Georgia Judge: Just Certify the Votes, Bitch!

A Georgia judge has ruled county election officials must certify election results by the deadline set in law and cannot exclude any group of votes from certification even if they suspect error or fraud.

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney ruled that “no election superintendent (or member of a board of elections and registration) may refuse to certify or abstain from certifying election results under any circumstance.” While they have the right to inspect the conduct of an election and to review related documents, he wrote, “any delay in receiving such information is not a basis for refusing to certify the election results or abstaining from doing so.”

Georgia law says county election superintendents, which are multi-member boards in most counties, “shall” certify election results by 5 p.m. on the Monday after an election — or the Tuesday if Monday is a holiday as it is this year.

Julie Adams, a Republican member of the Fulton County election board, had asked the judge to declare that her duties as an election board member were discretionary and that she is entitled to “full access” to “election materials.”  Adams argued that county election board members have the discretion to reject certification.  She also claimed that county election officials could certify results without including ballots that appear to have problems, allaying concerns of a board member who might otherwise vote not to certify.

Instead, Judge McBurney ruled that nothing in Georgia law gives county election officials the authority to determine that fraud has occurred or what should be done about it. Instead, he wrote, the law says a county election official's “concerns about fraud or systemic error are to be noted and shared with the appropriate authorities but they are not a basis for a superintendent to decline to certify.”

 

Trump is Going off the Deep End

Everybody is saying that the former president’s strange town hall event in Pennsylvania is raising new questions about his health and mental stamina.

The Q&A event was paused when someone in the crowd fainted, then paused again when someone else fainted in the room, which Trump complained was too hot. “Personally, I enjoy this. We lose weight, you know,” Trump joked. “No, you lose weight. We could do this ― lose 4 or 5 pounds.”

After the second person fainted, Trump decided to ditch the Q&A.  “Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music,” he said. “Let’s make it into a music fest. Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?”  He called on his audio team to play “a couple of really beauties,” then stayed on stage for 40 or so minutes more, swaying to the songs, mouthing some of the lyrics and occasionally moving his hands to the music. He also offered comments about the music from time to time, such as “great song.”

Trump’s decision to cut off the questions at the town hall comes in the wake of him canceling a “60 Minutes” interview as well as refusing to take part in a second debate with his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.

It also comes amid a new focus on his health and cognition due to speeches marked by slurred words, confusion over names and location, and lengthy, rambling digressions.

“I saw decline in his skills in ’20 from ’16,” former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, once a Trump insider before turning into a critic, told New York Times columnist Frank Bruni on Sunday. “And you see significant declines still.”

 

Happy Columbo Day!

These MAGA Whackos are Actually Hurting People

Government officials were forced to flee a North Carolina county amid reported threats of armed civilians out “hunting” for hurricane relief workers.

On Saturday, the Washington Post reported that a U.S. Forest Service official sent an email to several different federal agencies warning "National Guard troops had come across two trucks of armed militia saying [they] were out hunting FEMA," the government body responsible for overseeing emergency response management.  The message added that incident management teams “have been notified and are coordinating the evacuation of all assigned personnel” in Rutherford County.

After FEMA officials had been given the all-clear to return to the area, similar threats were reported in Ashe County-- the local Sheriff’s office warned FEMA had yet again been forced to “pause their process” while an assessment of the risk was carried out, Axios reported.

These incidents offer the starkest evidence yet of the havoc caused by the rampant spread of misinformation as to the origin of Hurricanes Helene and Milton and the nature efforts to contain the damage caused. Many of the conspiracy theories surrounding the storms and the government’s response have been spearheaded by GOP representative Marjorie Taylor Green, who in a series of social media reports blamed nefarious (albeit unidentified) electoral forces for “controlling the weather” by means of extra-terrestrial laser technology.  Other tinfoil-hatted pundits have suggested the weather was somehow engineered as part of a conspiracy to provide political cover to mega-corporations engaged in lithium mining, as well as spreading fake reports of citizens being deliberately abandoned in the rubble.

Donald Trump also fanned the flames, pushing unfounded allegations that the Democratic Party is deliberately withholding disaster relief from Republican voters, and that emergency funds have been diverted to undocumented migrants.

With FEMA already having been forced to set up a “rumor response” page on its website, the recent reports of militias roaming the hills in North Carolina is sadly not the only evidence of ways in which these disinformation narratives are adversely affecting the emergency relief efforts.

“It’s terrible because a lot of these folks who need assistance are refusing it because they believe the stuff people are saying about FEMA and the government,” Riva Duncan, a former Forest Service official based in Asheville, North Carolina, said. “And it’s sad because they are probably the ones who need the help the most.”

 

A Healthy Kamala Harris Draws a Sharp Contrast With a Lazy Orange Septuagenarian

Kamala Harris has released her medical records, which show that the Democratic presidential nominee is in “excellent health” and “possesses the physical and mental resiliency” necessary to serve as president, her doctor said in a letter, external.

Harris's most recent physical exam was in April.  Dr Simmons, a US Army colonel and physician to the vice-president, categorized the visit as "unremarkable", noting that her blood pressure and heart rate were within normal range.  Her cardiac exam, abdominal exam and skin exam were all "normal", Dr Simmons said. Harris has no personal history of diabetes, blood pressure, high cholesterol or cardiac disease.  She does have a family history "notable" for colon cancer on her mother's side of the family-- but Harris is up to date on all preventative care recommendations, including a colonoscopy. 

On the other hand, Donal Trump has NEVER released any comprehensive medical records.  If elected next month, Trump would be the OLDEST PRESIDENT EVER by the time he completed his term.  

Trump told CBS in August that in his most recent medical exam the doctor had given him a "perfect score".  No one know what that means, since there is no such thing as a "score" (much less a "perfect" one) in medical exams. In 2015, Trump published a letter from his doctor (Harold Bornstein) who said Trump would be "the healthiest person ever elected to the presidency".  A few years later, Bornstein was forced to admit said Trump had dictated the contents of the letter and that three of Trump's agents had seized his medical records in a February 2017 raid on the doctor's office. 

In 2018, White House physician Dr Ronny Jackson told reporters Trump was in "excellent health". Dr Jackson said at the time that Trump's heart exam, cardiac exam, and head, ears, nose and throat exam were all normal. At the time, Trump was taking a range of prescription and over-the-counter drugs, which included Crestor to lower cholesterol; aspirin for cardiac health; Propecia for prevention of hair loss; and Soolantra ointment for Rosacea, an inflammatory skin condition.

Trump has admitted he sleeps only about four or five hours a night. He has called golfing his "primary form of exercise" but usually talks a golf cart (instead of walking the course).  Trump considers exercise a waste of energy because he believes the body is "like a battery, with a finite amount of energy", which is depleted by exercise.  Of course, this assertion is ridiculous, as energy in the human body is replenished on a continual basis by the consumption of food and drink. 

Since a would-be assassin’s bullet grazed Trump in July, Trump's campaign has not granted reporters access to his hospital records or the emergency physicians who treated him.  A campaign spokesman said today that Trump has "an extremely busy and active campaign schedule unlike any other in political history".  He claimed that Kamala Harris is "unable to keep up with the demands of campaigning" and that "her schedule is much lighter because, it is said, she does not have the stamina of President Trump."

Of course, this is just more bullshit.  The fact is that Trump held 72 rallies between June and September of 2016. He's held 24 in that same period this year.  Trump held 69 rallies in October and early November of 2016, taking the stage as many as five times per day in the stretch run. Trump held 43 rallies over the five weeks leading up to Election Day in 2020.  This campaign cycle, Trump is primarily relying on cable TV  appearances and podcasts, often made from his home in Florida. 

 

The Smile - Bodies Laughing

The GOP's Weather Paranoia is Geting Out of Control

First, they tried to claim that FEMA was a deep-state ideological op, but that didn’t work. So then, the hard-core MAGA-wackos moved on to another sci-fi trope: weather control. Taking the lead of that reliable arbiter of rational discourse,Marjorie Taylor Greene, they began (as Florida prepared for the landfall of Hurricane Milton) to sound the alarm that the fierce succession of destructive hurricanes battering the Southeast was all orchestrated from from the sinister, power-grabbing left. As communities in the path of Hurricane Helene started to dig out from the damage last week, Greene  spouted new nonsense on her X account:: “Yes they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”

Greene’s demented assertion at first seemed a sideshow to the crisis, calling to mind her infamous declaration that the 2018 wildfires in California were actually the handiwork of Jewish space lasers.  Yet as Hurricane Milton made landfall in west Florida, the weather-control hypothesis had moved into the white-hot center of MAGA conspiracy-mongering—so much so that President Joe Biden was forced to refute it in a TV interview.

The basic MAGA argument (if you can even call it that) is that the forces of liberal world domination have “geo-engineered” the suspiciously timed storms as yet another weapon in their vast, shape-shifting arsenal of election interference. The far-right conspiracy site Gateway Pundit boosted Greene’s claims with a grab-bag set of testimonials from other purveyors of paranoia. The piece highlights the findings of no less an authority than Robert Kennedy Jr., who declared that nefarious deep-state actors have seized control of the weather via the Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum. “They aggravate the problem, and sell us the solution,” Kennedy breathlessly announced. “The solution they want is more social controls.”

But we're not done yet! Other MAGA-aligned hucksters supplied the obvious connection--