear that Donald Trump was far more interested in becoming the POTUS than actually being that person. To be the commander in chief, the head of government and head of state requires laser-like focus. Trump exhibits none of that trait as he stumbles, bumbles and blathers his way through each day he is in office.

He continues to bitch about losing the 2020 election to President Joe Biden … and cannot bring himself to say a single empathetic word about the former president’s struggle against cancer. He continues to lie about presiding over the “the greatest economy the world has ever seen” when in fact the USA is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.

This individual has sought to destroy our democratic republic. He cheapens the presidency every single day he sits in the Oval Office. Donald Trump has no business holding the office to which he was elected twice. What in the world is wrong with this nation?

national security, political news

Don’t underestimate this fool

For sure I have learned a lesson or two about Donald J. Trump, which is that never — not ever — believe he is finished when the whole rest of the world is saying as much.

He was supposed to have been done during the 2016 presidential campaign after a number of ghastly personal performances. He managed to pull off the biggest political fluke in U.S. history by scoring enough Electoral College votes while losing the popular vote by 3 million ballots to Hillary Clinton.

He lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden but has sown enough doubt about the integrity of our electoral system to cast a pall over it that lasts to this day.

Trump won’t be on the ballot in 2028 and this coming November we’ll have the midterm election. Control of Congress is at stake. The odds favor a Democratic takeover he House of Representatives. The odds of a Democratic coup in the Senate are longer, but still doable. Trump won’t be on the 2026 ballot, either.

Make no mistake that this charlatan, this election denier in chief, this ghastly pretender to the presidency is pulling out all the stops to deny Democrats the victory they deserve and are expecting. He’s seeking to nationalize the midterm, which I have noted already in an earlier blog post is an impossibility. However, it is a mistake to dismiss this moron’s ability to make it so.

That could result in the House flipping far fewer seats to the Democratic column. And it could mean the GOP keeps control of the Senate. Many of us want the Democrats to win the day in contests for both congressional chambers. I say that, though, knowing full well that Trump’s ability to dodge political freight trains is nothing to dismiss.

That’s what makes him so damn dangerous.

Beware, y’all.

local news, national news, political news

Nationwide electoral theft? Impossible!

Let’s visit briefly — shall we? — Donald Trump’s continual harping about the 2020 presidential election and how the result, a victory by Joe Biden over Trump, was an act of electoral theft.

It didn’t happen. Here’s how I know that to be so.

To suggest that a federal election was orchestrated to produce a winner ignores this undeniable fact, which is that our elections are conducted by individual states. Each state operates independently from other states. They all have their own system of counting ballots. They abide by rules set by their legislatures, and signed into law by governors.

Collin County, Texas, where I have lived for the past seven years, has a perfectly fine election system. It’s modern, it’s secure, and it’s free of the kind of corruption that Trump seems to believe exists in counties throughout the nation. He’s full of mule dookey.

The county’s election system is run by Stacey Kemp, a competent county clerk who oversees a staff of deputy clerks who are committed to upholding the oath they all take to defend and protect the Consitution of the United States.

Trump, though, sees this issue as a national matter. Indeed, he is looking for crimes that simply cannot exist in our electoral system.

I also should point out that our state electoral systems are not connected to the Internet, which Trump alleges is a prime source of the shenanigans he says occurs.

The POTUS went on the air the other night to relitigate a six-year-old gripe that has been tossed out in more than 60 lawsuits filed in courts from coast to coast. Let me also note here that many of the federal judges who have ruled against Trump have been nominated for their seats by Donald Trump … which tells me quite clearly that these men and women understand the law far more clearly than the dimwit who sits in the Oval Office.

national security, political news

Game of election denial … breathtaking!

Never in my life — not ever! — have I witnessed a rhetorical game being played out to the extent that it has been regarding the result of the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

I’ve been around a bit, as I am now 76 years of age and have been following politics pretty closely for, oh, about the past 60 years.

Donald Trump’s choice to become the next director of national intelligence was merely the latest Trumpkin to play the word game with Democratic lawmakers. Jay Clayton, in testimony this week to a Senate committee, refused to say that President Biden won the 2020 election.

Here’s how Al Jazeera reported the exchange between Clayton and senators:

“Senators pressed Clayton about his views on the 2020 race between Biden and Trump, and he acknowledged that Biden had been ‘certified’ as the victor. But he avoided directly saying Biden ‘won’ the race.

“In one exchange, Democrat Jon Ossoff asked Clayton point-blank, “’Who won the 2020 election?’

“’I’m not going to do this with you,’ Clayton responded.

“’This is a job interview. We’ve established that you have an obligation to be honest and forthright with the committee,’ Ossoff replied. He then repeated, ‘Who won the 2020 election?’ Clayton responded that he had ‘already answered the question.'”

Clayton danced the same two-step with Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona. He refused to say Biden “won” the 2020, but that he was “certified” the winner by virtue of the electoral votes he received.

It baffles me to end in sight why these individuals would choose to damage the integrity of the electoral system based on the Big Lie being fomented by the liar in chief. This game has been going on since that election, which President Biden won a slim but undeniable Electoral College majority and a 7 million popular vote majority. Trump, though, still has none of it and, of course, he instigated the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol that injured hundreds of people and killed several others.

Trump’s team has repeatedly refused to answer the simplest of questions regarding the 2020 election. They have demonstrated their disgusting fealty to a convicted felon over the U.S. Constitution. They make me sick.

national news

Hoping to hear truth behind what we received

I am hoping the day will arrive — and that I’ll be alive to watch its arrival — when we will understand how American voters got suckered twice into electing a known fraud, con man and imposter to the nation’s highest office.

To be honest, I am still in a fog over that one. We once demanded the very best among us to serve in the presidency. With Donald John Trump we have gotten the worst among us.

What makes this case even more maddening is that Trump forewarned us himself about what we would get if we elected him. He once declared in the open that he would be the “retribution” of those who believe they have been done wrong. Boy howdy, has this clown delivered the goods on that one.

There were plenty of high-powered individuals who had told us to be wary of what we were swallowing. Mitt Romney, the Republicans’ 2012 presidential nominee, called Trump a “phony, a fraud,” and spelled out in excruciating detail evidence he had to make such a claim. Our collective response was to push it all aside. Many MAGA faithful called Romney guilty of spitting sour grapes. Well, Mitt was spot on!

A POTUS who should have more important matters to occupy his time instead vents on a reflecting pool, bitches about the removal of his name from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and continues to denigrate the records of his immediate predecessors … namely Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

This is what he told us we would get if we elected him to the White House? Yep. It damn sure is!

Shame on American voters for guzzling this swill.

national news, political news

How’d we go from best to worst?

This point deserves to be repeated, so … therefore I will do so.

I will go to the Great Beyond never understanding how the American voting public could stop insisting on selecting the best among us for high office and settle for the worst among us.

Our values have been turned on their ears. We no longer care if our president is a serial philanderer, or that he is a convicted felon, lacks any semblance of a moral compass, or mocks war heroes, disabled Americans.

We set aside his lies as long as he tells us what we want to hear.

I am not going to give up on the idea that our quest for the best of us is a lost cause. It can return. Indeed, it did briefly with the election in 2020 of President Biden. Then he was gone. We got the nimrod he defeated in 2020 back for a second term after he pledged in plain English that his next term would be run with a vengeance.

Many of us said, “Hey, that’s OK! As long as he delivers the goods.” Donald Trump hasn’t delivered a damn thing!

national news

Trump’s damage will last longer than the POTUS

Donald Trump’s time in the Oval Office has an end date, and I am grateful for that deadline.

However, the damage Trump has done — and is doing — is likely to last longer than his time in office. That consequence saddens me to no end. The damage is being done to the public perception of our electoral process.

He has been hammering at the credibility of that process since he lost his re-election bid during the 2020 election. Joe Biden beat his sorry behind but Trump never accepted the beating he took. His constant yammering about electoral credibility has sown plenty of doubt among too many Americans.

I believe none of the nonsense that Trump has fomented since 2020. Too many state legislatures, though, are controlled by Republicans and they have acted to make voting an arduous task for many citizens. They call it “voter suppression” and it appears to be working.

I hear from friends and aquaintances in North Texas about the doubt they say lingers over the election process. I have heard too many of them say something like “if it counts” when describing the act of voting. My answer always is, “Yes … it counts!”

The lasting damage to the public’s perception of our cherished voting process is troubling in the extreme and it serves as a damning testament to the harm committed to our public service by an imbecile who has no understanding or appreciation of the work done to further our democratic process.

crime news

Trump sets dangerous precedent

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Donald J. Trump’s pardoning this week of 1,500 or so mobsters who stormed the Capitol Building four years ago sets a precedent that sends chills up my spine … and should frighten you, too.

Many of those pardoned by Trump were involved in violent crimes against Capitol cops, against security officials and against bystanders.

What this idiot has done by pardoning the worst among the insurrectionists is send a message to anyone who, in the future, decides to do the very same thing in his defense that the president has their back. They will not have to pay for the crimes they commit.

Think about that for just a moment. That’s all the time you’ll need to process what this means. It means that Donald Trump has legitimized violence against police; it means the POTUS has decided that it’s OK to desecrate public property — even defecate on the floor — as long as you are defending whatever numbskull policy the president decides to enact.

You want an existential threat to our way of life? Donald J. Trump has just delivered it to us in the form of that blanket pardon of the mobsters who stormed the Capitol at his behest.

Moreover, do not tell me or anyone else that the pardon only affected the non-violent participants. Some very bad actors are walking free today because their MAGA chieftain defied the rule of law on their behalf.