It's a Fundraising Scam
The Trump litigation / recount is just a fundraising scam to retire his campaign debt.
There's no way Trump can win. He would have to overturn the results in three of the final states in order to flip the election. A reasonable man would understand that contesting the election with claims of fraud is not worth the damage to the country. But Donald J Trump is not a reasonable man.
He couldn't care less about the residual damage he's creating, because once again it's all about him, and to him everything is a grift. On the face of it, he's whipping up his supporters in a quest to save democracy. But the reality of it is that his supporters weren't really into giving the "billionaire" money for his campaign, and now he has to bilk it from them with a scam.
I'm not the first to notice that between 50% and 60% of new donations will go toward the campaign debt.
a disclaimer on the website states that 50% of any donation will go toward the campaign's general election debt retirement and the other half toward the campaign's recount account, the Wall Street Journal first reported.
A separate fundraising effort by the "Trump Make America Great Again Committee" states that 60% of contributions will go toward campaign debt
OF COURSE this is more about fundraising than it is with electoral justice. We're talking about Donald Trump, after all.
Comments
Surprise surprise surprise
As Gomer would say...
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TnkJ8_BmSI]
“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
Nunca se rinde.
Never quit, never give up, never stop. He has to be true to who he is. He learned the never give up thing at the same time he was told that he could never really be caught until he stopped lying.
"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now..."
Something evil this way comes
But it's just as evil going away too.
Evil never changes.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
What kind of working class stiff
would give their hard-earned money to a(an alleged) billionaire famous for not paying his debts? I never understood his celebrity, or his rise in politics. Had I watched him on tv, I would have been too embarrassed to admit it to my friends and colleagues.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
I'll never understand this
GW Bush was a moron, but in a way he was kind of a likeable moron. He had enough self-awareness to at least sound intelligent, well at least some of the time. What I can't comprehend is how any of Trump's supporters could ever listen to him speak and still be committed to the idea that he matured past the age of 13. How they have not called him out on his obvious, and incessant bullshitting is beyond me.
F the F'n D's
Bush was far more dangerous than Trump.
The Intelligence agencies worked WITH Bush to create fake evidence to launch the first of the illegal Wars for Empire in Iraq. The IC worked AGAINST Trump and created fake evidence to sabotage his unexpected presidency. The IC has worked WITH the Deep-State Department for 20 years to keep the Empire Wars going strong. They will continue their PRO-EMPIRE sabotage and propaganda indefinitely, regardless of who is elected President. Trump's internal chaos was a brief setback for Empire, but with a CFR-groomed cutout like Kamala Harris at the helm, the Empire Forces can put the pedal-to-the-metal to achieve global supremacy. They are committed to a better-dead-than-red outcome to their century-long push to rule the world, because they have everything to lose if they fail.
Just sayin' what's actually going on.
____________________
The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
Well, yeah
I've always said about Donald Trump that at least he's incompetent and too arrogant to delegate to good people.
But that wasn't my point. With Bush we had eight years and sure, you can go back and find a few choice quotes that highlight his stupidity "Fool me once..." but with Trump he says something stupid every time he opens his mouth. IDK how his supporters can overlook that.
F the F'n D's
By and large Trump
is the smartest among that bunch. Let that sink in a bit.
By definition
half of a population is below average intelligence. Trump has 47.6% of the vote.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Albert Bartlett
"A species that is hurtling toward extinction has no business promoting slow incremental change." -- Caitlin Johnstone
Trump can't win?
Jimmy discusses the election with Greg Palast about Trump's options with the courts. Penn is still not really decided especially if the Supremes get involved.
STEALING ELECTIONS! - Investigative Reporter Greg Palast!
Palast: Your vote is a mere suggestion because of the electors. Video cued to start there.
They also discuss voter suppression and how blacks and other minorities get purged from voter rolls. This is not over yet. As for Trump retiring his debt, don't most folks do shenaniganish stuff when they did theirs? Trump might just pull a Trump and stiff everyone he owes money to. Won't be the 1st time.
25% of votes are thrown out or people are not able to vote for various reasons. This is highly informative from Palast.
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
3 states
Even if you accept this premise, it's still just one state out of three needed to flip the election. And yes, every politician does something gimmicky to retire debt, but never before with the audacity and potential damage that this stunt comes with.
F the F'n D's
I see no reason for the Supreme Court
...to hear such a case.
It's all risk and no gain for Empire.
____________________
The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
They are already involved
Have you seen this article?
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/why-trump-will-triumph-pa-litigation
Law is definitely not my forte, but the case from PA is still open before the US SC.
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
That is a very helpful article.
The way I understand it:
1. In 2019, the Pennsylvania legislature passed a law — called Act 77 — that said mail-in ballots had to arrive by 8PM on election day to be counted.
Sometime before Election Day in 2020, the Republic Party filed a lawsuit in PA to block the counting of mail-in ballots received after the deadline, as per Act 77.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court responded to the lawsuit by rewriting Act 77 and extending the deadline to include mail-in ballots that come in late but were postmarked on or before Election Day.
It is unconstitutional for the Supreme Court in PA to rewrite legislation. Laws can only be written and passed by elected officials in the legislature.
The Republican Party of PA sent a Petition to SCOTUS to review the unconstitutional action and decision of the PA Supreme Court.
Sometime later, the Republican Party of PA also sent a Motion to the Federal Supreme Court to expedite their Petition.
On October 28, SCOTUS declined the Motion to expedite — but, they did not deny the Petition to review the PA Court decision.
:::
I have not heard that SCOTUS has accepted the case. Have you?
I doubt that reversing PA would change the election outcome. However, I now think SCOTUS may be forced to take on such a clearly unconstitutional action by a state Supreme Court..
I imagine they are waiting to see if it could become a path to a 2020 victory for Trump.
____________________
The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
Yes Congress has accepted it
I excerpted some of this article in the OT. Allioto had PA separate the votes that came in after and it says that the case is still open.
When I posted on this Friday night I thought it wouldn't matter if Biden wins Nevada. So no this won't make Trump win. I guess they might just correct the electoral totals and move towards the inauguration. Oh joy.
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
Something happened between your
first paragraph and the next sentence.
I do know that the past in PA that absentee ballots were highly restrictive. Military on assignment, legitimately out of state on election day, an physical disability. I also know that those in poor and minority communities were made to wait for quite a long time to vote. I don't know to what degree the 2019 legislation was intended to expand on absentee ballots.
From the little that I've been able to determine, it was expanded due to Covid-19. The primary was delayed and apparently there were either problems or questions about how it was handled. Also unclear why the GOP legislators sued the SoS in July 2020 which seems to the be the dispute that keeps ending up in state and federal courts.
I doubt that the PA SC was willy nilly in ruling that if postmarked by election day and received within three days that it's a valid ballot. And as of election day 2019 that was the law., Changing it after the fact would be an extraordinary.
I don’t know whether fraud
occurred. I also don’t think Trump’s fraud accusations are credible. I do think a reasonable person should absolutely question the integrity of our voting system and be skeptical of claims that the counting machines have not been tampered with or pre-programmed to achieve a result. And I think it’s perfectly reasonable to believe the damage wrought by discovering such fraud exists is far better than the damage done by simply ignoring it.
check out Miami-Dade 2020
Very inconsistent with past results and inconsistent with the results in other 2020 FL counties. IOW -- it looks very stinky, imho.
I meant to ask
if anyone knows if Trump lent his campaign any of his own money? I can't imagine that he gives two hoots about paying back anyone else. But if his own cash was on the line it would be worth running this scam to be made whole.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Albert Bartlett
"A species that is hurtling toward extinction has no business promoting slow incremental change." -- Caitlin Johnstone
Not as of 10/14/20
- FEC report: Form 3P. He did donate $8,020.58 to his campaign. (Don't know what the fifty-eight cents represents.)
Looks as if Adelson ponied up approximately $75 million.
As of 10/14/20 the campaign had $44 million in CoH and debts of just over a million. Unless the campaign was using Trump accounting tricks.
The two week 'burn rate' in October was $63 million. So, they needed approximately $100 million to get them to election day. Two week receipts was $44 million. At the same receipts and disbursement rates, they wouldn't have been in bad shape as Nov 3.
Thanks!
And very interesting. We kept hearing that they were going dark in various media markets because they were broke. Trump was doing fundraisers in October. Yet they weren't all that hurting for money. Now all their fundraising carries disclaimers about retiring debt. What debt?
Maybe they loaded up on debt at the end, not because they needed the cash in the last couple of weeks, but to build CoH? A campaign's funds can be rolled into a personal PAC that the candidate can milk in various ways. Maybe there are rules about continuing to raise funds for a campaign that is no longer active, but everyone raises funds to retire debt.
Of course they were expecting to win, and for the campaign to be an ongoing enterprise. Maybe just hedging their bets?
Some journalist will make a career for themselves untangling this mess.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Albert Bartlett
"A species that is hurtling toward extinction has no business promoting slow incremental change." -- Caitlin Johnstone
We don't know the source of those rumors.
Either party could have seed them in an attempt to gain an advantage. I wouldn't say that his campaign was fat as of mid October and his infection did cut off a few days of fundraising. As approximately 40% of his adverts was handled by Pacs/superpacs, it's possible that they ran a bit short and chose to go dark in certain markets. OTOH, they may not have planned well for end of campaign media blitzes that would result in higher media costs. Or in states that they had originally taken for granted such as OH and TX when by mid-Oct it didn't look like as much of a shoo-in.
For what it's worth (and considering the source it may be total wishful thinking), by the end of Oct Trump was claiming that his EV would be higher than his 306 in 2016. I'd take that to mean that his original game plan had him carrying one or more 2016 'blue' states. Which one(s)? NV was likely a prime target -- with Adelson bucks? A stretch when so much of the state has been closed during 2002. And he'd planned to do victory laps during the last three weeks.
What still amuses me is that GA flipped.
"Bush was far more dangerous than Trump"
This is pretty questionable, at best.
Anyone who is elected to higher public office in this country is going to be a corporate sell-out and beholden to those who fund their campaigns.
Bush, as bad as he was, was never a brazen racist, disregarding science and pretty much spreading death all over the country through fascist "rallies".
COVID 19 threw a monkey wrench into the process of the corporate takeover of our democracy.
There is a difference between the Democratic and Republican parties.
It might take a global pandemic for people to realize it, but it's there.
The Democratic Party is owned and wholly subsidized by corporate money, but they don't deny science and they don't want us all to die. There's something to be said for that small difference.
"The enemy is anybody who is going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on." Yossarian
Katrina ring any bells?
I don't know, but leaving a city full of poor minorities to deal with the aftermath of Katrina seems pretty racist to me. Bombing Muslim countries seems pretty damn racist. His No child left behind crap seems pretty racist to me. Or maybe it's classist? Killing hundreds of thousands of people from a lie seems pretty damn racist.
Obama's Katrina was Flint MI where he didn't do a damn thing to help people poisoned by its water that was deliberate.
IF you are interested in comparing Bush to Trump you can read the Hitler article I wrote about. Or this article by Greenwald.
No Matter the Liberal Metric Chosen, the Bush/Cheney Administration Was Far Worse Than Trump.
IF after you read this and still think that Trump is worse than Bush I'd love to know why. Yes Trump is a horrible president, but whitewashing Bush's crimes is dishonest. The Lincoln Project guys were doing just that and so many liberals' ate it up. Glenn talks about them too. And in case you didn't know, some of them and some of the worst from Bush's admin are working with Biden now and some will be in his cabinet.
Here's a taste:
Did anyone think that by electing Joe Biden we would see the return of Dick Cheney? I didn't, but oh well. Trump will be gone and Americans can go back to pretending that democrats walk on water and no one should EVER Criticize them. Returning things to normal just returns us to the things that made Trump possible and the possibility of the next "Trump' being much worse.
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
Bush damaged science in the US for two decades.
It was easy for China to pull ahead in almost any scientific field.
In an unprecedented move, the White House announced that scientists now need approval from senior Bush political appointees to participate in World Health Organization (WHO) meetings.
In August 2001, George W. Bush gave a primetime speech promising to limit the number of stem cell lines available for research on Alzheimer’s, cancer and other diseases. More than four thousand scientists (a good number of whom have served both Democratic and Republican administrations) signed a statement attacking the Administration’s unprecedented politicization of science.
____________________
The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
Biden: "I will listen to the scientists"
Scientists: "Fracking is very bad for the environmnet."
Biden: "I will NOT ban fracking!"
Harris: "Joe Biden is not gonna ban fracking."
Phew it is a good thing Biden's going to listen to scientists. Yippee. Trump has lost and everything will now be okay because Biden is an adult and ........oh hell.
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
must be doing well on those donations from
from the little people.