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--

Enough With the Sick Crap About Race-Based Genetics

Donald Trump has once again invoked the debunked and bigoted notion of race science, this time in a interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt.  While criticizing President Joe Biden’s administration over immigration, Trump claimed that some migrants who enter the United States via an “open border” (which doesn't exist, btw) have “bad genes.”

In the interview Trump claimed, "How about allowing people to come to an open border—13,000 of which were murderers—many of them murdered far more than one person. And they’re now happily living in the United States. You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country right now."

Race science is the long-debunked racist notion that certain negative human traits are inherent to one race over another. In the United States, this was one of the justifications used to keep Black people as slaves.

Trump’s most recent argument echoes the claim he made in December 2023 when he said that immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of the United States.

False arguments that Jewish people were “poisoning” blood were perhaps most infamously used by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime to justify the mass murder of millions of people in the Holocaust.

Trump has also promoted the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which argues that Latino immigrants are being allowed into the U.S. to vote and replace white people.

Trump’s race-science rhetoric has been widely criticized by Democrats, including Vice President Kamala Harris.  “It is language that I think people have rightly found similar to the language of Hitler,” Harris told MSNBC in December. “I think it’s just critically important that we remind each other, including our children, that the true measure of the strength of a leader is based not on who they beat down, but who they lift up.”

 

GOP Disinformation Disaster

Trump is a Disaster at Dealing with Disaster

Donald Trump and his allies have been misinforming the public about the federal response to Hurricane Helene, be it with ridiculous lies or crazy conspiracy theories. Trump’s first administration was a disaster for our environment—but he and his friends are far from done. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s agenda for a potential second Trump administration, includes dismantling the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Agency—the U.S. agency that forecasts weather—and greatly limiting the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s ability to respond.  Do we need to remind everybody how badly Trump managed some of the country's most difficult times?

Trump didn’t staff the federal agencies tasked with disaster response.

Trump’s administration did not sufficiently staff FEMA or NOAA with administrators for months after he came into office. Worse, he imposed a government-wide hiring freeze that affected hundreds of unfilled positions at the National Weather Service, and that was called “a contributing factor” in a renewed decline in NOAA staff.

Trump initially refused to send aid to California during wildfires because it was a blue state.

When wildfires ravaged California in 2018, Trump attacked the state for its “mismanagement” of the fires. Meanwhile, a former senior director on Trump’s National Security Council staff told E&E News that when Trump resisted sending wildfire assistance to the Golden State, staffers “went as far as looking up how many votes he got in those impacted areas … to show him these are people who voted for you.”

Trump delayed and obstructed getting federal aid to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. 

The Trump administration’s initial neglect in helping Puerto Rico was outshined only by his administration’s continued delays in congressionally allotted aid for years after. At every step, Trump looked to block further aid to the U.S. territory. Trump also reportedly joked about trading Puerto Rico for Greenland as he faced criticism for his response to Hurricane Maria.

Hurricane Dorian and the infamous black marker.

In 2019, during the lead up to Hurricane Dorian, Trump made an incorrect assessment that the state of Alabama was in the projected path of the approaching storm. His assessment was then corrected by the National Weather Service office in Birmingham, leading Trump to double down on being wrong. Eventually, he held a press conference where he showed a conspicuously doctored map of Dorian’s path to support his lie. The sloppy use of black marker on the map became emblematic of how unserious Trump’s approach to disaster was.

Trump uses flooding in Michigan to try and stop absentee voting.

When flooding hit Michigan in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump tweeted out a threat to withhold federal aid if absentee ballots were sent out to voters ahead of the 2020 primary and general elections. Of course, the only thing being sent out at the time were applications for absentee ballots.

Trump screwed up COVID.

Research has determined that Trump’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic led to hundreds of thousands of excess deaths. His incompetence began early on as he downplayed the severity and spread of the global pandemic. He then offered up a barrage of fake cures and other misinformation, from shilling for the ineffective hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin to disinfecting the blood with something like Clorox.

Trump's history of mismanaging disasters is widely acknowledged, and his lies about the current administration’s management of this newest natural disaster are a new low, even for a moron like Trump.

Maniac Musk is Tipping The Scales

Trump Was Cultivated as a Russian Asset to the KGB

Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset over 40 years and proved so willing to parrot anti-western propaganda that there were celebrations in Moscow, a former KGB spy has told the Guardian. Yuri Shvets, who was posted to Washington DC by the Soviet Union in the 1980s, compares Trump to “the Cambridge five”, the British spy ring that passed secrets to Moscow during the second world war and early cold war.

Shvets is a key source for "American Kompromat," a new book by journalist Craig Unger, which also explores Trumps’s relationship with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. Shvets had a cover job as a correspondent in Washington for the Russian news agency Tass during the 1980s. He moved to the US permanently in 1993 and gained American citizenship. He works as a corporate security investigator and was a partner of Alexander Litvinenko, who was assassinated in London in 2006.

Unger describes how Trump first appeared on the Russians’ radar in 1977 when he married his first wife, Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech model. Trump became the target of a spying operation overseen by Czechoslovakia’s intelligence service in cooperation with the KGB.  Three years later Trump opened his first big property development, the Grand Hyatt hotel near Grand Central station. Trump bought 200 television sets for the hotel from Semyon Kislin, a Soviet émigré who co-owned Joy-Lud electronics on Fifth Avenue.  According to Shvets, Joy-Lud was controlled by the KGB and Kislin worked as a so-called “spotter agent” who identified Trump, a young businessman on the rise, as a potential asset. Kislin denies that he had a relationship with the KGB.

Then, in 1987, Trump and Ivana visited Moscow and St Petersburg for the first time. Shvets said Trump was fed KGB talking points and flattered by KGB operatives who floated the idea that he should go into politics.  Shvets recalled: “For the KGB, it was a charm offensive. They had collected a lot of information on his personality so they knew who he was personally. The feeling was that he was extremely vulnerable intellectually, and psychologically, and he was prone to flattery.

Soon after he returned to the US, Trump began exploring a run for the Republican nomination for president and even held a campaign rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Trump also took out a full-page advert in the New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe headlined: “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure.”

The ad offered some highly unorthodox opinions in Ronald Reagan’s cold war America, accusing ally Japan of exploiting the US and expressing skepticism about US participation in NATO. It took the form of an open letter to the American people “on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves”.

The bizarre intervention was cause for astonishment and jubilation in Russia. A few days later Shvets, who had returned home by now, was at the headquarters of the KGB’s first chief directorate in Yasenevo when he received a cable celebrating the ad as a successful “active measure” executed by a new KGB asset.

“It was unprecedented. I am pretty well familiar with KGB active measures starting in the early 70s and 80's . . . and I haven’t heard anything like that or anything similar – until Trump became the president of this country – because it was just silly. It was hard to believe that somebody would publish it under his name and that it will impress real serious people in the west but it did and, finally, this guy became the president.”

Craig Unger said of Trump: “He was an asset. It was not this grand, ingenious plan that we’re going to develop this guy and 40 years later he’ll be president. At the time it started, which was around 1980, the Russians were trying to recruit like crazy and going after dozens and dozens of people.“Trump was the perfect target in a lot of ways: his vanity, narcissism made him a natural target to recruit. He was cultivated over a 40-year period, right up through his election.”

 

Jelly Roll - Liar

As If We Needed More Naked Trump Art

Trump recently said at a rally,“I had a hell of a life,” “I could’ve been sunbathing on the beach. You have never seen a body so beautiful. Much better than Sleepy Joe.”  Well, if you've been trying to get that hypothetical image out of your mind, read no further.

A new art installation is haunting the desertscape north of Las Vegas: a naked, 43-foot-tall marionette of Donald Trump. (You can find a full image of the statue below the fold.)

According to The Wrap, the statue is made of rebar and foam, weighs around 3 tons, and will travel the United States as part of a “Crooked and Obscene” art tour, though future dates and locations have yet to be announced.

This is far from the first time the wannabe dictator has inspired art.  In 2016, an anarchist art collective
called INDECLINE commissioned five life-sized statues of a naked Trump. Titled “The Emperor has No Balls,” the statues appeared in public spaces in Cleveland, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Seattle.

One of the completed life-size naked statues of Trump was put up in Central Park in NYC in 2018.  It was removed by the New York City Parks Department, which issued the following statement: “We don’t allow private erections in our park, no matter how small.”

And who could ever forget the Donald Trump Baby Blimp, which now lives in the collection of The Museum of London. In 2018, the blimp was allowed to fly over Parliament Square in the United Kingdom during Trump’s visit.

 

 

Tales of Toxicity - Prairie du Chien Edition

Trump was speaking at a rally at Praire du Chien, Wisconsin when a fly began buzzing around his lectern.  The insect distracted him  talking about a hat to his crowd of supporters at Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin on Saturday (September 28) when the insect distracted and seemingly irritated him.

“Oh there’s a fly,” Trump said. “I wonder where the fly came from?”

"See, two years ago, I wouldn’t have had a fly up here. You’re changing rapidly. We can’t take it any longer."

The clip was quickly shared on social media, as viewers were confused as to what exactly he was talking about, and some even questioned if it was a sign of the 78-year-old's cognitive decline.  One person asked: "What the actual hell does that even mean?"

"As someone who watched their grandmother slip into dementia I can tell you those two sentences are the exact way she would have talked about that fly," another person wrote.  "He's losing a debate without any other candidates there," someone else added.  MSNBC host and legal analyst Katie Phang also commented on the clip, saying "this is not normal.”

 

Happy October!